Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes from Underground

I found that I had posted several entries about The Notes from Underground in association with other works, but I had never given this work its own posting.  So, I decided (being lazy) to gather together the various comments I had made to see if I could make something coherent about this very complex work.

The first part consists of an extended passage in which the underground man (UM) reveals himself. He is a civil servant who has come into a small inheritance and has retired. He is an outsider with no friends or relatives. He lives in isolation. He sneers at society, but at the same time longs to join them, to be one of them.  It is also a philosophical rant against those who think that human behavior will eventually be completely explainable and predictable by the immutable laws of science.  In addition the narrator contends that there are two types of people:  the doers and the thinkers or the intellectuals.   Everything that is accomplished is done by the doers, because the thinkers are paralyzed when they attempt to handle all the ramifications of acting.


The second part shows our reclusive narrator in action and supports both of the arguments put forth in the first part.  In the second part, the UM forces himself upon some former student acquaintances who are giving a going-away party for one of the students. The UM insists on attending the party, while mocking himself and eventually the others. He desires to be one with them, but actively works to make this impossible.

 The UM also meets a prostitute in the second part; the UM persuades Liza to escape from the life of a prostitute. However, when Liza appears at his apartment several days later, telling him that she wants to escape, he rejects her and sends her away.

This is one of Dostoyevsky's most unusual works.  It was while I was reading it, for the third or fourth time actually, that I began to see some similarities between Dostoyevsky's short novel and Poe's short story, "The Imp of the Perverse." "The Imp of the Perverse" is another of Poe's first person confessions--the individual attempts to explain why he committed his act from a jail cell, with a gallows outside awaiting him.

One of the similarities is the format: both begin with lectures on one or more topics which are of considerable length in comparison to the work which is then followed by an incident that exemplifies the topic(s) discussed in the first part. Poe's lecture is solely on the nature of perverseness in human behavior while Dostoyevsky's contains several themes, only one of which is perverseness.


One of Dostoyevsky's first examples of perverseness is that at times he is sick but doesn't go to the doctor out of spite. Who is he injuring--himself. He knows he should go because he is "only injuring [himself]...My liver is bad, well--- let it get worse." He is knowingly acting against his own best interests. Later he speaks of a "friend" of his:

"When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interests of man; with irony he will upbraid the shortsighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and within a quarter of of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside him which is stronger than all his interests, he will go off on quite a different tack--that is, act in direct opposition to what he has just been saying about himself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to his own advantage, in fact in opposition to everything..."



Poe advances a similar argument about perversity: "Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say through its promptings we act, for the reason we should not."  In other words, we act  because we know we shouldn't.

Dostoyevsky here, like Poe, argues that humans will act at times in direct conflict with what they know to be their best interests.

Dostoyevsky postulates an advance in science which might provide accurate prediction of human behavior while Poe points out a combination of phrenology and metaphysics that attempts do the same. Both then attack the possibility of a completely accurate science of predicting human behavior.

Dostoyevsky says, "science itself will teach man that he never really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are , besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will not longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms..."

And then, when complete rational harmony and prosperity is established, someone will stand up and say that we should "'kick over the whole show here and scatter rationalism to the winds' ... [and] he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning; that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated."


Again, we do things simply for the sake of  being perverse or because we know we shouldn't.



A Side Note:


There are some subtle comic comments buried within the text. The UM seems such a humorless person in much of the work, I wonder if he understands what he says here.   

". . . I began to feel an irresistible urge to plunge into society.  To me plunging into society meant paying a visit to my office chief, Anton Antonych Setochkin.  He's the only lasting acquaintance I've made during my lifetime;  I too now marvel at this circumstance.  But even then I would visit him only when my dreams had reached such a degree of happiness that it was absolutely essential for me to embrace people and all humanity at once; for that reason I needed to have at least one person on hand who actually existed.  However, one could only call upon Anton Antonych on Tuesday (his receiving day); consequently, I always had to adjust the urge to embrace all humanity so that it occurred on Tuesday. . . .The host usually sat in his study on a leather couch in front of a table together with some gray-haired guest, a civil servant either from our office or another one.  I never saw more than two or three guests there, and they were always the same ones.  They talked about excise taxes, debates in the Senate, salaries, promotions, His Excellency and how to please him,  and so on and so forth. I had the patience to sit here like a fool next to these people for four hours or so; I listened without daring to say a word to them or even knowing what to talk about.   I sat there in a stupor; several times I broke into a sweat; I felt numbed by paralysis; but it was good and useful.  Upon returning home I would postpone for some time my desire to embrace all humanity."


 Is he being ironic?

18 comments:

  1. Great stuff, Fred. I remember reading the slender book when I was at a particularly low point in my life about 20 years ago, and that was probably bad timing, but I still remember being so impressed that I was telling everyone I knew to read the tale. Perhaps I need to grab it from my shelf in the near future for another reading. I shall try to choose a day or two when my spirits are soaring rather than cratering. That might be the best plan.

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  2. R.T.,

    Probably a good idea, but just don't let it drag you too far underground.

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  3. Love this book.
    Which translation did you read?

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  4. Di,

    I have the Norton Critical Edition. The translator is Michael R. Katz.

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    1. Oh okay. The one I read was the Pevear- Volokhonsky version.

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  5. Di,

    The first translation I read was by Constance Garnett, but that fell apart, page by page.

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    1. I've heard so much criticism of her translations that I'm now prejudiced against them altogether. Haha.

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    2. Di,

      Have you read any of her translations? I will pick up a new translation and give it a try if I don't have one of Garnett's translations available.

      Perhaps if had read Nabokov's critique of Dostoyevsky, I might never have read anything by Dostoyevsky. The same holds true if I had read George Bernard Shaw's take on Shakespeare--I might never have read any Shakespeare if I had read GBS oln Shakespeare..

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  6. Di,

    Do you think a translator or the publisher of a new translation is going to say wonderful things about her translations? People would then ask why we need another translation then.

    The obvious answer is that it's a way to make money. Since those 19th and early 20th century Russian works are now in the public domain, the publishers don't have to pay royalties to the author, just a salary to the translator. It's to their benefit to put down her translations and encourage readers to buy their new and improved brand of corn flakes or translations.

    I like her translations and stay with them if I can find them.

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    1. Of course not, but I've read Nabokov's comments and some other people's comparisons of translations. Those who like her often talk about the "smoothness" of her language, the "feel"... Those who criticise her often point to 2 things- 1, her habit of leaving out passages she didn't understand and 2, her tendency to write too smoothly and produce something entirely different in style from the original. Of course we've talked about this before, there is no perfect translation and there's always something that gets lost. But I've heard these things so much, so often, from various sources, not just new translators or publishers of new translations, that I cannot get rid of this prejudice. The idea that the translator just leaves out parts she doesn't understand is horrid.
      Note, new translators don't necessarily criticise previous versions just to justify and advertise the new ones. Anthony Briggs talks about the change in meaning in many words and phrases, as language evolves, that makes them inappropriate today, so there should be a new translation, that's all.

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    2. Di,

      Then, I guess, it's best you not read any of her translations.

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  7. re: translators
    Pevear and Volokhonsky seem to be the most recent species of highly regarded translators of 19th century Russian literature. I've read a couple of their efforts, and I have no complaints. But since I have no idea about their faithfulness to the original Russian, I am only reacting to the readability factors.

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    1. So far I notice that they're often praised for faithfulness, and criticised for "weird" English.
      Oh I wish I knew Russian and could read the originals directly. And French too.

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    2. R.T.,

      I've read one of their translations also. As you say, not knowing Russian, I can only go on the "readability factor" and that didn't pose any problems that stand out.

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  8. Di,

    So do I, and German also. Ah, to read The Magic Mountain in German.

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    1. Oh yeah, German. I once wanted to learn German to read Kafka.

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  9. The Constance Garnett translation is the one I read. All in all I enjoy her translations.

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  10. madamevauquer,

    Glad to see I'm not the only one out there.

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