Dostoevsky’s Man from the Underground: Diseased Consciousness – Personal Aberration as a Response to the Collapse of Public Values
The novels and stories of Dostoevsky (1821-1881) are legendary for their depiction of complex consciousness and the conflict between reason and the all-too-dynamic psyche. Dostoevsky’s great novels such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are epics of psychological, philosophical and religious debate. The power of his narrative imagination can be gleaned from the report of Neitzsche’s response to reading Crime and Punishment. Neitzsche, one of the most radical critics of the Enlightenment tradition, is reported to say on reading Dostoevsky’s novel: “At last, someone who understands me!”
Dostoevsky was an extremely complicated individual with intense personal obsessions and self-divisions. His life is as bizarre as the stories of his novels. He was arrested in 1848 as the member of a liberal group, critical of the Czar, imprisoned, sentenced to death by firing squad, reprieved at literally the last second from execution, and sent for five years of hard labor, followed by five years of harsh army life in Siberia. He was an epileptic and a compulsive gambler, a passionate believer in mystical Russian Christianity and one of the most astute critics of the operations of reason and regimentation in the Modern world.
In 1864, Dostoevsky published his notorious novella, Notes From Underground. These notes are cast in the form of the memoirs of one of the most disaffected characters in all of literature. We never know his name and can only refer to him as “the man from underground”. The novella is divided into two sections, an opening meandering monologue of the underground man’s petulant and brilliant reaction against the claims of public reason and virtue in society around him. At the age of forty, he has become the very prototype of the dysfunctional and brilliantly bitter outsider in Modern society. The second part of the notes is cast as a recounting of this man’s earlier life at the age of twenty-four, in which he attained, through conflict with acquaintances and his paradoxical engagement with a prostitute, his alienated and perpetually enigmatic solitary existence. In the novella, we first encounter the underground man inductively, through his observations and bitter irony, but then he reveals the dramatic events, which permanently uprooted him from all meaningful, social interaction.
The disturbing originality of Notes From Underground, takes its potency from the initially repellant sarcasm and contradictory wit of the underground man. He exists as one of the least attractive figures in all of literature, something like Shakespeare’s brilliant villain, Iago, who is “nothing if not critical,” but who seems never to actually act in the world or perform any gesture of evil. Uncannily, this dyspeptic and unattractive man reveals himself so directly and disarmingly that the reader seems forced both to reject him and yet to be evermore intrigued by him. With all honesty, he announces himself in the opening lines: “I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man, an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”
The underground man lives off of his animosity against the world of normalcy. He is sick, but as he says, “No, sir, I refuse to see a doctor simply out of spite.” While he seems to have lived an anxious life of accommodation when he was a minor official in office, his mind and spirit are those of an unfulfilled rebellion and protest. As he says about his frustrating office life: “I was aware at every moment of many, many altogether contrary elements. I felt them swarming inside me, those contrary elements.” He has enemies in the bureaucratic world. There is the self-certain officer who appears boldly and unreflectively satisfied with himself. The coherent image of an identity is a falsehood, proved by the underground man’s own complexity. The most distasteful figure in this world would seem to be that intolerable figure “the man of action.” Appropriately, the underground man lives in a city, in St. Petersburg, in what he calls “the most abstract and intentional city on earth.” Peter The Great’s imperative of building a preconceived city on the banks of the Neva River in the early 18th Century, exists both as the abstract imposed form of a city known as St. Petersburg, but by extension becomes the prototype of all planned neighborhoods, housing estates, and property developments in the 19th Century and beyond. The bureaucratically controlled and commanded city is a denaturing of social and personal life, but with the tools of engineering and economics it becomes in some way a new model of dwelling places in the arrangement of societies in the Modern world. As the city becomes more abstractly structured and divided, so does the inner life of its inhabitants. Certainly, the underground man in his witty and bitter alienation, claims, as the height of irony, that he himself is the model of the new individual.
Dostoevsky works through the underground man to expose the hypocrisy, pretention and regimentation of the external life of the city and societies in the modern world. Like the underground man, Dostoevsky rejects the denaturing of society, the imposition of soulless reason on human life, the uprooting of human beings from their natural and supernatural origins and the pain and despair of forcing human beings into too fabricated boxes. One of the underground man’s most effective images of modern dysfunction is the great triumphal edifice, The Crystal Palace of 1850. This building, presented in Britain as the epitome of technological success (and consequently the predecessor of the skyscraper), represents for the underground man, and to an extent for Dostoevsky, the abstracting of the elements of social existence into the products of technology and materialism. Much of the power of the underground man, comes from his brilliant and disaffected critique of the world of material and mathematical ascendancy and the bitter honesty of his attacks are appealing in spite of his own personal failings.
While Dostoevsky clearly shares many of the underground man’s criticisms of a westernized world, he personally leaves that there could or should be a human and perhaps divine alternative to the desiccation of Modern life. Apparently, Dostoevsky had a significant passage in the draft of the novella, where the underground man gestured towards the possibility of a religious answer to the oppressive materialism of his world. However, the censor eliminated this passage from the printed version, apparently unable to believe in the genuineness of such sentence. Consequently, the underground man’s critiques and dysfunction now exist on their own, shorn of any religious or spiritual answer to his curdled consciousness.
In some anthologies the opening section of the novella, the underground man’s brilliant discourse against the limitations of Modern society and existence, is printed on its own as if it were a self-sufficient work. But in the novella, Dostoevsky follows the underground man’s journal of critique with the story of the underground man’s earlier life, his conflict with distant friends whom he wishes to join and yet rejects, and most importantly his encounter with the prostitute, Liza, who reveals her spiritual and emotional complexity behind her role as an agent of sensual satisfaction. Liza, like the underground man, has been divided by her work from the realm of the human need. In response to the underground man’s stylized speech about the value of individual human life, she conceives a kind of affection or love for him, which he does not see in himself. At the end of the novella, she shows up at his apartment, and his confusion between his obsessive sarcasm and his denial of his own emotional needs leads to his rejection and insulting of her. The underground man clings to the safety of his brilliant rejection of the world and society at a cost of his own emotional and spiritual reality. He retreats into the underground and a diseased consciousness, claiming that his sarcasm and wit are ultimate truth, but Dostoevsky dramatizes the human loss of rejection. In order to sustain his bitter and brilliant aloofness, the underground man rejects both Liza’s humanity and his own.
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Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground captures with almost unequalled brilliance and success, the contradictions of consciousness and the tragic cost of Modern materialism and the ascendancy of abstract power. In terms of the effects of the Modern city and the consequences of the divided self, Dostoevsky was indeed a prophet of Modernism.
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