Notes from Underground
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| Notes from Underground | |
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| Author | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
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| Original title | Записки из подполья |
| Translator | Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky OR Constance Garnett OR Jessie Coulson OR David Magarshack OR Michael Katz |
| Country | Russia |
| Language | Russian; English |
| Genre(s) | Novella |
| Publisher | Vintage; Reprint edition |
| Publication date | 1864 |
| Published in English |
1918 |
| Media type | print (paperback) |
| Pages | 136 |
| ISBN | ISBN 067973452X |
Notes from Underground (Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapíski iz podpól'ja, also translated in English as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld while Notes from Underground is the most literal translation) (1864) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
The novel is divided into two rough parts.
[edit] Part 1
He falls into an introduction, three main sections and a conclusion. (i) The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings will be further developed. (1) Chapters two, three and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; (2) chapters five and six with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious "inertia"-inaction; (3) chapters seven through nine with theories of reason and logic; (c) the last two chapters are a summary and a transition into Part 2.
War is described as people's rebellion against the 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 pain and paranoia is exemplified by his liver pain and toothache. This parallels Raskolnikov's behavior in Dostoevsky's later novel, Crime and Punishment. He 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[1] and inactivity[2]. Unlike most people, who typically act out of revenge because they believe justice is the end, he is conscious of this problem. Though he feels the desire for revenge, he does not find it virtuous; this incongruity leads to spite and spite towards the act itself with its concomitant circumstances. He feels that others like him exist, yet he continuously concentrates on his spitefulness instead of on action that avoids the problems he is so concerned with. He even admits at one point that he’d rather be inactive out of laziness.
The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and intellectual attempts at dictating human action, which the Underground Man mentions in terms of a simple math problem two times two makes four (see also necessitarianism). He states that despite humanity’s attempt to create the "Crystal Palace," a reference to a famous symbol of utopianism in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, one cannot avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act against what is considered good, and some will do so simply to validate their existence and to protest that they exist as individuals. This type of rebellion is critical to later works of Dostoevsky as this type of rebellion is used by adolescents to validate their own existence, uniqueness and independence (see Dostoevsky's The Adolescent) in the face of the disorder one inherits under the understanding of tradition and society.
In other works, Dostoevsky constructs a negative argument to validate free will against determinism in the character Kirillov's suicide in his novel The Demons (that sumbebekos is supernatural). Notes from Underground is the marked starting point of Dostoevsky's moving from his psychological and sociological themed novels to novels based on existential and human experience in crisis.
[edit] Part 2
The second part is the actual story proper and consists of three main segments that lead to a furthering of the Underground Man's super-consciousness.
The first is his obsession with an officer who physically moves him out of the way without a word or warning. 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 transfered 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 and using them as the symbol of it. At the end they go off without him to a secret brothel, and in his rage the underground man follows them there to confront Zverkov once and for all, regardless if he is beaten or not. He arrives to find Zverkov and company have left but it is there that he meets Liza, a young prostitute.
After they finish their business and then sitting in silence for a while, the underground man confronts Liza with an image of her future, by which she is unmoved at first, but she eventually realizes the plight of her position and how she will slowly become useless and go lower and lower until she is no longer wanted by anyone. The thought of dying such a terribly disgraceful death brings her to realize her position, and she then finds herself enthralled 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, 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 embarrassed by his situation. Liza realizes how pitiful he is and they embrace. The underground man cries out “They – they won’t let me – I – I can’t be good!” After this he still acts terribly towards her, and before she leaves he stuffs a five ruble note into her hand, which she 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 recalls this moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it, yet again proving the fact from the first section that his spite for society and his inability to act like it makes him unable to act better than it.
[edit] Literary significance and criticism
The Underground Man became a common character type in many of the works that followed the novella. He is present in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the milder form of the character Nikolai Levin, in Anton Chekhov's Ward No. 6, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 as Yossarian the 28-year-old Army Air Corps Captain, and in Richard Wright's short story The Man Who Lived Underground.
Like many of Dostoevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of socialist utopianism and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied even through 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 was very impressed with Dostoevsky, claiming that "Dostoevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something," and that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood".[3]
The novel has also been cited by Paul Schrader as an influence when he wrote the screenplay for the film Taxi Driver, which has existential themes.
Oleg Liptsin has adapted Notes from Underground for the stage. The world premiere was at the Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco on September 28th, 2007.
The novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis quotes a passage from the introduction of Notes from Underground as one of its epigraphs, as a means of comparing the use of the Underground Man as a symbol of his generation and environment to the novel's protagonist Patrick Bateman as a similar contemporary symbol.
[edit] See also
- Anti-hero
- Self-consciousness
- Boredom
- Narodnik
- Oblomov
- Vasily Rozanov
- Russian Orthodox Christianity
- Voluntarism
- Free will
- We
[edit] References
- ^ and it was all from ennui, gentlemen, all from ennui ; inertia overcame me. Notes from Underground ch5
- ^ Chief among these others is the underground man who confesses to his own inertia (inercija), defined as "conscious-sitting-with-arms-folded", and who also criticizes his supposed antitheses, the men of action and les hommes de la nature et de la vérité for their active, machine-like existence. http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/DS/06/143.shtml
- ^ An investigation on the source of this statement may be found here
[edit] External links
- Notes from the Underground at Project Gutenberg
- Free audiobook available at LibriVox
- Full text of Notes from Underground in the original Russian
- SparkNotes
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