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. 

Devils (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

In the seminal early 2000s comedy series 'Freaks and Geeks', young Sam Weir, set a homework assignment on Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment', remarks to his father that the novel is "really weird, and all the characters have really long names". Like all such gnomic simplifications, this description of Dostoevsky's work certainly contains a grain of truth, but once the Western reader gets over the patronymics, there's a great deal more to discover.

Despite my extremely thorough literary education, I had not actually heard of 'Devils' before. This book first gained my attention in the way so many others have, that is, by looking beautiful on the shelves of Waterstones. Accusations of shallowness be damned, there's nothing like a well designed cover to set the imagination of the reader racing. When I picked this tome up just after Christmas and read the blurb, I was instantly entranced. Revolutionaries running riot in a provincial Russian backwater? Sounded like my type of thing. Soon after, my girlfriend brought it home as a surprise gift. The past two months have been spent worshipping at its altar. This is a truly astonishing work of literature. 

The primary problem with any literature originally written in a foreign tongue is that a great deal is lost in translation. One particular issue with editions of Dostoevsky is that often, the biting social satire and absurdist comedy he is so adept at fall by the wayside. Michael Katz, of the University of Texas, is therefore to be congratulated for endeavouring to embue this new Oxford World's Classics edition with the wit Dostoevsky intended it to possess in the first place. The novel, assumed to be set in the 1860s, starts as a gentle satire of the Liberalism that swept through Russia in the 1840s, primarily through the narrator's observations of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhoevensky, a former Professor of History whose impolitic liberal views got him dismissed from his post twenty years before the beginning of the novel. Following this dismissal, he finds himself the tutor to the son of provincial landowner Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, an arrangement which has lead to Stepan Trofimovich becoming a kept wit on her estate, perfectly comfortable but a man of less consequence than he thinks, an absurdly vain little man living off past glories that were not actually particularly glorious. Stepan Trofimovich is a masterpiece of characterisation, with his self-conscious use of French phrases mixed into his Russian (for example "voyez vous" instead of "do you see") and his bilious attacks of nerves. Although he seems like a harmless innocent, almost a buffoon, it is, Dostoevsky shows us, his liberal ideals which lead inevitably to the warped radicalism of the younger generation. Specifically, it is the son of Stepan Trofimovich, Peter Stepanovich, who causes the chaos that subsequently consumes the town. Liberalism literally gives birth to Radicalism. Similarly, Varvara Petrovna's son Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin is shown to be an amoral black hole of charisma, completely out of touch with his fellow man, unable to take on the challenge of modernising relations between the aristocracy and everyday Russians but also unwilling to join the revolutionary movement as participant or figurehead; he is the ultimate nihilist. Only very slowly does Dostoevsky uncover the rot at the heart of this province, a group of revolutionaries put together and manipulated by Stepanovich. This occurs at a pace slow enough to be gripping but not slow enough to frustrate. Behind the comedy is tragedy, behind the farce is serious political comment.

Indeed, the 'Devils' of the title are the ideas that have torn Russia apart through the Nineteenth Century. Conservatism, Liberalism, Nihilism...all are at fault, as far as Dostoevsky is concerned. The metaphor is based on the scriptural story of the Gardarene Swine, into whom Christ cast the Devil after he had possessed a man. The swine ran into a deep lake and were drowned; the evil spirits destroyed themselves. Many critics have suggested that Dostoevsky intended to explicitly criticise Liberalism and Anarchism with this allusion, but in my view the establishment do not come off any better; the new governor of the province, Von Lembke, is a weak and marginalised figure expertly manipulated by Peter Stepanovich and ultimately humiliated and badly injured in front of the entire town. His wife is similarly disgraced when a literary fete she organises ends in uproar and controversy. Even the Russian Orthodox church is ridiculed, with icons routinely stolen and a hermit priest, Father Tikhon, the agency for a lengthy (but unacted on) confession by Stavrogin. The ultimate themes of the novel are chaos and confusion, in terms of action and in terms of ideas. No-one ever seems to know what they are doing, nor what their philosophy is. In this way, Dostoevsky accurately reflects real life, where idealists and dogmatic types alike constantly contradict themselves in debate.

This novel is a towering achievement. It is not only a fascinatingly complex tragedy of human frailty and vanity, it is also a burlesque of a dizzying array of political and philosophical ideas that is laugh out loud funny. The characters are compelling and moving, the final section a dazzling tour de force that ties up the loose ends that are strewn cavalier style throughout the first two sections. This is a book that everybody should read. A literary education is incomplete until you've read it.