Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья) - Introduction
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
September 10, 2024
Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья) - as always, do not read the introduction to your translation till after we finish the novel - too many spoilers!!!
Since Notes from Underground is such an infuriating, hilarious, idiosyncratic, and counterintuitive read - I decided to give you this key - it will assist you during your reading and help you identify the philosophical ideas that are scattered throughout the narrative!!! Enjoy!!!
Russian political life changed dramatically while Dostoevsky was in Siberia. The Western oriented liberals of the 1840s, with whom Dostoevsky identified in his 20s, were replaced by a new, more radically inclined generation of reformers and revolutionaries who were seeking forceful and immediate social changes in Russia. With the abolition of the institution of serfdom during the rule of Emperor Alexander II in 1861, literary works started to reflect new Russian realities.
The first important novel that addressed this shift towards radicalization was Ivan Turgenev’s (1818-1883) 1862 Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети) whose protagonist Yevgeny Bazarov, a self-proclaimed nihilist, clashes in heated ideological debates with representatives of the older generation of 1840s liberals who feared that the new generation, “the sons,” had the potential of becoming the gravediggers of Russian culture and society. Turgenev received criticism from both the liberals – for denying Bazarov a path towards revolutionary self-realization, and from the conservatives – for creating a literary platform for the dissemination of nihilist ideology. Please consider reading my Fathers and Sons commentary on the Anna's Thinking Cap Substack page May7-June 2, 2024.
The novel inspired several responses including Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (1828-1889) 1863 novel What is to Be Done? (Что делать?), which became a classic of socialist literature and prompted Vladimir Lenin to write his own 1902 What Is to be Done? – an outright call for revolution. Dostoevsky’s 1864 Notes from Underground engaged both Turgenev and Chernyshvsky and established the foundation for the ideas Dostoevsky developed in his final five novels that focused on the concept of free will.
Economic satisfaction and a promise of universal happiness cannot induce us to suppress our free will – which it turn can prompt us to act against our rational self-interest. Dostoevsky argues against the Western ideas of utilitarianism and utopian socialism Chenishevsky advocates in What Is to Be Done? and mocks the symbol Western progress, the Crystal Palace, the cast iron and plate glass structure designed by Joseph Paxton and constructed in London for the Great Exhibition in 1851. Dostoevsky saw the Crystal Palace as yet another iteration of the proverbial Tower of Babel, born of human hubris and a desire to play god. NOW you understand the main image for this tutorial!!!
Dostoevsky’s arguments are directed both against the rationalist enlightenment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and the utopian socialism Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Charles Fourier (1772-1837), as well as the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The extreme self-imposed personal isolation of the Underground Man allows him to view society from a detached position and make pronouncements that may seem paradoxical – “two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing” – but underscore the psychological complexity of human consciousness that cannot be forced into rational margins. “Who wants to want according to a formula?” exclaims the Underground Man.
As I quoted in my Dostoevsky marathon announcement:
“Now I ask you: what can be expected of man as a being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower him with all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness completely, over his head, so that only bubbles pop up on the surface of happiness, as on water; give him such economic satisfaction that he no longer has anything left to do at all except sleep, eat gingerbread, and worry about the noncessation of world history – and it is here, just here, that he, this man, out of sheer ingratitude, out of sheer lampoonery, will do something nasty.”
The visceral human being is irrational and may reject to engage in formulaic behavior even for his or her own benefit. Dostoevsky’s greatest fear, that human beings may be induced to willingly abandon their humanity and free will, subjugate themselves to a pervasive ideology, and “contrive to be born somehow from an idea” will be explored in his later works, and especially in his most political novel, Demons - which we are reading in the fall of 2027!!!
Ivan Turgenev, 1874, by Ilya Repin, 1844-1930, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889).
The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, Grand International Exhibition, London, 1851.
The Tower of Babel, 1563, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1525/1530-1569, The Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.