Notes from Underground

• 1. Introduction

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  Notes from Underground, a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, closes with an accusation aimed straight at the reader. The narrator says, "I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway."

  A retired civil servant in St. Petersburg tells this story, and he never gives his name. Critics call him the Underground Man. He is bitter, isolated, and braced for the reader to disagree with him. Dostoevsky published his words in the journal Epoch in 1864, after first announcing the piece under the plainer title A Confession.

  What could the arithmetic of two times two possibly have to do with human freedom? Why would a man cling to his own suffering? And what happens to a grand philosophy when its owner finally meets a young woman who listens?

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• 2. The Stone Wall

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  Two times two makes four, and the Underground Man cannot forgive it. The sum is his favorite example in the first part of the novella, where he attacks determinism. Determinism holds that the human personality and will can be boiled down to the laws of nature, science and mathematics. To the narrator, that sounds like a prison sentence.

  He gives nature's laws a symbol, the Stone Wall. It stands for every barrier that natural law sets against human freedom. He wants the liberty to declare that two plus two equals five, and the wall simply refuses to move.

  The Crystal Palace is the wall's grand architectural cousin. It appears in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, where it symbolizes a utopia in which everyone lives in harmony. The narrator ridicules the enlightened self-interest that Chernyshevsky offers as the foundation of that world. Any culture or legal system built on rational egoism is exactly what he despises.

  His objection is simple. At any moment, anyone may choose something that does not serve their own interest. Some will do it just to prove that they exist as individuals. The odd twist is that the narrator lives by the very ideal he mocks, and he seems to blame it for his unhappiness.

  He offers no rival blueprint in return. What he offers instead is a strange defense of pain.

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• 3. The Pleasure of Pain

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  Sections 2, 3 and 4 of the first part dwell on suffering, and on the irrational pleasure that the narrator finds in it. This sits at the center of his quarrel with utopia. A perfect society would remove pain, he argues, yet people want pain and need it in order to be happy. Take it away, and you take away their freedom.

  Society is cruel, he adds, and that cruelty teaches people to moan about their own pain only so that they can pass it on to others.

  Revenge shows how his mind works. Most people take revenge because they believe justice is the goal. The narrator feels the urge but does not find it virtuous. That mismatch curdles into spite against the act itself and everything surrounding it. He suspects that others like him exist, yet he keeps feeding his spite instead of doing anything that might ease his torment.

  Sections 5 and 6 turn to what he calls inertia. The root problem is ennui, a boredom so deep that it leaves him inactive. He even admits that he would choose idleness out of plain laziness. His pleasure in being rude, and his refusal to seek medical help, serve as small demonstrations of the same point. An idealized rationality, he suggests, overlooks the darker and more irrational side of people.

  Sections 10 and 11 gather the argument and hand the narrator over to Part 2, where his theories must survive contact with real people.

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• 4. Wet Snow and Insults

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  The second part is called Apropos of the Wet Snow, a nod to the critic Pavel Annenkov. He observed that "damp showers and wet snow" were indispensable to writers of the natural school in Petersburg. Beneath the title sits an epigraph from Nekrasov's poem "When from the darkness of delusion...", about a woman driven into prostitution by poverty. Dostoevsky breaks the quotation off with an ellipsis and the words "Etc., etc., etc."

  Ten sections follow, and the themes of the first part are now told as anecdotes. The narrator keeps his self-conscious, quarrelsome tone.

  An officer who once insulted him in a pub is the first obsession. The man keeps walking past him in the street, apparently unaware that he exists. The narrator plots revenge, borrows money for an expensive overcoat, and deliberately bumps into the officer to claim equality. To his astonishment, the officer does not seem to notice the collision at all.

  A going-away dinner for Zverkov is the next disaster. Zverkov is an old school friend being transferred out of the city, and the narrator hated these classmates when he was younger. After a chance visit to Simonov's, he decides to attend anyway. Nobody tells him that the time has been moved from five to six, so he arrives early. Soon he is arguing with all four of them and declaring his hatred of society, with the group standing in for it.

  The party then slips away to a secret brothel without him. Furious, the narrator follows, determined to confront Zverkov once and for all, whether or not he is beaten for it. He arrives to find Zverkov and the others already retired with prostitutes to separate rooms. Zverkov is out of reach, and the person the narrator meets instead is a young prostitute.

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• 5. Liza

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  Liza and the narrator lie silently in the dark, and then he begins to talk. He lays out an image of her future. At first she is unmoved. Then he challenges her own private utopian dreams, and she begins to see her position. She will slowly become useless, sink lower and lower, and finally be wanted by no one. The thought of such a disgraceful death grips her. She is enthralled by what seems to be his moving grasp of how society destroys people. He gives her his address and leaves.

  Afterward, fear takes hold of him. He dreads that she will really come to his dilapidated apartment, now that he has appeared such a hero to her. In the middle of an argument with his servant, she arrives. He curses her and takes back everything he said. He claims he was laughing at her, and he repeats how miserable her position is.

  Near the end of his rage, he breaks into tears. He confesses that he only wanted power over her and a chance to humiliate her. He admits that he is horrified by his own poverty and embarrassed by his situation. Liza sees how pitiful he is and tenderly embraces him. He cries out, "They - they won't let me - I - I can't be good!"

  Even then he behaves terribly. Before she leaves, he stuffs a five ruble note into her hand, and she throws it onto the table. The story implies that he slept with her and that the money is payment. He rushes into the street after her, cannot find her, and never hears from her again.

  To dull the pain, he turns to fantasizing. In the fantasy, the insult becomes a gift: "Insult - after all, it's a purification; it's the most caustic, painful consciousness!" Tomorrow, he tells himself, he would have defiled her soul and wearied her heart. Yet he admits that the memory makes him unhappy whenever it returns.

  Liza leaves the story at that point, and the narrator is left alone with his justification.

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• 6. Russia Under Reform

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  Tsar Alexander emancipated the serfs in 1861, only a few years before this novella appeared. Even so, Russia remained a traditional peasant society, post-medieval in character.

  In the 1860s, Western European ideas and culture were pouring into the country at an accelerating pace, and the result was an unsettled climate. Revolutionary activity was growing as tsardom restructured itself. The liberal reforms came from an unwieldy autocracy, and they only deepened tension in politics and civil society.

  Russian intellectuals split into two camps. The Westernizers wanted to import Western reforms. The Slavophiles preferred to promote pan-Slavic traditions as the answer to Russia's particular social reality.

  Religious philosophy and enlightened utopian schemes were being debated with great energy. Dostoevsky used fiction as a weapon in that debate, challenging nihilism and rational egoism. The novella also rejects the rationalist assumptions beneath Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian social philosophy.

  What troubles the Underground Man most is collectivism itself. A society's shared dream of paradise, he insists, will always be resisted by the individuals inside it. A vision like the Crystal Palace will fail, because humanity is irrational at its root.

  To carry that argument, Dostoevsky needed a voice, and the voice takes its name from a Russian word that English handles badly.

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• 7. A Voice Under the Floor

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  The Russian word podpólʹya means, literally, under the fields, built from pod for under and pol'ya for fields. In chapter 11, the narrator describes how inferior he feels to everyone around him. He says that listening to people is like "listening through a crack under the floor."

  The English word underground, it turns out, comes from a poor translation. A better rendering would be a crawl space, a gap beneath the floor too small for a person but home to rodents and bugs. In Russian folklore, it is also the place where evil spirits live.

  Mikhail Bakhtin looked closely at how the narrator addresses his reader. The first part looks like a monologue, but Bakhtin judged that in the confession there is "literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word." Every word anticipates the reply of someone else, and the narrator enters an obsessive internal quarrel with that imagined listener.

  The syntax matches the mind. Subject and verb often arrive at the start of a sentence, and then the object drops into the depths of the narrator's thoughts. He repeats many of his concepts. The "I" who speaks is never really discovered, even though the narrative is told in the first person.

  Dostoevsky frames the whole thing with notes of his own. A footnote opens the first part and discusses the character of the "author" and the nature of the "excerpts." A final note at the end of the second part says that the "author" could not help himself and kept writing, but that "it seems to us that we might as well stop here." Many later writers and filmmakers refused to stop there.

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• 8. Long Shadows

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  Friedrich Nietzsche read Notes from Underground in a French translation. His philosophy is one of several fields the novella has touched, alongside literature and film. The work has even been described as "probably the most important single source of the modern dystopia." Its challenge to the idea of an enlightened society laid groundwork for later writing.

  Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, from 1915, belongs on the list of works it influenced, and so does Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, from 1952. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, from 1976, is another entry. In 1995, Gary Walkow directed a film adaptation with Henry Czerny and Sheryl Lee in the leading roles. The same list includes Yeraltı, directed by Zeki Demirkubuz in 2012, and a 2014 work by Roger Scruton that shares the novella's title.

  In Ramin Bahrani's 2018 film Fahrenheit 451, Michael B. Jordan plays Guy Montag, who picks the novel to read. It transforms his worldview and leads to his rebellion. That same year, in Infinite Regression, the philosopher Eugene Thacker recapitulated the novella's influence on pessimist philosophy and literature.

  Vladimir Nabokov weighed the novella in the Dostoevsky chapter of his Lectures on Russian Literature. He described art as "a divine game," in which readers must remember that it is all make-believe. He invited his listeners to ponder Crime and Punishment and Memoirs from a Mousehole, also known as Notes from Underground, from that point of view. Is the artistic pleasure of following Dostoevsky into sick souls always greater than disgust or morbid interest?

  Translators have kept returning to the book. C. J. Hogarth's English version of 1913 carried the title Letters from the Underworld. Constance Garnett followed in 1918, and Ralph E. Matlaw revised her work in 1960. David Magarshack translated it in 1955, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in 1993. Kirsten Lodge's 2014 version is the latest on that long list, and the narrator is still waiting for his definitive English voice.

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