The Theme in the Work
Reason in the work has a precise form: it is the calculation of interest, the idea that man would always act for advantage and that it would be enough to show it to him to make the world good. The underground man attacks this idea from within, as one who knows it, and the whole of Part One is the dispute between what reason enumerates and what it leaves out.
The early chapters fix the ground. In ch. III of Part One reason appears as a wall: the laws of nature, the sciences and arithmetic, before which the man of action yields and the narrator does not make his peace. In ch. V of Part One he describes it from within: each first cause that thought encounters drags behind it another, earlier one, and so he cannot stop at any one of them in order to act.
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 challenge comes from ch. VII of Part One onward. The narrator maintains that the systems that promise to make man good by showing him his interests are mere logistics, and that civilization develops only the multiplicity of sensations, among which are those of blood.
Цивилизация выработывает в человеке только многосторонность ощущений и… решительно ничего больше., Civilization develops in man only a multiplicity of sensations and... decidedly nothing more.
And he points to what the statisticians' list forgets, the advantage that fits into no classification.
Свое собственное, вольное и свободное хотенье, свой собственный, хотя бы самый дикий каприз, своя фантазия, раздраженная иногда хоть бы даже до сумасшествия, — вот это-то все и есть та самая, пропущенная, самая выгодная выгода, которая ни под какую классификацию не подходит и от которой все системы и теории постоянно разлетаются к черту., One's own will, willful and free, one's own caprice, however wild, one's fancy, sometimes irritated even to the point of madness: all this is precisely that omitted advantage, the most advantageous of advantages, which fits into no classification and because of which all systems and theories keep flying apart and going to the devil.
In ch. VIII of Part One he answers the interlocutor's objection, that once everything is calculated we will reason instead of will, with the distinction on which the rest rests: reason satisfies one faculty of man, while will is the manifestation of all of life.
рассудок есть только рассудок и удовлетворяет только рассудочной способности человека, а хотенье есть проявление всей жизни, то есть всей человеческой жизни, и с рассудком, и со всеми почесываниями. И хоть жизнь наша в этом проявлении выходит зачастую дрянцо, но все-таки жизнь, а не одно только извлечение квадратного корня., reason is only reason and satisfies only the rational faculty of man, while will is the manifestation of all of life, that is, of all human life, with reason and with all its itches. And although our life, in that manifestation, often ends up as a little mess, it is life, and not merely the extraction of a square root.
In ch. IX of Part One reason arrives at twice two is four, which he calls the beginning of death, and in ch. X of Part One at the crystal edifice, the utopia reason promises. What Part One combats is not reasoning; it is the pretension that reasoning exhausts man.
Part Two returns reason in another guise, the lucidity that accompanies the act without preventing it. In ch. V of Part Two, in the sledge, the narrator weeps over the script of revenge he rehearses and knows, at that very instant, that he took it from two books.
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.
It is Liza who tells him, in ch. VI of Part Two, what his lucidity does not prevent: that he talks as if he were reading from a book.
Что-то вы… точно как по книге, You sound... just as if from a book.
In ch. X of Part Two the narrator generalizes, and the reason he had spoken of as an adversary becomes the habit of living by reading.
Мы мертворожденные, да и рождаемся-то давно уж не от живых отцов, и это нам все более и более нравится. Во вкус входим. Скоро выдумаем рождаться как-нибудь от идеи, We are stillborn, and it has been a long time since we were born of living fathers, and this pleases us more and more. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we will invent being born of an idea.
Reason in the work has, therefore, two tenses. In Part One it is the object of attack and is measured by what it cannot reach. In Part Two it is what the narrator does with the scenes, writing them before they happen, and what does not fit the script, like Liza's embrace, is what he cannot read.
Who Embodies It
The underground man is at once the critic and the practitioner of reason: he argues against it with all its weapons. The "friend," the "collective person" of ch. VII of Part One, is the portrait of the argument: someone who lays out clearly what reason commands and, fifteen minutes later, does the opposite. Liza is the one who names, in ch. VI of Part Two, what is bookish in the narrator's reason.
Where It Appears
- Part One, ch. III: The underground man calls the laws of nature and mathematics a stone wall, and says he will not make peace with it just because he lacks the strength to break through it.
- Part One, ch. V: The underground man explains that each first cause he finds pulls another, earlier one, and that for this reason he cannot stop at any one of them in order to act.
- Part One, ch. VII: The underground man asks who proved that man does evil only because he does not know his interests, and answers that millions of facts show men who preferred caprice to the advantage they understood.
- Part One, ch. VIII: The underground man answers the interlocutor that reason is only reason and satisfies only the rational faculty of man, while will is the manifestation of all human life.
- Part One, ch. IX: The underground man declares that twice two is four is no longer life but the beginning of death, because once the formula is ready there is nothing left to do or to know.
- Part One, ch. X: The underground man refuses the crystal edifice the gentlemen promise and says that he would not accept the chicken coop as a palace, out of gratitude.
- Part Two, ch. V: The underground man weeps in the sledge over the script of revenge he rehearses, though he knows at that same moment that he took it from Silvio and Masquerade.
- Part Two, ch. VI: Liza tells the underground man that he speaks as if he were reading from a book, after he paints the picture of marriage for love.
- Part Two, ch. VII: The underground man admits that he speaks in a labored, bookish manner when he lectures Liza, but counts on that bookishness to move her.
- Part Two, ch. X: The underground man says that everyone has lost the habit of living life and prefers things by way of books, and that his own life only carried to the extreme what others do halfway.
Where the Readings Diverge
The book's reason can be read in two ways, and the text supports both. On one reading, the narrator argues that freedom is worth more than calculation, and Part One is a refusal to reduce man to arithmetic. On the other, Joseph Frank sees a satire: the narrator accepts in full the utilitarian determinism that Dostoevsky wants to refute and pushes it to the extreme until it destroys itself from within.
Part Two strengthens the second reading, because it shows the consequence of thinking everything through books, but it leaves the first standing, because none of the scenes proves that calculation would have done better.