Authors: Joseph Frank
As might have been expected, these shopworn heroics remain purely imaginary, and everyone has vanished from sight by the time the underground man enters the salon of the “dressmaking establishment.”
It is at this point, when the underground man finally encounters another human being more vulnerable than himself, that the comedy changes into tragedy. Dostoevsky was well aware of this shift in tonality, and we have earlier quoted his allusion to it as similar to “a transition in music”: “in the first chapter, seemingly, there’s only chatter; but suddenly this chatter, in the last two chapters, is resolved by a catastrophe.”
9
The final text was subsequently broken up into smaller chapters, and the catastrophe beginning with
Chapter 5
runs through
Chapter 10
. No part of
Notes from Underground
has been more wrenched out of context to support one or another theory about Dostoevsky, even though the function of this section is surely to drive home the contrast between imaginary, self-indulgent, self-glorifying, sentimental Social Romanticism and a genuine act of love—a love springing from that total forgetfulness of self that had now become Dostoevsky’s highest value. By his ironic reversal both of Nekrasov’s poem and of the incident in
What Is To Be Done?
, Dostoevsky wished to expose all the petty vainglory lying concealed in the intelligentsia’s “ideals,” and to set this off against the triumph over egoism that he saw embodied in the spontaneous Christian instincts of a simple Russian soul.
When the underground man arrives in the brothel, the madam, treating him like the old patron that he is, summons a girl. As he goes out with her, he catches sight of himself in a mirror: “My harassed face struck me as extremely revolting, pale, spiteful, nasty, with disheveled hair. ‘No matter, I am glad of it,’ I thought; ‘I am glad that I shall seem revolting to her; I like that’ ” (5: 151). Not having been able to subdue his companions or to insult them sufficiently to be taken seriously, the underground man typically anticipates revenging himself on the helpless girl; the more repulsive he is to her, the more his egoism will be satisfied by forcing her to submit to his desires. It is not by physical submission alone, however, that the underground man attains a triumph over Liza. For when, after having sex, he becomes aware of her hostility and silent resentment, “a grim idea came into my brain and passed all over my body, like some nasty sensation, such as one feels when going into a damp and moldy underground” (5: 152). This idea takes the form of playing on Liza’s feelings, with the intention of triumphing over her not only physically but spiritually as well.
The underground man thus proceeds very skillfully to break down the armor of feigned indifference and cynicism by which Liza protects herself against the debasing circumstances of her life. “I began to feel myself what I was saying,” he explains, “and warmed to the subject. I longed to expound the cherished
little ideas
I had brooded over in my corner.” Mingling horrible details of degradation with images of fidelity, whose banality makes them all the more poignant (Balzac’s
Le père Goriot
is parodied in the process), the underground man succeeds in bringing to the surface Liza’s true feelings of shame about herself and precipitating her complete emotional breakdown. None of his apparent concern, of course, had been meant seriously; the underground man simply had been carried away by the power of his eloquence and because “the sport in it attracted me most.” But Liza is too young, naïve, and helpless to see through his perversity, which sounded like truth and was, in fact, even half-true. “I worked myself up to such pathos that I began to have a lump in my throat myself, and . . . suddenly I stopped, sat up in dismay, and bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a beating heart.” For Liza had lost control of herself and “her youthful body was shuddering all over as though in convulsions” (5: 155, 156, 161, 162).
The underground man, carried away by his victory, cannot resist attempting to live up to the exalted role of hero and benefactor that he had so often played in his fantasies. When he leaves, he gives Liza his address with a lordly magnanimity, urging her to come and visit him and quit her life of shame. It is this gesture that undoes him and provides Dostoevsky with his dénouement. For the moment the underground man emerges from the self-adulatory haze of his charlatanism, he is stricken with terror. He cannot bear the thought that Liza might see him as he really is—wrapped in his shabby dressing gown, living in his squalid “underground,” completely under the thumb of his manservant, the
impassive, dignified, Bible-reading peasant Apollon. Never for a moment does it occur to him that he might really try to help her all the same; he is so worried about how
he
will look in
her
eyes that the reality of her situation entirely vanishes from view. Or not entirely: “Something was not dead within me, in the depths of my heart and conscience it refused to die, and it expressed itself as a burning anguish” (5: 165).
After a few days pass and Liza fails to appear, the underground man becomes more cheerful; as usual, “I even began sometimes to dream, and rather sweetly.” These dreams all revolved around the process of Liza’s reeducation, her confession of love for him, and his own confession that “I did not dare to approach you first, because I had an influence over you and was afraid that you would force yourself, out of gratitude, to respond to my love, would try to rouse in your heart a feeling which was perhaps absent, and I did not wish that because it would be . . . tyranny. . . . It would be indelicate (in short, I launch off at this point into European, George-Sandian inexplicably lofty subtleties), but now, now you are mine, you are my creation, you are pure, you are beautiful, you are my beautiful wife” (5: 166–167). And here Dostoevsky throws in two more lines from Nekrasov’s poem.
Interspersed with these intoxicating reveries is the low comedy of the underground man’s efforts to bend the stubborn and intractable Apollon to his will. Dostoevsky interweaves these two situations adroitly by coordinating Liza’s entry with a moment at which the underground man, enraged by the imperturbable Apollon, is giving vent to all his weakly hysterical fury. By this time, he has reached an uncontrollable pitch of frustration and nervous exasperation; at the sight of the bewildered Liza he loses control, sobbing and complaining that he is being “tortured” by Apollon. All this is so humiliating that he turns on her in spiteful rage when, by stammering that she wishes to leave the brothel, she reminds him of all that came before. His reply is a vicious tirade, in which he tells her the truth about their earlier relation: “I vented my spleen on you and laughed at you. I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my power.” With the typical inversion of his egoist’s logic, he shouts: “And I shall never forgive you for the tears I could not help shedding before you just now, I shall never forgive
you
, either!” (5: 173–174).
But now an unprecedented event occurs—unprecedented, at least, in the underground man’s experience; instead of flaring up herself and hitting back, Liza throws herself into his arms to console
him
. Both forget themselves entirely and break into tears, but the unconquerable vanity of the underground man, which incapacitates him from responding selflessly and spontaneously to others, soon regains the upper hand: “In my overwrought brain the thought also occurred that our parts were after all completely reversed now, that she was now the heroine, while I was just such a crushed and humiliated creature as she had
been before me that night—four days before.” And then, not out of love but hate, the underground man takes her on the spot to revenge himself on
her
for having dared to try to console him. To make his revenge more complete and crush her entirely, he slips a five-ruble note into her hand when their embraces are finished. “But I can say this for certain: though I did that cruel thing purposely,” he admits, “it was not an impulse from the heart, but came from my evil brain. This cruelty was so affected, so purposely made up, so completely a product of the brain, of
books
, that I could not keep it up for a minute” (5: 175, 177). Dostoevsky could not have stated more explicitly that the heart of the underground man, the emotive core of his nature, had not lost its moral sensitivity. It was his brain, nourished by the education he had so thoroughly absorbed—an education based on Western prototypes, and on the images of such prototypes assimilated into Russian literature—that had perverted his character and was responsible for his despicable act.
Liza, however, manages to leave the money on the table unobserved before leaving. Noticing the crumpled bill, the underground man is filled with remorse and runs after Liza into the silent, snow-filled street to kneel at her feet and beg forgiveness. But then, pulling himself up short, he realizes the futility of all this agitation: “ ‘But—what for?’ I thought. ‘Would I not begin to hate her, perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I kissed her feet today?’ ” And later at home, “stifling the living pang of [his] heart with fantastic dreams,” he conceives the most diabolic rationalization of all for his villainy. “Will it not be better that she carry the outrage with her forever?” he thinks. “Outrage—why, after all, that is purification: it is the most stinging and painful consciousness! Tomorrow I would have defiled her soul and have exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of humiliation will never die in her, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her, that outrage will elevate and purify her—by hatred—h’m—perhaps by forgiveness also. But will all that make things easier for her, though? . . . And, indeed, I will at this point ask an idle question on my account: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted suffering? Well, which is better?” (5: 177–178).
With this final, stabbing irony, Dostoevsky allows the underground man to use the very idea of purification through suffering as an excuse for his moral-spiritual sadism. In so doing, Dostoevsky returns to the main theme of the first part and places it in a new light. Consciousness and suffering had been affirmed as values when the underground man, struggling to preserve his human identity, wished to suffer
himself
rather than to surrender to the laws of nature. But so long as this struggle springs only from the negative revolt of egoism to affirm its existence, so long as it is not oriented by anything positive, it inevitably runs the risk of a diabolic reversal; there is always the danger that the egoist, concerned only with himself, will cause
others
to suffer with the excuse of helping to purify
their
souls. Such a possibility, broached here in passing at the end of
Notes from
Underground
, will be brilliantly developed in
Crime and Punishment
, when Raskolnikov tries to convince Sonya that his sacrifice of
another
for a noble end is morally equivalent to
her
self-sacrifice for the same purpose.
As the second part of
Notes from Underground
comes to a close, the underground man again returns to the frustrations of his solitude. For one moment he had caught a glimpse of how to escape from the dialectic of vanity: Liza’s disregard of her own humiliation, her whole-souled identification with
his
torments—in short, her capacity for selfless love—is the only way to break the sorcerer’s spell of egocentrism. When she rushes into his arms, thinking not of herself but of him, she illustrates that “something else” which his egoism will never allow him to attain—the ideal of the voluntary self-sacrifice of the personality out of love. In his encounter with Liza, the underground man had met this ideal in the flesh, and his inability to respond to its appeal dooms him irrevocably for the future. Nonetheless, as we look at
Notes from Underground
as a whole, we see that the egoistic Social Romanticism of the 1840s, with its cultivation of a sense of spiritual noblesse and its emphasis on individual moral responsibility, does not have a totally negative value. Egocentric though it may be, such sentimental Social Romanticism still stressed the importance of free will and preserved a sense of the inner autonomy of the personality, and without such a sense no truly human life is possible at all.
The underground man, hyperconscious as always, knows exactly where the source of the trouble is located: “Leave us alone without books and we shall at once get lost and be confused—we will not know what to join, what to cling to and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are even oppressed by being men—men with
real
,
our own
flesh and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to be some sort of impossible generalized man” (5: 178–179). It may be inferred, then, that the only hope is to reject all these bookish, foreign, artificial Western ideologies and to return to the Russian “soil” with its spontaneous incorporation of the Christian ideal of unselfish love.
So ends this remarkable little work, certainly the most powerful and concentrated expression that Dostoevsky ever gave to his genius as a satirist.
Notes from Underground
, it has often been said, is the prelude to the great period in which Dostoevsky’s talent finally came to maturity, and there is no question that with it he attains a new artistic level. For the first time, he motivates an action
entirely
in terms of a psychology shaped by radical ideology; every feature of the text serves to bring out the consequences in personal behavior of certain ideas, and the world that Dostoevsky creates is entirely conceived as a function of this purpose. Psychology has now become strictly subordinate to ideology; there is no
longer a disturbing tug-of-war, as in
The Insulted and Injured
, between the moral-psychological and the ideological elements of the structure.
Dostoevsky has also at last found the great theme of his later novels, which will all be inspired by the same ambition to counter the moral-spiritual authority of the ideology of the radical Russian intelligentsia (depending on whatever nuance of that ideology was prominent at the time of writing). In this respect, the nucleus of Dostoevsky’s novels may be compared to that of an eighteenth-century
conte philosophique
, whose characters were also largely embodiments of ideas; but instead of remaining bloodless abstractions like Candide or Zadig, they will be fleshed out with all the verisimilitude and psychological density of the nineteenth-century novel of Social Realism and all the dramatic tension of the urban-Gothic roman-feuilleton. It is Dostoevsky’s genius for blending these seemingly antithetical narrative styles that constitute the originality of his art as a novelist.