'Chernyshev-skians' could not be a struggle for domination, that what was in question was the complex reality of the human being, the whole person, the 'thing itself,' and that a true articulation of that reality could only come as the final 'gift' of an artistic image. Mikhail Bakhtin noted in his study of Dostoevsky's poetics: 'Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time.'
Hence the formal inventiveness of Notes from Underground: its striking language, unlike any literary prose ever written; its multiple and conflicting tonalities; the oddity of its reversed structure, which seems random but all at once reveals its deeper coherence - 'chatter… resolved by an unexpected catastrophe,' as Dostoevsky described it to his brother. ('All Dostoevsky's novels were written for the sake of the catastrophe,' the critic Konstantin Mochulsky observed. 'This is the law of the new 'expressive art' that he created. Only upon arriving at the finale do we understand the composition's perfection and the inexhaustible depth of its design.') The catastrophe that resolves Notes from Underground, with its resoundingly symbolic slamming door, is at the same time the moment of its origin. There, in a sudden confusion of tenses, the narrator cries out from the past into the future: 'and never, never will I recall this moment with indifference.' It is a fleeting moment, but it has determined the narrator's life and gives the edge of passion to his attack, his outburst, after all his years 'underground.' Coming at the end of the book, it sends us back to the beginning; thus the round of the underground man's ruminations is given form, and this whole 'image' Dostoevsky holds up to us as a sign.
There may, however, have been a more directly opposing idea in the book as Dostoevsky originally wrote it, a sort of ideological climax in Part One to match the narrative climax in Part Two. When the first part appeared in Epoch, Dostoevsky complained in a letter to his brother that the tenth chapter -'the most important one, where the essential thought is expressed' - had been drastically cut by the censors. 'Where I mocked at everything and sometimes blasphemed for form's sake - that is let pass; but where from all this I deduced the need of faith and Christ - that is suppressed.'
The published version of the chapter, according to its author, was left 'full of self-contradictions.' Indeed, the reader will notice that in the third paragraph the 'crystal edifice' ceases all at once to represent the ideas of the narrator's opponents and becomes instead something that he himself has possibly invented 'as a result of certain old nonrational habits of our generation,' something, he says, that 'exists in my desires, or, better, exists as long as my desires exist.' Obviously there have been major cuts here, removing the transition from one crystal edifice to the other - the word 'mansion' being left us as a clue to its nature. We must try to imagine what would have transformed the 'chicken coop' into a mansion, what would have made it more than 'a phalanstery in a brothel,' what would have turned it from an embodiment of the 'laws of nature' into a contradiction of those very laws, and how from all this 'the need of faith and Christ' was deduced. Dostoevsky never restored the cuts, as he never restored similarly drastic cuts in Crime and Punishment and Demons. Various explanations have been offered for this circumstance, some practical (lack of time, reluctance to confront the censors), others aesthetic (a recognition that the cuts were improvements). We do not know. But if we look at Dostoevsky's outlines of his ideas for novels in his notebooks and letters and then at the novels themselves, we will realize at least that the scheme barely hints at the surprises of its development. However it was that Dostoevsky 'deduced the need for faith and Christ' in this chapter, we may be sure that he did not add it on as an external 'ideological' precept, but drew it from the materials of the work itself.
The man from underground refutes his opponents with the results of having carried their own ideas to an extreme in his life. These results are himself. This self, however, as the reader discovers at once, is not a monolithic personality, but an inner plurality in constant motion. The plurality of the person, without any ideological additions, is already a refutation of l'homme de la nature et de la verite, the healthy, undivided man of action who was both the instrument and the object of radical social theory. Unity is not singularity but wholeness, a holding together, a harmony, all of which imply plurality. What the principle of this harmony is, the underground man cannot say; he has never found it. But he knows he has not found it; he knows, because his inner disharmony, his dividedness, which is the source of his suffering, is also the source of consciousness. Here we come upon one of the deep springs of Dostoevsky's later work - not his thinking (Dostoevsky was not a thinker, or, rather, he was a plurality of thinkers), but his artistic embodiment of reality. The one quality his negative characters share, and almost the only negative his world view allows, is inner fixity, a sort of death-in-life, which can take many forms and tonalities, from the broadly comic to the tragic, from the mechanical to the corpselike, from Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin to Nikolai Stavrogin. Inner movement, on the other hand, is always a condition of spiritual good, though it may also be a source of suffering, division, disharmony, in this life. What moves may always rise. Dostoevsky never portrays the completion of this movement; it extends beyond the end of the given book. We see it in characters like Raskolnikov and Mitya Karamazov, but first of all in the man from underground.
*
How much the mere tone of Notes from Underground is worth!
LEV SHESTOV
The philosopher Shestov, the critic Mochulsky, and most Russian readers agree that the style of Notes from Underground is, in Shestov's words, 'very strange.' Bakhtin describes it as 'deliberately clumsy,' though 'subject to a certain artistic logic.' A detailed discussion of the matter is not possible here, but we can offer a few comments on the style of our translation, pointing to qualities in the original that we have sought to keep in English for the sake of 'mere tone,' where they have been lost in earlier translations.
Though he likes to philosophize, the underground man has no use for philosophical terminology. When he picks up such words, it is to make fun of them; otherwise he couches his thought in the most blunt and even crude terms. An example is his use of the rare word khoteniye, a verbal noun formed from khotet', 'to want.' It is a simple, elemental word, with an almost physical, appetitive immediacy. The English equivalent is 'wanting,' which is how we have translated it. The primitive quality of the word appears to have alarmed our predecessors, who translate it as 'wishing,' 'desire,' 'will,' 'intention,' 'choice,' 'volition,' and render it variously at various times. The underground man invariably says 'wanting' and 'to want.' He plays on the different uses of the word ('Who wants to want according to a little table?'); there is one passage running from the end of Chapter VII to the start of Chapter VIII in the first part where 'want' and 'wanting' appear eighteen times in two paragraphs - the stylistic point of which is blunted when other words are used.
Another of the underground man's words is vygoda, which means 'profit' (gain, benefit), and only secondarily 'advan- tage,' as it is most often translated. 'Profit' has very nearly the same range of uses in English as vygoda has in Russian. It is also a direct, unambiguous word, with an almost tactile quality: you have an advantage, but you get a profit. And like vygoda, with its strongly accented first syllable, 'profit' leaps from the mouth almost with the force of an expletive, quite unlike the more unctuous 'advantage' or its Russian equivalent preimushchestvo. Again, the narrator insists on his word and plays with it. Thus we arrive at the full music of this underground oratorio:
And where did all these sages get the idea that man needs some normal, some virtuous wanting? What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
Repetition is of the essence here. When the underground man speaks of consciousness and heightened consciousness, it is always the same word: 'consciousness,' not 'intellectual activity' as one translator has it, not 'awareness' as another offers, and never some mixture of the three. The editorial precept of avoiding repetitions, of gracefully varying one's vocabulary, cannot be applied to this writer. His writing is emphatic, heavy-handed, rude:
