Who He Is
The underground man has no name. The one who writes is a former clerk of forty, a collegiate assessor (a middle rank in the imperial civil service), who served only to have something to eat, inherited six thousand rubles from a distant relative and retired soon afterwards, and who lives in a corner of Saint Petersburg, in a poor room on the outskirts, with an old servant (ch. I of Part One). He addresses "gentlemen" that he himself invents, and the work shows him in two stages: in Part One he argues, at forty, and in Part Two he goes back to twenty-four and recounts what he did, a period that Joseph Frank places in 1848. He lives in the city that he himself describes as the most abstract and premeditated on the globe (ch. II of Part One), knows that the climate is bad for him and that life there is expensive for his money, and stays (ch. I of Part One).
Before he opens his mouth, Dostoevsky presents him as invented and, nonetheless, necessary:
И автор записок и самые «Записки», разумеется, вымышлены. Тем не менее такие лица, как сочинитель таких записок, не только могут, но даже должны существовать в нашем обществе, Both the author of the notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, invented. Even so, people like the writer of such notes not only can, but even must exist in our society.
Everything known about him comes from what he chooses to tell, in the order he chooses, for an audience he invents and disavows at the end. What he says about himself and what he does must therefore be read separately: the first is argument, the second is scene.
Trajectory
In Part One, the underground man presents himself by his defect, before anyone points it out (ch. I of Part One), and soon disavows the presentation: he says he lied in calling himself wicked and that he did not manage to become anything at all, neither a scoundrel, nor honest, nor a hero, nor an insect.
Я не только злым, но даже и ничем не сумел сделаться: ни злым, ни добрым, ни подлецом, ни честным, ни героем, ни насекомым., I have not managed to become not only wicked, but anything at all: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor honest, neither a hero nor an insect.
In ch. II of Part One he gives the reason: he has too much consciousness, and the pleasure he finds in humiliation comes from seeing it clearly.
наслаждение было тут именно от слишком яркого сознания своего унижения, the pleasure came precisely from an overly vivid awareness of one's own humiliation.
In ch. III of Part One he sets himself against the man of action, whom he envies, and describes himself as the mouse: the man of hypertrophied consciousness who humbles himself alone and withdraws into the underground. He also refuses to make peace with the stone wall, the laws of nature and arithmetic, just because he lacks the strength to break through it. The paralysis gains an explanation in ch. V of Part One: each cause he finds drags another, earlier one, and he cannot stop at any one of them.
они вследствие своей ограниченности ближайшие и второстепенные причины за первоначальные принимают, таким образом скорее и легче других убеждаются, что непреложное основание своему делу нашли, ну и успокоиваются, they, owing to their limitation, take the nearest and secondary causes for first ones, and so they are convinced faster and more easily than others that they have found the unshakable foundation of their work, and then they calm down.
The turn comes in ch. VII of Part One, when he passes from lucidity to the defense of what the list of advantages omits.
Человеку надо — одного только самостоятельного хотенья, чего бы эта самостоятельность ни стоила и к чему бы ни привела., Man needs one thing only: independent willing, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
In ch. VIII of Part One he pushes the hypothesis to its limit: if there were a formula for willing, man would be the piano key, and for that reason would desire the absurd, to prove that he is not. In ch. IX of Part One he gives suffering the central place in the thesis.
Страдание — да ведь это единственная причина сознания., Suffering, after all, is the only cause of consciousness.
In ch. X of Part One he refuses the crystal palace and says he would go into a chicken coop to escape the rain, without calling it a palace, out of gratitude. In ch. XI of Part One he denies almost everything, and the denial includes the interlocutor he himself had invented.
Разумеется, все эти ваши слова я сам теперь сочинил. Это тоже из подполья., Of course, all those words of yours I have just now composed myself. This, too, comes from the underground.
Part One ends with him choosing to tell a memory that troubles him, and the choice comes from the wet snow falling in the street that day. In Part Two lucidity continues whole and ceases to serve as argument: it accompanies each gesture without preventing any. In ch. I of Part Two, what he does not forgive in the officer who moves him out of the way in the billiard room is that the other did not notice him.
Я бы даже побои простил, но никак не мог простить того, что он меня переставил и так окончательно не заметил, I could even have forgiven a beating, but I could in no way forgive his having moved me from one place to another and so completely failing to notice me.
From this come years of hatred, much rehearsal, a loan to change the collar of his overcoat (The Coat and the Beaver Collar) and a shoulder-to-shoulder collision on Nevsky, with eyes shut, which the officer pretends not to have felt. In ch. III of Part Two he invites himself to Zverkov's farewell dinner, and the decision to go is explained by what makes it inconvenient.
Но потому-то я и бесился, что наверно знал, что поеду; что нарочно поеду; и чем бестактнее, чем неприличнее будет мне ехать, тем скорее и поеду, But that was precisely why I was furious: I knew for certain that I would go; that I would go on purpose; and the more tactless, the more improper it would be for me to go, the sooner I would go.
In ch. IV of Part Two the table treats him as harmless, and he answers by walking from table to stove for three hours, knowing that he proves the opposite of what he wants to prove.
Бессовестнее и добровольнее унижать себя самому было уже невозможно, и я вполне, вполне понимал это и все-таки продолжал ходить от стола до печки и обратно, To humiliate oneself more shamelessly and more voluntarily was no longer possible, and I understood this perfectly, perfectly, and yet I went on walking from the table to the stove and back.
In ch. V of Part Two, in the sledge, he rehearses the slap, the duel and the final pardon, and knows where he took the scene from.
Я было даже заплакал, хотя совершенно точно знал в это же самое мгновение, что все это из Сильвио и из «Маскарада» Лермонтова, I even began to cry, though I knew with perfect exactness, at that very moment, that all of it came from Silvio and from Lermontov's Masquerade.
The house is empty, the plan falls apart without his having to decide, and Liza enters. In ch. VI of Part Two and ch. VII of Part Two he moves from provocation to sermon: he describes to her a pit full of water that he says he saw and never saw, the end in a house on Sennaya and the erasing of her name, and speaks, as she timidly points out to him, in a bookish way, which he admits he used on purpose.
Я знал, что говорю туго, выделанно, даже книжно, одним словом, я иначе и не умел, как «точно по книжке». Но это не смущало меня; я ведь знал, предчувствовал, что меня поймут и что самая эта книжность может еще больше подспорить делу, I knew that I spoke in a stilted, artificial, even bookish way; in short, I could not do otherwise than "just like a book." But that did not embarrass me; I knew and sensed that I would be understood, and that this very bookishness might help the matter even more.
In ch. VIII of Part Two he writes Simonov a gentleman's letter that lies about the drinking, spends three days waiting for Liza and fearing that she will come, and the quarrel with Apollon over wages is interrupted by her arrival. In ch. IX of Part Two, in his dressing gown in front of her, he tells the truth at the top of his voice: he went to the house to take out on someone the humiliation of the dinner.
от чего спасать! Да я, может, сам тебя хуже, Save her from what! Why, I may even be worse than you.
When Liza answers with an embrace, he feels shame, then possession, and in ch. X of Part Two he gives the form of what he calls love.
Во-первых, я и полюбить уж не мог, потому что, повторяю, любить у меня — значило тиранствовать и нравственно превосходствовать, In the first place, I could no longer even love, because, I repeat, to love for me meant to tyrannize and to be morally superior.
She leaves and leaves the banknote on the table. He runs after her and stops at a corner without catching up. He never sees her again. The text ends in an accusation against the reader, and an observation by the editor warns that the memoirs go on, but that one may stop there.
Что же собственно до меня касается, то ведь я только доводил в моей жизни до крайности то, что вы не осмеливались доводить и до половины, да еще трусость свою принимали за благоразумие, и тем утешались, обманывая сами себя, As for me, what I did was only to carry to the extreme, in my life, what you did not dare carry even halfway, and moreover you took your cowardice for prudence, and consoled yourselves with that, deceiving yourselves.
Themes Embodied
The underground man is the objection to calculation made by someone who knows calculation. The Reason he refuses in Part One is the one he practices on every page, and this familiarity is what leaves him in Action and Inaction: he thinks the cause of the cause and does not begin. What he defends in exchange, independent willing, is Fate and Free Will turned inside out, a freedom that asserts itself only by going against what suits him. In Part Two, Pride, wounded, makes each encounter a scene of revenge; Suffering is what he keeps in order to prove to himself that he feels; and Love is the only ground on which this logic meets someone, Liza, who does not answer on his terms.
What he wants, in the scenes, is a place in the scene of others: to be noticed, even as an offender (ch. I of Part Two, ch. IV of Part Two). What he fears is to be seen without disguise: to be caught pretending (ch. I of Part One), to be seen in a dressing gown by someone he wanted to impress (ch. IX of Part Two). What he knows is everything about himself and almost nothing about the other: he anticipates each consequence of his own acts and is taken by surprise by Liza's banknote on the table (ch. X of Part Two). Where he is wrong: he believes lucidity protects him from what he does, that revenge is measured by being recognized, and that to love is to exercise superiority, and for that reason he reads as a reversal of roles the embrace that welcomes him. The text gives two origins for this and does not choose between them: the vanity he confesses as a flayed skin (ch. IX of Part Two), or the school where, orphaned and mocked, he learned to measure himself by the gaze of those who ridiculed him (ch. III of Part Two).
Divergent Readings
Joseph Frank rejects two readings of the underground man, the one that takes him as Dostoevsky's spokesman against reason and the one that takes him as a clinical case, and reads the text as satire: the narrator accepts in full the two ideologies the author wants to refute, the utilitarian determinism of Chernyshevsky in Part One and the social romanticism of the 1840s in Part Two, and carries them to their final consequences until they destroy themselves from within. The author's warning that opens the text, with the character declared invented and typical, supports this key.
The two readings meet in the final chapter: the narrator says he carried to the extreme what readers do not carry even halfway (ch. X of Part Two), and the phrase both confirms the satire, because he credits himself with a courage others lack, and undoes it, because the same phrase comes from someone who has just stopped at a corner without catching Liza. Whoever reads the book as a defense of freedom must explain Part Two, and whoever reads it as a clinical case must explain Part One.
Relationships
- Liza: the girl of the house to whom he delivers the sermon and whom he humiliates on purpose, and the only one who answers him without entering his game (ch. VI of Part Two, ch. VII of Part Two, ch. IX of Part Two, ch. X of Part Two).
- Apollon: the servant who dominates him with silence, from whom he cannot free himself in seven years and whose wages he tries to withhold to prove he can (ch. VIII of Part Two, ch. IX of Part Two).
- Zverkov: the school friend he hates for his beauty and luck, and who treats him with the condescension of a patron (ch. III of Part Two, ch. IV of Part Two).
- Simonov: the only acquaintance from school who still receives him (ch. II of Part Two), and from whom he borrows six rubles on leaving the dinner (ch. IV of Part Two).
- Trudolyubov and Ferfichkin: the two colleagues who receive him as the most common of flies (ch. III of Part Two) and treat him at dinner, one with impatience and the other with mockery (ch. IV of Part Two).
- Anton Antonovich Setochkin, the section chief who lends him money twice and in whose house he endures four hours of visiting to postpone the wish to embrace humanity (ch. I of Part Two, ch. II of Part Two, ch. VIII of Part Two).