own sake first of all, but also with an eye for some indeterminate others - readers, critics, judges, fellow creatures. He is a passionate amateur, a condition that marks the style and structure as well as the content of the book. Where the master practitioner would present us with a seamless and harmonious verbal construction, the man from underground, who literally cannot contain himself, breaks decorum all the time, interrupts himself, comments on his own intentions, defies his readers, polemicizes with other writers. The literariness of his 'notes' and the unliterariness of his style are both results of his 'heightened consciousness,' his hostility to and dependence upon the words of others. Thus the unifying idea of Notes from Underground, embodied in the person of its narrator, is dramatized in the process of its writing. The controlling art of Dostoevsky remains at a second remove.
This man who may be trying to write his way out of the underground, originally read his way into it. 'At home,' he says, 'I mainly used to read. I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me. And among external sensations the only one possible for me was reading. Reading was, of course, a great help - it stirred, delighted, and tormented me.' That was during his youth, in the 1840s. He read, he dreamed, and he engaged in 'little debauches.' These were his three diversions, and it is interesting that he puts them together. What did he read? At various points in his account he compares himself with Byron's Manfred, with characters from Pushkin and Lermontov - all romantic figures. He refers more than once to Rousseau. Farther in the background, but looming large, stand Kant and Schiller, representing German philosophical and poetic idealism, summoned up in the phrase 'the beautiful and lofty,' which had become a commonplace of Russian liberal criticism of the 1840s. His reading was, in other words, that of the typical educated Russian of the time. Reading nourished his dreaming, and even found its way into his little debauches 'in exactly the proportion required for a good sauce.' And so it was that he evaded the petty squalor and inner anguish of his daily life; so it was, as he confesses sixteen years later, that he 'defaulted on his life through moral corruption in a corner.' One main thematic strand of the book is the underground man's denunciation of the estranging and vitiating influence of books, so that from his perspective of the 1860s, when he begins to write, the word 'literary' has become one of the most sarcastic he can utter. To all the features for an antihero purposely collected in Motes from Underground there are added all the features for an antibook.
That book is the underground man's book, not Dostoevsky's, though the two coincide almost word for word. Indeed, the sharp personality of the underground man, the intensity of his attacks and confessions, the apparent lack of critical distance in the first person narrative, have given many readers the impression that they have to do here with a direct statement of Dostoevsky's own ideological position, and much commentary has been written on the book in that light. Much has also been said about the tragic (or at least 'terribly sad') essence of its vision. Both notions seem to overlook the humor
– stylistic, situational, polemical, parodic - that pervades Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky certainly put a lot of himself into the situations and emotions of his narrator; what distinguishes his book from the narrator's is an extra dimension of laughter. Laughter creates the distance that allows for recognition, without which the book might be a tract, a case history, a cry of despair, anything you like, but not a work of art. Notes from Underground has been called the prelude to the great novels of Dostoevsky's last period, and it is so partly because here Dostoevsky first perfected the method of tonal distancing that enabled him to present characters and events simultaneously from different points of view, to counter empathy with intellection.
The underground man's book is a personal outpouring
– harsh, self-accusatory, defiant, negligently written, loosely structured - a long diatribe, followed by some avowedly random recollections ('I will not introduce any order or system. Whatever I recall, I will write down.') It claims to be genuine, if artistically crude. 'No longer literature, but corrective punishment,' the narrator finally decides. Nietzsche thought he could hear 'the voice of the blood' in it.
Dostoevsky's novel is something quite different. It is a tragicomedy of ideas, admirable for the dramatic expressiveness of its prose, which gives subtle life to this voice from under the floorboards with all its withholdings, second thoughts, loopholes, special pleadings; and admirable, too, for the dynamics of its composition, the interplay of its two parts, which represent two historical moments, two 'climates of opinion,' as well as two images of the man from underground, revealed by different means and with very different tonalities.
The two parts of Notes from Underground were first published in 1864, in the January and April issues of Epoch, a magazine edited by Dostoevsky's brother Mikhail, the successor to their magazine Time, which had been suppressed by the censors in
1863. The note Dostoevsky added to the first part insists on the social and typical, as opposed to personal and psychological, aspects of the man from underground: 'such persons as the writer of such notes not only may but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.' His view of those circumstances would have been familiar to readers of his articles in Time over the previous few years, particularly 'Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,' an account of his first trip to Europe in 1862, which had appeared in the February and March issues of Time for 1863. There he discussed Russia's 'captivation' with the West:
Why, everything, unquestionably almost everything that we have -of development, science, art, civic- mindedness, humanity, everything, everything comes from there - from that same land of holy wonders! Why, our entire life, even from very childhood itself, has been set up along European lines.
Russian society had been formed by decades of imported 'development' and 'enlightenment,' words that acquire a sharply ironic inflection in Dostoevsky's later work. Some sources of this ideology have already been mentioned - Rousseau, Schiller, Kant. To this list may be added the names of such French social romantics as Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and the Utopian socialists Fourier and Saint-Simon. In Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, Joseph Frank points to the presence of these 'influences' in the theme of the redeemed prostitute, which was a favorite among Russian liberals of the 1840s (the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, for example), and which Dostoevsky parodies brilliantly in the second part of Notes from Underground. The parody is, of course, Dostoevsky's, not the underground man's. The latter, on the contrary, had taken all these influences to heart; they had made him into a 'developed man of the nineteenth century,' a man of 'heightened consciousness.' It was the attempt to live by them that drove him 'underground.' In the social displacement of an imported culture, Dostoevsky perceived a more profound human displacement, a spiritual void filled with foreign content.
A second theme from 'Winter Notes' reappears in Motes from Underground - that of the 'crystal palace,' which is as central to the polemics of the novel's first part as the redeemed prostitute is to the parody of the second. The crystal palace in the travel article is the cast-iron and glass exhibition hall built in London in 1851 for the Great Exhibition. It appeared to Dostoevsky as a terrifying structure, a symbol of false unity, of 'the full triumph of Baal, the ultimate organization of an anthill.' The tones in which he speaks of it will be echoed almost twenty years later by the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov:
But if you saw how proud is that mighty spirit who created this colossal setting and how proudly convinced this spirit is of its victory and of its triumph, then you would shudder for its pride, obstinacy, and blindness, but you would shudder also for those over whom this proud spirit hovers and reigns.
This mighty spirit is the spirit of industrial capitalism, and the crystal palace is its temple. In Motes from Underground the same structure comes to stand for the future organization of socialism. It remains an image of false unity, but is denounced in rather different terms: the underground man puts his tongue out at it, calls it a tenement house and a chicken coop.
