A Novella in Two Parts and a Journal
Notes from Underground appeared in 1864 in Epoch, the journal Dostoevsky ran with his brother Mikhail, and the two-part design comes from the circumstances of that publication. Part One, The Underground, appeared in the journal's first issue, cut by the censors; Part Two, Apropos of Wet Snow, would not be ready until May, after the funeral of the author's first wife.
The Year of Losses
Maria Dmitrievna, Dostoevsky's first wife, died of tuberculosis in Moscow on April 16, 1864, while he was writing the novella. His brother Mikhail, overwhelmed by debts, collapsed on July 6 and died three days later, and Dostoevsky chose to keep Epoch alive; the journal went bankrupt in 1865.
The Quarrel with Chernyshevsky
The book answers What Is to Be Done?, by Chernyshevsky, written in prison and published in 1863 in three installments in The Contemporary, with the censors' own approval, in one of the most spectacular bureaucratic blunders of the reign of Alexander II. The novel preaches rational egoism, the idea that well-calculated self-interest solves human problems, and culminates in the dream of a socialist utopia in the form of the London Crystal Palace. It was as a response to him that Dostoevsky began writing the text, in early 1864.
In Joseph Frank's reading, Part One has this target: the underground man accepts Chernyshevsky's utilitarian determinism and discovers that, once accepted, it makes any moral reaction impossible, guilt, forgiveness or revenge, because there is no longer any guilty party, only fate. Part Two, Frank says, has another: the social romanticism of the 1840s, and the Liza episode parodies a scene in What Is to Be Done? in which a hero redeems a prostitute with angelic ease.
The Crystal Palace Before the Underground
The crystal palace the narrator refuses comes from outside the book. Dostoevsky saw the London Crystal Palace on his first trip to Europe, in 1862, and described it in the Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, of 1863, where it appears as the sanctuary of a materialism that proclaims itself humanity's final ideal. Frank reads the Winter Notes as the antechamber of the novella: the anthill, the palace and the complaint about the liver are already there, still loose, in the tone of a travel chronicle.
The Censor's Cut
In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky complains that the censors let pass the passages in which he mocked everything and at times blasphemed, but cut those in which he concluded that faith and Christ were necessary, and that the chapter came out with truncated sentences that contradict one another. The letter speaks of the penultimate chapter, and Frank places the cut in chapter X of Part One, where he sees its trace in the Crystal Palace, which suddenly changes meaning.
A Warning Before the Text
Before the first line, Dostoevsky placed a warning: the author of these memoirs and the memoirs themselves are invented, but people like him not only can but must exist in the society in which the book was born, given the circumstances in which that society took shape; the narrator, he says, is a representative of a generation living its last days. The narrator is forty in 1864 and twenty-four in the events of Part Two, which, by Frank's reckoning, places the action in 1848, the year Dostoevsky began attending the Petrashevsky Circle.