Notes From Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

This book blog was born in March and began with an analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel 'Devils', a book that I found compelling and ignited in me the desire to get to grips with Dostoevsky as often as possible. It is therefore entirely apt that five months of successful book blogging later, I've returned to the works of Dostoevsky, specifically, to the short novel 'Notes From Underground', which, like 'Devils', examines the way that Romantic Liberalism leads inevitably to Nihilism. In the case of 'Devils', this transition is metaphorically elucidated through a father, Stepan Trofimovich and his son, Peter Stepanovich, but with the earlier 'Notes From Underground', Dostoevsky has his narrator describe his current feelings of disgust at the futility of man attempting to build the symbolic utopian "crystal palace" through enlightened social consciousness and then move towards narrating three episodes which led to his current nihilistic world view.

Part one of the novel, then, is the ranting, self-pitying, diversionary "notes" of a nameless former civil servant of around forty. He attained the rank of Collegiate Assessor in the Tsarist civil service (a well-paid rank equivalent to the rank of major in the army), which he quit immediately upon receiving a hefty bequest in a relative's will to descend "underground", that is, separate from society and its stupidity, as he perceives it. He poses a number of questions in this introduction which he will come round to addressing in the anecdotes that form part two. Firstly, why do most people find revenge virtuous and just, and easily find the means to take it, when he struggles to find meaning in the act of revenge and only pursues it through meaninglessly spiteful and petty acts? Secondly, why do people find such pleasure in pain and in describing it to others? Thirdly, why are we struck with inertia at crucial moments? Finally, what is civilisation and what is our relation to it?

These questions lead into a series of episodes which occurred twenty years before, events which helped to turn the narrator into the Underground Man. The first episode, rendered by Dostoevsky with typical humour and irony, concerns the narrator obsessively attempting to take revenge on an officer who physically moved him out of his path without a word, only to find that the officer has no idea that the narrator's chosen method of revenge (a shoulder barge in the street) has even happened. The second surrounds a dinner some school acquaintances of his have for one of their number who is leaving town. Despite the fact that he hated them at school, the narrator inveigles his way into the gathering, only to behave towards them with scorn and contempt until they leave to visit a secret brothel without him. The third episode follows on immediately after the dinner, and finds our anti-heroic narrator visiting the brothel; his acquaintances are gone, but he strikes up a conversation with one of the prostitutes and unintentionally sleeps with her and then tells her his vision of society's ills. His behaviour in all three episodes shows a sort of bizarre juxtaposition of bravery and cowardice; bravery because he will not compromise just to fit in and cowardice because he never takes action in the way that he steels himself to. Alarmingly, I rather recognised myself throughout the narrator's misadventures! In any event, these reminiscences give the reader a succinct summary of why the narrator has separated himself from contemporary life.

What is most striking about this novel is the way the idea, tone and style have influenced so much of the literature that follows it. In interrogating Russia's flawed obsession with Determinism, the author anticipates his own 'Devils'. By charting the way that pleasure can be obtained by spreading one's pain, he lays the ground for 'Crime and Punishment', while Dostoevsky's critical response to Chernyshevsky's idealist socially utopian novel 'What Is To Be Done?' is a thread that runs through all of his late masterpieces. The figure of the man underground has been used by- amongst others- Ralph Ellison, whose 'Invisible Man' takes Dostoevsky's concept and applies it to the plight of African-Americans in the post-war United States. The absurdist humour and nihilist themes of Dostoevsky's book are used by Joseph Heller in 'Catch 22', particular in Yossarian, the air captain who points out the essential ridiculousness of the air warfare he's involved in: you'd have to be mad to fly, but recognising this fact simulataneously means you are sane enough to fly. Bret Easton Ellis uses a quotation from 'Notes From Underground' as one of the epigraphs to 'American Psycho' as a way of pointing out the fact that he intends to critique 1980s America in the same way as Dostoevsky critiqued 1860s Russia. Looking at the style, it is so strikingly minimalist in many ways, full of stark, short sentences and proclamations of disgust, self-aggrandisement, self-laceration and poetic social awareness. In Dostoevsky's chosen prose style and narrative voice, one can see how Camus, Sartre, Hemingway and Ellis were his successors and imitators. 

This is a truly important text in the development of modern fiction, and, indeed, modern consciousness. The Underground Man is a compelling narrator, utterly brutal in expressing his views, acting as both a vehicle for Dostoevsky to satirise Nihilism and also as a means to criticise Social Determinism, which he loathed. It's short, tightly focused, experimental and hugely enjoyable. Of all the many European authors of the Nineteenth Century, I feel that it is Dostoevsky who has most influenced the novelists of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries. A grand claim, I know, but when one reads his books, one sees how truly influential they are.