Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground is a strange little novella, half literary critique and half misadventure. Pevear and Volokhonsky do a heroic job putting this book into its context, and it still struggles under its contradictions.

Apparently Dostoevsky wanted to write a review of a utopian socialist Russian novel called What is to be Done, which later inspired Lenin. His critique was an attack against the entire system of rational progressive idealism, the idea that man, both singular and collective, knowing his interests and endeavoring to advance them, could get anywhere.

The Underground Man is a Russian bureaucrat, retired after coming into an inheritance and now profoundly unhappy outside St. Petersburg. He recounts his philosophy, and then several incidents from when he was younger. The central arc of part 2 concerns his wounded pride, facing down an officer who simply moves him aside in a tavern by bravely bumping him in a crowd, trying to celebrate with former schoolmates, and then in the climax, getting drunk and going to a whorehouse, and trying to connect with a young prostitute named Liza, and then deciding to humiliate and demean her.

There’s something hilarious in the narrator giving a five page monologue about the hazards of an immoral life to this poor woman he’s lying next to, but if the farce is meant to be a satire of rationalism, I feel like it misses entirely. The Underground Man is so profoundly unhappy because he can’t fit into the profoundly honor-driven and irrational world of 19th century Tsarist Russia. Somehow this book prefigures the mindset of the Twitter poster perfectly.