Review: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)

A mysterious narrator presents the first part of this book as a series of essays about the nature of suffering, ethics, and reason. His rhetoric is passionate and intuitive, conveying the thinly veiled implication that his words stem from pivotal emotional experiences in his own life. He describes himself as having lived underground for forty years, until in the moment of his speaking he has finally come forth to share his insight with an audience whose attention and agreement is not guaranteed.

The second part describes a series of embarrassing events in the narrator’s early life. Driven by a fragile ego and an obsession with honor, he socially disgraces himself in front of coworkers, then runs straight into the bed of a random prostitute. Her candid innocence is unprepared for his dramatic raving, especially as she grows to love him.

19^th-century Russians never produced light bedtime reading, and Dostoevsky was no exception. I was entranced by two of his classics, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, for their exploration of light in the darkest corners of the human soul. Notes from the Underground displays the same capacity, but unlike those later and longer novels, there is little story to match it. My guess is that this work laid the philosophical groundwork for Dostoevsky’s later and greater writing, and in that regard it is essential to an understanding of his messages. The trouble is that it’s downright uncomfortable to read.

Like much European literature of this era and later, the narrator is heavily unreliable. His initial essays vacillate widely, which is partly prevarication and partly the self-contradiction that comes from a troubled but insightful mind. This is a man who aches to be a hero but considers himself lower than a worm. His intense self-focus borders on narcissism, but for the fact that he is harshly critical of many of his actions and does not deflect the blame for the implied straits in which he has found himself. The central paradox of this half is, for me, the contrast between his stated age and the maturity of all the lesser paradoxes he writes, which fit perfectly into a troubled adolescent consciousness. To feel so vile and yet so self-important, with an urgency of life or death, would more accurately describe a teenage psyche, and without true narrative we have no knowledge of any late-blooming coming of age for our sad narrator.

The second half, while easier to understand for its narrative cohesiveness, is that much more painful for the narrator’s social awkwardness. He is a man of little consequence, and his typical social relationships leave him in shambles and the other parties more or less unaffected. This tendency is illustrated by his obsession with an officer who once moved him out of the way without acknowledgement in a crowded bar; the narrator schemes like a maniac to collide with the officer in the street to reassert his self-worth. Such desperate pettiness in a narrator, a position with whom the reader naturally identifies on some level, is difficult to swallow, and it only gets worse. His buffoonery culminates when Liza, the prostitute mentioned earlier, becomes the first person to take him seriously. His reaction toward her attempt to understand him is great tragedy, a gem of interesting relationship amid a shipwreck of unsettling gaffes.

The elements of human introspection in this book are fundamental and worthy of study, but their conveyance comes up short, at least in the English translation. I recommend this book to any dedicated fan of Dostoevsky, but not to anybody else.