Notes from Underground (1864)

Part 1

The Underground Man claims that his reason for writing down episodes from his life twenty years earlier is because “I am particularly oppressed by a certain memory from the distant past.  It came back to my mind vividly a few days ago, and since then, has remained with me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of.  And yet I must get rid of it . . . For some reason I believe that if I write it down I will get rid of it.”  

This immediately makes me wonder—what is the memory that irritates him?  As I read on, I’m looking for it.  He eventually reveals that of all the events that disturb him throughout the novel, one moment in particular haunts him: 

“Of all that happened . . . I pictured one moment especially vividly: it was when I lighted up the room with a match and saw [Liza’s] pale, distorted face with its tormented eyes.  And how pathetic, how unnatural, how twisted her smile was a that moment!  But I did not know then that even after fifteen years I would still be picturing Liza precisely with the pathetic, twisted, needless smile she had at that moment.”

That was his next-day reflection on the moment.  Here’s how he described it at the time: 

“As soon as light shone in the room, Liza suddenly rose, sat up, and looked at me almost senselessly, with a somehow distorted face and a half-crazed smile.”  

She gave him this look right after he vividly painted for her the horrors of continuing to be commercially sexually exploited.  Her response was deeper than he had anticipated.  A grief, an anguish, a despair overtook her that broke her down completely.  She lost her defences and looked at him with complete vulnerability.  His immediate response to this look was to ask her forgiveness.

Why does this moment rankle him to such a degree that he writes a whole memoir to try to rid himself of it?  I’m reluctant to answer directly.  This is such a beautiful book that any explanations seem to only make it smaller.  I will only say this: that look touched the core of his being, the same part of him that tells Liza, “It’s good to live in the world,” and is moved by his own words.  The Underground Man has a longing to connect—this is partly why he chases his schoolmates who despise him right after he humiliated himself before them.  This is why he, without intending to, starts baring his soul to Liza right after he sexually exploited her.

But this longing to connect is extremely painful to him.  Connecting inevitably means facing the dissonance within him that he doesn’t treat people in the good way that he wants to. He can’t bear that pain, and so this desire is pitted against another—his urge to find relief from that pain through isolation and oblivion.  He calls this numb seclusion “the Underground.”  

This side of him doesn’t want to have a conscience.  This side of him doesn’t want to believe that there’s any such thing as wickedness.  He experiences conscience as a dissonance that he wants resolved.  He wants to be “a plus,” “a real positive,” by which he means that he wants to be all one desire without this inner conflict and doubt.  He searches for this relief in two forms of fantasy.

First, in revenge.  That is, the fantasy of imagining himself all good.  When he vengefully bumps into the officer, for a moment he suppresses his consciousness that the act is accomplishing nothing, and for that brief moment he inhabits his revenge as “a plus.” In that moment, he’s able to be like the people he envies, the people that “are overcome . . . by a vengeful feeling, then for the time there is simply nothing left in their whole being but this feeling.”  He longs for this blotting out of the swarm of all the elements in him that oppose revenge.  He sees irritation as a diversion from the pain of this swarm.  This is why he’s grateful for his rude servant, Apollon.  Apollon’s rudeness diverts the Underground Man by inciting vengeful irritation.  He thinks of this irritation as effecting him similarly to alcohol—a sort of mood-altering substance that can make him forget the needling memories for a time. 

He makes this connection clear when he is at dinner with his classmates.  He says he got irritated easily from lack of habit.  A few paragraphs later, he says he got drunk easily from lack of habit.  He sees a connection between the two.  They both function as numbing drugs.

Second, the Underground Man searches for relief from his conscience in lust and the feelings of shame associated with it.  That is, the fantasy of imagining himself all bad.  He refers to his intercourse with Liza as an “oblivion” in which he is actively trying to forget painful memories.  “People do drink from grief,” he tells her, “well, so I’m here—from grief.”  He connects soliciting a prostitute to drinking—it’s the same seeking for relief from emotional pain.  Such binges were common with him, and he always associates them with words like “debauchery,” “filth,” “loathsome,” and “shame.”  He is attracted to this behavior because the other part of him sees it as insect-like, and he wants to blot out that sensibility by reveling in it.  He describes his pleasure in johning in this way: 

“The pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that here is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.”

But when Liza’s face shows him her vulnerability, the Underground Man’s longing for connection gets the better of him and he gives her his address.  When she comes and sees him in his suffering, he is overwhelmed.  He ends up facedown on the sofa, sobbing in hysterics.

This image immediately brings to mind Liza’s despair.  She had been 

“lying prone, her face buried deep in her pillow, which she embraced with both arms.  Her breast was bursting.  Her whole young body was shuddering as in convusions.  Suppressed sobs were straining, tearing her breast, and would suddenly burst out in wails and cries.  Then she’d cling to her pillow even more: she did not want anyone there, not a living soul, to learn of her torment and tears.”

The Underground Man was “lying prone on the sofa, my face buried hard in the wretched leather cushion.”  The repetition of the image shows that he is now in the same place she was right before she looked up at him with such vulnerability.  This repetition makes me think—now it’s his turn to be vulnerable.  Will he take it?

He doesn’t.  He tries to bury his vulnerability with lust and revenge.  He throws away his chance to connect.

Two worlds exist for the Underground Man.  The first he calls “the Underground,” which is his life of isolation, fantasy, and seeking oblivion.  The second he calls “real life,” which consists of his efforts to connect with other people—most significantly, Liza.  The action of Part II begins with him emerging from the Underground, seeking admittance to the real world.  It ends with his return to the Underground.

To give us an experience of these two worlds, Dostoevsky has us hear them.  When the Underground Man returns to the real world, he is unused to its sounds, and so they often sound shrill and painful to him.  He hears his wall clock “hissing,” he hears the other diners at the restaurant as “nasty French squeals,” he hears Ferfichkin’s voice “yelping like a little mutt,” he hears Liza’s clock as “an unnaturally prolonged wheeze” followed by “a thin, vile, somehow unexpectedly rapid chiming.”  I can almost see him wincing every time he hears something.  He’s unaccustomed to the noise of social life, and so he hears it harshly.

But when he returns to the Underground, that is, when he forces Liza to leave him, the street was “still, and the snow was falling heavily, almost perpendicularly, laying a pillow over the sidewalk and the deserted roadway.  Not a single passer-by, not a sound to be heard.”  The Underground has a muffling silence.  Dostoevsky uses the image of the pillow here, which immediately makes me think of the pillows the Underground Man and Liza each sobbed into, trying to hide their despair.  The silent pillow carries with it those associations of hidden despair.  The sudden lack of shrill sounds is devastating, which we feel for the Underground Man as he gives up on real life and returns to the Underground.