Part 1, Chapter 10 — the Crystal Palace

You believe, the chapter opens, in a crystal palace that can never be destroyed — a palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a long nose on the sly. The Crystal Palace, by 1864, was a fixed reference: the iron-and-glass exhibition hall built in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and adopted by Chernyshevsky as the visual emblem of his utopia of rational self-interest. The Underground Man is naming it directly. The polemic has been working towards this image for several chapters. Here it arrives.

And perhaps, he says, that is precisely why I am afraid of this edifice — that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed, and that one cannot put one's tongue out at it even on the sly. He develops the point with characteristic doubling. If it were a hen-house, he says, he might creep into it to avoid getting wet, but he would not on that account call the hen-house a palace out of gratitude for keeping him dry. The hen-house respects what it is. The Crystal Palace insists that it is more, and the insistence is what cannot be borne.

The chapter compresses the whole argument of Part 1. The objection to the rationalist utopia is not that it would not work; the objection is that working would be its problem. The Underground Man wants the freedom to put his tongue out, to make the long nose on the sly, to disrespect what he has been given. The Crystal Palace forecloses that freedom by being, on its own account, beyond reproach. He would prefer the hen-house in the rain. He would prefer twenty years in a basement flat in Petersburg, ridiculous, but possessed of the small remaining freedom to refuse to be impressed.