What It Is
The Crystal Palace is the utopia that the underground man attributes to the "gentlemen" he addresses: a future in which men's desires have been calculated, their acts recorded in a table, and economic relations fixed with mathematical exactness, and in which nothing new has to be decided. In chapters IX and X of Part One the text also calls it a crystal edifice, eternally unshakable, and sets it against a henhouse. Outside the text, Joseph Frank notes that Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? culminates in a utopian dream in the form of the Crystal Palace of London, and that Dostoevsky had already described that palace in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions as a sanctuary of a materialism taken for the final ideal.
Where It Appears
In chapter VII of Part One the palace appears for the first time, as the endpoint of science: science will teach man that he has neither will nor caprice, acts will be calculated by a table of logarithms, and questions will disappear because they will have answers. Then the crystal palace will rise. The narrator does not guarantee that it will not be terribly tedious, and, he says, from boredom one can invent anything.
In chapter IX of Part One he asks whether man perhaps loves the edifice only from afar, and only raising it, not living in it.
может быть, он здание-то любит только издали, а отнюдь не вблизи; может быть, он только любит созидать его, а не жить в нем, предоставляя его потом aux animaux domestiques, как-то муравьям, баранам и проч., и проч., perhaps he loves the edifice only from afar, and by no means from close up; perhaps he only loves to raise it, not to live in it, leaving it afterward to the aux animaux domestiques, that is, to the ants, the sheep, and so on, and so on.
And he makes the palace the place where suffering has no room.
Страдание, например, в водевилях не допускается, я это знаю. В хрустальном дворце оно и немыслимо: страдание есть сомнение, есть отрицание, а что за хрустальный дворец, в котором можно усумниться?, Suffering, for example, is not allowed in vaudevilles, I know that. In the crystal palace it is unthinkable: suffering is doubt, is negation, and what crystal palace is that in which one can doubt?
In chapter X of Part One he gives the reason for the fear: in the crystal edifice one could not even stick one's tongue out on the sly.
Вы верите в хрустальное здание, навеки нерушимое, то есть в такое, которому нельзя будет ни языка украдкой выставить, ни кукиша в кармане показать., You believe in a crystal edifice, eternally unshakable, that is, one in which one could not even stick out one's tongue on the sly, nor make a fig in one's pocket.
He would go into a henhouse if it rained, but would not take it for a palace out of gratitude.
курятника не приму за дворец из благодарности, I will not accept a henhouse as a palace out of gratitude.
In return he asks to be shown something better, and promises to follow whoever does it. According to Frank, the censorship cut in this chapter the bridge between this false palace and a true, Christian one, and from that would come the change in the meaning of the palace throughout the text, from an embodiment of the laws of nature to an object of human desire, which would be the visible trace of the cut.
In Crime and Punishment, the name returns as that of a tavern in Petersburg where Raskolnikov reads newspapers and meets Zamyotov (chapter VI of Part Two).
What It Means
What the narrator fears in the crystal palace is not comfort but the impossibility of disagreeing: a house in which nothing can be challenged, not even in secret. The image condenses what Part One fights in the calculation of interest. That is why suffering, which for him is doubt and negation, has no room there. Two readings of the refusal: horror of perfection and defense of the freedom to say no, or the vanity of someone who prefers the image of the palace to the shelter he has. The text also leaves open that the palace may not even exist, given the laws of nature, and that his objection is only against the lack of an edifice in which one would not need to stick out one's tongue.
Relationships
- Themes: Reason, Suffering, Pride.
- Character: the underground man.
- Related symbols: the stone wall, of which the palace is the habitable version, and the piano key, the man who would live in it.