Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, Part II, Chapters 8, 9, 10 - the end…
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment September 1 - December 10, 2024
100 Days of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment
September 1 - December 10, 2024
Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья)
September 19
Part II, Chapters 8, 9, 10 - the end
Next passages:
September 20-21
Break
September 22
Chime and Punishment Part One, Chapter 1, 9 pages
Ah, what do you do with a human being endowed with such contradictions?! Give him understanding, compassion, possibly even love - and it is he, this human being, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lamprey, out of sheer spite, will do something nasty… And no talk of the “beautiful and the lofty” triumphing all around by the book will alter human nature - contradictory, obstinate, rebellious, inconsistent, irrational, willful - but endowed with the possibility of consciously stepping towards resolution… Three cheers for free will!!! AND eternal curses upon free will…
NOTHING is resolved in Notes - because Dostoevsky is JUST getting started - he stumbled upon the greatest human contradiction - willful and stubborn desire to choose suffering - and will not resolve his search for an answer till the final pages of Brothers Karamazov just before his death in 1881… Should you read the last page of Brothers Karamazov NOW - and skip the next 4 years of sifting through ALL of his novels?! It all depends on what you prefer - cheap happiness or lofty suffering!!! Are there any other options, Anna?! Ask the Underground Man!!! 😂😂😂
The pages dedicated to his argument with Apollon are HILARIOUS!!! Here we need to wink at another great Russian writer, Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891), member of the editorial board of The Contemporary in the 1850s (along with Tolstoy and Turgenev) whose 1859 novel Oblomov was immensely consequential and gifted us with the most delightfully hopeless of servants, Zakhar, who is as inefficient as Apollon whose creation he influenced!!! Apollon is willing to do nothing for 7 rubles a month - and can be brought into the state of respectful deference just by the dangling of the possibility of receiving money!!! And OF COURSE Lisa shows up JUST at the peak of the Underground Man’s battle with Apollon!!!
“And now, full mistress of the place Come bold and free into my house.
From the same poetry”
Dostoevsky brings up references to the Nekrasov poem two more times - juxtaposing the positivist progressive drive towards human reformation exhibited in the poem with the contrary and hideous reality of people consciously acting against their rational self interest…
You sound like a book - says Lisa… Which book?! Could it be the hopeless, mechanical, and unrealistic utilitarian positivism of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Filled with cardboard cutout characters who act out their theoretical convictions?! Or a romantic book Lisa read in her youth that convinced her life can be “beautiful and lofty”?!
Please forgive the lengthy quote - it is crucial for our understanding of the psychological state of the Underground Man:
“I stood before her, crushed, disgraced, disgustingly embar-rassed, and, I think, smiling, trying as hard as I could to wrap myself in my ragged old quilted dressing gown—well, exactly as I had pictured to myself recently in fallen spirits.
Apollon hovered around us for about two minutes and then left, but that made it no easier for me. Worst of all was that she, too, suddenly became embarrassed, much more so than I would even have expected. From looking at me, of course.
"Why did you come? Answer! Answer!" I kept exclaim-ing, all but beside myself. "T'll tell you why you came, my dear. You came because of the pathetic words I said to you then. So you went all soft, and you wanted more 'pathetic words.' Know, then, know that I was laughing at you that time. And I'm laughing now. Why do you tremble? Yes, laughing! I'd been insulted earlier, at dinner, by the ones who came there ahead of me. I came there to give a thrashing to one of them, the officer; but I didn't succeed, he wasn't there; I needed to unload my offense on someone, to get my own back, and you turned up, so I poured out my spite and laughed at you. I'd been humiliated, so I, too, wanted to humiliate; they'd ground me down like a rag, so I, too, wanted to show my power... That's what it was, and you thought I came then on purpose to save you, right? That's what you thought? That's what you thought?"
I knew she might perhaps get confused and not understand the details; but I also knew she'd understand the essence perfectly well. And so it happened. She turned white as a sheet, tried to utter something, her mouth twisted pain-fully; but, as if cut down with an axe, she sank onto the chair.
And all the rest of the time she listened to me with open mouth, with wide open eyes, and trembling in terrible fear.
The cynicism, the cynicism of my words crushed her ..
"To save you!" I went on, jumping up from my chair and running back and forth in front of her, "to save you from what! But maybe I'm worse than you are. Why didn't you fling it in my mug when I started reading you my oration:
'And you, what did you come here for? To teach us mor-als, or what?' Power, power, that's what I wanted then, the game was what I wanted, I wanted to achieve your tears, your humiliation, your hysterics that's what I wanted then!
But I couldn't stand it myself, because I'm trash, I got all scared and, like a fool, gave you my address, devil knows why. And afterwards, even before I got home, I was already cursing you up and down for that address. I already hated you, because I'd lied to you then. Because I only talk a good game, I only dream in my head, but do you know what I want in reality? That you all go to hell, that's what! I want peace. I'd sell the whole world for a kopeck this minute, just not to be bothered. Shall the world go to hell, or shall I not have my tea? I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea. Did you know that or not? Well, and I do know that I'm a blackguard, a scoundrel, a self-lover, a lazybones. I spent these past three days trembling for fear you might come. And do you know what particularly bothered me all these three days? That I had presented myself to you as such a hero then, and now you'd suddenly see me in this torn old dressing gown, abject, vile. I just told you I was not ashamed of my poverty; know, then, that I am ashamed, I'm ashamed of it most of all, afraid of it more than any-thing, more than of being a thief, because I'm so vain it's as if I'd been flayed and the very air hurts me. But can you possibly not have realized even now that I will never forgive you for having found me in this wretched dressing gown, as I was hurling myself like a vicious little cur at Apollon? The resurrector, the former hero, flinging himself like a mangy, shaggy mutt at his lackey, who just laughs at him! And those tears a moment ago, which, like an ashamed woman, I couldn't hold back before you, I will never forgive you! And what I'm confessing to you now, I will also never forgive you! Yes—you, you alone must answer for all this, because you turned up here, because I'm a scoundrel, because I'm the most vile, the most ridiculous, the most petty, the most stupid, the most envious of all worms on earth, who are in no way better than I, but who, devil knows why, are never embarrassed; while I will just go on being flicked all my life by every nit—that's my trait! Besides, what do I care if you won't understand a word of it! And what, tell me, what, what do I care about you and whether you're perishing there or not? Do you understand, now that I've spoken it all out to you, how I'm going to hate you for being here and listening?
Because a man speaks out like this only once in his life, and then only in hysterics! ... What more do you want? Why, after all this, do you still stick there in front of me, tormenting me, refusing to leave?"
What to do with a human being endowed with such qualities?! And Lisa?!?!?! She understands EVERYTHING - the way a woman can, if she loves sincerely:
“What occurred was this: Liza, whom I had insulted and crushed, understood far more than I imagined. She understood from it all what a woman, if she loves sincerely, always understands before anything else—namely, that I myself was unhappy.”
If only the Underground Man could appreciate her!!! But he can’t!!! If he would let her into his life, he would have no reason to lash out at life - and suffering is sometimes more profitable for us than happiness!!! At this point I always ask my students - did you complain about something today?! Did you have reasons to complain - or did you complain because that’s what people do - embrace suffering and misery out of spite, because we can, because being a happy piano key is contrary to our desire for self affirmation…
And even in the presence of the possibility of happiness, human happiness that is not perfect, but attainable in there here and now - we push it away… Why?! Is it our fault?! NEVER!!! We would LOVE to be good - but THEY won’t let us!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!! How many times have you heard this argument?! Daily…
“She suddenly jumped from her chair on some irrepressible impulse, and, all yearning towards me, but still timidly, not daring to move from the spot, stretched out her arms to me... Here my heart, too, turned over in me. Then she suddenly rushed to me, threw her arms about my neck, and burst into tears. I, too, could not help myself and broke into such sobbing as had never happened to me before...
"They won't let me ... I can't be ... good!"
And the Underground Man, to his chagrin, has to admit that Lisa now is the heroine of the novel - why?! Because she is capable of love, capable of understanding, capable of attaining happiness as it comes her way, imperfect and human, within reach…
“What was I ashamed of? I don't know, but I was ashamed. It also came into my agitated head that the roles were now definitively reversed, that she was now the heroine, and I was the same crushed and humiliated creature as she had been before me that night-four days ago...”
And he can’t accept this, can’t settle for this, can’t submit to life… And will try to rationalise his rejection of Lisa for the rest of his life…
“Even now, after so many years, all this comes out somehow none too well in my recollection. Many things come out none too well now in my recollections, but . .. shouldn't I just end my Notes here? I think it was a mistake to begin writing them. At least I've felt ashamed all the while I've been writing this story: so it's no longer literature, but corrective punishment. Because, for example, to tell long sto-ries of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through a deficiency of milieu, through unac-custom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground-is not interesting, by God; a novel needs a hero, and here there are purposely collected all the features for an anti-hero, and, in the first place, all this will produce a most unpleasant impression, because we've all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all lame, each of us more or less.
We've even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real "living life," and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we've reached a point where we regard real "living life" almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it's better from a book. And why do we sometimes fuss about, why these caprices, these demands of ours? We ourselves don't know why. It would be the worse for us if our capricious demands were fulfilled. Go on, try giving us more independence, for example, unbind the hands of any one of us, broaden our range of activity, relax the supervision, and we ... but I assure you: we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage. I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: "Speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying we all?'" Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allness. 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, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more “living" than you. Take a closer look! We don't even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or what it's called!
Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we'll immediately get confused, lost—we won't know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. It's a burden for us even to be men— men with real, our own bodies and blood; we're ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We're stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We're acquiring a taste for it. Soon we'll contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write any more "from Underground"
•••
However, the "notes" of this paradoxalist do not end here.
He could not help himself and went on. But it also seems to us that this may be a good place to stop.”
Once again, forgive the long quote - I wanted you to ponder the most important section of the novel within the longer context… Dostoevsky’s conclusion is devastating:
“Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we'll immediately get confused, lost—we won't know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. It's a burden for us even to be men— men with real, our own bodies and blood; we're ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We're stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We're acquiring a taste for it. Soon we'll contrive to be born somehow from an idea.”
Human beings born of ideas are the heroes of Dostoevsky’s future novels - the first of whom we will encounter in Chapter 1 of Crime and Punishment!!! My first comment on Sunday, September 22!!!
Maxim Vorobiev (1787-1855), Neva River by the Russian Academy of Art, 1835. I was THRILLED to discover this painter and his phenomenal images of Saint Petersburg - painted just before the action of Part II of Notes!!! You can just see the Underground Man roaming here - cursed with his obsessive and oppressive self-conscience…
