But, you know, this is what is surprising : why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages and lovers of humanity, when they reckon up human advantages invariably leave out one ?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Notes from the Underground
Having been taken by the deep spiritual force and the philosophical agonies of the formidable Russian classic The Karamazov Brothers, the natural sequel of my reading affairs somewhat conspicuously required that I take up more and more Dostoyevsky with the precaution of carefully planned intervals so that the strange shade of darkness with which his works are tinted should not lean too heavily on my mind already sufficiently inclined to brooding. After completing a Gambler-Karamazov-Crime&Punishment trio resounding in pointedly minor keys, I landed upon a writing that pulled me in a vertiginous spiral still deeper into the inner world of not merely a prolific writer, but also a prophetic, genius mind.
The Notes from the Underground is a tricky novel. It is so slender one might pass by it quickly without taking further notice had it not been so strongly layered with insights that reach even the far-off world of our culture, as visibly detached from 19th century Russia as it only could be, yet remaining connected to the past by ragged threads of repeated mistakes. It was written by Dostoyevsky as an answer to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s enlightened self-interest and rational egoism that put an individual’s needs first and foremost on the ladder of coldly calculated priorities. This theory feverishly opposes the ideal of human altruism, and conditions it to the unwritten law that one should help one’s fellow man only if this demonstration of generous nobility intentionally promotes one’s own interests. The desired consequence of such string of action should then bring about a society that diligently operates upon the unwavering mechanisms of ratio.
What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Notes from the Underground
The novel, divided into two parts, starts with a self-justifying confession of an anti-hero whose resentful, arrogant and nihilistic attitudes soak the pages like the scent of a repulsive odour. A retired civil servant, this embittered, unnamed narrator known to the reader simply as the Underground man writes in the monotonous span of his dismal days a monologue, or rather a diary, addressing equally unknown and invisible audience to justify and expand the factitious reality of his own inertia. Apparently, there are no redeeming qualities to be ascribed to his sluggish habits, yet his confession reveals a penetrating insight which his decayed mind is able to exercise with much brilliance and clarity upon the proposed subjects of a utopian society where continuous wellfare and the bountiful blessings of well-being for human spieces would be secured with one inevitable result – man’s loss of free will.
Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself as though that were so necessary that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
[…]
Good Heavens, gentlemen, what sort of free will is left when we come to tabulation and arithmetic, when it will all be a case of twice two make four. Twice two makes four without my will. As if free will meant that!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Notes from the Underground
Dostoyevsky’s vehement, unequivocal argument against such a straight-faced establishment of a society relies on the principle that man needs to validate his existence by exercising the freedom of choice regardless of the options proposed, and by that the author also wholeheartedly embraces the reality of suffering as an inherent and indelible part of the human experience – experience which is in fact of the uttermost importance provided one wants to grow and thrive.
Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering ? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Notes from the Underground
The second part of the novel lays bare all of the anti-hero’s spiteful qualities by putting him into a position of a saviour of a girl reduced to poverty and prostitution only to unmask his vile, mocking, twisted ways of psychological manipulation when he abruptly backs out with a sneer of the sunlit valley he so vividly painted for the pure-hearted and inexperienced girl.
The Notes from the Underground is considered to be one of the first existentialist novels to appear in the latter half of the 19th century, and one that turned out to be painfully prophetic when presented in the tragic light of the forthcoming October Revolution 1917, an event which inflicted deep wounds and left palpable traces across the ‘bent but not broken’ spines of numerous cultures and countries. It is not an easy read, and definitely one couldn’t find a trace of poetry in it – in its own dark and twisted way it is grimly humorous and viciously scoffing, full of self-loathing and contempt, but it contains such sparkling proofs of unsurpassed intellectual lucidity that it can serve even today as a torch amidst the complicated darkness of human chaos.
L'art de subtilité 