Dostoyesky's anti-hero is the the first of a long line of existential anti-heroes who followed later in the 20th century. Clearly, here is an utterly loathsome man who is alienated from his brethren by virtue of his own worldview and is victimized by it. In his sublime genius Dostoyevsky sufficiently respects his readers to challenge them to find something, however dreadful it may be, to connect intellectually with a protagonist who is virtually impossible to admire. While so many novelists of his era present protagonists with whom it is hoped that you will connect at deeper levels, Dostoyevsky almost seems to care less whether you find something of yourself in the lonely man living in a wretched room beneath the boards of an apartment on the edge of St. Petersburg apropos of wet snow. The underground man has squandered his gifts to burrow impossibly deep within his interior life, so much so that he has abandoned all social graces and is unwilling or unable to connect with outsiders above-ground. This underground man finds himself "morbidly developed, as a man of our time ought to be developed... Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave." He is trapped by his superior intellect and his heightened consciousness showers him with agony to leave him without a clue as to how to relate to men and women of any social status. He is entirely, utterly and hopelessly alone living in a random world the sense of which eludes him with its futility. "I am now living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the twentieth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being: a man of character, an active figure -- primarily a limited character." He foreshadows the players in the dramas of Samuel Beckett and Sartre: "The final end, gentlemen: better to do nothing... And so, long live the underground." He is Nietszche and Kierkegaard in the ways in which they experienced their lives. He is "The Stranger" of Camus and a being straight out of "The Metamorphosis" of Kafka: "I'll tell you solemnly that I wanted many times to become an insect." Dostoyevsky anticipates the dreadful and perverse 20th century anti-hero Humbert of Nabokov in "Lolita" and utterly bewildered, shell-shocked protagonists like Billy Pilgrim in Dresden after its bombing in World War II in "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut. Honest to a fault, brilliant, alienated and articulate, the underground man asks and answers his own question: "What can a decent man speak about with the most pleasing? Answer: about himself. So then, I, too, will speak about myself." He finds it impossible to channel his intellect into positive action: he lives in a state of nearly total paralysis. Like all good existentialists he is plagued by his own haunting consciousness: "I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness... What is the result of heightened consciousness: it is simply to become a scoundrel." He wonders how a man of consciousness can have the slightest respect for himself as every primary cause drags with it another and so it goes infinitely. He deems that the express purpose of every intelligent man is "babble -- a deliberate outpouring from empty into void." But he blames himself because he is more intelligent than everyone around him. He scorns the "good and lofty" and considers such idealism as building a Crystal Palace, which only leads to getting stuck deeper in the mire underground. The underground man is highly in agreement with Heine who observed, rightly I suspect, in criticism of Rousseau who lied about his life for his vanity in his "Confessions." The educated and well developed man of his time challenges the notion of what is profitable in this "twopenny bustle" and scorns reason itself: "Gentlemen, why don't we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick?" But there's much more on this subject which is curious coming, as it does, from an intelligent man: "Reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man's reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life... I, for example, quite naturally want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living and not so as to satisfy just my reasoning capacity alone." No magnanimity graces his soul as because of it he would be tormented by the consciousness of its utter futility as Nature does not ask your permission and doesn't care about your wishes or if you like its laws. He invited you to listen to the moaning of an educated 19th century man suffering from a toothache. Point well made and taken. Man is an animal damned by ingratitude and in a classical definition of our species he defines man as "the ungrateful biped" and is further distinguished among all other creatures as the only animal which curses. He finds that man is "comically arranged" and that somewhere in all of existence there is a joke and perhaps existence is simply a grand hoax foisted upon humanity. For example, he wonders why he has been so arranged with such desires as he possesses or which possess him utterly. When he encounters and seeks relief in a prostitute named Liza, he falls in love, an emotion which betrays and makes a fool of him. But he yields to his nature, as he feels he can do no other, and seeks to win her with his intelligent face and to liberate her from the life of the streets with his intellect: "I'll get you with these pictures!" He derides Liza by saying, "What are you putting in bondage? It's your soul, over which you have no power, that you put in bondage along with your body...And for the sake of what, one wonders, have you ruined your life here?... There is not and never has been any harder or harsher work in the world than this. One would think your heart alone would simply pour itself out in tears." On the subject of love in his underground dreams he describes it as "God's mystery" and later as the yielding right to become tyrannized by your lover. Most of all, the anti-hero is Dostoyesky, the author, penning immortal lines of literature from debtor's prison. "Our discussion is serious... I am not going to bow and scrape before you. I have the underground." He taunts his readers boldly, as few novelists before him have written, as to be "so gullible as to imagine I will publish all this and, what's more, give it to you to read... I shall never have any readers." Ultimately, what does the underground man want most of all? "I longed for 'peace,' I longed to be left alone in the underground. 'Living life' so crushed me, unaccustomed to it as I was, that it even became difficult for me to breathe." In the end he insults his readers by advising them that his notes are only his work to carry to an extreme what his readers, you and I, are too cowardly to carry and chides all of us for taking comfort in our morbid and possibly surreal self-deception, a major theme later developed by Sartre in "Existentialism Is a Humanism." "But enough: I don't want to write any more 'from Underground" with a capital "U" this time. However, in another paradox in the last lines his notes continue because the underground man can't help himself and went on scribbling his babble anyway. To understand clearly the influence of this Father of Existentialism in 20th century literature, one must first understand this germinal literary classic.
I scribbled on my notepad, random words, stared at them, struck them and occasionally, tore the page to reveal a new one. The overcast sky was teetering at the rain’s behest and the drowning sun was not of much assistance either. I was wriggling my fingers between the spaces of the black wrought iron bench on which I had been sitting for over three hours now. My patience was about to surrender and I was in no mood to cajole it any further. I snapped shut my notepad, freed my fingers and was about to leave when….I: Did you come from there?D: Did you not expect that?I: Ah well, I was kind of…D: You see, you ask questions for which you already know the answer.I: Actually, it’s called confirmation.D: No, it is deeper. It’s called consciousness.I: What does that mean?D: You are clearly conscious of a thing and yet you keep it groggy under the limp veils of confirmation and validity and other fancy words.I: Consciousness comes with a lot of digging; consistent digging. It is not everyone’s cup of tea.D: (mildly chortles)I: What? D: Nothing. I: C’mon! You cannot smirk like that and shut up without explaining!D: Okay. Let me ask you something. Why have you been waiting here for three hours?I: Because I had a meeting with you.D: That was timed three hours ago and you should have been long gone.I: Well, yes. But I thought you might have gotten stuck somewhere and would be probably on your way.D: Really? Think again.I: Well, may be I wanted to meet you.D: And waiting made you feel good!I: Certainly not!D: Oh very much, my lady. The waiting was a pain which during the first hour was scratching at your consciousness. But once it seeped in, you began enjoying it. Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.I: Rubbish. How can someone enjoy suffering?D: Have you ever dabbed your nail over a dry cut on your skin? And with every dab, a shrill of pain running through your nerves bringing you a sense of enjoyment after a while? So much that you continue the activity?I: Perhaps some moments were…D: There! The enjoyment was just from too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one has reached the last barrier.I: You might be right in some distorted way. But your fixation with darkness renders everything fair, meaningless.D: You interpret wrong again, my lady. The darkness I talk about is already ingrained in you. You choose to be aware of it and pursue it too. You just stop short of accepting it. I: I pursue darkness?D: Your dark side, to be precise.I: How can you say that?D: Let us just take today’s instance. You could have easily walked at the strike of 3pm and kept your upright sense breathing with principle. But you chose to hover. Not for 1, 2, 3 but freaking 190 minutes! There was fun in waiting for the unknown visitor since that window gave you the independence to create the story the way you wished to. You could make me tall or short, contort my face to suit your image, sway the discussion to merge with your thoughts. But the moment I appeared, you had to banish your independence and cede the power in my favour. So, you see, you enjoyed the waiting, the suffering if you so choose to call it. That is the reason you waited - to appease your dark side, not to fulfill my flair; in the slightest. I: (in a low voice) What you say might have some truth in it. But it may not be the entire truth. I think….D: Ah….And in a swoosh, he rose in thin air, flung towards the adjacent underground and disappeared into it before I could blink twice. I kept sitting on the bench, at the risk of proving him right, hoping for another rendezvous with the mysterious D who made sense and muddled it, all the same. I looked up. The sky had turned dark after all.
What do You think about Notes From Underground (2004)?
My edition of “Notes from Underground” includes a magisterial foreword by Richard Pevear that gives an extra dimension to the introspective musings of its sardonic anti-hero, bestowing them with the required intellectual authority to reproach the utopian socialism and the aesthetic utilitarianism prevalent in the Russia of the 1860s and offer responses to ideological, philosophical and moral paradoxes of a world in the threshold of progress and modernity.The fact that Dostoevsky’s novella constitutes one of the founding pillars of the psychoanalysis theories and the existentialist reasoning didn’t come as a surprise. The protagonist establishes an inner dialogue with himself and engages the reader in an acerbic and self-mocking dialogue in which he reasserts his individual freethinking over the redemptive control imposed by totalitarian principles.But as juicy as Pevear’s references and footnotes were, the cavernous voice that crawled from the netherworld and seeped into my conscience seemed atemporal and devoid of indoctrinating intention to me, and therefore, universal. “I'm now asking an idle question of my own: which is better--cheap happiness, or lofty suffering? Well, which is better?”I listened to a man’s introspective self-judgement, to the confession of a life dragged away by the currents of his deficiencies, his frustrations, his shame and infectious regrets that fester in the wound of his current existence.Dostoevsky’s man from the underground is the embodiment of a decisive juncture that every human being will face at some point in his life: the crossroads between ignoble actions taken in the heat of the moment and virtuous resolves that never materialized, the split second when the mask of self-deception is dropped and lofty pride and steely detachment dissolve into smothering sadness and remorseful loneliness. I listened and nodded in recognition.“I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.” The hypocrisy of denouncing the perversity of the Western civilization, this “crystal palace” of rationality and hollow idealism and its despicable inhabitants, and the irrepressible craving to belong to it, to be accepted and praised by those who were adamantly ridiculized in order to cover one’s own failures and corroding envy.The acrimonious humor and spiteful demeanor, mere rudimentary shields to conceal the resigned acquiescence to one’s insignificance and disguise the fear of losing with affected indifference.Does it ring a bell? Yes, I know.“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”Desire makes the man from the underground vulnerable.Feigned hate, rocambolesque plans for revenge and mean-spirited humiliation become necessary tools to banish those who might offer unselfish love and the burden of happiness.I listened to the cacophony of the paradoxical selves that give voice to this conflicted narrator who speaks from the underworld, from the fetid gutter in the obscure basement of mankind’s subconscious, and I joined him in polyphonic canon.For this cantankerous misfit exposes the turpitudes of our human souls without reservation, sometimes with his head, others with his heart but mostly with a gut instinct that bleeds with the raw honesty only the unrepentant liar possesses. There is no light that allows us to discern a clear image of the creature that inhabits the catacombs of our consciences but the man from the underground has learned to see in the dark. His voice comes from beyond. You just need to close your eyes and listen.
—Dolors
Original ReviewNotes from Underground is a small but influential work.In particular, it is the inspiration for the Howard Devoto (of Magazine fame) song "A Song from under the Floorboards" from "The Correct Use of Soap" (later covered by the solo artist Steven Patrick Morrissey).The song begins, "I am angry, I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin", which is partly based on the first paragraph of the novel.The name of the novel takes a bit of a liberty with the original Russian title.In the English, it conveys the meaning of "The Underground" as in the counterculture of the 60's.Apparently, the original Russian is closer to "Notes from under the Floorboards".Devoto, one of my favourite songwriters, would also rhyme "Raskolnikov" with "ripped me off" in the song "Philadelphia" (which he rhymed with "healthier").As far as I can tell, he never managed to rhyme anything with Dostoyevsky.Neither have I. March 7, 2011Review after Re-ReadingSee my review after a re-read:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
—Ian Agadada-Davida
Chris wrote: "I am enjoying it (I think?) Rowena, thank you. I've read some philosophy and psychology in the past, but ...as you said earlier in this discussion, Dostoyevsky is intimidating (although I did once ..."Yup, I know what you mean. I keep saying I need to finish Crime and Punishment, not sure why I haven't yet. I need to pick a month to devote to Russian lit:)
—Rowena
