Notes from Underground

Summary

Notes from Underground is a short novel in two parts, presented as the private notes of an unnamed retired civil servant of forty who lives in a shabby room on the edge of St. Petersburg. A footnote signed by the author explains that the writer of the notes is imaginary but represents a type produced by Russian society of the time. Part I, "Underground," is a monologue in eleven chapters addressed to imaginary "gentlemen" whom the narrator mocks and anticipates. He opens by calling himself sick, spiteful and unattractive, says his liver is diseased, and refuses to see a doctor out of spite. He was a collegiate assessor and retired when a distant relative left him six thousand roubles. He argues that heightened consciousness is itself a disease that makes action impossible, takes pleasure in humiliation and even in toothache, and envies the plain man of action who can stop at a wall. His central target is the confident belief, associated with the radical writers of the 1860s, that people always act for their own advantage once reason shows it to them, and that science will one day tabulate human wishes and build a perfect society, a palace of crystal. Against this he sets free, even perverse, choice: human beings will choose against their own interest merely to prove they are not piano keys, and he prefers the right to say twice two makes five. He ends by admitting that he does not believe what he has written and that something other than the underground is what he thirsts for. Part II, "Apropos of the Wet Snow," goes back sixteen years to the narrator at twenty-four. In ten chapters he recalls how a tall officer moved him aside in a tavern like a piece of furniture, and how he spent months planning to bump into the man on the Nevsky Prospect, finally doing so. He forces himself on a farewell dinner for his old schoolfellow Zverkov, arranged by Simonov with Trudolyubov and Ferfitchkin, insults the party, paces the room for hours while they ignore him, and follows them to a brothel. There he meets Liza, a young woman of twenty, and describes to her at length the death and burial of a prostitute and the family life she has lost, until she breaks down; he gives her his address. Days later she comes to his room just as he is quarrelling with his servant Apollon over wages. He confesses his humiliation and spite, she embraces him in pity, and afterwards he presses money into her hand. She leaves the crumpled five-rouble note on the table and goes out into the snow; he runs after her but does not find her. A closing note by the editor says the notes continue, but that this is a good place to stop. The work appeared in 1864 in Epoch, the journal Dostoevsky edited with his brother. The library text is Constance Garnett's English translation of 1918.

Plot or Argument

• Author's note

  A footnote states that the diarist is invented but represents a type that must exist in Russian society, introducing himself in the first fragment and recounting events of his life in the second.

• Part I, Chapters I–IV: The sick and spiteful man

  The narrator introduces himself as a retired official living on a small inheritance, argues that acute consciousness is an illness that paralyses action, and describes the pleasure of humiliation and the toothache that a cultivated man moans over so that others will suffer with him.

• Part I, Chapters V–VI: Inertia and the man of action

  He contrasts himself with the straightforward man who accepts the stone wall of natural law, confesses that he could not even become an insect, and imagines himself, if only he were lazy with conviction, as a connoisseur of everything sublime and beautiful.

• Part I, Chapters VII–IX: Advantage and free choice

  He attacks the theory that people do wrong only because they misunderstand their own advantage, cites the bloodshed of his century against the claim that civilization softens men, and names the overlooked advantage: independent choice, however foolish. People will go mad on purpose rather than become organ stops, and twice two makes four is a fine thing but not the whole of life.

• Part I, Chapters X–XI: The palace of crystal

  He refuses to accept a palace of crystal at which no one may put out his tongue, says he would rather have a hen-house he did not have to call a palace, praises conscious inertia, and then confesses that he is lying and that it is not the underground he really longs for.

• Part II, Chapters I–II: The officer and the dreams

  At twenty-four the narrator, a lonely clerk, is moved aside in a tavern by an officer, writes him a letter he never sends, and spends months on the Nevsky Prospect before finally colliding with him shoulder to shoulder. He alternates debauchery with romantic daydreams and visits to his superior Anton Antonitch.

• Part II, Chapters III–V: Zverkov's dinner

  He invites himself to a farewell dinner at the Hôtel de Paris for Zverkov, a former schoolfellow now an officer. He arrives an hour early, quarrels with everyone, paces the room for three hours while the others ignore him, borrows money from Simonov and pursues the party to a brothel, resolved to strike Zverkov.

• Part II, Chapters V–VII: Liza

  Finding the others gone, he talks with Liza, a young prostitute. After she mentions a coffin carried out that morning he paints vivid pictures of her decline and lonely death and of the love of a family, until she is shaken with sobs, and he gives her his address.

• Part II, Chapters VIII–X: Apollon, Liza's visit and the five-rouble note

  Dreading her visit, he wages a petty war with his servant Apollon over seven roubles of wages. Liza arrives in the middle of it. He breaks down, confesses that he had only been playing with words, and she embraces him; afterwards he humiliates her by putting money in her hand. She leaves the note on the table and goes. He runs after her into the wet snow and never sees her again. An editorial note closes the book.

Characters

• The Underground Man, narrator and protagonist

  Unnamed retired collegiate assessor of forty, highly educated, proud and spiteful, who writes the notes and recalls his life at twenty-four.

• Liza, young woman in a brothel

  Twenty-year-old from Riga whom the narrator moves to tears and later humiliates, and who answers his cruelty with compassion and leaves his money behind.

• Zverkov, former schoolfellow

  Handsome, successful officer in whose honor a farewell dinner is given; the narrator envied and despised him at school.

• Simonov, former schoolfellow

  Steady acquaintance who organizes Zverkov's dinner and reluctantly lends the narrator money.

• Trudolyubov, former schoolfellow

  Dull, respectful guest at the dinner who admires Zverkov's success.

• Ferfitchkin, former schoolfellow

  Russianised German at the dinner who quarrels openly with the narrator.

• Apollon, servant

  Elderly, pompous manservant whose wages the narrator withholds out of spite.

• The officer, stranger

  Tall officer who moves the narrator out of his way in a tavern and becomes the object of a months-long revenge.

• Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin, superior

  The narrator's superior at the office and his only lasting acquaintance, at whose Tuesday at-homes he sits silently.

Lessons

• Freedom cannot be reduced to calculation

  The narrator argues that a theory of human beings as rational calculators of advantage leaves out the thing people value most: the freedom to choose, even against their interest. He offers this not as a recipe for happiness but as a fact the planners of the palace of crystal must face.

  • What is the 'most advantageous advantage' that the narrator says has been left off every list?
  • Why does he compare a perfectly predictable person to a piano key or an organ stop?
  • Is his defense of caprice a defense of human dignity, a symptom of his sickness, or both?

• Consciousness without action

  Part I describes a mind so busy watching itself that it can neither forgive nor take revenge, and so sinks into inertia. Part II then shows the same mind in practice, rehearsing insults and confrontations and turning each meeting into a contest of pride.

  • Why does the narrator envy the straightforward man who stops at a stone wall?
  • How does the long campaign against the officer on the Nevsky Prospect illustrate the ideas of Part I?
  • Can thinking about oneself ever become a kind of prison?

• Pride, humiliation and the refusal of love

  At Zverkov's dinner and with Liza, the narrator cannot bear to be either ignored or pitied. When Liza responds to his confession with love, he turns it into a transaction, and she answers by leaving his money and walking away.

  • Why does the narrator force himself onto a dinner with men he despises?
  • What does Liza understand about him that he does not expect?
  • Why does he put money into her hand, and what does her leaving it on the table say?

• An argument from within the Underground Man's voice

  Dostoevsky does not speak in his own name; he lets an unattractive narrator voice real objections to rational egoism and utopian planning. Readers must decide which of the narrator's claims belong to Dostoevsky and which belong to a man the author meant to show as diseased.

  • What does the author's note at the start tell us about how to read the narrator?
  • Where in Part I does the narrator admit that he does not believe what he says?
  • Can a writer argue through a character he does not admire?

Context

In the early 1860s, after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Russian radical writers such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky taught a doctrine of rational egoism: people act from self-interest, and once reason and science show them their true interest they will act well and a just society can be built. Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1863) imagined a future community housed in a building of glass and iron modeled on the Crystal Palace of the London exhibition of 1851, which Dostoevsky had visited in 1862 and described in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863). Notes from Underground answers this program from the standpoint of a writer who had shared radical hopes in the 1840s, suffered Siberian prison, and returned to Orthodox Christianity.

Composition

Dostoevsky wrote the book in 1863–64 while his first wife, Maria, was dying of tuberculosis. Part I appeared in the first double issue of Epoch in 1864 and Part II in a later issue the same year. In a letter to his brother Mikhail in March 1864 Dostoevsky complained that the censors had cut a passage in Part I, Chapter X in which he had drawn from the argument the need for faith and Christ, while letting the mockery stand; the passage was never restored.

Reception

The book attracted little notice at first and was later recognized as a prologue to Dostoevsky's great novels. In the twentieth century it was read as a founding text of existentialist thought, alongside Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who read it in French translation in 1887 and admired it. Scholars differ over how far the narrator speaks for Dostoevsky: some read him as the author's mouthpiece against rationalism, others as a satirical portrait of the sickness the author diagnosed, and many as both. Constance Garnett's translation of 1918 introduced the work to a wide English readership.

Comparisons

• crime-and-punishment

  Raskolnikov tests in action what the Underground Man only theorizes, and his road from isolation to Sonia's love completes the movement that breaks off when Liza walks into the snow.

• the-brothers-karamazov

  Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisitor, who offers bread and order in exchange for freedom, takes up the Underground Man's objection to a happiness that abolishes free choice.

• white-nights

  An earlier Petersburg dreamer tells his own story in the first person; the tender, lonely hero of 1848 becomes the bitter, self-watching narrator of 1864.

• the-sickness-unto-death

  Kierkegaard's analysis of despair as defiant self-assertion before God reads almost as a commentary on the narrator's spite and his refusal to be helped.

• camus-the-fall

  Camus's Clamence, talking to a silent listener in an Amsterdam bar, is a twentieth-century descendant of the Underground Man's confessional monologue addressed to imaginary gentlemen.

• pensees

  Pascal's thinking reed and his account of the restless, divided self anticipate the narrator's claim that human beings cannot be reduced to formula.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The author's footnote at the very beginning, which tells us the narrator is invented and representative.
• The narrator's constant addresses to imaginary gentlemen and his habit of answering their objections before they make them.
• The palace of crystal, the piano keys and twice two makes four in Part I, Chapters VII–X.
• How the officer, Zverkov's dinner and the visit to Liza in Part II act out the ideas of Part I.
• The crumpled five-rouble note and the wet snow at the end.

Key terms and names

Underground

The narrator's name for his isolated, resentful inner life and the corner where he has lived for twenty years; also the title of Part I.

Palace of crystal

The narrator's image for a perfectly rational society built on science and self-interest, taken from Chernyshevsky's novel and the Crystal Palace in London.

Rational egoism

The teaching of the radical writers of the 1860s that people always act for their own advantage and will act well once reason shows them their true interest; the doctrine Part I attacks.

Most advantageous advantage

The narrator's ironic phrase for free, independent choice, the good that every list of human interests leaves out.

Anti-hero

The narrator's own word in the last chapter for a central character gathered from unattractive traits rather than heroic ones.

Collegiate assessor

A middle rank in the Russian civil service table of ranks, the narrator's rank before he retired.

Epoch

The St. Petersburg journal edited by Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail, where the book first appeared in 1864.

Content note

Recommended for older high school students with guidance: Part II includes scenes in a brothel, a vivid description of a prostitute's lonely death, and the narrator's cruelty and despair.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does the narrator describe himself in the opening chapter, and why does he refuse to see a doctor?
2. Comprehension What does the narrator do to get even with the officer who moved him aside in the tavern?
3. Comprehension What happens at Zverkov's farewell dinner, and why does the narrator follow the party afterwards?
4. Interpretation Why does the narrator fear a palace of crystal at which no one could put out his tongue?
5. Interpretation Why does the narrator speak so movingly to Liza in the brothel and then treat her so cruelly in his room?
6. Interpretation What does Liza's leaving the money on the table mean, and why does the narrator fail to find her?
7. Big Question Is freedom still good if a person uses it chiefly to harm himself?
8. Big Question Can reason and science alone show human beings how to live well?

Faith Connections

• Romans 7:15-24 (Scripture)

  Paul's cry that he does what he hates and fails to do the good he wants describes the divided will that the narrator turns into a theory of human freedom.

• Luke 7:36-50 (Scripture)

  Christ receives the woman who was a sinner and forgives her because she loved much; Liza's compassion for her tormentor stands in the same tradition, and the narrator is in the place of the proud host who cannot receive love.

• Augustine, Confessions II (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's theft of pears, done for no gain but the pleasure of the forbidden, is an early analysis of the perverse choice the narrator defends.

• Dostoevsky, letter to his brother Mikhail, March 1864 (Great Conversation)

  Dostoevsky complained that the censors cut the passage in Part I, Chapter X where he had drawn from the narrator's argument the need for faith and Christ, which shows how the author himself meant the argument to end.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If human beings value above all the freedom to choose for themselves, and if a society planned on calculated self-interest would make every choice predictable, then such a society would be unbearable to them and they would rebel against it even at cost to themselves; therefore rational egoism misunderstands human nature.

Rhetorical device: procatalepsis. Throughout Part I the narrator raises objections in the voice of imaginary gentlemen, as when they laugh at his talk of the advantage that has been overlooked, and answers them before they can finish.

Debate: Resolved: that the Underground Man's defense of free choice is stronger than the rational egoism he attacks.

Memory Work

I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.

I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Argue whether Part II proves or undermines the claims the narrator makes in Part I, using the officer, Zverkov's dinner and Liza's visit.

Comparison with Crime and Punishment: Compare the Underground Man and Raskolnikov as two isolated Petersburg thinkers, and contrast how each responds to a woman who offers compassion.

Medical Lens

The narrator presents himself from the first line as a sick man, but the illness he describes is chiefly one of consciousness: endless self-observation, inability to act, pleasure taken in humiliation, and spite turned against himself as well as others. He refuses medical help on principle while professing respect for doctors. Part II uses the nineteenth-century vocabulary of hysteria and fever for his rages, sleepless nights and sobbing collapse. Later readers, including psychiatrists, have read him as a portrait of chronic resentment, social anxiety or masochistic character; such labels are retrospective readings, not Dostoevsky's terms, and the author himself framed the condition as the moral and spiritual sickness of a generation cut off from real life. Liza's story touches the conditions of prostitution in Petersburg and the lonely death of a sick woman in a brothel cellar.

• Part I, Chapter I

  The narrator calls himself sick, suspects his liver, and declares that he will not consult a doctor out of spite.

  Physicians Doctors Mind Body
• Part I, Chapter IV

  The argument about toothache: the educated man moans not from pain alone but to make his suffering felt by everyone in the house.

  Pain
• Part II, Chapters I–II

  The young narrator's fevers, delirium and hysterical rages during his campaign against the officer.

  Hysteria Neurosis Anxiety
• Part II, Chapters VI–VII

  The narrator describes to Liza the abandonment and death of a sick woman in a damp cellar and the careless burial in the wet snow.

  Death Dying
• Part II, Chapter IX

  The narrator collapses on the sofa in sobbing hysterics while Liza comforts him.

  Hysteria

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Trace the image of the palace of crystal through Part I and explain what the narrator fears in it and what he says he really wants instead.

• Fiction

  Write Liza's account of the evening she visits the narrator's room, ending as she leaves the five-rouble note on the table.

• Classroom

  Stage a debate between the Underground Man and a follower of Chernyshevsky on whether people always act for their own advantage once they understand it.

Further Reading

• What Is to Be Done?, Nikolai Chernyshevsky

  The 1863 radical novel of rational egoism and the crystal palace to which Part I responds.

• Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Dostoevsky's 1863 account of his European journey, including the Crystal Palace in London.

• Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865, Joseph Frank

  The volume of Frank's biography that treats the writing of Notes from Underground in its intellectual setting.

• Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann (ed.)

  Anthology that opens with Part I of Notes from Underground as a starting point of existentialist writing.