Review: Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground"

A cautionary annihilation, in two parts

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) is the narrative of a man seeking the truth, even if the truth is that he is wicked. The protagonist is caught in a contradiction. He scorns shallow and vain people, but finds himself without alternatives. He so lacks any wholesome structure or insight that he cannot come to the good, alone, in any way at all. He fails to hear the voices of kindness, drowned out by the screams of his own ego’s flailings.

I began reading “Notes from Underground” because of the way it appeared in a screen dramatization of “Fahrenheit 451” starring Michael B. Jordan. That film had several scenes in montage of the protagonist, Guy Montag, reading the introductory prose of Notes to his lover, Clarisse. “Fahrenheit 451” used Dostoevsky to romanticize the idea of introspection, of stringing words together into sentences longer than, for example, 160 venal and overly succinct glyphs. The protagonist couple were drawn together because they shared the same doubts and fears, not because they knew the same truths. Dostoevsky’s oeuvre is replete with tergiversating intellectual struggles and emotional pangs, illustrated in morbidly obsessive detail. For the reader, the dawning realization of knowing that another human being shares your feelings can illuminate a path through and out of a shadowy struggle. The two people in the Fahrenheit 451 film form a common bond through Notes. They saw that conforming silence and willful ignorance and blind obedience are wrong, and perception is not always reality. I was hoping that Dostoevsky would have that same effect on me.

Dostoevsky’s book is relevant to the life of a well-meaning geek at a moment when society struggles to learn to live with the immutable facts of nature and with the sometimes-overwhelming grip of a technologically-turbo-charged social media apparatus. How many men today are looking for meaning and purpose in their lives? Must we be forever locked into loneliness and alienation? Can we hope to bond with human beings in the “meat-space” of real life, or are we fated to tragically destroy the lives of others and ourselves as we venture out of our agonizing but familiar safety bubbles?

Dostoevsky writes a cautionary tale so well-crafted and with such rich detail that it seems to be an actual, personal confession. The book is split into two parts. In the first, the protagonist builds up an argument, culminating in the rejection of the ideal of perfect knowledge. He criticizes the popular belief of his era about the budding knowledge of the laws of the physical world. Those laws seemed to dictate that all outcomes are inevitable, that meta-physical exploration is unnecessary and immaterial. This belief implies that material progress is the only positive product of man's intellect. In response, Dostoevsky questions the benefits of prosperity in the absence of virtue and spirit. His protagonist asks why his lifestyle seems so bereft and shabby and inadequate. His self-doubts and internal dialogue have little restraint, flowing from anguish to guilt to blame, to logical self-recrimination, then jumping to mocking denials in order to swim up for a breath of fresh air – before being pulled under the tumultuous sea of despair once more.

The second half of the book constructs a narrative of a man approaching middle age having squandered over two decades of his life with nothing to show for it. From his beginnings in a pipeline preparatory school for military and government service, he decries the systematic wringing of promise out of the pupils and the infusing of conformity in its stead. The man euphemizes prostitution as “debauchery” and glides into romanticizing the subsequent euphoria, until his own disgust with his hypocrisy inevitably turns him to torment. The vanity of his peers and rivals, and their pursuit of casual sexual triumphs, are embodied in the characters of Zverkov and Simonov. The protagonist envies their cheer but not their cynicism. He cannot reconcile his conflict between admiring the cohesion of these comrades while deploring their abuse. In a paroxysm of frustration, he falls into the arms of a young woman named Liza, half his age. He bitterly predicts a future of decline for her and proposes an alternate path for her. Yet when she dares to accept his vision of kindness, he is disgusted that she could ever love a man as loathsome as himself. He casts her out, and so his scales of justice tip towards weighing the bad far more than the good. The narrative is all the more pitiful for the fleeting times when the protagonist touches on maternal love, appeals to a higher power, and quiet dignity. However, Dostoevsky observes, “we, in our Russian land, have no fools.” There is no time to wait for righteousness and piety, for hesitation means cold death.

Many popular guides and gurus, such as Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink and Adam Carolla, offer ways out. They recommend clear thinking, sobriety and hard work. They hint at their own struggles but do not get bogged down in the mire, focusing mostly on their efforts at self-improvement within a framework of responsibility and accountability. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, clearly illustrates unhinged apoplectic fits through the novella’s protagonist. He provides absolution by immersion to the sin’s ultimate conclusion. This sort of bare-all self-portrait is more along the lines of J.D. Salinger or Philip Roth. The reader is invited to become horrified at the main character, just as the narrator is with himself. After reading this brief and jarring novella, the smoldering ashes from the protagonist’s self-immolation form an inkblot by which the reader may mark one’s choices in their journal of life as a reminder to select a different path - one of obeisance to gentle dignity.