Beginning in 1843, we find the first references to his intense and enthusiastic preoccupation with Gogol… A friend recalls, ‘In the course of our conversations, he was the first to explain to me all the great significance of the creations of Gogol, all the depths of his humor… [H]e revealed to me all the depth of thought in the story, The Overcoat. (Seeds, 127)
Dostoevsky’s artistic narration is very likely his most heralded dynamic and it is demonstrated best in his first post-Siberian novel, Notes from the Underground.
The Confession
MM Bakhtin labels Notes from the Underground as an Ich-Erza:hlung, an artistic confession from the first person, as extremely and acutely diagonalized, with no single monologically firm, undissociated word (Dostoevsky, 152). As such, the narrator is aware of the one to whom he confesses at the very beginning, “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man”. The Underground Man makes it clear he desires no appeal, no sympathy, “[A]re you not imagining, gentlemen, that I am repenting… am asking your forgiveness…. I assure you it does not matter to me if you are.” He does not want to appear the hero but, “simply a nasty person, a scoundrel…” “He fears that the other might think he fears that other’s opinion” (Dostoevsky, 154). This approach adds much confusion and subjectivity to interpretation, and demonstrates Dostoevsky’s literary idiosyncratic forte. “Condemning himself, he wants and demands that the other person dispute this self-definition, and he leaves himself a loophole”; Bakhtin explains that “a loophole is the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final meaning of one’s own words” (158). This device incites immediate questioning of his polemic, chameleon-like approach, - a confession must be told for a reason, but are we not supposed to believe his words? An author always has a context with which he writes, and exploring this context is possibly the endeavor of literature to explore.
Serving Time in Siberia and Slavophilism
Notes from the Underground (NfU) is the first work of recognized Dostoevsky since he served five years in a Siberian labor camp for his participation with conspiracies planning to overthrow the government. He was a idealist, socially-engaged ‘left-wing radical’ who was spared at the gallows with others, one of whom went mad on the spot; this experience left Dostoevsky deeply scarred, and his memoirs during the labor camps show the event’s terrible impact upon him. His once highly Western-influenced ideologies have drastically transformed into Slavophilism -- Russian brotherhood. He now sees Western rationality and Christianity, as opposed to Russian Orthodoxy, as “a principle of individualism, a principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation, of personal gain” (100). He begins propounding the ideas of selfless love that will be found in all his later pieces. In Winter Notes, He asks, “Must one be without individuality to be happy?” He renounces Western egoism and instead develops the highest individuality demonstrable, laying down “one’s life willingly for others, to be crucified or burned at the stake for others”; continuing, he proclaims “all will be lost if… there exists even the slightest calculation on behalf of one’s own advantage” (100).
The identification between reason (which on the moral level amounted to utilitarianism) and egocentrism was deeply in rooted in the radical Russian thought of the period; and this convergence enables Dostoevsky to present all these conflicts as part of one pervasive and interweaving pattern. (Frank, 571)
The Underground Man’s rejection of reason is not coincidental,
Returning from Siberia his essential ideas began to ripen- ethical supremacy of suffering and submission over struggle and resistance, defence of free will not as a metaphysical but as a moral proposition, and the ultimate formula of egoism-antichrist Europe on one side and brotherhood-christ-Russia on the other. (Nabokov, 103)
Although Notes from the Underground attracted little attention when it was first published, Frank explores evolution of reactions it inspired since, “Its widespread notoriety has given rise to a good deal of misunderstanding” with critics and commentators proclaiming “their particular emphasis to be identical with Dostoevsky’s own” (214). Dostoevsky’s exposure of idealist radicals’ ‘advanced ideas’ and their implications are read as “a declaration of Dosteovsky’s supposed adherence to Nietzsche’s philosophy of ‘amoralism’ and the will to power” or “the revolt of the human personality against all attempts to limit its inexhaustible potentialities” (Frank, 219) – but Nietzsche was only twenty years old when NfU was published, and his ideas had surely not been successfully communicated by then; most of Nietzsche’s works were first published shortly before his death in 1900. Nietzsche actually proclaimed that “Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn”.
The Underground Man: Sick and Spiteful
Immediately following the aforementioned beginning of NfU, the narrator speaks of his “liver’s being diseased” and his refusing to see a doctor. He continues by admitting that he really doesn’t know a thing about his illness and later he describes his ‘hyperconsciousness’ is a disease “but so is being conscious at all. I insist on it. But let’s leave that alone for a minute (1,6)”. His “’reason,’ which would prompt him to seek a doctor out of self-interest is evidently thwarted by some other motive” (Frank, 220). He continues his address about his spite, describing that it was “begging to be let out, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely let them” (4). Frank remarks that this man is not evil and perverse ‘by nature’, but he is a “character innately deformed and distorted” (221), and that he “enjoys the experience of his own degradation”, admitting “to being an unashamed masochist [my emphasis]” (222). He continues by proclaiming this as inevitable and begins his ‘rant’ on ‘laws of nature’ and the “inertia which results directly from these laws” which, consequently, one couldn’t change (7). “Spite is not a valid cause for any kind of action, and hence it is the only one left when the laws of nature make any justified [my emphasis] response impossible” (223). The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s unfinished and final exegesis of a theme underlying most of his written efforts, and likely his life, expressed his embrace of Russian Orthodoxy since his near-death experience, one after which he could write because of forgiveness rather than punishment.
[W]e now come to the very act of revenge [my emphasis]…. [L]’homme de la nature et de la verite with his innate stupidity, considers his revenge nothing more than justice, pure and simple; but the mouse, as a result of its overly acute consciousness, rejects the idea of justice. [B]ut perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid – how do we know? Perhaps it’s even very beautiful. (8)
Why Evil? Naturally…
Vladimir Nabokov provides some contextual questions relating to common themes in Dostoevsky’s work, “Perhaps suffering is the only origin of consciousness… Perhaps man, so to speak, becomes a human being with the first awareness of his awareness of pain” (188). This, of course, relates to the Western religious and mythological conceptions of Original Sin and the Fall of Prometheus, respectively. “It is thus only the imperfections of God’s world that provide the incentive for the moral activity and moral autonomy of the self” (Frank, 286). In Part I of NfU, the Underground Man makes mention of Cleopatra’s sticking golden pins in the breasts of her slave girls to amusingly watch their pain and anguish, and, in The Brothers K, Ivan addresses a news story which had earlier stricken Dostoevsky where a father, without heed, ruthlessly and bloodily beat his young daughter and was acquitted, “I beat her for a long time, I was besides myself, unaware of what I was doing, with what was at hand.” Another mythological relation is Hercules who, driven to frenzy by Hera, killed his children, and was only atoned by performing the Twelve Labors, feats that were deemed impossible. Similar frenzied violence appears in Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky had commented, though, that “evil must be called evil, despite any humane feelings, and must not be raised to the level of a heroic deed” (Frank, 294). Thus, nature of man is beyond good or evil; both are Necessary.
Frank notes that The Brothers Karamazov begins with a preface labeled ‘From the author’ and so again some question has arisen whether this ‘author’ is Dostoevsky himself or the fictional narrator of his story (572). The relevant pieces of his last masterpiece begin with the first of its easily best-known chapters, translated as both Mutiny and Rebellion. Ivan has been portrayed as most likely an atheist and the most intellectual character in the book and his brother, Alyosha, while not stupid, has been living in a monastery and may be interpreted as ‘divinely-inspired’ by the Elder Father Zossima, with whom he lives there. At this time Ivan is terribly disturbed, the occasion of which is frequent, and he meets his brother, also disturbed but for somewhat religious reasons, at lunch, and the question of faith and belief arises. During the discussion Ivan emotionally vents his disgust and horror at reported barbarities involving children, such as the aforementioned man and his daughter, amongst others, “I think if the devil doesn’t exist, and therefore was created by man, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” Ivan chuckles when Alyosha replies innocently, “Just as he did God then?” Ivan finds the suffering and misery in the world emotionally unendurable and intellectually incomprehensible,
How is one to accept the idea of original sin… that children must suffer for the sins of their fathers?... Do you understand why this infamy must be permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth for he could not have known good and evil. Why should [man] have known that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? ...It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child…and so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I must give it back as soon as possible… [I]t’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him my ticket. (605-6)
Hence the title, Mutiny or Rebellion, Ivan’s conviction that humans can only use freedom to accomplish evil and that it’s necessary in the presence of individuality and egoism. Ivan asks Alyosha whether a man who unleashed a dog on a young boy in front of his mother should be shot, to which he responds, “Yes, shot!” Ivan exclaims, “Bravo!... So there is a little devil sitting in your heart Alyosha Karamazov!” Alyosha is immediately reminded of Jesus Christ, who shed his Own blood for All (607).
Christ or Caesar?
The second chapter appropriately titled The Grand Inquisitor is a poem of Ivan’s he tells set immediately after an auto de fe where 100 heretics were burned in the presence of the king, the courts, the cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole “teeming” population in Seville. Here the Church’s Grand Inquisitor encounters Christ, risen again but recently jailed in a cell where the two discuss the state of humanity and Christ’s decision not to “change stones into bread”. We see the reference to Idealist Socialism, which proposes only hunger and poverty keeps man from happiness. But “Man cannot live on bread alone”. The Grand Inquisitor scolds Christ for preserving humanity’s freedom to decide between good and evil rather than transforming the stones into bread and thus leading to a thousand years of suffering for the human race. Continuing, he says “No science will come to give them [humankind] bread so long as they remain free” (609). The Grand Inquisitor has been forced to lie, and admits “nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater source of suffering”; this seduction is represented in Man’s appeal for miracle, mystery, and authority. He explicates that individual freedom is also bondage – it may lead some not to humility and complete self-control but to the most satanic pride, that is, to bondage and not freedom. To spite Jesus he continues,
We are not with thee, but with HIM. The Roman Church accepted Christ’s third temptation of the devil – punishment in Christ’s name. We [the Roman Church] shall triumph and be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man… For their happiness we shall entice them with the reward of heaven and eternity. (615)
Upon these last words, the Grand Inquisitor sees only the forgiving face of Christ, who approaches the Grand Inquisitor and kisses his lips. Christ is ordered to leave, leaving The Grand Inquisitor in the cell.
These scenes demonstrate the recurring appeal of Christ’s selfless, responsive love, which the Underground Man eventually rejects at the conclusion of Notes from the Underground, in favor of the individualism of the Devil, who because of pride became a Fallen Angel. Who was the most tragic figure, the Underground Man or the Grand Inquisitor? The underground man battles with egoism and altruism (Frank, 221). Ivan battles with reason and faith, to which Alyosha responds, “Your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of him – as you meant it to be.” But the younger, naïve, and innocent does not see precisely the despair, or the One Question that incites Ivan’s declaration that he will end his life at thirty years of age. Alyosha its affecting Ivan after their lunchtime rendezvous has concluded, “How will you live?... with such a hell in your heart and your head, how can you?”
An Irrational Conclusion
Madness results from development of the rational self, which necessitates evil to demonstrate it’s autonomy over the ‘best rational decision’. But there is the other side to the paradox too, that Man has an awareness of the self while also recognizing, to some relative degrees, Man’s place in the world with which we live. The problem lies in that this world of which we are a part may only be a totalitarian ideal, and the malefits of a separation of ideals from reality has been shown in the above. How is one to respond? to others? and the World? Dostoevsky, I believe would say faith and forgiveness – revenge is only a perpetuation of evil, and a manifestation of individual freedom therefore; one only desires revenge from when the ‘self’ is offended. But selfless love has no offense, no aggression. The rational necessarily involves a self, for whom the advantage is calculated. Dostoevsky explicates the dangers of a ‘hyperconscious self’ via the Underground Man, and the Grand Inquisitor, a product of his last work. So years of masterpieces, thousands of pages, and years in labor camps after a truly revelationary experience have afforded a truly irrational conclusion – please forgive him.
Works Cited
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground. Translated and edited by Katz, Michael R. New York: Norton and Company, 2001.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. San Diego: Harcourt Incorporated, 1981
Nabokov, Vlabimir. Nikolai Gogol. A New Directions Paperback, 1961.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849. Princeton University Press, 1976.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet 1865-1874. Princeton University Press, 1976.
Word count 3249
A lecturer reminded us that ‘person’ and ‘face’ are the same in both Russian and Greek.
Platonically, this is impossible.
Frank does not seem to support this kind of reading.
Recalled by the author from a different Notes from the Underground bookcover.
With these passages, and those which follow, one must remember Nietzsche’s complaint that most people do not really know how to read, especially his type of writing; a naivete, which would allow a superficial misinterpretation, to the weight of Dostoevsky’s words here, and throughout, support the claim.
The pun is distracting but very significant. Inertia is Newton’s describing a motive mass’s maintaining motion until a sufficient ‘external’ force may stop it, i.e. an object in motion will remain in motion.
He possibly alludes to F. von Schiller’s idea of the beautiful as Freedom, and freedom as beauty.
These are not pretended to be original to Dostoevsky.
The myth’s was confirmed by . Hercules set the ‘precedent’ for frenzy as insanity regarding Law.
See the handout, “[H]ardly conscious of what he was doing…His strength seemed to have deserted him, but as soon as the axe descended it all returned to him.”
All quotations from The Brothers Karamazov are from Frank.
Frank believes that this is the “closest outpouring of Dostoevsky’s personal anguish but it should not be interpreted as a loss of artistic control” (607)
While this title in the chapter’s context first and foremost reminds the reader of the Inquisition in Spain, another meaning of the word is significant and will be developed later regarding ‘one question’.
See p. 8, Notes from the Underground, “so many unresolved questions have emerged from that one single question…”
