![]() ![]() ![]() Could anything be more contemporary? You can easily imagine what Dostoevsky would make of modern sociology, psychology, advertising techniques, war games, polling of any sort. He rails against everything that the building represents-industrial capitalism, scientific rationality, and any sort of predictive, mathematical model of human behavior. In the first part of the novel, the underground man, after introducing himself, complains, in his ejaculatory, stop-and-start way, about the spectacular Crystal Palace built in London (this was back in 1851). He’s only possible-entertaining, funny, nasty-on the page. No one would put up with this guy in his home for more than a half hour. He pulls the rug out from underneath his own feet he realizes he’s trapped in the prison of his own character. The underground man taunts his listeners, apologizes, criticizes himself, then gets aggressive, then collapses again. We are inevitably subjective and self-justifying-that is one of the modern elements in the book. It’s not so much that the underground man’s opinions are wrong-surely Dostoevsky thought that many of them were true, however wildly phrased-but that they were inseparable, like all opinion, from personal strengths and weakness, even personal pathology. The text, as academics might say, is multivalent, at odds with itself. ![]() Is the underground man Dostoevsky himself? No, but he spouts many of Dostoevsky’s ideas and antipathies the book is certainly an appropriate introduction to Dostoevsky the Slavophile reactionary who emerged in his final years.īut “Notes” is a canny work of literature, not a tract: Dostoevsky may have put his own ideas into the mouth of a brilliant man, but he undermined him as a self-destructive mess at the same time. They are also enamored of German idealism-”the good and the beautiful” of Schiller’s rhapsodic writing. They are people besotted, he believes, with Western ideas of progress-the ideologies of utilitarianism, socialism, evolution, the greatest good for the greatest number, and so on. He alternately teases, insults, and abases himself before them. The underground man (the title, in Russian, literally means “notes from under the floorboards”) addresses an imaginary audience whom he refers to as “you” or “ladies and gentlemen”-presumably a representative group of educated, Westernized Russians. A family bequest has allowed him to quit his job, which he hated, and he is now forty, living with a servant whom he despises in what he calls “a mousehole.” In an introductory note, Dostoevsky explains that both the character and his “notes” are fictional, but that he represents a certain Russian type the public needs to know about. The text itself purports to be the writings of a retired mid-level government bureaucrat. Petersburg life in this period was furtive and desperate. Dostoevsky himself had recently returned from exile, and his St. Petersburg-an atmosphere of careless improvidence, neglect, self-neglect, cruelty, even sordidness. What the two fictions share is a solitary, restless, irritable hero and a feeling for the feverish, crowded streets and dives of St. “Notes from Underground” feels like a warmup for the colossus that came next, “Crime and Punishment,” though, in certain key ways, it’s a more uncompromising book. I wondered if “Notes” would seem like a dim echo, whether it still had the shock value that I remember from long ago.ĭostoevsky worked on the text in 1863 and published it the following year in Epoch, the magazine edited by his brother Mikhail. MacAndrew’s translation for Signet Classics), I wondered if it had been overwhelmed by the books and movies that it has influenced. ![]() As I began reading “Notes” again recently (in Andrew R. A self-regarding, truculent, miserable, paralyzed man. Petersburg, “that most abstract and pre-meditated city,” and a man unable to act and also unable to stop humiliating himself and embarrassing others. (Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856.) Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” perhaps Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and half of Woody Allen’s work wouldn’t have been the same without the existence of this ornery, unstable, unmanageable text-the fictional confession of a spiteful modern Hamlet, an inhabitant of St. Many people would say that Dostoevsky’s short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature. ![]()
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