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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• Part II, Chapters I–II

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

• 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.

• Part II, Chapter IX

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