Dostoevsky (92 page)

Although this comparison of the Socialist ideal to an ant-hill was a commonplace in the Russian journalism of the period, Dostoevsky may have used this image in connection with the end of history as an allusion to Herzen. “If humanity went straight to some goal,” Herzen had written in
From the Other Shore
,” there would be no history, only logic; humanity would stop in some finished form, in a spontaneous
status quo
like the animals. . . . Besides, if the libretto existed, history would lose all interest, it would become futile, boring, ridiculous.”
⁵
The obvious similarity of these texts shows how much Dostoevsky
had absorbed from the work he admired so greatly; it also reveals how accurately he was thematizing a profound ideological contrast between his own generation and that of the 1860s. For the intellectual and ideological physiognomy of the generation of the 1840s, nourished on Romantic literature and German Idealist philosophy, formed a sharp contrast to that of the 1860s. Herzen, like Dostoevsky, always staunchly refused to accept Chernyshevsky’s material determinism and denial of free will.
⁶
It is thus appropriate that the underground man later attributes his opposition to the ideal of the Crystal Palace at least partly to having come of age when he did.

All these arguments are then focused in a final rejection of the Crystal Palace as leaving no room for “suffering.” “After all,” the underground man says, “I do not really insist on suffering or on any prosperity either, I insist . . . on my caprice, and that it be guaranteed to me when it’s necessary.” Suffering is no more an end in itself than madness or chaos, and remains subordinate to the supreme value of the assertion of moral autonomy, but it serves as a prod to keep alive this sense of moral autonomy in a world deprived of human significance by determinism: “In the Crystal Palace it [suffering] is even unthinkable: suffering is doubt, negation, and what kind of a Crystal Palace would that be in which doubts can be harbored?” The ability to doubt means that man is not yet transformed into a rational-ethical machine that can behave
only
in conformity with reason. This is why the underground man declares that “suffering is the sole origin of consciousness” (5: 119); suffering and consciousness are inseparable because the latter is not only a psychological but primarily a moral attribute of the human personality.

Chapter 10
of
Notes from Underground
poses a special problem because it was so badly mutilated by the censorship. In this chapter, as we know, Dostoevsky claimed to have expressed “the essential ideal” of his work, which he defined as
“the necessity of faith and Christ,” but the passages in which he did so were suppressed and never restored in later reprintings. At no period of his life, it should be noted, would Dostoevsky have relished the dangerous and time-consuming prospect of attempting to persuade the censors to reverse an earlier ruling. To have tried to do so would only have imperiled and delayed the publication of the reprints and collected editions of his work on which he counted for badly needed income.

Despite its mutilation, let us examine this “garbled” chapter to see what can still be found that may help us to come closer to Dostoevsky’s “essential idea.” We learn that the underground man rejects the Crystal Palace because it is impossible to be irreverent about it, but, he says, “I did not at all say [this] because I am so fond of putting out my tongue. . . . On the contrary, I would let my tongue be cut off out of sheer gratitude if things could be so arranged that I myself would lose all desire to put it out” (5: 120–121). Dostoevsky thus intimates that the underground man, far from rejecting all moral ideals in favor of an illimitable egoism, is desperately searching for one that, rather than spurring the personality to revolt in rabid frenzy, would instead lead to a willing surrender in its favor. Such an alternative ideal would thus be required to recognize the autonomy of the will and the freedom of the personality, and would appeal to the moral nature of man rather than to his reason and self-interest conceived as working in harmony with the laws of nature. For Dostoevsky, this alternative ideal could be found in the teachings of Christ, and from a confusion that still exists in the text, we can catch a glimpse of how he may have tried to integrate this alternative into the framework of his imagery.

This confusion arises in the course of a comparison between the Crystal Palace and a chicken coop. “You see,” says the underground man, “if it were not a palace but a chicken coop, and it started to rain, I might creep into the chicken coop to avoid getting wet, but all the same I would not take the chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude that it sheltered me from the rain. You laugh, you even say that, in such circumstances, a chicken coop and a mansion—it’s all the same. Yes, I answer, if one has to live simply to avoid getting wet.” It is not the usefulness of the chicken coop that is impugned by the underground man but the fact that, in return for its practical advantages, it has been elevated into mankind’s ideal. “But what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that this [not to get wet; utility] is not the only object in life, and that if one must live, it may as well be in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my desire. Well, do change it, tempt me with something else, give me another ideal” (5: 120).

The underground man thus opens up the possibility of “another ideal,” and, as the text goes along, he seems to envisage a different sort of Crystal Palace—one that would be a genuine mansion rather than a chicken coop satisfying
purely material needs. For he then continues: “And meanwhile, I will not take a chicken coop for a palace. Let the Crystal edifice even be an idle dream, say it is inconsistent with the laws of nature, and I have invented it only as a result of my own stupidity, as a result of some old-fashioned, irrational habits of my generation. But what do I care if it is inconsistent? Isn’t it all the same if it exists in my desires, or better, exists as long as my desires exist?” (5: 120). At this point, we observe a shift to a “Crystal edifice” based on the very
opposite
principles from those represented by the Crystal Palace throughout the rest of the text; this new Crystal edifice is
inconsistent
with the laws of nature (while the Crystal Palace is their embodiment) and owes its existence to desire rather than to reason. The change is so abrupt, and so incompatible with what has gone before, that one can only assume some material leading from one type of Crystal building to the other has been excised from the manuscript.

Dostoevsky, we may speculate, must have attempted here to indicate the nature of a true Crystal Palace, or mansion, or edifice (his terminology is not consistent), and to contrast it to the false one that was really a chicken coop. From his letter, we know that he did so in a way to identify a true Crystal Palace with the “need for faith and Christ,” but such an attempt may well have confused and frightened the censors, still terrified out of their wits by the recent blunder over
What Is To Be Done?
and now accustomed to view the Crystal Palace as the abhorrent image of atheistic Socialism. Hence, they would have excised the sentences in which Dostoevsky tried to give his own Christian significance to this symbol, perhaps considering them to be both subversive and blasphemous. These suppositions would explain the strange history of Dostoevsky’s text and would account for the flagrant contradiction, clearly evident on close reading, that provoked his indignant outcry that his entire meaning had been distorted.

Although this alternative ideal may have originally been indicated more clearly, Dostoevsky’s conception still requires the underground man to remain trapped in the negative phase of his revolt. An alternative is suggested only as a remote and, for the underground man, unattainable possibility. Each episode in the original text was meant to have its own type of climax, and there would have been a distinct gradation between the first and the second ideal. What appears in the underground man’s thoughts only as an impossible dream in the first part becomes a living reality in the second, strongly presented in terms of dramatic action. For the underground man in this first part longs for another ideal; he knows it must exist; but he is so committed to a belief in material determinism and the laws of nature that he cannot imagine what it could be. “I know, anyway, that I will not be appeased with a compromise, with an endlessly recurring zero, simply because it exists according to the laws of nature and
actually
exists. I will not take as the crown of all my desires—a block of buildings with apartments for
the poor on a lease for a thousand years, and, for any contingency, a dentist’s sign hanging out” (5: 120). What that something else is, and why the underground man cannot find it, provides the substance for the second part of Dostoevsky’s novella.

The underground man is forty years old in 1864 when he begins to write his
Notes
; he is twenty-four when the events in
Part II
take place, which would locate them in 1848—the very year that Dostoevsky first assiduously began to attend the meetings of the Petrashevsky Circle. The underground man is still primarily a social-cultural type, but in the second part, where he becomes a parody of the attitudes of the 1840s, he was certainly nourished by Dostoevsky’s judgment of himself as a member of that generation. Evaluating his state of mind at that time, Dostoevsky had written to General Totleben in 1856: “I believed in theories and Utopias. . . . I was a hypochondriac. . . . I was excessively irritable with an unhealthy susceptibility. I deformed the simplest facts, endowing them with another aspect and other dimensions.”
⁷
This description applies, word for word, to the portrait we are given of the underground man’s psychology in his youth.

The subtitle, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” also helps to set the action firmly in a symbolic setting. Annenkov had noted in 1849 that the writers of the Natural School were all fond of employing “wet snow” as a typical feature of the dreary Petersburg landscape, and Dostoevsky thus uses his subtitle to bring back an image of Petersburg in the 1840s—an image of what, in the first part, Dostoevsky had called “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world” (5: 101), a city whose very existence (ever since Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman”) had become emblematic in Russian literature for the violence and inhuman cost of the Russian adaptation to Western culture.

The atmosphere of the 1840s, with all its social humanitarian exaltations, is also evoked explicitly by the quotation from a poem of Nekrasov appended as an epigraph to the second part. This is the same poem, dating from 1846, that had already been mentioned ironically in
The Village of Stepanchikovo
, the first work in which Dostoevsky explicitly dissociated himself from what he now considered the naïve illusions of the Natural School and of his own past. Written from the point of view of the (male) benefactor of a repentant prostitute who
has saved her from a life of sin by his ardent and unprejudiced love, the poem describes her torments of conscience:

By cutting this passage short with three et ceteras, Dostoevsky manifestly indicates that the philanthropic lucubrations of the speaker are just so much banal and conventional platitudes. The redemption of a prostitute theme had indeed become a commonplace by the 1860s. It figures as a minor episode in
What Is To Be Done?
, where one of the heroes salvages a fallen woman from a life of debauchery, lives with her for a time, and turns her into a model member of Vera Pavlovna’s cooperative until she dies of tuberculosis. The climactic episode in the second part of
Notes from Underground
—the encounter between the underground man and the prostitute Liza—is an ironic parody and reversal of this Social Romantic cliché.

Part II
of
Notes from Underground
, then, satirizes the sentimental Social Romanticism of the 1840s just as
Part I
satirized the metaphysics and ethics of the 1860s, and Dostoevsky draws for this purpose on the image of the 1840s he had already sketched in the pages of
Time
. The superfluous men of the gentry liberal intelligentsia lived in a dream world of “universal beneficence” while neglecting the simplest and most obvious moral obligations. It was incumbent on them, he had made clear, to live up to their own pretensions and to turn their abstract love of humanity into a concrete act directed toward a flesh-and-blood individual. This is precisely the theme of the second part of
Notes from Underground
, which has been transposed into the bureaucratic world of Dostoevsky’s early work and embodied in a character who is the lowly but supremely self-conscious equivalent of the superfluous man.

This shift of theme is reflected in
Part II
by a noticeable change of tone. Ultimate issues were at stake in the first part, where the final argument against the world of the “false” Crystal Palace could only be the rage of madness and self-destruction, and Dostoevsky’s irony is accordingly bitter and twisted, his tonality harsh and abrasive. No such ultimate issues are involved in the misadventures of the underground man’s early manhood, which are all provoked by that standard comic source—overweening vanity. Hence the second part is written in a lighter tone of burlesque and caricature, and whole sections are nothing but an extended mockery of the underground man’s stilted and pedantic responses to the simplest human situations.