REVIEW!
The other day I read the work of F. M. Dostoevsky “Notes from Underground”; it accidentally fell into my hands, and it was very opportune. So, “Notes”...
The work was first published in the magazine “Epoch” (1864. No. 1-2, 4) with the signature: Fyodor Dostoevsky. I will note right away that the story belongs to the early period of creativity, Dostoevsky was already known as a writer, but such famous works as “Crime and Punishment” and “The Idiot” were just in the making. And the hero of “Notes” became a new “anti-hero” literary world of those times. Criticism was not at all ready then for Dostoevsky’s breakthrough vision and tried to identify the ideology of the “underground” man with the worldview of the author himself, although this was completely wrong. Dostoevsky is a genius, it’s difficult to understand him, but when you read history through the centuries, “long ago days gone by”, as if blinding with light - how it turns out that the author thought correctly and what relevant thoughts he had to this day, undoubtedly this is a contribution to national and world culture.
Prototype literary image“underground man” - commoners, who made up in the 60s. XIX century a social stratum already relatively numerous and widely represented in society and the bureaucracy, although not at its highest levels. So, the hero has already passed 40 years and he sits in his gloomy St. Petersburg apartment and reflects: “I am now forty years old, but forty years is my whole life; after all, this is the deepest old age. Living beyond forty years is indecent, vulgar, immoral!” He reflects a lot, a lot, throughout the first part of the story. In fact, the entire first part is his conversation with himself and with an imaginary audience. In the end, he asks himself: “why, why exactly do I want to write?” - and comes to the conclusion that in this way he gets relief from his soul and escapes boredom (“I’m bored, but I’m constantly doing nothing”). In the second part, he is struck by memories of the events of his youth, which still haunt him, “pressing” as he says. But in fact there is nothing to put pressure on, all his problems and “tragedies” were the result of his unsuccessful thinking strategies! But the author does not undertake to judge the strategies of thinking; Dostoevsky then had a different task. This is how the composition turned out: in the first part, “Underground,” there are endless conclusions of the hero, who is only capable of this in this life, what to think, and in the second part, “About the Wet Snow,” his autobiography, more precisely, episodes from his youth, the beginning of his personal journey going nowhere.
Dostoevsky tried to explain the principle of constructing a story based on contrasts in a letter to his brother dated April 13, 1864: “You understand what a transition is in music,” he wrote. - Exactly the same here. In the 1st chapter, apparently, there is chatter, but suddenly this chatter in the last 2 chapters is resolved by an unexpected catastrophe.
So, what is the essence of that “chatter” of the lost underground man? Yes, the fact is that he himself drove himself into this position, but he constantly makes excuses and feels sorry for himself. Throughout the entire story, he repeats the same thought “I’m smart, I’m smart, I’m smart,” he really was smart, his whole life consisted of reading books, in fact he couldn’t do anything except think and reflect! He divided all people into smart people and into practical figures, whom he called fools: “I consider such and such a direct person to be a real, normal person... I envy such a person to the extreme bile. He's stupid, I don't argue with you on that, but maybe normal person and must be stupid, why do you know? He had an even lower opinion of himself. Translated into modern language, the hero is a sociopath! Next come all these deep, soul-dissecting thoughts of his. So what did he think about... This is where Dostoevsky’s genius was revealed, how clearly he could describe all these emotional and mental movements. One of his main ideas: human free will is the greatest value of life, life has no meaning without free will (using theses and concepts close in some cases to the philosophical ideas of Kant, Schopenhauer, Stirner, the hero of “Notes from Underground” argues that the philosophical materialism of enlighteners, views of representatives utopian socialism and positivists, as well as Hegel’s absolute idealism, inevitably lead to fatalism and the denial of free will, which he places above all else).
The second part, the autobiographical one, shows the whole underside of a person who has voluntarily spent his entire life sitting in his cocoon. This cocoon is truly terrifying. Constant self-judgment, biting yourself, low self-esteem, fear of people, fixation on your own low social status. My brain almost exploded at how similar my own worldview is to the description of the hero’s base qualities! However, what is the tragedy of Dostoevsky? His hero deliberately took the path of debauchery, deliberately! And he even calls his debauchery touchingly “debaucher.” Everything is written there in detail, how he walked, how he suffered, what he did mean and base. But it would seem that the person understood everything! As a result, he began to consider insulting a woman (a brothel worker) his highest achievement in life! He broke her heart, one might say, gave her false hope, and then cleverly insulted her. This is an achievement... But how he dreamed at the beginning that she would love him and he would love her, and how they would get married and be happy, he flew in his dreams. And then once, and he threw out such a number. Yes, a person completely closed himself in a cocoon and rotted himself in it.
Well, here are the conclusions... What is the relevance of the work for us, contemporaries. Let's not be like that! Let the antihero remain in the book, that’s why they are books, to teach us about life. Let's think less, fly in our dreams and daydreams, it's better to be a “stupid” leader than to rot in hiding all your life. The underground is a “cocoon” that separates a person from reality. That's it, stop chatting.
“Oh, gentlemen, maybe the only reason I consider myself an intelligent person is that all my life I could neither start nor finish anything. Even if I am a chatterbox, a harmless, annoying chatterbox, like the rest of us. But what can we do? ", if the direct and only purpose of every intelligent person is chatter, that is, deliberately pouring from empty to empty."
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"Notes from the Underground"- a story by F. M. Dostoevsky, published in 1864. The story is told on behalf of a former official who lives in St. Petersburg. In terms of its problematics, it foreshadows the ideas of existentialism.
Plot
“Notes” begins with a presentation of the intellectual “finds” of the protagonist. In the first quarter of the story, only a few biographical facts are given - that the hero received an inheritance, resigned from service and completely stopped leaving his apartment, going “underground”. However, later in his notes the hero talks about his life - about his childhood without friends, about his “skirmish” (perceived this way only by him) with an officer, and two episodes of his life, which, assuming the veracity of the notes, became the most significant and noticeable event in hero's life. The first was a dinner with old school “comrades”, at which he offended everyone, got angry, and even decided to challenge one of them to a duel. The second is the moral bullying of a prostitute from a brothel, to whom he first, out of malice, tried to show the abomination of her situation, then, accidentally giving her his address, he himself suffered unbearable torment from her, which had its root in his embitterment and the fact that he the image with which he tried to present himself to her had a striking discrepancy with his actual situation. Trying with all his might to offend her a second time, with this action he ends his story about the exits from the “underground”, and on behalf of the editor of these notes he adds that the existing continuation of these notes is again the intellectual product of the hero - in fact, the above was written in a very distorted form.
Allegories
“Underground” is an allegorical image. The hero has nothing to do with revolutionary activity, since he considers the active will to be “stupid” and the mind to be weak-willed. After some hesitation, the “Underground Man” leans rather toward an intelligent, reflective lack of will, although he envies people who are unreasoning and act simply and brazenly.
"Underground" is another name for atomicity. Key phrase: “I am alone, but they are all.” The idea of personal superiority over others, no matter how insignificant life may be, no matter how grovelling an intellectual may be, is the quintessence of this confession of a Russian intellectual.
The hero, or rather the anti-hero, as he calls himself at the end, is unhappy and pitiful, but, while remaining human, takes pleasure in torturing himself and others. This human tendency, following Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, is discovered by modern psychology.
“Crystal Palace” is the personification of the future harmoniously organized society, universal happiness based on the laws of reason. However, the hero is sure that there will be people who, for completely irrational reasons, will reject this universal harmony based on reason, will reject it for the sake of causeless volitional self-affirmation. “Eh, gentlemen, what kind of will will there be when it comes to arithmetic, when only two times two makes four will be in use? Twice is two and without my will it becomes four. Is there such a thing as one’s own will?”
Cultural reminiscences
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Notes
Literature
- Koshlyakov A. On the function of the story-memory in “Notes from the Underground” by F. M. Dostoevsky // Language. Literature: Yazgulyam collection. 2. St. Petersburg, 1997, pp. 100-106.
- Larange Daniel S. Récit et foi chez Fédor M. Dostoïevski: contribution narratologique et théologique aux "Notes d"un souterain" (1864), Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002.
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An excerpt characterizing Notes from Underground
Be that as it may, I think that someone definitely laid out a “pillow” for me... Someone who thought that it was too early for me to break up then. There were a lot of such “strange” cases in my then very short life. Some happened and then very quickly disappeared into oblivion, while others were remembered for some reason, although they were not necessarily the most interesting. So, for some reason unknown to me, I remembered very well the incident with the lighting of the fire.All the neighborhood kids (including me) loved to light bonfires. And especially when we were allowed to fry potatoes in them!.. It was one of our most favorite delicacies, and we generally considered such a fire almost a real holiday! And how could anything else compare with the scorching, stunningly smelling, ash-strewn potatoes freshly fished out of a burning fire with sticks?! We had to try very hard, wanting to remain serious, seeing our waiting, intensely concentrated faces! We sat around the fire, like hungry Robinson Crusoe who had not eaten for a month. And at that moment it seemed to us that nothing could be tastier in this world than that small, smoking ball slowly baking in our fire!
It was on one of these festive “potato-baking” evenings that another “incredible” adventure happened to me. It was a quiet, warm summer evening, and it was already starting to get a little dark. We gathered in someone’s “potato” field, found a suitable place, gathered a sufficient number of branches and were ready to light a fire, when someone noticed that we had forgotten the most important thing - matches. The disappointment knew no bounds... No one wanted to follow them, because we had gone quite far from home. We tried to light it the old-fashioned way - rubbing wood against wood - but very soon even the most stubborn ones ran out of patience. And then suddenly one says:
- Well, we forgot that we have our “witch” here with us! Well, come on, light it up...
They often called me “Witch,” and on their part it was more of an affectionate nickname than an offensive one. So I wasn’t offended, but, to be honest, I was very confused. To my great regret, I never lit a fire and somehow it never occurred to me to do this... But this was almost the first time they asked me for something and I, of course, was not going to miss this case, and even more so, “to lose face in the dirt.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do to make it “light”... I just focused on the fire and really wanted it to happen. A minute passed, then another, but nothing happened... The boys (and they are always and everywhere a little angry) began to laugh at me, saying that I could only “guess” when I needed it... I felt very offended - because I honestly tried my best. But of course, no one was interested in this. They needed a result, but I just didn’t have the result...
To be honest, I still don’t know what happened then. Maybe I just felt very indignant that they laughed at me so undeservedly? Or did a bitter childhood resentment stir up too powerfully? One way or another, I suddenly felt like my whole body was frozen (it would seem that it should have been the other way around?) and only inside my hands, real “fire” was pulsating with explosive shocks... I stood facing the fire and sharply threw my left hand forward... A terrible roaring flame seemed to splash out of my hand straight into the fire the boys had built. Everyone screamed wildly... and I woke up at home, with very strong cutting pain in my arms, back and head. My whole body was burning, as if I was lying on a hot brazier. I didn’t want to move or even open my eyes.
Mom was horrified by my “antics” and accused me of “all worldly sins,” and most importantly, of not keeping my word given to her, which for me was worse than any all-consuming physical pain. I was very sad that this time she did not want to understand me and at the same time I felt unprecedented pride that I still “didn’t lose face in the mud” and that I somehow managed to do what I wanted expected.
Of course, all this now seems a little funny and childishly naive, but then it was very important for me to prove that I could possibly be useful to someone in some way with all my, as they called it, “things.” And that these are not my crazy inventions, but the real reality, which they will now have to take into account at least a little. If only everything could be so childishly simple...
As it turned out, not only my mother was horrified by what I had done. Neighboring mothers, having heard from their children about what had happened, began to demand that they stay as far away from me as possible... And this time I was truly left almost completely alone. But since I was a very, very proud person, I was never going to “ask” to be someone’s friend. But it’s one thing to show, and quite another to live with it.....
I really loved my friends, my street and everyone who lived on it. And I always tried to bring everyone at least some joy and some good. And now I was alone and only myself was to blame for this, because I could not resist the simplest, harmless childish provocation. But what could I do if I myself was still just a child at that time? True, as a child, who has now begun to understand little by little that not everyone in this world is worthy of having to prove something... And even if you prove it, it still does not mean at all that the one to whom you are you prove, you will always be understood correctly.
7. “Notes from the Underground.” On the nature of evil
The era of scandals
So, we have reached the 60s of the 19th century, this is the era of renewal of Russia, the era of choice, and this is a new era for Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. From 1861 to 1865, he was the main author, the engine of magazines - first "Time", together with his brother Mikhail, and then, when "Time" was banned, they published the magazine "Epoch". That is, this is the time of journalism, the time when Dostoevsky, after hard labor and exile, plunged into the turbulent 1860s of Russia. At the same time, he writes journalistic articles and works of fiction.
But it must be said that this, apparently, did not work out very well for him or was achieved with very great effort, so subsequently a different algorithm was chosen. After “The Epoch,” Dostoevsky went into novelism for a long time: “Crime and Punishment,” “The Gambler,” “The Idiot,” “Demons.” Then for a year and a half he publishes the magazine “Citizen”, after which he writes the novel “Teenager”, and then for two years “The Diary of a Writer”, that is, journalism for him becomes both a prologue and an epilogue to his great novels. And he consistently maintains this algorithm from “Crime and Punishment” to “The Brothers Karamazov”.
But the beginning of the 1860s is a bit of a vinaigrette, and maybe this partly affected the quality of it itself works of art. In particular, in 1861 he published his great novel “Humiliated and Insulted” in the magazine “Time”, in which he tried to find and show new heroes. This is Alyosha - in him true nobility of soul is combined with equally true, naive meanness. Here is such a “broad” person, one of Dostoevsky’s first “broad” people. And his father, Prince Valkovsky, who combines boundless cynicism with a sharp mind and impeccable secularism.
And against the background of these “broad” ones, we see a “narrow” selfless, largely autobiographical hero who is capable of self-sacrifice for the sake of love, for the sake of the happiness of a loved one. This is how the theme of “White Nights” continues in a unique way. And it turns out that in this novel dreamers and cynics, egoists and altruists, predatory and meek came together, but they came together and collided, I would say, somewhat straightforwardly. Still, this novel was written in a hurry, and Dostoevsky himself admitted this. Although it was remarkable and with flashes of genius, it was still only a test of the pen before future great novels.
What else was published in these magazines from Dostoevsky’s artistic works? This is the story “A Bad Anecdote” (1862), a malicious mockery of the illusions of Russian liberal dreaming of the era of reforms. But what a plot! I would say that the plot of “A Bad Joke” is an epoch-making plot.
And here Dostoevsky clearly overlaps with Saltykov-Shchedrin, who called this era of reforms “the era of embarrassment.” And in Dostoevsky we see how a modern hero, who wants good, who wants the instant embodiment of liberal values, finds himself in an embarrassing situation. In the language of a modern humorous person, “they wanted the best, but they got it as always.” We got a bad anecdote of an ostentatious, false connection with the people.
“A bad joke” is a very interesting thing in this sense, because Dostoevsky is groping for some new type of plot, stemming, as I already said, from an embarrassing situation, from a scandal.
Look how many scandals there are in his subsequent novels: the scene with Sonya being accused of theft in “Crime and Punishment”, the plot of “The Idiot”, “Demons”, “Demons” moves from scandal to scandal, “Demons” can generally be called a novel of scandals, they are in abundance in “ A teenager”, in “The Brothers Karamazov”. Sometimes this era itself is called the era of scandals; they are extremely popular in the media mass media(the time of magazines is replaced by the time of newspapers). And for Dostoevsky, why are embarrassing situations interesting, why are some scandalous plots interesting? The scandal reveals to him some of the absurdity of life. The scandal makes it possible to aggravate and show this absurdity in a multiple magnification.
Well, what else at the same time? “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”, this is already 1863, and this, one might say, is artistic journalism, such, you know, original letters from a Russian traveler new era, where thinking about Russia is combined with thinking about the fate of Europe.
In particular, speaking about Russia, Dostoevsky touches on an important topic here, we will now need it very much - this is the topic of extra people, which for him begins with Chatsky. And Dostoevsky here makes a very important remark about all these superfluous people both in literature and in life: “They all didn’t find anything to do,” he writes in “Winter Notes,” “they didn’t find anything for two or three generations in a row. So, I don’t understand that clever man, at any time, under any circumstances, could not find anything to do.”
Well, what about in Europe? About her in “Winter Notes” we read a wonderful chapter “An Experience on the Bourgeois”: “ A strange man This bourgeois: directly proclaims that money is the highest human virtue and duty, and yet he terribly loves to play at the highest nobility.
The phenomenon of the underground man
Well, we’ll talk about Europe later, we’ll return to this very interesting motif in Dostoevsky’s work, both journalistic and artistic. In the meantime, we have quietly approached, perhaps, the main work of this time - this is “Notes from the Underground,” which was published in 1864 in the magazine “Epoch”. And it must be said that they made virtually no impression on the reading public or on criticism. Only Saltykov-Shchedrin responded, and rather dismissively: “Well, what kind of incomprehensible hero appeared there.” And somehow these “Notes” passed quietly, but in due time they will have their own rise in reader interest.
This is the end of the 19th and especially the beginning of the 20th century, when “Notes from the Underground” will be read by philosophers, both Russian and European, when Maxim Gorky will say that this story contains all of Nietzsche, when European thinkers will call this work a prologue to new philosophy existentialism. Indeed, all of existentialism, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, is implicated in this plot of the underground man.
And there are also writers - Sartre and Camus - who considered Dostoevsky their predecessor, and, say, Camus, especially his “The Outsider” - this is, you know, a continuation of the underground man and, I would say, the completion of the underground hero Dostoevsky to the very edge.
So, existence, a certain integral existence, rules man, this philosophy says, not reason, but a certain integral existence. And Dostoevsky, in this struggle with rationalism, with the understanding of the spiritual integrity of man, is, of course, a follower of Russian thinkers, whom I have not yet named. These are primarily Slavophiles, Ivan Kireyevsky and Alexey Khomyakov. It can be said that existential philosophy is largely rooted in Russian thought and especially in Russian literature.
So what is the underground, the underground hero? Well, this is not an underground revolutionary and this is not a person who is hiding underground. The underground man is the definition of a certain essence of humanity, human character. Dostoevsky's underground man is, of course, the heir to the so-called superfluous people in Russian literature.
The concept " extra person“came from Turgenev, this is still the turn of the 1840-50s, when his “Diary of an Extra Man” was published. This includes his “Hamlet of Shchigrovsky District”. This is a hero who is thrown out of life. He White crow. At the same time, he is terribly touchy, he is such a touchy, ambitious black sheep. And Turgenev already raises the question that the reason for this abandonment of the hero is not only in the environment, not only in the circumstances, although the circumstances, of course, are important, and the reason is also in himself.
If Shakespeare's Hamlet suffers mainly from the fact that the age has gone crazy, then the Russian Hamlets experience some strange self-disrespect - I'm talking now about Turgenev's heroes and Dostoevsky's heroes, this brings them closer together - a strange self-disrespect with an aggravated self-esteem. That's it, self-disrespect combined with ambition. One does not agree with the other, and the end result is what Hegel called “torn consciousness.” A hero with a torn mind! This is how we get closer to the underground man. Where should such a hero go who is not accepted by the environment, and he does not accept it? Where to go from the pack? Well, go into some solitude, into a secluded space. Dostoevsky's underground man is a man of both torn and solitary consciousness.
Consciousness as a disease
“Notes from the Underground” is clearly divided into two parts. The first part is a kind of shorthand recording of a torn consciousness. Only in the 20th century did the term “stream of consciousness” appear, but it is quite applicable to this work of Dostoevsky; this is perhaps one of the first phenomena in art of this kind. The entire first part is a conversation with oneself, a confession, notes for oneself. The hero writes notes, but not for anyone to read them except himself. He is trying to figure out some things for himself. And then, after this part, there are three stories from the life of an underground hero, which somehow realize what was said in the first chapter. Dostoevsky himself, in a letter to his brother, reports about this two-part nature of Notes from Underground: “You understand,” he writes, “what transition is in music. Exactly the same here. Chapter 1 appears to be chatter; but suddenly this chatter in the last 2 chapters is resolved by an unexpected catastrophe.” So, chatter, and then disaster.
But let's look at the "chatter" first. Here is the beginning of the story. The hero introduces himself and tries to understand himself. How he does it: “I am a sick person... I evil person. Unattractive person. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t know a damn thing about my illness.” So sick or not sick? Sick or angry? Let’s turn the page: “I lied to myself just now, that I was an evil official. I lied out of anger... I was not only evil, but I didn’t even manage to become anything, neither evil nor good.” And this is such an oscillatory movement, when the hero is in constant dynamics, in constant development, and as soon as you have time to watch him, how he defines himself, then he is sick, then he is angry, then he lied to himself.
But one of the results he comes to in the first part: “An intelligent person of the nineteenth century,” he says, “must and is morally obliged to be a creature predominantly characterless; a person with character, an activist, is primarily a limited being.” Spinelessness is presented as a characteristic of a person who is too conscious, and as the underground hero puts it, “too conscious is a disease.” And moreover, even any consciousness is already a disease. So, it seems that some loose ends have been tied: we have a conscious and self-aware hero, but this is precisely his illness. This first part, it is very interesting because the underground hero philosophizes, he tries to define himself with the help of philosophical categories, and it must be said that this story by Dostoevsky is perhaps the first appearance of his philosophical prose. And here we will find “greetings” from Kant, from Hegel, from Schopenhauer.
This is far from accidental; Dostoevsky prepared for this work for a long time. Here's one interesting fact. He comes out of hard labor and in his very first letter, literally in the first week, he writes to his brother asking him to send him books. He names which books, “but the first number must be,” he writes, “send me a German dictionary.” A man has just come from hard labor and rushes to a German dictionary!
Dostoevsky at this time literally plunges into philosophical disputes, although they were familiar to him back in the 1840s from Petrashevsky’s circle, when Russian thought was divided, if you like, in two. Let's say Stankevich's circle is, first of all, a philosophizing circle: they read Hegel and are immersed in philosophy. But the Petrashevsky circle is, perhaps, a circle of a different direction, more social. And if the first is focused on German classical philosophy, then the second is on French social thought. That is, it turns out that upon leaving hard labor, Dostoevsky seemed to move from one direction to another. He switched to philosophical interests.
And we notice that Notes from Underground marks the rise of intellectual prose. It is not for nothing that philosophers write and talk about him so much to this day. This is a work in which, perhaps, the strongest rebuff was given to rationalist educational philosophy, which at that time - after all, it was already the beginning of the 1860s - came to Russia with some delay, but nevertheless captured the minds of young people, the minds of the so-called advanced Russian intelligentsia. Here, first of all, of course, we need to name N.G. Chernyshevsky. Chernyshevsky with his novel “What is to be done?” turned the heads of several generations in this direction, and the underground man enters into an argument - Chernyshevsky’s novel is already more than well known - enters into an argument with the belated, but very radical Russian Enlightenment, and we understand, of course, that behind the underground hero sometimes stands the author himself.
According to my wish
This is very a big problem“Notes from the Underground”: where is the author, and where is the hero. It is not always possible to separate them. There is a lot of controversy about this, but in this anti-Enlightenment beginning, of course, we understand that here the underground hero expounds the ideas of Dostoevsky himself, but in his own way, of course, he expounds. I’ll quote: “Oh, tell me, who was the first to announce, who was the first to proclaim that a person only does dirty tricks because he does not know his real interests; and that if he were enlightened, his eyes were opened to his real, normal interests, then the person would immediately stop doing dirty tricks, would immediately be kind and noble, because, being enlightened and understanding his real benefits, he would see in goodness your own benefit." Well, will you find out? Chernyshevsky’s new people follow precisely this belief that it is enough to enlighten the brain and a person will become different.
“When has it ever happened,” says the underground man, “in all the millennia, that a person acts only for his own benefit?” And he attacks this word “benefit”, he really doesn’t like it, and he creates such a wonderful picture: “I, for example, would not be at all surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, among the general future prudence, some gentleman appeared , with an ignoble or, better said, with a retrograde and mocking physiognomy, will put his hands on his hips and say to us all: what, gentlemen, shouldn’t we push all this prudence at once, with our feet, dust, for the sole purpose of these logarithms went to hell and let us live again according to our stupid will! This would be nothing, but the insulting thing is that he will certainly find followers: that’s how man is made. And all this for the most trivial reason, which, it seems, is not worth mentioning: precisely because man, always and everywhere, no matter who he was, loved to act as he wanted, and not at all as he was commanded reason and benefit... One’s own, free and free desire, one’s own, even the wildest whim, one’s own fantasy - this is all that missed, most profitable benefit that does not fit into any classification... A person needs - just independent desire, no matter what this independence costs and no matter what it leads to.”
So, desire. In fact, one recognizes here, somewhat, Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Idea”: in Dostoevsky, the world is as human desire, which is much more important than all ideas and any reasonable benefits. “You see,” the underground man continues, “reason, gentlemen, is a good thing, this is indisputable, but reason is only reason, it satisfies only the rational ability of a person, and desire is a manifestation of all life, that is, all human life, and with reason and with all the scratching.” So, desire is a manifestation of a person’s holistic life, in contrast to reason. Why is that? “Yes, it’s very simple,” explains the underground, “because the most important thing, the most precious thing for a person is our personality, our individuality.”
This is such an anti-rationalist philosophy, a justified tilt away from reasonable egoism, but leading, alas, to the other extreme, to the lawlessness of egoism, to individualism. The underground man formulates his philosophy very aphoristically, catchily: “Lord God, what do I care about the laws of nature, arithmetic, when for some reason I don’t like these laws of two times two is four?” Well, you don’t like the fact that two and two are four, and if you don’t like it, then it can be five, or as many as you want, right? There are no limits to desire. And the underground man comes to his most important aphorism, which is often quoted and really is such a quintessence of underground philosophy: “Should the light fail,” he says, “or should I not drink tea? And I’ll say that the world is gone, but that I always drink tea.”
Of course, one can object, how can this be, because this path of permissiveness will lead to both the destruction of society and the self-destruction of a person. “So what?” - the underground will answer us. And he will give out another aphorism: “Man loves to create, this is indisputable. But why does he also passionately love destruction and chaos?” (this idea will be readily picked up by other heroes of the writer later). These are the abysses Dostoevsky opens in the human underground. And what I would like to emphasize here is that he discovers these abysses not only by observing the people around him, but in many ways by observing his own psychology. Only, unlike the underground, he follows the path of overcoming this chaos found in his own nature.
Broad natures
Well, let’s say the underground mocks romanticism, but we said at one time that Dostoevsky in many ways felt like a romantic in the 1840s, and in the 1860s too. What does the underground say about this? He says that there is some peculiarity of our Russian romantics, some quality, as he formulates it, “to understand everything, to see everything, not to reconcile with anyone or anything, but at the same time not to disdain anything , not to lose sight of a useful, practical thing (some kind of government apartments, pensions, stars [here there is such an ambiguous word, stars, because romanticism is associated with the stars of heaven, and here, of course, stars on shoulder straps are meant]) - and see this goal through all enthusiasms,” that is, to be a romantic and at the same time not to disdain some practical things. “The broad man is our romantic,” says the underground man, “and the first rogue.” Wide man. Dostoevsky, perhaps, for the first time here, but perhaps this was already outlined in “Notes from the House of the Dead,” the definition of “a broad person” appears, such a person combines romanticism, practicality, and even trickery.
Such amazing versatility is revealed with the help of the underground hero: “Extraordinary versatility! - he says, - And what a capacity for the most contradictory sensations! That is why we have so many “broad natures” who, even at their very last fall, never lose their ideal; ... Even though they are notorious robbers and thieves, they still respect their original ideal to the point of tears.” The early Dostoevsky had such a story, called “The Honest Thief,” but look at what it grew into in the 1860s. We are already on the eve of “Crime and Punishment,” whose hero is a murderer, but a man with an ideal. Underground, however, provides a brilliant sketch of the versatility of a broad person.
But look what happens next. In the novel “The Idiot,” a whole string of heroes appears who illustrate the concept of “double thoughts,” that is, these are heroes who combine some kind of romantic beginning, nobility, and are capable of the lowest acts. This is Keller, this is Ferdyshchenko, this is the genius of duplicity Lebedev himself, a business scoundrel and at the same time a secret romantic. And this duality, the versatility of the “underground” is the first sketch for Dostoevsky’s future heroes. The underground one almost prophesies: “The versatility is truly amazing, and God knows what it will turn into and develop in subsequent circumstances and what it promises us in our future?”
The underground hero is a big dreamer, and he turns out to be a kind of successor to Dostoevsky's early dreamers. He is inclined to invent, as he says, to compose life, just like, let us remember, the hero of White Nights. He is also a bookish person, he reads a lot. He is captivated by these ideas of the beautiful and sublime - yes, Kant’s famous formula is recognized here - but these ideas of the beautiful and sublime, they remain for him only in his head dreams.
Moreover, the underground hero is clearly fed up with this dreaming, he complains that all this lofty and all this beautiful has already put so much pressure on the back of his head that there is no longer any patience. And he wants something else, and from the lofty and beautiful he rushes in the opposite direction: “But still I wanted to move,” he says (that is, not to live in books, not to live in this Schillerism), “and I suddenly plunged into dark, underground, disgusting - debauchery, not even debauchery, but debauchery. The passions in me were sharp, burning... There was a hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts.” Before us is one of the manifestations of the underground: the tendency to high and beautiful thoughts and dreams is combined with the ability to debauchery, to base and even vile actions. This is, in fact, the underground.
The underground, one can consider, is such a phenomenon, reinforced many times over by the phenomenon of duality, which we have already talked about. And it is curious that, while working on Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky seems to be leaving the Double, because during these years he is reworking the Double, trying to develop the discoveries of the Double, but suddenly gives up. And obviously, then he finally moves on to the underground hero, and the underground hero is such a successor to Mr. Golyadkin in the writer’s work. But enough about the “chatter,” about the philosophizing of the underground hero.
Story one: officer in the billiard room
What follows are three stories in which his philosophy is tested, his character is tested. The first story is about an officer who terribly insults him. The hero enters the billiard room, and the officer, passing by, as he writes, “he took me by the shoulders and silently moved me from the place where I was standing to another, and he walked by, as if not noticing. They treated me like a fly. But, of course, alas, I preferred... to angrily fade away.” Didn't object.
By the way, this verb “to fade away” was directly taken from “The Double,” where it was used for the first time. In general, Dostoevsky believed that he invented this wonderful word, which has now entered the language, and used it for the first time in “The Double,” but here too, in “Notes from the Underground”: “he was embittered.” He was shy, that is, he faded away, in this case he did not resist, he went into his corner. Either he was afraid, although he says that it was not out of cowardice, but out of “boundless vanity,” because he was afraid that they would laugh at him if he began to resist.
What's next? And then the plot of the “underground” begins. Our “anti-hero” has been hatching plans for revenge for several years. At first he wanted to challenge his offender to a duel and even made up how it would be: he would shoot in the air, show nobility, and so on, but while he was getting ready, a lot of time passed, and the challenge to a duel somehow became irrelevant.
He comes up with a new way. That officer walks along Nevsky in such a way that everyone makes way for him. But the underground hero - on the contrary, he makes way for everyone. “A fly inferior to everyone,” he says, “humiliated by everyone and insulted by everyone.” But then the fly conceives a rebellion, plans to confront the officer on an equal footing, and prepares extremely carefully for this feat. He even changed his overcoat to look more dignified, sewed on a noble beaver instead of a “disgusting raccoon,” got new gloves, and a decent hat. And when it finally came down to it, he suddenly gave up.
This is very typical of an underground hero, there is such a recognizable moment: he had already decided that that was it, he was abandoning this plan, and suddenly, unexpectedly, when confronted on Nevsky, he did not yield to the officer, did not yield a single step and publicly put himself on an equal footing with him social leg, as he says. Here is a peculiar paradox: at first I decided to abandon my plan, and then suddenly changed my mind. I must say that this is also in “The Double”, we observed such psychological paradoxes when the hero, remember, stood on the stairs, was thinking whether he should enter or not enter the forbidden ball, he had already decided: no, I won’t enter, I’m returning home, - and he entered immediately. In Notes from Underground, the hero's unpredictable actions are repeated. For example, when he was insulted by his school friends in a restaurant, he decided: “I’m leaving right now,” and then: “Of course, I’m staying.”
Story in the restaurant and meeting with Lisa
The second story takes place in a restaurant, where three of his former school friends accompany the fourth to the Caucasus, and the underground man attaches himself to them. They really don't want him. He has no friends. This is also a feature of the underground hero: he cannot get along with anyone. There are, of course, objective reasons for this, because these friends he tells us about are really such vulgar people, and it seems that this is not his company, but nevertheless he really wants them to join him in this very company accepted.
None of this works out, because although he is stuffing himself for a farewell dinner, they don’t care about him and carry on their conversations, and for three hours, mind you, three hours, he walks from corner to corner and serves some kind of cues they don't pay attention to. This, of course, is another humiliation. And then they go to an underground (in the sense: illegal) brothel, again they don’t invite him with them. He rushes after them, he is going to prove to them some kind of superiority, to defend his humiliated dignity, but he is late.
And here the third story begins, and the most important one - his meeting with Lisa. This chapter is preceded by a very popular poem by Nekrasov, starting from the 1840s: “When from the darkness of error // With a hot word of conviction // I extracted a fallen soul...”. We will find its echoes from Chernyshevsky to Chekhov. This is the story of the salvation of a fallen woman. The hero “with a hot word of persuasion” tries to extract a prostitute from this hole, tries to return her to the true path. “I forgot everything, I forgave everything,” he says, but she cannot forget, and he tries to convince her and enlighten her. There is such an enlightening moment in this poem. And Dostoevsky uses this plot in his own way.
The underground hero also enlightens Lisa, after everything happened between them, he reads her a moral (“like from a book”), tells her that she ruined her life and that she is not just her body, she is ruining her soul . And he finds some very strong words. He's very persuasive, very eloquent, and he's very engaging. That very lofty and beautiful thing was reflected in him. And Lisa heard him and was moved. He essentially did the same thing as Nekrasov’s lyrical hero, who at the end of the poem proclaims: “And enter my house boldly and freely // Enter as a complete mistress.” Dostoevsky's hero remembers these lines, and in enthusiasm gives his address to Lisa.
Will to power
What is this happening to Dostoevsky's hero? He himself admits: “The game captivated me.” However, why did he get involved in this strange game with an unpredictable result? The explanation is very simple: he is humiliated by these school friends of his, and he is trying to win back, to realize himself, to regain some lost primacy, power. So I come to a very important word that largely defines the phenomenon of the underground. As the hero later explains: “I was humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; They crushed me into a rag, so I wanted to show power.” This is what he strives for. He needs this “Nekrasov” game of nobility only in order to feel power over the soul of another person: “I needed power, power, I needed the game, I needed to achieve your tears [he later confesses this to her], I needed to achieve your humiliation.”
So, power over another person is what the unlimited freedom of the underground man ultimately comes down to. And he understands self-affirmation of human dignity as the acquisition of power over another person. There is something recognizable here for the Russian reader. Mr. Pechorin from Lermontov’s novel once wrote in his diary: “Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other.” The underground man, by the way, recalls that he once had a friend, back in school years, he tyrannized him, tried to humiliate him, erase him into a rag, and then left him.
So what happens? He himself suffers from being treated like a rag, and at the same time accepts the rules of the game, only he needs to be on top in order to humiliate the other. This reminds us of something. Isn’t it Foma Opiskin, and to some extent Mr. Golyadkin? “The game fascinated me, but by the way,” adds the underground, “not just one game.” This means that in this hobby there was something even more important for him, perhaps, but he does not want to admit it to himself.
Then, assessing the situation when he expects Lisa to come to him, and he does not know what he will say: “Put on this dishonest lying mask again!” - that's what he calls the game he started. But he immediately makes a reservation: “Why dishonest? I spoke sincerely." Again the same duality: he spoke sincerely, and at the same time this sincerity was his deceitful mask. A wonderful paradoxical connection in the spirit of Dostoevsky. And then, when Lisa comes to him and he has a hysterical episode, he again says: “I was, as they say, imagining myself, although the seizure was real.” Again this is a terrible dichotomy. Or, when he humiliates Lisa during the second date: “The main martyr was, of course, myself, because I was fully aware of all the disgustingness, the baseness of my evil stupidity, and at the same time I could not restrain myself.” Apparently, there is something stronger that draws him into an evil game. The spiritual chaos that lurks in his very nature kills everything that is best, lofty and beautiful.
Paradoxes of autopsychologism
And here's what's interesting. I return again to the topic of Dostoevsky’s autopsychologism. Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov, Dostoevsky’s closest friend, after his death wrote a famous letter to Tolstoy, I have already mentioned it, where he claims that Dostoevsky wrote an underground hero from himself: “... this is Dostoevsky himself, that’s how he was, that’s how he’s described in this stories."
And Tolstoy’s response to Strakhov’s letter is interesting. Tolstoy did not delve into these moral and ethical moments, but said a very important thing to the point. He wrote to Strakhov that the deeper an artist digs into himself, the more common he will be for others. This is a very well-known idea by Tolstoy himself, which will later be stated aphoristically in the novel “Sunday”: “People are like rivers.” Rivers flow in different directions, but the water is the same everywhere. Thus, Tolstoy does not directly respond to Strakhov’s accusations, but from the very logic of his judgment it follows that if an artist extracts the “underground” from himself, this does not mean at all that he is that very underground. We see the hero of Notes from Underground through a magnifying glass, in an extreme enhancement of the qualities that Dostoevsky found in himself.
But why in yourself? Do I have any proof? I think it has. I return once again to that letter to Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina in February 1854, after leaving hard labor, which I have already quoted. “The most unbearable misfortune,” he writes to her, “is when you yourself become unfair, angry, disgusting, you are aware of all this, you even reproach yourself - and you cannot overcome yourself. I experienced it."
Already in the 1870s, Dostoevsky, completing the novel “The Teenager” and about to write a preface to it, returned to the definition of the type of underground hero, which is present in almost all of his novels. “I am proud,” writes Dostoevsky, “that for the first time I brought out a real man of the Russian majority and for the first time exposed its ugly and tragic side. Tragedy lies in the consciousness of ugliness. I alone brought out the tragedy of the underground, which consists in suffering, in self-punishment, in the consciousness of the best and in the impossibility of achieving it and, most importantly, in the vivid conviction of these unfortunates that everyone is like that, and therefore, there is no need to improve!” The duality of human nature, generally speaking, lies at the basis of the underground. And Dostoevsky, through the mouth of his hero, admits that the underground even intensifies as civilization develops.
There was an idea, Buckle expressed it, that civilization softens human morals. Dostoevsky’s underground hero, without naming the fashionable Buckle, argues with this idea and says that “civilization develops in a person a versatility of sensations, and nothing more. And through the development of this versatility, man will perhaps even reach the point where he will find pleasure in the blood. ...Now we even consider [that is civilized people] bloodshed is disgusting, and yet we are engaged in this disgusting thing, and even more than before.” This is the underground of human civilization, according to Dostoevsky.
The Humiliation and Rise of Lisa
Lisa comes to the underground to seek his help, and he humiliates and insults her even more, although he understands that she is driven by some very strong feeling. He impressed her with his “hot” words at that time. And so last scene, the climax of the underground. Desperately tormented by pride, the hero splashes out all the abominations of his character on Lisa. In a fit of frankness, he explains to her that everything that happened between them was just a game of vanity. “I,” he says, “only wanted to humiliate. They crushed me into a rag, so I wanted to show the power... That’s what happened, and did you really think that I came to save you?”
And here the image of Lisa is very interesting, which outlines the future Sonechka Marmeladova. At first she was taken aback by such an unexpected insult: “She turned as pale as a handkerchief, wanted to say something, her lips twisted painfully; but as if someone had hooked her with an axe, she fell onto a chair. And all the time then she listened to me, her mouth open, her eyes open, and trembling with terrible fear. Cynicism, the cynicism of my words crushed her...” But what next? What happens next is a completely strange scene. Here he is wide open in front of Lisa and reaches the edge in his revelations: “And what do I care,” he says, “about you, about whether you die or not? Do you understand that now I will hate you even more?
And after these words, after this confession of shameful cowardice, Lisa’s completely unexpected reaction follows: “But then a strange circumstance suddenly happened,” writes the underground. - And this is what happened: Liza, insulted and crushed by me, understood much more than I imagined. She understood from all this what a woman will always understand first of all if she sincerely loves, namely: that I myself am unhappy.”
And then her reaction: “And her face twitched with some kind of spasm. She wanted to get up; when I finished, she didn’t pay attention to my screams: “Why are you here, why don’t you leave!” - but the fact that it must have been very difficult for me to say it all myself.” That is, she sees and understands how loving woman, Dostoevsky emphasizes, she sees not only what he says, but also what is hidden behind these words, this is the very thing that he hides from himself, this very image of God, which he has blackened and polluted in himself and which somehow turned out to be visible to her, for some reason she felt it in him.
And look what happens next: “She suddenly jumped up from the chair in some kind of uncontrollable impulse, all striving towards me, but still timid and not daring to leave her place, she stretched out her hands to me... Then my heart turned upside down. Then she suddenly rushed to me, wrapped her arms around my neck and began to cry. I, too, could not stand it and began to cry as I had never experienced before.” Please note: “has never happened to me before.” The image of God, the human, suddenly, under the power of love, understanding and forgiveness, suddenly came to the fore, but, alas, not for long, because this minute must pass. What to do next? And here comes the most terrible test for the underground hero: he really doesn’t like this situation.
Five-ruble note
What doesn't he like? After all, in front of him is a loving woman who understood him better than anyone, and it seems that here is the path of salvation for him, but for him, love is not the path of salvation. For him, love is the power of one person over another, and therefore he perceives this impulse of Lisa as a seizure of primacy: she defeated him. They switched places: then he taught her - now she has risen. And he cannot tolerate this superiority over himself, and therefore decides to commit an extremely vile act. When a love scene occurs between them, Lisa throws herself into this love with an open soul, and he - in order to gain power over her. And then an act, boundless in its baseness: he puts a five-ruble banknote in her hand, that is, pays for love, making it clear to her, resurrected “boldly and freely” for a new life, that she is just a prostitute.
Lisa cannot stand this new insult. She runs away, leaving, by the way, these five rubles for him, and this last fact for some reason, the underground hero was shocked most of all (her superiority again?). He rushes after her, he tries to bring her back, but it’s too late. His latest meanness crossed all boundaries. Positive critic Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky, who subsequently analyzed this story, argued that the last scene was too invented, well, a person cannot reach such an abomination, well, this does not happen. But according to the definition of an underground hero, it happens: “I did this cruelty, although on purpose, but not from my heart, but from my bad head. This cruelty was feigned, head-on, deliberately fabricated.”
This is the end, and it leads us to another very important conclusion. The underground rejects these hands stretched out to him, rejects love, does not believe in love. He is a man who embodies, I would say, lovelessness modern world. And this is his tragedy: that he rejected the very possibility of love.
Prohibited by censorship
It is curious that there were some pages in the story that have not reached us. Dostoevsky complains to his brother: “The censor’s pigs, where I mocked everything and sometimes blasphemed for show, is omitted, but where from all this I derived the need for faith and Christ, it is forbidden...” What kind of words are these, which were not included in the story, but were obviously implied?
I think that Dostoevsky’s rough notes, made by him after the story was written, and made by him in a very critical manner for himself, can serve as a commentary. life situation, when he, like an underground hero, tried to analyze himself and move from introspection to an understanding of human nature. I mean the entry in the drafts that begins with the words: “Masha is lying on the table. Will I see Masha?” That is, there is a coffin with the body of his wife, and Dostoevsky writes down his thoughts.
This recording is one of the most frank confessions. He is tormented by guilt before his late wife; he was not faithful to her. In the last years of their married life they separated. To some extent, the reason for the cooling was both the character of Maria Dmitrievna and her illness, but most of all the fact that Dostoevsky at that time was dating Apollinaria Suslova, terribly fascinated by this disastrous woman, who would become the prototype of his infernal heroines.
What was Dostoevsky trying to understand at his wife’s coffin? I will quote: “To love a person as yourself according to the commandment of Christ is impossible. The law of personality on Earth binds. I'm preventing. Christ alone could, but Christ was an eternal, eternal ideal, to which man strives and, according to the law of nature, must strive. Meanwhile, after the appearance of Christ as an ideal, it became clear as day that the highest, latest development The personality must reach the point where a person finds, realizes and is convinced with all the strength of his nature that the highest use that a person can make of his personality, from the fullness of his development, is to destroy this self, to give it entirely to everyone and everyone, undividedly and selflessly. And this is the greatest happiness. This is the paradise of Christ."
“But the whole history of mankind,” Dostoevsky writes here, moving away from painful thoughts about the impossibility of love, “the whole history of mankind, partly and of each individual, is only development, struggle, striving and achievement of this goal.”
“So,” he concludes his entry, “man strives on earth for an ideal that is opposite to his nature. When a person did not fulfill the law of striving for an ideal, that is, did not sacrifice his self with love to people or another being [in parentheses: “me and Masha” - that is, I could not do this either], he feels suffering and called it state of sin. So, a person must constantly feel suffering, which is balanced by the heavenly pleasure of fulfilling the law, that is, sacrifice. This is where earthly balance comes in. Otherwise the earth would be meaningless.” This note of Dostoevsky at the coffin of his wife is, you know, the quintessence of his understanding of human nature, it is also behind the pages of Notes from Underground. The underground one also “did not sacrifice his self to another being with love,” although such a desire beats within him, strives outward, but he does not give it movement and therefore suffers.
Life-creation of the genre
It should be noted that the genre of the work plays a very important role. These are notes. The underground hero does not keep notes so that someone will read them later, as, for example, Rousseau’s “Confession” was written so that after his death people would read and be surprised. No, he writes only for himself. And then why should he, a 40-year-old man, write about the events of 15 years ago? Initially, he sets the following goal: “Maybe I will get relief from writing.” Obviously, the memories are oppressive, bring suffering, and he believes that now he will put them on paper, the paper will endure everything, and he will be freed from them. “And for some reason I believe that if I write it down, it will go away.” But what is the result? Writing down and remembering his adventures, the hero relives them, and even stronger than initially, because after 15 years, he understands much more, feels the loneliness and lovelessness of his existence much more strongly, and love, once trampled into the dirt, brings terrible suffering.
The underground says: “This is no longer literature, this is some kind of corrective punishment.” Writing down your memories is the work of the inner “I”, these sprouts that make their way out, and he crushes them, but the writing itself, an act of spiritual creativity, makes it possible for these sprouts, this image of God, to come out. This is not self-inventing in the sense that the underground says that he was self-inventing when he showed off in front of Lisa. I would call his notes as “corrective punishment” life-creativity. The genre of notes for oneself allowed Dostoevsky to see this movement of the soul towards the light. It remained unfinished, but it is important that it was.
Summary of the story and “Winter Notes”
What did you want to say and what did the underground paradoxist think? Let me remind you that he rejects the theory of rational egoism, according to which it is beneficial for a person to be kind, like two and two are four: no, one’s own free will is much more more necessary for a person, that is, the theory of rational egoism comes up against the irrational nature of man. In this sense, the onslaught of the underground hero is probably accepted by the author himself. But this is only the first, and there is also something second, this is the theory of the underground hero himself, who, in contrast to reasonable egoism, creates his own philosophical formula. This is a formula for permissiveness, derived from the idea of self-worth human personality.
But what is the intrinsic value of the human personality? In isolation and absolute self-sufficiency, excluding what is called love? The second part of the story is a test of the idea of an underground hero, what he calls “his own will,” and this test leads him to collapse. What happens? We have two options, two, so to speak, models, and in the end both turn out to be untenable: “twice two is four” is bad when everything is calculated, but bad when everything is allowed. Both versions do not stand the test of real life.
Well, I want to return to where I started, to “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” to the European impressions of the new Russian traveler. Both of these ideas, stated in “Notes from the Underground,” have their origin, of course, in European thought. In “Winter Notes,” Dostoevsky speaks on his own about the limitations of rationalism: “But reason turned out to be incompetent in the face of reality... and there was no such thing as pure reason; it is an eighteenth-century invention.” It turned out that human nature is not given for free. What slogan did European civilization put forward based on the idea of rational reality? "Liberty, equality and fraternity."
Dostoevsky has very strong doubts: freedom not secured by a money bag seems illusory to him. “A man without a million is not one who does anything, but one with whom they do anything.” In such conditions, he prefers to remain silent about equality, but brotherhood remains. This article, he says, is “the most curious”: “Western people talk about brotherhood as a great driving force humanity." I think that the author of “Winter Notes” and “Notes from the Underground” would be ready to agree with this, but the question arises: where can we get brotherhood if it doesn’t exist in reality? Well, if it doesn’t exist, we need to make it, says European civilization. How? “The Western personality is not accustomed to this course of affairs: she demands in battle, she demands rights, she wants to share - well, brotherhood does not come out.”
And then Western man, says Dostoevsky, came up with socialism. The socialist, seeing that there is no brotherhood, begins to persuade and explain that brotherhood is very beneficial to everyone. Here we find a bridge to the underground hero, to his doubt: can he be seduced by the benefits of brotherhood? Dostoevsky thinks not. He believes that this must appear in human nature itself in its development: “...it is necessary to become an individual, even to a much greater extent than the one that has now been defined in the West. Understand me: unauthorized, completely conscious and unforced self-sacrifice of oneself for the benefit of everyone is, in my opinion, a sign of the highest development of the individual, his highest power, the highest self-control, the highest freedom of one's own will. Voluntarily laying down your belly for everyone, going to the cross, to the fire for everyone, is possible only with the strongest personal development.” “This,” says Dostoevsky, “is the law of nature; a person is naturally drawn to this.”
These are the reflections in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,” which can serve as comments on “Notes from the Underground,” as well as the entry “Masha is lying on the table,” and another entry, also from 1864, “Socialism and Christianity,” where Dostoevsky finally dots the i’s, separates these two directions: socialism, which seduces with profit, and Christianity, which operates with other “levers”.
I recommend reading this entry by Dostoevsky more carefully, it is called “Socialism and Christianity.” We, of course, will return to it when we talk about Dostoevsky’s subsequent novels, in particular, about the novel “Demons,” where this dilemma “socialism and Christianity” is already realized in a full-scale philosophical novel.
Literature
- Zhivolupova N.V. “Notes from the Underground” by F. M. Dostoevsky and the subgenre “Confessions of an Anti-Hero” in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th – 20th centuries. Nizhny Novgorod, 2015.
- Kotelnikov V. “Notes from the Underground” by F. Dostoevsky and “The Decay of the Atom” by G. Ivanov // Dostoevsky and the Russian Abroad of the 20th Century. St. Petersburg, 2008 (Dostoevsky monographs. V. 1).
- Nazirov R. G. On the ethical issues of the story “Notes from Underground” // Dostoevsky and his time. L., 1971.
- Skaftymov A.P. “Notes from the Underground” among Dostoevsky’s journalism // Skaftymov A.P. Moral quest Russian writers. M., 1972.
- Shestov L. Overcoming self-evidence // Ruler of Thoughts: F. M. Dostoevsky in Russian Criticism late XIX– beginning of the 20th century. St. Petersburg, 1997.
Rated the book
We all love to suffer, right? And we also love to feel sorry for ourselves. We sit quietly in our underground, like mice, gnawing ourselves from the inside, eating ourselves, tormenting ourselves with endless introspection and self-deprecation, and then indulge in self-pity and hatred of others. If we didn’t like to suffer, we probably wouldn’t endure physical pain with such manic obsession, but would immediately run to the doctors, wouldn’t endlessly sort things out with our loved ones, exhausting ourselves and them and getting sadomasochistic pleasure from it, not would read “White Bim Black Ear”, watch “Titanic”, the program “Wait for Me” and the NTV channel.
Of course, not all people are like this, and I deliberately say “we,” meaning us - intellectuals, people who read a lot and know a lot. I, of course, also consider myself an intellectual. How could it be otherwise, because I also read Kafka and Nietzsche, and my profession obliges me. Nevertheless, there are people who absolutely do not care about all these experiences and sufferings of intellectuals. They spit on pity, both for themselves and for others, and with the tenacity of sheep they achieve their goals, not hesitating to punch someone in the face or step on a mouse flickering under their feet. Meanwhile, we fiercely hate them for this, call them tyrants, vain egoists, and we ourselves sit down to read the book “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.” But we are just as selfish as they are. And we suffer, and feel sorry for ourselves, and analyze our actions, and dig into ourselves like in a dung heap, only because we love ourselves so much. And we choose loneliness, going underground, only so that no one will stop us from indulging in selfishness. It turns out that all of us - power seekers, intellectuals, small people, rebels, and ordinary adventurers - are absolutely all selfish to the core.
Of course, I made this conclusion myself and made it a long time ago. But here’s the thing, this conclusion flashed a red alarm light in my mind again after I read “Notes from Underground.” Fyodor Mikhalych certainly portrays a “superfluous person” in “Notes.” This “superfluous man” of his, due to his great intelligence, chooses conscious inertia and withdrawal into the gloomy and gray world of the “underground”, from where he can calmly and harmlessly for others shovel his life and wallow in pity and self-hatred. But this “superfluous person,” despite his wretched appearance, of course, does not consider himself superfluous. On the contrary, he considers himself to be a contingent of unique, educated, deeply feeling, but not understood and not accepted by society people. And he makes such a conclusion only due to his great egoism, selfishness and self-interest.
Dostoevsky in “Notes” shows the “superfluous man” of the nineteenth century, but if you take a good look at him, and then look around, you can even now, in the twenty-first century, see great amount the same people. Especially now, when we have a computer and the Internet, when we can come up with a nickname for ourselves, choose an avatar, hide behind them and calmly pour out streams of bile from this shelter, engage only in grumbling and empty chatter, while considering ourselves smart and highly educated people and surrounding themselves with an aura of uniqueness and difference from others, but in reality being only small, empty, superfluous and uninteresting people.
And that’s what’s worst, because I’m just as much of a talker, which means, oh gods, I’m just as much of a “superfluous person.” But
let, let me be a chatterbox, a harmless, annoying chatterbox, like the rest of us. But what to do if the direct and only purpose of every intelligent person is chatter, that is, deliberately pouring from empty to empty.
Rated the book
I don’t know how a thinking person can read Notes from Underground and remain the same person. This is not a literary work, but Chemical substance, which reacts with the contents... No, not the head. No, not souls. With the contents of your “I”, most likely.
There is a situation when some person does something ridiculous or stupid, and for some reason you feel ashamed. Although you have nothing to do with it. It’s the same parsley here: the main character confesses, and with your mind you understand that you only have a few little nasty features in common with him, but you’re still ashamed until your ears burn with a scarlet flame. This is not just a confession, but a super-confession, when a person, having told what he thinks, immediately analyzes on the spot why he is thinking and why... And the result is not very pleasant. It seems to me that few people can be as honest even to themselves as the main character in this monologue. We always justify ourselves with something, we look for explanations, but of a completely different kind than the “underground worker”. He knows that many of his actions are based not on noble motives, but on rotten ones. And he pulls out this foulbrood, millimeter by millimeter, from the area of the subconscious hidden from everyone, only so that with horror we recognize ourselves in some of its manifestations. I don’t know if there are saints who haven’t drawn an analogy with themselves for even the slightest moment. I still won't believe them.
Dostoevschina flourishes in all its glory. The main character flagellates himself with masochistic pleasure, clearly exulting in the colorful description of “his own wretchedness.” Later we will see its reflection in many novels and heroes: the shadow of Raskolnikov, and several Karamazovs at once, and... What is there, this is a concentrated Dostoevsky type, the real quintessence of his atmosphere and characters. You should definitely read Notes from Underground before reading Dostoevsky's novels. How much this reading can give!
"Notes from the Underground" is divided into 2 parts. The first is precisely this crazy confession, the density of which is amazing. It is not surprising that so many quotes were taken from it that if you put them all back into the work, there will probably be even more text than there was at first. The second is in the best scientific traditions, about the practical embodiment of the protagonist’s spiritual swamp. This suffering and tossing about utter nonsense cannot be repeated in a short description, you should definitely read it, it’s worth it.
Oh, and Dostoevsky loves to pick with a scalpel in a well-rotten little soul, dragging out secret veins into the light. After “Notes...” I want to immediately go out into the fresh air, catch my breath and... Try to become at least a little brighter, kinder and more honest. Although the ears will be blazing red for a long time.
Rated the book
"The reason for the 'underground' is the destruction of faith in general rules. Nothing is sacred."
F. M. Dostoevsky
Perhaps this is the key thing for understanding the entire work of the classic. The tangle of ideas that appeared in the “Notes” will in many ways become the basis for further creations. The story already contains everything that will appear in subsequent novels (“Crime and Punishment”, “Demons”, “The Brothers Karamazov”), and here he formulated the ideas of existentialism for the first time in Russian literature. The main character is an attractive scoundrel, a suffering ideologist who has studied himself to incredible depths, painfully experiencing a break with people:
“I had the patience to sit next to these people like a fool for four hours and listen to them, not daring and not being able to talk to them about anything.”
He contains the “lofty and beautiful” along with a craving for debauchery, he poses “damned questions” and answers them himself:
“Every decent person of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. This is his normal state. I am deeply convinced of this. It is made that way and designed for that. And not at the present time, because of some random circumstances, but in general at all times, a decent person must be a coward and a slave. This is the law of nature of all decent people on earth. Only donkeys and their bastards are brave.”
Fedor Dostoevsky
NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
Part I
UNDERGROUND
I am a sick person... I am an angry person. I'm not an attractive person. I think my liver hurts. However, I don’t understand a damn thing about my illness and I don’t know for sure what hurts me. I am not being treated and have never been treated, although I respect medicine and doctors. In addition, I am also extremely superstitious; Well, at least enough to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, sir, I don’t want to be treated out of anger. This is probably what you don’t deign to understand. Well, sir, I understand. I, of course, will not be able to explain to you exactly whom I will annoy in this case with my anger; I know very well that I won’t be able to “mess up” the doctors by not being treated by them; I know better than anyone that with all this I will only harm myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t get treatment, it’s out of anger. The liver hurts, so let it hurt even more!
I've been living like this for a long time - twenty years. Now I'm forty. I served before, but now I don’t serve. I was an evil official. I was rude and found pleasure in it. After all, I didn’t take bribes, so I had to at least reward myself with this. (It’s a bad joke; but I won’t cross it out. I wrote it, thinking that it would come out very sharp; and now, as I saw for myself that I only wanted to show off in a disgusting way, I won’t cross it out on purpose!) When they approached the table where I was sitting , there used to be petitioners for certificates - I gnashed my teeth at them and felt an inexorable pleasure when I managed to upset someone. Almost always succeeded. For the most part they were all timid people: it is known that they were petitioners. But among the Ferts, I especially couldn’t stand one officer. He did not want to submit and rattled his saber disgustingly. I had a war with him for a year and a half over this saber. I finally prevailed. It stopped rattling. However, this happened in my youth. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point of my anger? Yes, that was the whole point, that was the greatest disgusting thing, that every minute, even in the moment of the strongest bile, I was shamefully aware within myself that I was not only not evil, but not even an embittered person, that I only scare the sparrows in vain and amuse myself with it. I’m foaming at the mouth, but bring me some kind of doll, give me some tea with sugar, I’ll probably calm down. I’ll even be touched in my soul, although I’ll probably end up gnashing my teeth at myself and suffering from insomnia for several months out of shame. This is my custom.
I lied to myself just now that I was an evil official. He lied out of anger. I was simply fooling around with both the petitioners and the officer, but in essence I could never become evil. I was constantly aware in myself of many, many elements that were the most opposite to this. I felt that they were swarming within me, these opposite elements. I knew that all my life they had been swarming inside me and were asking to come out of me, but I didn’t let them in, didn’t let them in, deliberately didn’t let them out. They tortured me to shame; They drove me to convulsions and finally got tired of me, how tired they were! Don’t you think, gentlemen, that I am now repenting of something to you, that I am asking you for forgiveness for something?.. I am sure that it seems so to you... But I assure you that I don’t care , if it seems...
I was not only evil, but I didn’t even manage to become anything: neither evil, nor good, neither a scoundrel, nor an honest one, nor a hero, nor an insect. Now I live out my life in my corner, teasing myself with the malicious and useless consolation that an intelligent person cannot seriously become anything, but only a fool becomes something. Yes, sir, an intelligent person of the nineteenth century must and is morally obliged to be a creature predominantly characterless; a person with character, an activist, is primarily a limited being. This is my forty-year-old conviction. I am now forty years old, but forty years is my whole life; after all, this is the deepest old age. To live beyond forty years is indecent, vulgar, immoral! Who lives longer than forty years, answer sincerely, honestly? I'll tell you who lives: fools and scoundrels live. I will say this to all the elders, to all these venerable elders, to all these silver-haired and fragrant elders! I’ll say it to the whole world! I have the right to say so, because I myself will live to be sixty years old. I will live to be seventy years old! I’ll live until I’m eighty!.. Wait! Let me catch your breath...
You probably think, gentlemen, that I want to make you laugh? We were wrong about that too. I am not at all such a cheerful person as you think or as you may think; however, if you, irritated by all this chatter (and I already feel that you are irritated), decide to ask me: who exactly am I? - then I will answer you: I am one collegiate assessor. I served so that I had something to eat (but only for this), and when last year one of my distant relatives left me six thousand rubles in his spiritual will, I immediately retired and settled in my corner. I lived in this corner before, but now I have settled in this corner. My room is crappy, nasty, on the edge of the city. My maid is a village woman, old, angry from stupidity, and besides, she always smells bad. They tell me that the St. Petersburg climate is becoming harmful to me and that with my insignificant means it is very expensive to live in St. Petersburg. I know all this, I know it better than all these experienced and wise advisers and nods (1). But I remain in St. Petersburg; I will not leave St. Petersburg! That's why I won't leave... Eh! But it doesn’t matter at all whether I go or don’t go.
But by the way: what can a decent person talk about with the greatest pleasure?
Answer: about myself.
Well, I’ll talk about myself.
Now I want to tell you, gentlemen, whether you want to hear it or not, why I couldn’t even become an insect. I will tell you solemnly that many times I wanted to become an insect. But he didn’t even deserve that. I swear to you, gentlemen, that being too conscious is a disease, a real, complete disease. For human use, ordinary human consciousness would be too much, that is, half, a quarter less than the portion that falls to the lot of the developed man of our unfortunate nineteenth century and, moreover, who has the extreme misfortune of living in St. Petersburg, the most abstract and deliberate city in the world. all over the globe. (Cities can be intentional or unintentional). It would be completely sufficient, for example, to have such a consciousness by which all so-called direct people and figures live. I bet you think that I am writing all this out of force, to make jokes about the leaders, and even out of bad taste I rattle my saber, like my officer. But, gentlemen, who can be vain about their own illnesses, and even force them?