The two time periods of the novel represent two stages in the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia: the sentimental, literary 1840s and the rational and utilitarian 1860s; the time of the liberals and the time of the nihilists. One of Dostoevsky's constant preoccupations in his later work was the responsibility of the liberal generation for the emergence of the nihilists, an idea he embodied literally in the novel Demons (1871-72) in the figures of the dreamy individualist Stepan Verkhovensky and his deadly utilitarian son Pyotr. In Motes from Underground the same evolution is reflected in the mind of one man: the polemicist of the first part grew out of the defeated dreamer of the second. The inverted time sequence of the two parts seems to lead us to this discovery.
However, the underground man is hardly a typical 'rational egoist,' any more than he had been a typical romantic. There is a quality in him that sets him apart, which he himself defines on the last page of the book: 'Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway.' Submitted to the testing of full acceptance, the testing of this irreducible human existence, the 'heightened consciousness' of the rationalist, like the sentimental impulses of the romantic, runs into disastrous and comic reversals. Hence the paradoxically defiant double-mindedness of the underground man, and his intransitive dilemma.
The 'gentlemen' he addresses throughout his notes, when they are not a more indeterminate 'you,' are typical intellectuals of the 1860s. More specifically, they are presumed to be followers of the writer Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, the chief spokesman and ideologist of the young radicals. N. G. Chernyshevsky was the author of a number of critical works, notably The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (1860), in which he propounded the abovementioned doctrine of 'rational egoism,' an adaptation of the 'enlightened self-interest' of the English utilitarians. His programmatic Utopian novel What Is to Be Done?, written in prison following his arrest in 1862 for revolutionary activities and published in 1863, immediately became a manual for social activists. Several decades later, V. I. Lenin, who dubbed Dostoevsky a 'superlatively bad' writer, could testify that What Is to Be Done? had made him into a confirmed revolutionary. The nature of Chernyshevsky's hero and his ideas may be deduced from the following passage:
Yes, I will always do what I want. I will never sacrifice anything, not even a whim, for the sake of something I do not desire. What I want, with all my heart, is to make people happy. In this lies my happiness. Mine! Can you hear that, you, in your underground hole?
This is the voice of the healthy rational egoist, the ingenuous man of action. Dostoevsky took up the challenge.
Though Chernyshevsky is not mentioned by name in Motes from Underground, his theories, and in particular his novel, are the most immediate targets both of the underground man's diatribes and of Dostoevsky's subtler, more penetrating parody. Dostoevsky had intended originally to write a critical review of What Is to Be Done? for the first issue of Epoch, but was unable to produce anything. The strained conditions of his personal life at that time and the problems of starting the new magazine do not explain the difficulty he faced. Evidently it was not enough for him simply to counter Chernyshevsky's arguments; more was at stake than a conflict of ideas - there was a question of the very nature of the human being who was to be so forcibly made happy. Dostoevsky's response had to take artistic form. He was challenged to reveal 'the man in man,' precisely in and through the ideas of the new radicals themselves.
The counterarguments of the 'gentlemen' in the later chapters of the first part, for example, are clearly Cherny-shevskian, based on his notions of normal interests, natural law, and the denial of free will. The crystal palace, too, in its reappearance here, has been transmuted by its passage through 'The Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna,' the section of What Is to Be Done? that presents Chernyshevsky's vision of mankind made happy. The pseudoscientific terms and even a certain clumsy use of parentheses, as Joseph Frank has shown, are the narrator's deliberate mockery of Chernyshevsky's writing. Frank has also shown that the attack is not limited to Part One: two of the three main episodes in the second part of Notes - the episode of the bumped officer and the episode with the prostitute Liza - are in fact parodic developments of episodes from Chernyshevsky's novel. The latter episode, which is the climactic episode of the novel as a whole, gives fullest play to Dostoevsky's criticism through comic reversal. But the reversal is not a simple contrary; it is the puncturing of a literary cliche by a truth drawn from a different source, from what the narrator comes in the end to call 'living life.'
Dostoevsky's reply to Chernyshevsky is both ideological and artistic, the implication being that the two are inseparable, and the further implication being that the indispensable unity of artistic form reflects a more primordial unity of the living person. Those who favored Chernyshevsky's ideas, however, were able to separate them from the form of their expression. Even the conscientious old radical Alexander Herzen, though he found Chernyshevsky's novel 'vilely written' and could not help noting that it ends with 'a phalanstery in a brothel,' immediately added: 'On the other hand there is much that is good and healthy.' (An interesting pair of adjectives when one recalls the opening lines of Motes.) These remarks of Herzen's are passed on to us by Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift (1938), whose monograph on the life of Chernyshevsky makes up the fourth of the novel's five chapters. Godunov-Cherdyntsev notes a certain 'fatal inner contradiction' in Chernyshevsky's own reflections on art, what he describes as the dualism of the monist Chernyshevsky's aesthetics - where 'form' and 'content' are distinct, with 'content' pre-eminent - or, more exactly, with 'form' playing the role of the soul and 'content' the role of the body; and the muddle is augmented by the fact that this 'soul' consists of mechanical components, since Chernyshevsky believed that the value of a work was not a qualitative but a quantitative concept, and that 'if someone were to take some miserable, forgotten novel and carefully cull all its flashes of observation, he would collect a fair number of sentences that would not differ in worth from those constituting the pages of works we admire.'
Indeed, there could hardly be a more thorough denial of artistic unity than this last quoted passage. The naive blithe-ness of its expression is characteristic of Chernyshevsky and thinkers like him (utilitarians, nihilists; then Lenin, Lunachar-sky, the theorists of 'socialist realism'). It is defined by Nabokov's narrator in terms of a decomposition of the human person. The metaphor comes quite naturally; the aesthetic question immediately brings with it the human question - or, rather, they are the same.
As a writer and thinker, Chernyshevsky was the embodiment of what in Russian is called bezdarnost' - giftlessness - and was thus the perfect foil for that minutely observant, wondering, grateful, and form-revealing intelligence that Nabokov celebrates in The Gift. Giftlessness, as Dostoevsky feared and Nabokov knew, became the dominant style in Russia; it eventually seized power, and in the process of 'making people happy' destroyed them by millions, leaving its vast motherland broken and desolate. 'The triumph of materialism has abolished matter,' the poet Andrei Bely said in the famine- ridden 1920s. Godunov-Cherdyntsev gives a more detailed formulation:
Our overall impression is that materialists of this type fell into a fatal error: neglecting the nature of the thing itself, they kept applying their most materialistic method merely to the relations between objects, to the void between objects and not to the objects themselves; i.e. they were the naivest metaphysicians precisely at that point where they most wanted to be standing on the ground.
A fatal error, a fatal contradiction. In this respect the greatest foresight was shown by long-eared Shigalyov, the radical theoretician in Dostoevsky's Demons: 'I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea I start from. Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution to the social formula, there is no other.' A direct line leads from metaphysical naivety to murder; a direct line leads from the anti-unity of utilitarian aesthetics to the false unity of the crystal palace. Dostoevsky perceived these relations more clearly than anyone else of his time. The perception coincided with, and in fact constituted, the maturity of his genius. He recognized that his opposition to the
