Notes from Underground — themes & analysis

Part 1 of Notes from Underground is a polemic. The target, named in the text, is Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? — a utopian novel published the year before, hugely influential among the Russian radical intelligentsia, that imagined a future society organised entirely by rational self-interest. Show people their advantage, Chernyshevsky argued, and they will choose it. Educate, calculate, rebuild — and human misery becomes a problem of insufficient information. The image he offered was the Crystal Palace, the iron-and-glass exhibition hall built in London for the 1851 Great Exhibition: transparent, shatterproof, total.

The Underground Man takes that palace apart. His argument runs roughly like this. You can show a man his rational interest as often as you like; he will choose against it on purpose, to demonstrate that he is not a piano key whose notes can be predicted. He will choose suffering. He will choose perversity. He will smash the palace from the inside. Two times two equals four is, in his phrase, "the beginning of death." Two times two equals five is sometimes a charming little thing too. The point is not that he is wrong about arithmetic. The point is that he refuses to live in a world where what he is can be derived from arithmetic.

The argument is presented as a polemic but it is also a confession. The Underground Man is not a healthy man explaining a thesis to a class. He is a forty-year-old recluse in a basement flat, talking to readers he despises, defending a philosophy that has produced exactly the wreck of a life he is currently living. Dostoevsky is doing two things at once. He is making the case against rational utopianism — and he is showing what holding that case as a way of life does to the man who holds it. The Underground Man is right and ill at the same time. The novel does not separate the two.

Every regime since 1864 that has tried to engineer humanity into rational happiness has run into the wall the monologue describes. The contemporary debates about whether human behaviour can be modelled at scale are the same debate. The Underground Man's answer is unchanged: a creature whose freedom can be predicted is, by that fact, no longer free. He would rather be wretched than be modelled. He is wretched. He is not modelled.

Where to follow it: Chapter 7 (the rational interest), Chapter 10 (the Crystal Palace), Chapter 11 (long live underground).

The Underground Man's central psychological claim is that consciousness, past a certain pitch, becomes paralysing. The "direct" man — the man of action, who when wronged charges his target like a bull — does what he does because he has not stopped to examine his own motives. He believes his revenge is justice. He believes his love is love. He acts. The Underground Man cannot. Every motive, the moment he forms it, splits. Revenge becomes the wish for revenge plus the suspicion that the wish is petty plus the further suspicion that the suspicion is itself a posture. By the time the chain has run, the moment is gone and he has done nothing.

He calls this an illness. He says so in the second chapter and repeats it. He also claims to be proud of it. To have a developed consciousness is to be incapable of becoming anything — neither hero nor scoundrel, not even an insect. The "man of acute consciousness," he says, is a creature so abstracted, so morally exhausted, that he is incapable even of respecting himself. He envies the direct man "to the last drop of his bile." He despises him at the same time. He cannot stop being himself.

The novel's formal achievement is that the prose enacts the illness it describes. The Underground Man cannot complete a thought without doubling back on it. He says one thing, says he was lying, says the second statement was a lie too, says he is lying now in writing it down. The narration is the disease in operation. By the end of Part 1 a reader has been taught, by the rhythm of the sentences themselves, what it is like to live inside this kind of mind. The diagnosis is no longer abstract.

The question the novel will not settle is whether this is the diagnosis of a single sick man or the diagnosis of a generation. The Underground Man insists it is the latter. "I am only carrying to an extreme," he says, "what you have not dared to carry even halfway." The reader is invited to recognise the type. Dostoevsky drew the figure once in 1864; the type has only multiplied. Hamsun's narrator in Hunger, Sartre's Roquentin, Camus's Meursault, Ralph Ellison's invisible man — they are all, in one register or another, the man speaking from this floor.

Where to follow it: Chapter 2 (consciousness as disease), Chapter 3 (the direct man and the wall), Chapter 11 (the lying confession).

The opening line — "I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man" — gives the reader the three terms the rest of the book will live inside. Sickness, spite, ugliness. The middle term is the load-bearing one. Spite, for the Underground Man, is not a moral failing; it is a category of the will. It is what he has left when everything else has been taken away. He does not see the doctor out of spite. He keeps the unfinished sentence in the manuscript out of spite. He cannot become a "spiteful clerk" — he says even that was a lie, told out of spite. By the end of Part 1 the word is no longer a description. It is the name of the move he keeps making.

The move itself is consistent. Whenever an action would benefit him, the Underground Man performs the opposite action and explains it as freedom. He walks past doctors, refuses to be treated, refuses to apologise, refuses to leave the flat, refuses to be liked. Every refusal carries the same internal monologue: I will choose this, against my interest, to demonstrate that I am the kind of being who chooses. The two-times-two-equals-five passage is the philosophical version. The Liza scene is the human-cost version. He is being asked, in the Liza scene, to accept love that has been freely offered. Accepting would be an interest. He will not accept any interest. He humiliates her instead, and he calls the humiliation his self-respect.

Dostoevsky takes the position seriously and shows what it costs. The Underground Man is right that a creature whose freedom can be predicted is not free. He is also a man who has spent twenty years alone in a basement because he has refused, on principle, every offer that would make his life better. Spite, in the book, is the form free will takes when consciousness has hollowed out every other ground for action. It is also the form that, performed for a lifetime, ends in a wet-snow scene with a young woman crying behind a screen.

The argument is not that spite is wrong. The argument is that spite is what is left, and that what is left is enough to live by but not enough to live on. The novel does not adjudicate. It puts the man in front of you and lets you decide.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (the opening claim), Chapter 8 (against prediction), Chapter 21 (the five-rouble note).

Part 2 is the novel's case study. Three episodes from the Underground Man's twenties. The first two — the officer he plotted against, and the school dinner — are humiliations he engineers and suffers. The third is the meeting with Liza, and it is a different order of event. Liza is twenty, working in a brothel where the Underground Man has followed Zverkov's party. After the others have gone he finds himself alone with her. He delivers a sentimental speech about the life that is killing her and the future she still has if she will leave. She listens. She believes him. She gives him her address before he leaves.

Three days later she comes to his flat. He had been screaming, when she walked in, at his servant Apollon over unpaid wages. She has caught him in his actual life — the dressing gown, the candle stub, the petty squabble. He turns on her. He tells her he was lying that night, that the speech meant nothing, that she was a fool to believe him. He does this for several pages, with a sadism that is the philosophy of Part 1 made action. Liza, instead of leaving, sees through what he is doing. She crosses the room and embraces him.

He cannot tolerate it. He sleeps with her — to convert what she has done into something he can dominate. As she is leaving he presses a five-rouble note into her hand. He says explicitly, narrating later, that he did it "from spite" — to recast her presence as a transaction so that her gift of love could be reduced to the only kind of relation he can survive. On the table, when he turns back, the note is lying crumpled. She has thrown it down before leaving. He runs after her into the wet snow; he does not find her; he never sees her again.

The Liza scene is where the book stops being a polemic and becomes a tragedy. The argument of Part 1 — consciousness as illness, spite as freedom, the Crystal Palace smashed — is shown here in its operation on a single human being. Liza is one of the great quiet characters of the novel. She speaks little; she sees clearly; she gives once and is refused once and walks out into the snow. The Underground Man spends the rest of his life writing about it.

Where to follow it: Chapter 17 (the speech in the brothel), Chapter 19 (her arrival, his shame), Chapter 21 (the five-rouble note).

The Underground Man lives in a basement flat in Petersburg. Damp, cramped, a wardrobe and some boxes, a candle, an elderly servant called Apollon who despises him. The flat is real and is described with a specificity that does not pretend to be metaphor. But the title of the book is not Notes from a Basement Flat. The "underground" of the title is the condition the flat is the visible form of — the long withdrawal from real life that has produced a man who can no longer participate in any of it. The basement is a basement. The underground is what the man has become.

Dostoevsky is precise about the move from one to the other. Part 2 describes the years the Underground Man spent visiting his one social connection, Anton Antonovitch, every few months when the dreaming became unbearable. He went to the office. He had a few people he could not quite call friends. He made an attempt, at the end of Part 2, to insert himself into the company of his old schoolmates, and the attempt collapsed within hours into the dinner scene and its consequences. After Liza, he stopped trying. He retired on his small inheritance. He moved into the corner. He has been there for sixteen years when Part 1 begins.

The Underground Man insists that the underground is the only honest place to be — that the world above ground is a Crystal Palace fantasy held by people who have not been conscious enough to understand what they are inside. He also says, repeatedly, that the underground is not better; that he is lying when he claims it is preferable. Both are true at once. The underground is the only place he can survive. It is also the place where survival has become indistinguishable from being slowly dead. He cannot leave. He cannot want to leave.

The book ends without an ending. The Underground Man tries to stop writing in Chapter 21 and the editor's bracketed note tells the reader the notes did not stop there: the man could not stop, and the editor has decided, on the reader's behalf, that the book may. There is no exit from the underground; there is only the editor's scissors. The man is still down there. The notes are still being written. The book closes around him; he does not close.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (the corner), Chapter 11 (long live underground), Chapter 21 (the editor closes the notes).