Notes from Underground is a novel written by the
great Russian novelist Dostoevsky. His most popular novel is Crime and
Punishment. It is considered as the first Existentialist novel which has
two parts. This novel presents itself as a part of an underground man’s diary.
The man is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg , Russia
The novel consists of an
introduction, three main sections and a conclusion. The short introduction
speaks about a number of riddles whose meanings will be later developed.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 speaks about suffering and the enjoyment of suffering. (2)
Chapters 5 and 6 speak about intellectual and moral issues and with conscious
“inertia”-inaction. (3) Chapters 7 to 9 with theories of reason and logic. The
last two chapters are a summary and a transition into Part 2 of the novel.
War is described as people’s
rebellion against the belief (assumption) that everything needs to happen for a
purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines
human history.
Secondly, the narrator’s desire for
happiness is exemplified by his liver pain and toothache. This is similar to
Raskolinikove’s behaviour in Destoevsky’s later novel, Crime and Punishment.
The protagonist in the novel says that, due to the cruelty of society, human beings
only moan about pain in order to spread their suffering to others. He builds up
his own paranoia to the point he is incapable of looking his co-workers in the
eye. The main issue for the Underground
Man is that he has reached a point of ennui and inactivity. Most people always
act out of revenge because they believe justice is the end, but the Underground
Man is conscious of his problems, feels the desire for revenge, but he does not
find it virtuous; this confusion leads to spite and ill will and spite towards
the act itself with its circumstances. He feels that others like him exist, yet
he continuously concentrates on his spitefulness instead of on actions that
would avoid the problems he is so concerned with. At one point he says that
he’d rather be inactive out of laziness.
The first part of the novel also
gives a harsh criticism of determinism and intellectual attempts at dictating human
action and behaviour by logic, which the Underground Man mentions in terms of
simple math problem two times two makes four. He also says that humanity tries
to create the “Crystal
Palace
In other works, Dostoyevsky again
confronts the concept of free will and constructs a negative argument to
validate free will against determinism in the character Kirillov’s suicide in
his novel “The Demons”. “Notes from Underground” marks the starting point of
Dostoyevsky’s move from psychological and sociological named novels to the
novels based on existential philosophy and general human experience in
crisis.
Part 2: is titled “Apropos of the Wet
Snow” The
second part is the actual story and consists of three main segments that lead
to a furthering of the Underground Man’s consciousness. The first is his
obsession with and officer who physically moves him out of the way, seemingly
without noticing his existence. He sees
the officer on the street and thinks of ways to take revenge, eventually
deciding to bump into him, which he does, finding to his surprise that the
officer does not seem to even notice it happened.
The second segment is a dinner party
with some old school friends to wish Zverkov, one of their number, goodbye as
he is being transferred out of the city.
The underground man hated them when he was younger, but after a random
visit to Simonov’s, he decides to meet them at the appointed location. They fail to tell him that the time has been
changed to six instead of five, so he arrives early. He gets into an argument with the four after
a short time declaring to all his hatred of society aznd using them as the symbol
of it. At the end, they go off without
him to a secret brothel, and, in his anger, the underground man follows them
there to confront Zverkov once and for all, whether he might be beaten up or
not. He arrives to find Zverkov and company and have apparently already retired
with prostitutes to other rooms. He then encounters Liza, a young prostitute,
with whom he goes to bed.
When the underground man and Liza
lying silently in the dark together, he speaks to Liza about her future and at
first she is not bothered about his talk about her, but finally she realizes the plight of her
position and how she will slowly become useless and will descent more and more,
until she is no longer wanted by any one.
The thought of dying such a terribly disgraceful death brings her to
realize her position and she then finds herself attracted by the underground
man’s seemingly poignant grasp of society’s ills. He gives her his address and
leaves.
After this, he is overcome by the
fear of her actually arriving at his dilapidated apartment after appearing such
a “hero” to her and, in the middle of an argument with his servant, she
arrives. He then curses her and takes back everything he said to her, saying he
was, in fact, laughing at her and reiterates the truth of her miserable
position. Near the end of his painful rage he wells up in tears after saying
that he was only seeking to have power over her and a desire to humiliate her.
He begins to criticize himself and states that he is in fact horrified by his
own poverty and problems of painful situation. Liza realizes how pitiful he is
and tenderly embraces him. The underground man cries out “They - they won’t let me-I-I can’t be good”
After all this, he still acts
terribly towards her, and, before she leaves, he stuffs a five ruble note into
her hand, which she angrily throws onto the table. He tries to catch her as she
goes out onto the street but cannot find her and never hears from her
again. He tries to stop the pain in his
heart by “fantasizing” He says, “And isn’t it better, won’t it be
better?....Insult – after all, it’s a purification; it’s the most caustic,
painful consciousness!. Only tomorrow I would have defiled her soul and wearied
her heart. But now the insult will never ever die within her, and however
repulsive the filth that awaits her, the insult will elevate her, it will
cleanse her….” He recalls this moment as
making him unhappy, whenever he thinks
of it, yet again proving the fact from the first section that his anger for
society and his inability to act like it makes him unable to act better than
it.
The concluding sentences recall some
of the themes explored in the first part, and the work as a whole ends with a
note from the author that while there was more to the text. “it seems that we
may stop here.
Literary significance and criticism
Like many of Dostoevsky’s novels,
“Notes from Underground” was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its
clear rejection of utopian socialism and its portrait of humans as irrational,
uncontrollable, and uncooperative animals.
His claim that human needs can never be satisfied, in spite of
technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many existentialist
critics, notably Jean Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be a forerunner of
existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own philosophies. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called
Dostoevsky “the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had anything to
learn” and that “Notes from Underground” cried truth from the blood.”
Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel “Invisible Man”
which has themes of existential anguish in the black American experience, uses
a protagonist-narrator inspired by Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” –
kjt/15-03-2014.
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