Part 1, Chapter 7 — rational interest
The chapter where the polemic against Chernyshevsky begins. Show a man his rational self-interest and watch him refuse it on purpose.
Summary
But these are all golden dreams. The chapter opens with this and turns to the polemic that the rest of Part 1 sustains. Who first announced, the Underground Man asks, that man does nasty things only because he doesn't know his own interests? — that if his eyes were opened to his real advantage, he would at once stop and become good and noble, because being enlightened he would see his advantage in the good and nothing else. It is, in 1864, the most fashionable belief in Russia. Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? had been published the year before; the rationalist utopianism it argued for was gospel in the radical circles Dostoevsky moved among.
The Underground Man will not have it. New economic relations, he says, will indeed be established with mathematical exactitude — and then, then, the Crystal Palace will be built. He concedes the prediction with a sneer. The problem is not whether the calculations are correct. The problem is that the human being is not the kind of creature who will live inside them. Show him his interest, and out of mere ingratitude he will choose the opposite. Tell him he is acting irrationally, and he will choose to act more irrationally still, on purpose, to demonstrate that the formula is incomplete.
The chapter is the philosophical hinge of Part 1. Human freedom, for the Underground Man, is not the freedom to choose what is rational; it is the freedom to refuse the rational on principle. The Crystal Palace and the engineered society collapse because they cannot accommodate the one thing they were built to manage: a creature who will act against his own interest as soon as he discovers that his interest is being calculated for him.
- Part 1, Ch. 1The novel opens with the voice. A forty-year-old retired collegiate assessor, alone in a basement flat in Petersburg, addressing...
- Part 1, Ch. 2He could not even become an insect, he says. The reason is that consciousness past a certain degree is itself an illness — a real...
- Part 1, Ch. 3Two types of human being. The "direct" man — the bull — charges at the wrong done to him until a wall stops him. The man of acute...
- Part 1, Ch. 4An imagined reader laughs at him. Next he will be finding enjoyment in toothache! He answers seriously: yes, even in toothache...
- Part 1, Ch. 5A single long paragraph. Yes, he says, a man can take pleasure in his own degradation; he has done it for years, and is not, here...
- Part 1, Ch. 6If only he had done nothing simply out of laziness! "Sluggard" would have been a calling, a quality, a positive trait — something...
- Part 1, Ch. 7Who first announced, the Underground Man asks, that man does nasty things only because he doesn't know his own interests? The...
- Part 1, Ch. 8Science, his reader says, will eventually prove that free will is an illusion — that desire follows from antecedent causes the way...
- Part 1, Ch. 9The ant has finished his anthill, and that is why he is still an ant. Man — mercifully — prefers the process of building to the...
- Part 1, Ch. 10You believe in a Crystal Palace, he tells the reader — a palace at which one cannot put out one's tongue or make a long nose on...
- Part 1, Ch. 11Better to do nothing! Long live underground! He cries the conclusion — and, in the same chapter, takes it back. He does not...
- Part 2, Ch. 1Sixteen years earlier. The Underground Man is twenty-four, gloomy, ill-regulated, already as solitary as a savage. He hates the...
- Part 2, Ch. 2One night in a billiard room a tall officer in uniform brushes the Underground Man aside without noticing him. The Underground Man...
- Part 2, Ch. 3He drops in on Simonov to find two more schoolmates — Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov — planning a farewell dinner for Zverkov, a...
- Part 2, Ch. 4He arrives at the Hôtel de Paris an hour early; he has misread the time. The others appear at six, friendly to Zverkov and...
- Part 2, Ch. 5He runs out of the tavern. "So this is it, this is it at last — contact with real life," he mutters at himself, half-mocking, half...
- Part 2, Ch. 6Upstairs with Liza. He sleeps, wakes in the dark to a wheezing clock striking two, begins to talk. A long speech — half borrowed...
- Part 2, Ch. 7He walks home with her address in his pocket. By morning the sincere speech of the night before has become a trap. He has invited...
- Part 2, Ch. 8The long war with Apollon over a few rubles in unpaid wages reaches its loudest point. The Underground Man, in his dressing gown...
- Part 2, Ch. 9She comes in. He turns on her. The speech in the brothel was a lie, he tells her; he was amusing himself with her tears; she was a...
- Part 2, Ch. 10As she leaves he presses a crumpled five-rouble note into her hand, "from spite," to convert what she has just done into a...