Notes from UndergroundStudy Guide

The first sentence names a sick man, a spiteful man, an unattractive man. Then the speaker admits he is probably lying, and that the lie is the point. Dostoevsky published Notes from Underground in 1864. Seeing yourself this clearly does not make you free. It can make you crueler. The confession still sounds like therapy. It works like a weapon instead.

The Underground Man is forty, a retired collegiate assessor living on six thousand roubles in a wretched Petersburg room. He is too conscious to become anything definite, and he treats that failure as proof of intelligence. At twenty-four he is the same man with less money and more theater: he rehearses bumping an officer, crashes a dinner where Simonov and three schoolfellows do not want him, and hunts them through wet snow. Liza is the young woman in the brothel who believes the speech about dignity. Apollon is the servant he cannot command. The imagined gentlemen he argues with in Part I never leave the room.

He refuses a doctor out of spite and feuds eighteen months over a clanking sword. He calls consciousness a disease and envies the bull who acts without a second thought. He says twice two makes four is the beginning of death, and that people will smash a crystal palace just to prove they are not piano keys. At twenty-four he prepares all night for a dinner that humiliates him, races a sledge through wet snow, and finds Liza. He paints her a future of love so exact she weeps. Days later she comes to his room. He rages, offers money, and drives her out. She leaves the crumpled note. He stays underground.

Dostoevsky is answering Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, the fashionable claim that once people understand their rational self-interest they will choose virtue and build a perfect society. He had stood before a firing squad, served four years in a Siberian prison, and watched people choose suffering they could name. He never treats the Underground Man as a villain you can dismiss, or as a prophet you should copy. The man knows the kind act and still performs the cruel one. Insight is not the cure. It is the weapon he turns on himself and on anyone who gets close enough to see him. A theory built to flatter its believer was exactly what a Siberian barracks had already taught him not to trust.

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