I’m a sick person. I am an angry person. I am an unattractive person.
I think there is something wrong with my liver. But I don't understand the least thing about my illness, and I don't know for certain what part of me is affected. I am not having any treatment for it, and never have had, although I have a great respect for medicine and for doctors.
No, I refuse treatment out of spite. Many years ago, running late for my flight, I found myself panicking inside a London railway station. I had only a few minutes to catch my train, but I had no idea which platform.
I approached a uniformed staff. He looked me up and down for a few seconds, then told me to look at this massive timetable on the wall with writings so tiny like terms and conditions of new products. I managed to find someone else to help me.
I got to the platform, out of breath and sweating. That same man who had refused to help me turned out to be going on that same train. He could have saved me so much anxiety and stress.
I always wondered why he refused to help? Now reading this Dostoevsky’s novel written 150 years ago, I kind of have my answer. Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground in 1864.
That same year, he lost his wife, Maria and his brother, Mikhail. Despite those personal tragedies, Dostoevsky managed to create a novel that’s incredibly profound, funny and tragic, all at the same time. Two years later he published his most famous novel Crime and Punishment.
But his most important work is his final novel The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879, two years before his own death. I have reviewed both novels here. But today I will discuss one of his shortest novels, Notes from Underground, often called the first existential novel.
What is it about? Why is it important? And what lessons can we learn from the Underground Man.
Before I answer those questions, two things are important to mention here to give a broader context to the novel. First, Dostoevsky wrote it as a response to another Russian novel published a year earlier in 1863 titled What Is To Be Done by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which in turn was written in response to Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. In Fathers and Sons, Turgenev introduced one of the greatest characters in Russian literature, Bazarov, a nihilistic young man with a western education who believed in destroying everything in Russia so he could build it all anew in a western style.
Bazarov was a radical materialist and rationalist who believed Russian society was rotten, but by the end of the novel he changes his mind and fails to achieve any of his goals, and ironically dies of a medical mistake. In a way medicine the product of rationality, instead of liberating him, ends his life. While Turgenev was trying to warn Russians about the destructive ideology of Bazarov, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done, however, took revolutionary materialism as somewhat at a face value.
The novel’s protagonist is a woman who escapes her family to become financially independent in order to avoid an arranged marriage. It’s a novel of freedom through material success. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, nihilistic materialism is juxtaposed with romanticism and Russian traditionalism.
While Turgenev himself a romanticist, shows a level of objectivity and let his characters speak for themselves. In What Is To Be Done, however, Chernyshevsky argues that materialism leads to freedom. Materialism relies on science and rational thinking, which is the core idea of Marxism, and more specifically of Vladimir Lenin, the father of Russian communism.
Here is a fun fact, Lenin wrote a Russian version of the Communist manifesto titled… you guessed it What Is To Be Done in which he says a centralised political party is necessary for a revolution, thus The Russian Communist Party was born and in 1917 they overthrew the Tsar and the rest is history. Also, in Turgenev’s novel the main character, Bazarov, is a rational materialist, and in fact one of Lenin’s close Bolshevik comrades changed his name to Bazarov to commemorate that fictional hero of Russian Bolsheviks. Now you see how facts and fiction collide in Russia.
So to bring it full circle, Notes from Underground is Dostoevsky’s response to western nihilism encroaching on Russian soil and destroying Russian traditional values. However, his warning was ignored and 70 years later Russia turned into a socialist state with rational materialism at its core ideology. The second important thing to note is that Dostoevsky was 41 or 42 years old when he wrote Notes from Underground, which is the most precarious period in a man’s life when meaning and purpose come to an incredibly sharp focus, and most men experience what is termed as a midlife crisis.
The reason for that might be evolutionary. When men get to the age of 40, they have a grown son or daughter around 20 or 25, therefore has no other purpose left for him. Or they reach the peak of their career, therefore lose purpose.
So Notes from Underground is the confessions of a forty-year old man. The fact that he chose an underground, not a church, for his confession is also important. He knew the Russian intellectuals didn't go to church anymore.
He couldn't tell the truth to a priest, but he could tell the truth to his readers. By 1864 Dostoevsky had gone through so many tribulations in life. He had become a successful author after publishing Poor Folk in 1845, at the age of 24.
His radical, revolutionary ideas, led to his arrest, a mock execution and 10 years in Siberia. He returned to Saint-Petersburg in 1859 fully transformed from a westernised radical intellectual to someone who had the most disdain for those same intellectuals. So Dostoevsky combined his own midlife crisis with that of Russia’s socio-cultural crisis of 1850s into a short novella, made up of only two chapters or about 100 pages.
Summary: The first chapter is very short and has 11 sections in which the unnamed narrator, or the underground man introduces himself as a sick man, and also articulates his ideas about philosophy, human existence and his rejection of rationality as a solution to Russia’s problems or human happiness in general. In the second chapter, which is the bulk of the novel, he narrates his own story of how he was humiliated by an officer, and relates his cowardly botched and comical attempt to take revenge on him, but the officer doesn't even notice him because he is so insignificant. His second story is how he tried to borrow money from his boss, but found no courage to do so, again in a comical fashion showing his cowardice.
Later on when he forces an invite to a school reunion, his friends show no respect for him. They have a fight and leave him alone, but he follows them to the brothel where he meets a prostitute, named Liza. The name Liza shows up in many of Dostoevsky’s novels, and she represents a kind of an unfortunate woman.
Lizaveta in Crime and Punishment, the unfortunate sister of the pawn broker who walks in as Raskolnikov is murdering her sister and therefore become victim number 2. In the Brothers Karamazov, Pavel’s mother is also named Lizaveta who gets pregnant with Karamazov’s child and then dies at childbirth and her son ends up killing his father before committing suicide. The underground man feels his life is taking a positive turn when he manages to sleep with Liza, but then perhaps a post-sex mental clarity allows his bitterness to resurface.
Despite his own pitiful life, the Underground Man looks down on Liza. He even admonishes her for selling her body and her soul for money. He tells Liza that her life is futile and meaningless.
It’s in fact his own life that is meaningless, but now at the position of power he thinks can inject his venom onto her. She leaves him, and he is devastated. He curses himself for being so stupid.
The way society has treated him, he has become deeply resentful and petty and wanted to enact it on someone weaker than him, someone like Liza. Fredrick Nietzsche calls this resentment a slave mentality. Those treated badly, become biter for the rest of their lives and they try to enact their resentment onto others.
A good example is revolutionaries who succeed in toppling a tyrannical regime, end up becoming tyrannical themselves, as beautifully depicted in George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm. Now that the Underground Man feels like a total loser, he has nothing to lose so what does he do? He doesn't become a revolutionary, as Marx claimed that the ideal revolutionaries are those who have nothing to lose except his chains.
The Underground Man, however, goes into himself. He isolates himself from society like a Buddhist monk or an injured animal that goes somewhere quite to die away from others. The underground man is physically ill, mainly his liver, but most importantly he is so deeply psychologically wounded that he no longer wants to receive any treatment for his illness.
He has given up. Except that he wants to warn us about how modernity with its rationality-driven progress can turn us all into someone like him, isolated, dissatisfied, and resentful. Now, what can we learn from Dostoevsky’s Underground Man?
These 8 lessons will give you a great insight into Dostoevsky’s philosophy and psychological analysis of the modern man. Lessons: One: We’re insignificant. “Because I am the nastiest, stupidest, absurdist and most envious of all the worms on earth, who are not a bit better than I am, but, the devil knows why, are never put to confusion; while I shall always be insulted by every louse, that is my doom!
” The Underground Man suffers from inferiority complex, perhaps due to his lower socio-economic background. Throughout the novel, he talks about how insignificant he is. Early in the novel, he attempts an act of revenge, but much to his dismay, his nemesis doesn't even notice him.
As a result he develops self-hatred. He says: “For example, I hated my face, I thought it was a scoundrelly face, and I even suspected there was something servile about it, and so every time I went to the office, I made agonizing efforts to seem as independent as possible, so they should not be suspected of subservience, and to get my face the most well-bred expression I could manage. ” This realization leads him underground so he can assess his life in its entirety, as a kind of a sharp existential mirror.
He says: “Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. ” So in essence the Underground Man is too intelligent or too educated for his own good.
His bitterness also comes from the fact he is not brave enough to act on his ideas. He believes every respectable man has dark secrets, hidden bodies in the closet so to speak but he has none of that. His darkest secrets are nothing but a few acts of pettiness.
If you don't have secrets, mistakes, bad decisions or bodies in the closet for the lack of better terms, you have not done much. And he calls himself a mouse who has crawled underground. This describes the conditions of most people.
We are insignificant, which can be liberating in a way. Two: I’m a thinking man. “In order to act, one must be absolutely sure of oneself, no doubts must remain anywhere.
But how am I, for example, to be sure of myself? Where are the primary causes on which I can take my stand, where are my foundations? ” The Underground Man suffers from what he terms as, “a heightened awareness” of oneself.
Always extremely self-conscious of his own behaviours and thoughts. Why is that? He thinks this heightened self-awareness was the result of his modern education, which he calls a “test-tube” that produces uniformity and cowardice, therefore he has lost his natural spontaneity.
In a way he claims that schooling has killed his creativity but also his courage to be a man of action. This is similar to the superfluous man, a very important character in all Russian literature of 19th century, including in the works Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. What’s a superfluous man?
Someone who lives in his head, often romantic, thinks too much but has little or no initiative to take action. Turgenev compares Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Hamlet thinks without doing anything, while Don Quixote acts without much thought.
The Underground Man is intelligent but perhaps his social status is not high enough to enact on his ideas. This social impotence leads to his jealousy and psychological bitterness. He wishes he had the power to affect society or if not power, at least some stupidity to act without thinking.
He is a kind of middle of the road, neither here nor there kind of person. Intellectually superior than most people, but socially inferior than many men of action. This reflects Dostoevsky’s own position in Siberia.
He was thrown in among the common working class prisoners so he watched them with some envy as to how simple their worldview seemed. Dostoevsky on the other, an intellectual, lived in his own head wishing he enjoyed a bit more stupidity. What education does, it heightens your consciousness, useful it may be, it can also be a detriment to your growth and happiness because it tames you from being a proactive person.
Three: The problem of consciousness “But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease. ” Dostoevsky made childhood the focus of his final novel, the Brothers Karamazov, in which he laments the loss of innocence and a kind of blissful ignorance. Because once seen, nothing be unseen.
The Underground Man thinks that acute consciousness or being self-aware all the time, takes a huge psychological toll on an intelligent man. “I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that.
I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness. ” For him consciousness is to truly experiencing emotions such as jealousy, anger, resentment and revenge but yet completely unable to take action when experiencing those emotions. He says: “You cannot have a full, genuine consciousness without a pure heart.
” He feels the full depth of his humiliation because of his acute consciousness. His enemy, the officer however is a kind of cool-headed person who doesn't notice things at all, therefore lives in a sort of blissful state. So education nourishes your intellect, and your intelligence heightens your consciousness.
He says: “I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all "direct" persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. ” In other words, they lack acute consciousness, therefore they’re more spontaneous. Four: A man of action is spontaneous “Well, … spontaneous man is the real man… I am green with envy of such men.
They are stupid, I won’t deny that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid. ” The Underground Man considers a spontaneous person someone close to nature and his natural instincts. While he himself is far removed from his natural state of action, because he overthinks and over-analyse yet unable to make things happen.
When he wanted to borrow money from his boss, it took him forever to knock on the door. Another thing he envies about spontaneous men is their happiness and laughter. They burst out laughing, while the Underground Man observes them with doubt and questions fills his head.
Despite his jealousy for men of action, he still gives them a backhanded compliment that they’re stupid, which limits their thinking process, so they act quickly. Modernity, on a very deeper level, is about predictability. In Dostoevsky’s time only factories, armies and education system were aiming for total control and predictability.
But today the world has become so predictable that we cannot cope otherwise. Food must be available in supermarket. Drnks in bars.
Trains on time. Even algorithm predicts what we like to consume online. He says: “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.
” So we humans love predictability, but also surprises. The only time the Underground Man let’s his guards down and become spontaneous is after sex with Liza, or post-sex mental clarity, and as a result he suffers the consequences of her leaving him. Five: Humans are self-destructive “But despair can hold the most intense sorts of pleasure when one is strongly conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.
” In Chernyshevsky’s novel, What Is To Be Done? , the Crystal Palace of Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, UK, is seen as the ultimate utopia of material rationalism, a structure made of glass and iron. The underground man says no matter how beautiful such utopia might be, humans are fundamentally self-destructive, it’s written in our genes.
“… suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. Though …. consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction.
Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. ” Our negative emotions which cause suffering are there for a reason from an evolutionary perspective. We need pain so we can understand our world better.
We suffer so we can grow out of it. Today we cushion ourselves. Shield ourselves from the negative things.
We have therapy and medicine to protect us. With slightest issue, we turn to science to help us. The Underground Man despite suffering a serious illness refuses to get treatment or help and instead he has chosen to live alone, which is self-destructive.
He even gets pleasure from being humiliated by the officer. So the Underground Man’s approach goes against the self-help industry. Instead he highlights the self-destructive side of being human.
No matter how much we cushion ourselves from negative emotions, they are necessary for us. As I discussed in my video on Marcel Proust, suffering is fundamental to human creativity. Dostoevsky himself agrees with the Underground Man that suffering cannot be avoided and that there is a real pleasure in pain.
Six: We’re irrational, too “Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. ” The underground man refuses to get treatment for his illness to make a deeper point. When your body is sick, you’re no longer able to make rational decisions.
Obesity or addiction to alcohol, drugs or sex goes against rational thinking. The Underground Man points out that there deeper underlying motivations which dictate our choices on a daily basis. But then a simple physical illness can distort your thoughts or a simple emotional outburst can destroy palaces we spend years to build.
Human being is like a game of Jenga. There is always the danger of a small slip. Even a small toothache can change your view of the world.
Millions of years evolutionary hardwiring can’t change because modernity requires us to be rational and logical all the time. Dostoevsky has a very low opinion of humanity and paints a picture of human being as something very fragile, mailable, liquid and unstable. Our nature or our body dictates our lives, so we are chaotic, self-destructive and emotionally unstable.
Why? Our short-sightedness is because we can’t see the bigger picture of our lives. We are in the present and we have little or no knowledge of the future.
We’re in the midst of our lives. The Underground Man is suffering from some type of liver disease. Perhaps that has distorted his thoughts about his own self-worth and life.
When we’re happy for too long, we look for some chaos. When safe, we want fake danger like roller coaster, when peace we fight over trivial things. The Underground Man thinks we’re hardwired to seek negative emotions and irrational behaviour.
No matter how much rationality is instilled in us, it cannot control our irrational side, i. e. emotions.
Seven: Intelligence doesn't make you a better person “In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity. .
. ” According to rationalists, being aware of our own self-interest allows us to make intelligent choices, therefore if all rational beings make intelligent choices, we can create a society that runs like a machine, predictable and happy. But the Underground Man has two problems with rational choices.
First, intelligence, instead of giving you clarity of thoughts, makes everything appear foggy and blurry, while stupidity on the other hand, gives you black and white clarity. The underground man concludes that intelligence is futile when it comes to making good choices. He even questions free will, arguing our deeper desires determine most of our choices, without us being aware of it.
As an example, your choice of a partner is deeply rooted in our biology, so that’s why most people have so much difficulty finding a suitable partner in today’s world. Second, he says that intelligent people employ reason as an instrument to distort the truth for their own selfish interest, to the detriment of society as a whole. So intelligence, while highly prized, cannot give you that mental clarity or moral righteousness.
It merely heightens your sense of self or ego. The more intelligent you’re the less altruistic you become. Eight: The Underground Man Tells Stories “Finally: I'm bored, and I constantly do nothing.
And writing things down really seems like work. They say work makes a man good and honest. Well, here's a chance, at least.
” Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground in response to a novel boldly titled What Is To Be Done. Now The underground Man’s response is to do nothing. He describes himself as lazy and says he is in a state of conscious inertia or inaction.
He sounds like a Taoist monk hidden in some remote mountains. He doesn't want to change the world or himself. However, the underground man is not completely lost.
He has the desire to write. His confession is shedding lights into the darkness of human psyche. Either consciously or subconsciously he is trying to help us by telling his own story.
It’s a teachable moment. He has two important tools in his underground tool shed. First honesty.
He doesn't avert his gaze from the truth, at the expense of his own character, describing himself a mouse, a nasty person, resentful and a pathetic loser. His honesty is refreshing to read. It’s also therapeutic.
And I think his confessions here must have helped him to unburden himself a bit. The second tool he employs is comedy. Reading Notes from Underground, you cannot stop your laughter from time to time.
Despite his Russian pessimism, he has a good sense of humour. Comedy through self-deprecation. Even today, great comedians employs self-deprecation as a tool to create empathy and understanding.
The underground man is very successful in making the reader emphatic to his condition. So despite thinking that he is a complete loser, he manages to teach us all through the power of storytelling and comedy. His language is also beautiful that gives us a sense of pathos.
Here is an example: “The isolated street-lamps glimmered sadly through the haze of snow like torches at a funeral. ” The whole town, country, or even civilisation is doomed and we’re burying traditions with our own hands in the name change and progress. He’s telling us that it’s we stop and reflect on things, as to where we are heading.
The Underground Man lived during a time when therapy didn't exist. He took refuge in solitude. That loneliness is something that endears him to us all, because we are ultimately lonely souls wandering on this rocky planet we call home, while at the same time trying to make sense of it all, in our pursuit for meaning and purpose in life.
Thank you for listening.
