"Notes from the Underground", according to many critics, is an important stage in the formation of F.M. Dostoevsky. The work can be perceived as a draft for the creation of the most famous psychological novels, such as "Crime and Punishment", "The Brothers Karamazov", "Demons", in which the hero of the "underground" will receive his further development.
The work "Notes from the Underground", the brief content of which is rather difficult to convey, has a low event saturation. It represents the reflections of the protagonist about his life and place in society. The author of the notes is trying to evaluate his actions, as well as inaction, telling about all this in the form of a confession.
The story is told from the perspective of a forty-year-old man who recently retired from his post as a collegiate assessor. At the beginning of the work, it is mentioned in passing that he recently received an inheritance. Accordingly, the material issue of the hero does not bother. Having got rid of the bustle of everyday routine, the former official, finding himself alone, tries to sum up his life and give an analysis of its significance.
In his opinion, forty years is a rather serious age, and he does not flatter himself with hopes of seeing something else good in life. In the form of memoirs, the hero explores his life, starting from childhood. The key point in this analysis is the problem of who I am and how others wanted me to be.
During the first part of the story, the author explores the essence of contemporary society. It becomes obvious that he despises others, reality and, in order to abstract himself from the real world and communication with ordinary people, hides in the plane of literature. Opposing himself to society as a thinking and thinking person, the hero is nevertheless dissatisfied with himself. He despises himself for weakness, cowardice and inability to resist the surrounding reality. That is why he chooses to live underground.
The second part of the work demonstrates the hero's attempts to throw from one extreme to another in order to prove to himself his effectiveness and strength. Before the reader there are several events that the author considers the most striking and revealing in his biography. The reader becomes a witness to a situation in which, in one of the taverns, the hero, who interfered with a certain officer, was removed from his path by the latter. The author of the notes took this as a grave insult, after which he hated all the officers and hatched a plan of revenge for several years, hating himself for not being able to immediately answer the offender. A few years later, the hero, meeting by chance with an officer on the embankment, went straight to him and pointedly pushed him with his shoulder. Then he was incredibly proud of himself.
Another attempt to prove to himself and to society his individuality was the behavior of the hero at a meeting with friends from school. Instead of trying to enter their circle, he demonstratively emphasized his superiority over the rest, humiliating and insulting his comrades, as a result of which he again remained lonely and outcast.
Highlights of the story
The brightest event of the work is a meeting with Lisa, a girl from a brothel who had a pure and kind soul. Feeling the tenderness and kindness of the girl, the hero experienced warm feelings for her, but he immediately stopped himself and behaved rudely with Lizaveta, trying to prove to himself that he was better and higher than his surroundings.
At this heinous act, the notes are interrupted. This allows the reader to hope that by reviewing his life in writing and analyzing his actions, the hero will change his attitude towards himself and the world around him.
The protagonist of the work is an ambiguous image of a Russian intellectual, dissatisfied with his own role in society. He is the personification of the tragedy of the mind and spirit, which, hating itself for inaction, still does not take decisive steps. Afraid of appearing misunderstood in society, unable to respond to insult, he is not able to assert himself, therefore he hides underground and despises everyone and himself for the impossibility of changing anything.
According to many critics, the hero of Dostoevsky's story is one of the many representatives of the intelligentsia of his time - people who think, but do nothing. In his digging in the soul and moral torment, the hero finds a certain joy. Apparently, to a certain extent, he is comfortable in this state, because he is simply afraid to change anything. Many researchers agree that the hero of the story is the first developments in the creation of a psychological type, which we will meet in Dostoevsky's great Pentateuch.
The main ideas of the work
In the center of Dostoevsky's story, the problem of the relationship between the individual personality and the surrounding society is raised. Without giving the hero even a name, the author emphasizes the collective nature of his image, because most thinking people are dissatisfied with society, its primitive needs and values.
On the one hand, the author shares the relationship of the hero to the world around him. On the other hand, Dostoevsky shows his thinking hero as embittered, weak and morally fallen. Due to the inability to be effective, the main character does not rise above society, but, on the contrary, sinks to the bottom. The author condemns the banal existence of society and the passive contemplation of this by truly creative and thinking people.
In the story, evaluated by critics as an example of psychological realism, without a doubt, the first elements of the emergence of existentialism in Russian literature are noted. Disclosure of the inner torment of a person, the significance of his own figure in society and in his own eyes, reflections on the value of life, contrasting with a real and miserable existence, fundamental in the works of existentialism. The story, which the author himself titled as "Notes", in fact, is not it. It is rather a genre close to memoirs, diaries or letters. The confession, created in writing, is an attempt to materialize the thoughts of the hero and his mental anguish.
In the stylistic eclecticism of the work, allegorical images characteristic of symbolism are quite clearly visible. The main symbol of the work is the underground, as an allegorical image of the refuge of those who do not find a place in the real life of society. This is the shell in which the hero can be himself.
The image of the crystal palace is also symbolic; The Crystal Palace is not a beautiful dream, but a cold construction, created with clearly calculated proportions, where there is no place for individuality and freedom, and a certain social role is prepared for everyone. Soviet criticism interpreted the image of the crystal palace and the hero's attitude towards it as revolutionary views. However, the hero's reflections have nothing to do with the opposition to the political regime that was in force in the 60s of the 19th century. The attitude towards the image of the crystal palace is the rejection of traditional human values, the rejection of generally accepted interpersonal relations and the rejection of oneself in the world of reality.
The story "Notes from the Underground" was written by Dostoevsky in 1864 and occupies a special place in his work.
"Notes from the Underground" is a complex and multifaceted work that raises the most acute problems of Dostoevsky's novels, giving rise to allusions with the works of writers of the 19th century. (N.V. Gogol, I.A. Goncharov, N.G. Chernyshevsky), and also, to a certain extent, a forerunner of the philosophy of existentialism in the context of the incomplete, torn consciousness of the hero, who comprehended the absurd structure of the surrounding reality.
"Notes" are characterized by a complex genre organization. As already noted by researchers, they are associated with the “Confession” by J.J. Rousseau and enter into polemics with her,. Initially, having titled the work "Confession", Dostoevsky planned to write a long novel, which once again emphasizes the orientation towards Rousseau. Having changed the title, the author did not give up his intention to create a large text: “Following the first passage, which is printed “as if by an introduction”, others will follow, and together they will make up a “whole book” about the life of the hero. However, the final version of the "Notes" includes, in addition to the already indicated "introduction", only the story "About wet snow."
Thus, already at this stage, we can note that the work is excerpts from notes of a confessional nature.
The work is based on the understanding of literary confession proposed by M.M. Bakhtin: “Where there is an attempt to fix oneself in repentant tones in the light of moral obligation, the first essential form of verbal objectification of life and personality arises.<...>- self-report-confession<...>a lonely attitude towards oneself - such is the limit to which self-accounting-confession strives<…>and on the way to this limit, the other is needed as a judge who must judge me, how I judge myself, without aestheticizing me, is needed in order to destroy his possible influence on my self-esteem, in order to free myself from this influence by self-humiliation before him his evaluative position. Therefore, the word of the Underground Hero is dialogical: he emphasizes that he writes notes only for himself, but constantly looks back at the other.
“This struggle with the possible value position of the other in a peculiar way poses the problem of external form in self-report-confession; here a conflict is inevitable with the form and with the very language of expression, which, on the one hand, are necessary, and on the other hand, are fundamentally inadequate in the value consciousness of the other. The style of the author of the "Notes" is extremely uneven, deliberately rude, sometimes emphatically unliterary, defiant, reminiscent of the "meaningless", and sometimes rude words of holy fools, who almost always have human-fighting elements. This is the specificity of a literary confession and its difference from the church one: if the first involves not only a detailed account of one’s deeds, but also reflection, as well as the presence of another (even fictional) interlocutor, then the second can be completely taken out of speech and does not imply the presence no authority other than divine.
“The very coming to confession, silent standing, prayer, prayer, presenting oneself as a penitent, the inner effort of opening one’s soul to God, the silent “Yes” in the face of Him Who “came into the world to save sinners,” is already a confession, as it testifies about the free recognition of himself as a penitent sinner, unable to correct anything on his own and praying for the mercy of forgiveness and salvation. For church confession, the category of silence is important: words are not capable of expressing the fullness of the spiritual content of the believer, they reflect only the outer layer, the overcoming of which testifies to the desire to comprehend God. The underground hero, having spent forty years in the underground, on the contrary, seeks to overcome the silence and express to us all his "cherished ideas".
"Notes from the Underground" is a structurally unfinished story. Dostoevsky himself points to its incompleteness: “The “notes” of this paradoxicalist do not end here. He could not stand it and continued on. Confession is unfinished, like life: as long as consciousness exists, there will be a need to describe and analyze one's deeds. According to the original plan, the story was supposed to include several such passages, however, both the hero and the author at the end of the story indicate that there will be no other passages.
In addition to using the genre of literary confession and polemics with Rousseau, the text contains a clear polemic with the novel What Is To Be Done? N.G. Chernyshevsky. Dostoevsky in "Notes" reveals the mechanism of action of "semi-science", utopian anti-scientific theories, he also refers to them socialism, which gives "unscientific and even anti-scientific provisions a scientific status and obliges them to be accepted, relying on the authority of science as undeniable scientific truths" . Against these supposedly scientific truths, against completeness, the limitation of the personality to only rational principles, the Underground Hero rises: “Although a person has sometimes learned to see more clearly than in barbarian times, he is still far from accustomed to acting as reason and science indicate to him”, “ an enlightened and developed person, in a word, such as the future person will be, cannot deliberately want something unfavorable for himself, that this is mathematics.
Thus, "Notes from the Underground" are approaching, on the one hand, the tradition of scientific stories (the best examples of which can be called the works of V.F. Odoevsky), but, on the other hand, this is not a proper scientific story, rather an anti-scientific one, denying any scientific and the rational completion of man, ridiculing the utopian pseudo-scientific socialist ideas of Chernyshevsky. In the aspect of ridiculing pseudoscientific research, one can trace the connection between the work of Dostoevsky and O.I. Senkovsky, who created a new genre of scientific and philosophical story, in which a professional scientific joke turned into a new way of presenting material. These stories include "Notes of a Brownie" - popular science fiction, where the most irrational and unscientific feeling - love - is given a pseudo-scientific rational justification from the position of infernal forces. The predominance of the infernal beginning in the story is connected with the idea of the devil Bubantes that in people's lives there are many different areas that are led by devils (including the love sphere).
Rejecting rationalism in the definition of human needs and benefits, not accepting socialist theories, the Underground Hero quite often uses the word "devil". Thus, it can be assumed that Dostoevsky leads the reader to the same idea as Senkovsky: there are areas in life that are controlled by devils, and one of these areas is utopian socialist theories. This is all a diabolical obsession, devilry, "semi-science", in which the Underground Hero categorically refuses to believe. Of course, the works of Dostoevsky and Senkovsky are not put in the same row, but only the fact is indicated that the very idea of ridiculing excessive rationalism appeared already in the 30s. XIX century.
In addition to the genre components already mentioned, one should not forget that the Notes is also a philosophical story, especially its first part. Before us are “forty years of the underground”, the writer reveals the philosophy of the former “dreamer”, “superfluous person” of the 30-40s, “modern educated and developed person”, by the 60s. who became a “zero-personality” (V.Ya. Linkov’s term), “a person without properties”.
Speaking about the genre characteristics of "Notes", it is also worth noting that the hero himself focuses our attention on the fact that he writes his notes exclusively for himself and "that if I write, as if addressing readers, it is only for display, because so it's easier for me to write. Here is a form, one empty form, but I will never have readers. The form becomes the same "zero", i.e. completely speculative, capable of combining various genre formations. The hero also clarifies: “I will not start order and system. What I remember, I will write down. Despite this, the story still has a meaningful structure and logic of presentation.
"Notes" includes two parts and begins with a commentary by the author, placed in a footnote, where Dostoevsky defines the genre of the work. The first part is perceived by him as a kind of introduction, a performance in which the hero “recommends himself, his opinion”, while the second part is “already real“ notes ”of this person about some events of his life” . Consequently, by "notes" Dostoevsky still means the second part, and the first part becomes only an introduction, preparatory material necessary for the correct perception of the hero's notes themselves.
The first part, entitled "Underground", is actually the hero's notes, gravitating towards the genres of confession, diary, scientific and philosophical story and includes eleven small passages, numbered with Roman numerals and introducing us to the basis of the hero's philosophical views. The second part of "About wet snow" the hero gives a genre description - a story. It includes ten chapters and has an epigraph from a poem by N.A. Nekrasov "When out of the darkness of delusion ...", which is interrupted by a mocking "Etc., etc., etc.", which reduces the tragedy of the poem and emphasizes the mockery of it. Unlike the first part, which is more of a "stream of consciousness", the second part has a storyline that makes it a story. The "Notes" end with the author's comment that the hero continues to write.
Thus, Dostoevsky does not give us a clear indication of what genre the Notes from the Underground should belong to. The author considered the form of "notes" to be extremely free, often including other genre formations. Closer is the point of view, which is set out in the book by V.N. Zakharova “Dostoevsky’s system of genres”: “The mere fact that Dostoevsky’s stories, novels and novels are called “notes” does not give the right to consider “notes” an independent artistic genre. In this sense, Dostoevsky's "notes" are not an artistic genre, but a genre form of his stories, novels, novels.
The hero of the story is a petty Petersburg official, a forty-year-old bachelor, bilious, sarcastic, extremely intelligent. The short story is built as a confession, starting which the hero admits: “What can a decent person talk about with the greatest pleasure? ... Answer: about himself. Well, that's how I'll talk about myself.
Dostoevsky tells us some of the personality traits of his hero: he is 40 years old, he is "a collegiate assessor". An indication of the age and rank of the hero is important, since the author shows us who he could become by the 60s. a developed romantic dreamer of the 30s, who loves everything “beautiful and high”. In addition, 40 years is the age when the big (and perhaps the best) half of life is already behind us, the age when you want to look back and take stock of your life. In this regard, the Underground Hero notes that he “even did not manage to become an insect,” because “an intelligent person of the nineteenth century must and is morally obliged to be a creature predominantly spineless; a person with a character, a doer, is primarily a limited being.
One of the main confessions of the hero is the recognition that he is overcome by anger at all people and the whole world. This anger, like caustic bile, spills over all the pages of the story. No one is nice to the hero and no one is needed. He asks an amazing question: for example, if he has to choose - the world will fail or, say, he will not drink tea, what will he choose? The answer turns out to be this: let the whole world fail, but he should always drink tea! That is, the whole world is not worth a glass of tea intended for him personally.
This person does not feel sorry for either God, or God's world, or people. In the end, he doesn't even feel sorry for himself. And this little “vile Petersburger” (as he calls himself) compares himself with the same small, evil mouse that sits in its dark underground and viciously slanders the whole world from there. Thus, one of the meanings of the concept and image of the underground is revealed, which is quite external.
But this concept has another meaning, deeper. "Underground" is all the dark that resides at the bottom of the human soul; this loneliness, deep and hopeless, a person suffers from his loneliness and tries to understand himself. This is the basement of the soul, where the light of faith, goodness, love does not penetrate. This is a small hell that a person carries within himself. There, in this small, personal hell, everything low that is in a person is locked up. The energy of evil comes from there, which makes people lie, hate, steal, kill, that is, violate all divine and human laws. This is a way to open the soul, an opportunity to openly communicate with the world. In the center of the story is the image of a man painfully trying to understand himself, his feelings, and the world around him. This is a description of the reflections of a suspicious, embittered, vain and proud person.
The hero of Dostoevsky can be put on a par with the "superfluous people" who, having a powerful internal potential, could not find a worthy application for him. The underground hero can also be considered the forerunner of Dostoevsky's denying rebels: Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, the heroes of The Possessed. The author traced the evolution of this developed rebellious consciousness: if the hero of "Notes" is only capable of verbal rebellion, he is not an active figure (the maximum that he was ready to decide on, but did not dare - to slap Zverkov in the face), then the heroes of "Demons are already capable of killing for the sake of an abstract, far-fetched idea. But the author, and after him the hero, consider such figures to be limited people, incapable of thinking and establishing the correct cause-and-effect relationships: “Because of their limitations, they accept the immediate and secondary causes as primary ones, thus, more quickly and easily than others, they are convinced that they have found an immutable foundation for their work, well, they are calming down.
The idea of a reasonable good, which arises in the Notes as a result of a controversy with Chernyshevsky's novel, is denied by the hero and the author himself. Dostoevsky believes that it is impossible to build a harmonious society, relying only on a reasonable beginning. Therefore, his hero exclaims: “God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic, when for some reason I don’t like these laws and twice two four?” . Through uneven syllable, constant references to the devil, the author brings us to the idea that it is possible to build an ideal society not with the help of rational research, but only on faith in God. The unification of the flock and the return of a person to his origins should be based on a religious, and not a far-fetched socialist idea. A person cannot live in isolation from others, but brotherly love, and not profit, should unite him with others.
And here we come to the second component of the image of the Underground Hero - an attempt to self-identify through writing. Even in Poor People, Dostoevsky speaks of the hero's self-identification through another: Devushkin, like the Underground Hero, wears boots and an overcoat "for others" to show that he is no worse than them. Only through letters to Varenka does his self-identification, the formation of style and self-awareness take place.
It was said above that the hero writes notes only for himself. But in fact, as rightly proved by M.M. Bakhtin and K.V. Mochulsky, each replica of the hero contains an eye on the other (the reader) and enters into an imaginary polemic with him.
It is important for the hero to understand how he appears in the eyes of another, since he does not have a complete personal characteristic and protests against any completeness, he tries to at least somehow identify himself. But “in the search for identity, the subject cannot help but go astray. It is the power of imagination that leads the subject to the fact that he is faced with the threat of loss of identity, the absence of “I” ” . The entire first part of the Notes is a dialogue with the implicit reader. With the power of his imagination, the Underground Hero attributes certain remarks to his opponent and gives them a refutation. Thus, the first part is a continuous discussion with another consciousness, with the help of which the "philosophy of the underground" is revealed and receives justification. Having not acquired a final identity, being a speculative construction, the hero introduces us into the depths of his philosophical research.
However, “Notes” appears not only as a failed attempt by the hero to acquire a personal identity, but also as a lawsuit against himself: “... on paper, it will come out somehow more solemnly.<...>There will be more judgment on oneself, there will be more syllable. Besides: maybe I will really get relief from writing down. The categories of writing and judgment turn out to be interrelated: the Underground hero expresses the essence of his "crime" through writing, thus, the event described in the second part of the story receives comprehension and becomes part of being insofar as it is officially and "solemnly" fixed on paper.
That is why the hero believes that “if I write it down (memory. - A.S.), then it will get rid of it.” Until the memory is fixed on paper, it does not seem to exist, it does not have a material embodiment, it exists only in the memory of the hero, and the hero himself is responsible for it. Recording a memory means, first of all, giving it a material shell (as confirmation of its actual existence) and, as a result, meaning.
In addition, in reflection and judgment on himself, the Underground Hero is no longer alone: next to him is the consciousness of an implicit reader, which allows the author of the Notes to be extremely frank, in contrast to Rousseau, who “certainly lied about himself in his confession, and even deliberately lied, out of vanity. At the end, the hero claims that “I was ashamed all the time I was writing this story: therefore, this is no longer literature, but a corrective punishment.”
And finally, another reason that prompted the Underground Hero to take up his pen is boredom: “I'm bored, but I'm constantly doing nothing. Recording is really like a job. The category of boredom appears several times in Notes and refers us to Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka and Mirgorod by N.V. Gogol: "It's boring for the abandoned one!" , "It's boring in this world, gentlemen!" , where, among the general fun and revelry of the fair, there is a longing for the departing joy and youth, increasing in Mirgorod, one of the attractions of which is a huge puddle in the square, where people can quarrel and sue "for nonsense, for a gander". Such boredom and melancholy are familiar to the Underground Hero, they seize him "to the point of hysteria", make him plunge into the very depths of low "debauchery".
The hero's reasoning about romanticism and romantics gives rise to Gogol's and Goncharov's allusions: the mention of Costanjoglo from the 2nd volume of Dead Souls and uncle Peter Ivanovich from Ordinary History. And if the Gogol romantics of the 30s. more often go crazy, unable to withstand a collision with reality, then in the 40s. Goncharov, former romantics become "business rascals", which is now "ordinary history".
The hero speaks of romantics with contempt: “Our romantic will soon go crazy (which, however, very rarely happens), but will not spit if he has no other career in mind, and they will never kick him out, but will they take him to a lunatic asylum in the form of a "Spanish king". Here, the Underground Hero alludes to Gogol's Poprishchin, a romance in its original design (if we recall the original title of the story, Notes of a Mad Musician, the connection with German romanticism immediately becomes visible), as well as to Piskarev from Nevsky Prospekt, a story also mentioned in the text. . The underground hero combines the features of several of Gogol's heroes. First of all, it is Poprishchin with his ambition and admiration for ranks (Underground goes to Nevsky to fully taste the bitterness of humiliation, like a loach, like a fly, darting between higher officials, afraid not to give way to them). But at the same time, as in the case of Poprishchin, the hero's notes are a reflection of his awakened self-consciousness, which is no longer able to remain silent. Both heroes are imbued with universal responsiveness and try to absorb the whole world. Poprishchin has the highest degree of manifestation of this impulse - the desire to save the moon, Podpolny has a spiritual travelogue to different countries (“I go barefoot and hungry to preach new ideas and break retrogrades near Austerlitz. Then a march is played, an amnesty is issued, the pope agrees to leave Rome for Brazil ; then a ball for all of Italy at the Villa Borghese, on the shores of Lake Como, since Lake Como is purposely transferred to Rome for this occasion"), the desire to "immediately embrace people and all mankind." However, this sudden impulse of the hero’s soul collides with an insurmountable wall of bureaucratic orders: “Actually, it was necessary to come to Anton Antonych on Tuesdays (his day), therefore, and it was always necessary to adjust the need to hug all of humanity by Tuesday” . After visiting this house, where the hero sat silently for four hours, he lost his desire to embrace all of humanity.
In addition to Poprishchin, in the structure of the image of the Underground Hero, one can find the features of Lieutenant Pirogov (“I have foam at the mouth, but bring me some doll, give me some tea with sugar, I’ll probably calm down”, cf. Pirogov at Gogol: after after the way three German artisans treated him “rudely and impolitely”, the lieutenant was furious, but went into the confectionery, ate two puff pastries, read “The Bee” and calmed down); Akaky Akakievich (like Bashmachkin, they don’t notice him, higher ranks allow themselves to treat him like a fly, worse, as an inanimate object that can simply be taken and rearranged from one place to another: “I couldn’t forgive the one that he rearranged me and so completely did not notice").
An important aspect of the analysis of the Underground Hero's consciousness is the playful principle in his behavior, which was especially pronounced in his relationship with Lisa. The game is, “from the point of view of form, a kind of free activity, which is perceived as “not real”, not connected with everyday life and, nevertheless, which can completely capture the player; which is not conditioned by any immediate material interests or benefits; which takes place in a specially allotted space and time, in an orderly manner and in accordance with certain rules, and gives rise to public associations that seek to surround themselves with mystery or emphasize their unusualness in relation to the rest of the world with their own clothes and appearance.
All the indicated characteristics of the game beginning can be found in the "Notes". The game begins when the Underground Hero, humiliated by his schoolmates and unable to prove to them that he "also has the right", arrives at the brothel to slap Zverkov in the face. But instead, he is fascinated by the game with Lisa: "Most of all, the game fascinated me." The hero felt liberated and free in front of Liza, who, unlike his comrades, did not know anything about him, besides, she was a fallen woman, therefore, she was even lower on the social ladder than he was. The conversation with her took place in a special, marginal and, in fact, gaming space, where he himself established the rules and could pretend to be anyone. It was an unreal reality for the Underground Hero, he understood from the very beginning that this was a game, but the game captivated him so much that he left Lisa his address, thereby transferring this game, which began for him in such unusual circumstances, into real life.
Later, he would once again emphasize that he was passionate about the game, however, not just one game. So what else? “The play function, in those of its higher forms that we are considering here, can be immediately reduced mainly to two aspects in which it manifests itself. The game is a struggle for something or a show of this something. On the one hand, the Underground Hero fought for Lisa. It can be assumed that there are still glimpses of human feelings in him, and he is not alien to compassion. On the other hand, a more important aspect of the game for him was to show his power, his power over the heroine. That is why he humiliates Lisa when she comes to his house, realizing that she turned out to be stronger than him, feeling that the hero is also suffering.
And here we come to another important component of the game, for the sake of which it is actually arranged: “The concept of winning is closely connected with the game.<...>To win means to rise as a result of the game. But the effectiveness of this elevation tends to grow into an illusion of supremacy in general. The game, which was originally invented by him, the hero lost. He failed to rise and subdue the heroine. Lisa saw his humiliation in front of Apollo, his fit and weakness, she intuitively felt how unhappy he was, and was capable of compassion and pity for him - feelings inaccessible to the Underground Hero. All the reasoning of the hero was true and logical, but not viable, since the mind without a heart does not save from spiritual death.
At the end of the story, Dostoevsky once again emphasizes the main idea: it is impossible to build a happy society, guided only by reason (this applies both to Chernyshevsky's socialist ideas and to the search for "superfluous people" of the 1930s, which, according to the author, could lead them only to "underground"). Only a return to one's roots, Dostoevsky's famous "soilism", as well as Christian love and compassion should become the basis for creating a new society.
author Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
I. Underground
I
I am a sick person... I am an evil person. I am an unattractive person. I think my liver hurts. However, I don't know a damn thing about my illness, and I don't know for sure what hurts me. I am not treated and have never been treated, although I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am superstitious to the extreme; Well, at least enough to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, sir, I don't want to be treated out of anger. This is what you probably don't want to understand. Well, I understand. Of course, I will not be able to explain to you exactly whom I will annoy in this case with my anger; I know very well that I will not be able to “spoil” doctors by the fact that I am not being treated by them; I know better than anyone that by all this I will only hurt myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t get treated, it’s out of anger. The liver hurts, so let it hurt even more!
I've been living like this for twenty years now. Now I'm forty. I used to serve, but now I don't. I was an evil official. I was rude and enjoyed it. After all, I did not take bribes, so I should have at least rewarded myself with this. (Bad joke; but I won’t cross it out. I wrote it thinking that it would come out very sharp; and now, as I saw myself that I only wanted to put on a vile show, I won’t cross it out on purpose!) When people approached the table at which I was sitting , used to be petitioners for information - I gnashed my teeth at them and felt inexorable pleasure when I managed to upset someone. Almost always succeeded. For the most part, they were all timid people: it is known that they were petitioners. But of the forts, I especially could not stand one officer. He did not want to submit in any way and disgustingly rattled his saber. I had a war with him for a year and a half for this saber. I finally won. He stopped rattling. However, this happened in my youth. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point of my anger? Yes, that was the whole point, that was the most disgusting thing, that every minute, even at the moment of the strongest bile, I shamefully realized in myself that I was not only not an evil, but not even an embittered person, that I only frighten sparrows in vain and amuse myself with this. I'm foaming at the mouth, and bring me some doll, give me some tea with sugar, I, perhaps, will calm down. I’ll even touch my soul, even though I’ll probably gnash my teeth at you later and suffer from insomnia for several months from shame. That is my custom.
I lied to myself just now that I was an evil official. He lied with anger. I simply played pranks with the petitioners and with the officer, but in essence I could never become angry. I was constantly conscious in myself of many, many elements most opposed to that. I felt that they were swarming in me, these opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life and begging to get out of me, but I didn’t let them in, didn’t let them in, didn’t let them out on purpose. They tortured me to shame; They drove me to convulsions and - they bored me at last, how bored! Don’t you think, gentlemen, that I now repent of something before you, that I ask your forgiveness for something? .. I’m sure that it seems to you ... But anyway, I assure you that I don’t care if it seems...
Not only am I evil, but I have not even managed to become anything: neither evil, nor kind, nor a scoundrel, nor an honest one, nor a hero, nor an insect. Now I live out in my corner, teasing myself with a malicious and useless consolation that an intelligent person cannot seriously become something, but only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent person of the nineteenth century must and is morally obliged to be a being, for the most part, spineless; but a person with character, a doer, is primarily a limited being. This is my 40 year old belief. I am now forty years old, and forty years is the whole life; because this is the deepest old age. It is indecent, vulgar, immoral to live beyond forty years! Who lives longer than forty years - answer sincerely, honestly? I'll tell you who lives: fools and scoundrels live. I will say this to all the elders, to all these venerable elders, to all these silver-haired and fragrant elders! I'll tell the whole world in the eyes! I have the right to say so, because I myself will live to be sixty years old. I'll live to seventy! I will live to eighty years!.. Wait a minute! Let's take a breath...
You probably think, gentlemen, that I want to make you laugh? Wrong on this too. I am not at all such a cheerful person as you think, or as you may think; however, if you, irritated by all this chatter (and I already feel that you are irritated), take it into your head to ask me: who exactly am I? - then I will answer you: I am one collegiate assessor. I served so that there was something to eat (but only for this), and when last year one of my distant relatives left me six thousand rubles in a spiritual will, I immediately retired and settled in my corner. I used to live in this corner, but now I have settled in this corner. My room is crappy, nasty, on the edge of the city. My maid is a village woman, old, angry with stupidity, and besides, she always smells bad. They tell me that the Petersburg climate is becoming harmful to me and that it is very expensive to live in Petersburg with my meager means. I know all this, I know better than all these experienced and wise advisers and nods. But I remain in Petersburg; I will not leave Petersburg! That's why I won't leave... Eh! but it makes no difference whether I go out or not.
And yet: what can a decent person talk about with the greatest pleasure?
Answer: about yourself.
Well, I will talk about myself.
author Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
X
A quarter of an hour later I was running up and down the room in frenzied impatience, every minute I went up to the screens and looked at Lisa through the crack. She was sitting on the floor, her head bowed on the bed, and she must have been crying. But she didn't leave, and that was what annoyed me. This time, she already knew everything. I insulted her completely, but ... there is nothing to tell. She guessed that the outburst of my passion was precisely vengeance, a new humiliation for her, and that in addition to my old, almost pointless hatred, now personal, envious hatred towards her ... But, by the way, I do not claim that she understood all this clearly; but on the other hand, she fully understood that I was a vile person and, most importantly, incapable of loving her.
I know they'll tell me it's unbelievable - it's unbelievable to be as mean, stupid as I am; perhaps, they will add, it was incredible not to fall in love with her, or at least not to appreciate this love. Why is it incredible? In the first place, I could no longer fall in love, because, I repeat, to love with me meant tyrannizing and morally superior. All my life I could not even imagine any other kind of love, and I have reached such a point that sometimes I now think that love consists in the right voluntarily granted from a beloved object to tyrannize over it. Even in my underground dreams, I could not imagine love otherwise than as a struggle, it always began with hatred and ended with moral subjugation, and then I could not even imagine what to do with the conquered object. And what’s so incredible about it, when I had already managed to corrupt myself morally, so much from “living life” I had lost the habit, that just now I thought of reproaching and shaming her by the fact that she came to me to listen to “pathetic words”; and I didn’t even guess myself that she didn’t come at all to listen to pitiful words, but to love me, because for a woman all resurrection, all salvation from any kind of death and all rebirth, is contained in love, Yes, and it cannot manifest itself otherwise, as in this. However, I did not really hate her so much when I ran around the room and peered through the crack behind the screen. It was just unbearably hard for me that she was here. I wanted her to disappear. "Calm" I wanted, I wanted to remain alone in the underground. “Living life” unaccustomedly crushed me to the point that it became difficult to even breathe.
But a few more minutes passed, and she still did not rise, as if she was in oblivion. I had the shamelessness to knock softly on the screens to remind her... She suddenly started up, grabbed herself from her seat and rushed to look for her scarf, her hat, fur coat, as if fleeing from me somewhere... Two minutes later she slowly came out from behind the screens and heavily looked at me. I smiled wickedly, however, forcibly, for decency and turned away from her gaze.
Farewell,” she said, heading for the door.
I suddenly ran up to her, grabbed her hand, unclenched it, put it in ... and then squeezed it again. Then he immediately turned away and jumped quickly to another corner, so as not to see at least ...
I wanted to lie this very minute - to write that I did it by accident, without remembering myself, lost, foolishly. But I don’t want to lie, and therefore I say bluntly that I unclenched her hand and put it in her ... out of anger. It occurred to me to do this when I was running up and down the room, and she was sitting behind the screens. But this is what I can certainly say: I did this cruelty, though on purpose, but not from the heart, but from my bad head. This cruelty was so feigned, so heady, deliberately composed, bookish, that I myself could not stand even a minute - first I jumped into a corner so as not to see, and then, with shame and despair, I rushed after Lisa. I opened the door to the passage and began to listen.
Lisa! Lisa! - I shouted at the stairs, but timidly, in an undertone ...
There was no answer, I thought I heard her footsteps on the lower steps.
Lisa! I shouted louder.
No answer. But at that very moment I heard from below how hard, with a squeal, the tight outer glass door to the street opened and slammed tightly. The hum climbed the stairs.
She left. I returned to the room thinking. It was terribly hard for me.
I stopped at the table next to the chair she was sitting on and stared blankly ahead of me. A minute passed, and suddenly I shuddered all over: right in front of me, on the table, I saw ... in a word, I saw a crumpled blue five-ruble note, the same one that a minute ago I had clutched in her hand. It was that piece of paper; there could not have been another; there was no other in the house. She, therefore, managed to throw it out of her hand onto the table at the moment when I jumped back into another corner.
Well? I could expect her to do it. Could expect? No. I was so selfish before, I really did not respect people so much that I could not even imagine that she would do it. I couldn't take it. A moment later, like a madman, I rushed to dress, threw on what I had in a hurry, and rushed headlong after her. She had not yet gone two hundred paces when I ran out into the street.
It was quiet, the snow was falling and falling almost perpendicularly, laying a pillow on the sidewalk and on the deserted street. There were no passers-by, no sound was heard. The lanterns flickered dull and useless. I ran two hundred paces to the crossroads and stopped.
“Where did she go? and why am I running after her? For what? Fall in front of her, sob with repentance, kiss her feet, beg for forgiveness! I wanted it; my whole chest was torn to pieces, and never, never will I indifferently recall this moment. But why? - I thought. “Won’t I hate her, perhaps tomorrow, precisely because I kissed her feet today?” Will I give her happiness? Haven't I learned today again, for the hundredth time, the value of myself? Shall I not torture her!”
I stood in the snow, peering into the muddy darkness, and thought about it.
“And wouldn’t it be better, wouldn’t it be better,” I fantasized at home, afterward, drowning out the living pain of the heart with fantasies, wouldn’t it be better if it now forever takes away the insult with it? Insult - but this is purification; this is the most caustic and sick consciousness! Tomorrow I would pollute her soul with myself and weary her heart. And the insult will never freeze in her now, and no matter how vile the dirt that awaits her, the insult will elevate and purify her ... hatred ... um ... maybe forgiveness ... But, however, will it be easier for her from all this?
But in fact: now I’m asking myself one idle question: which is better - is it cheap happiness or sublime suffering? Well, what's better?
That's how it seemed to me as I sat at home that evening, barely alive from mental pain. Never have I endured so much suffering and remorse; but how could there be any doubt, when I ran out of the apartment, that I would not return halfway home? Never again did I meet Liza or hear anything about her. I will also add that I was satisfied for a long time phrase about the benefits of insult and hatred, despite the fact that he himself almost fell ill then from longing.
Even now, after so many years, it's all somehow too much not good I remember. I don't remember much now, but… why not finish the Notes here? I think I made a mistake when I started writing them. At least I was ashamed the whole time I was writing this story: therefore, this is no longer literature, but a corrective punishment. After all, to tell, for example, long stories about how I skimped on my life with moral corruption in the corner, lack of environment, unaccustomed to the living and conceited malice in the underground, by God, it’s not interesting; in a novel you need a hero, but here on purpose all the traits for an antihero are collected, and most importantly, all this will make an unpleasant impression, because we are all weaned from life, we all limp, everyone is more or less. We’ve even become so unaccustomed that we sometimes feel some kind of disgust for real “living life”, and therefore we can’t stand it when we are reminded of it. After all, we have reached the point where we almost consider real "living life" as work, almost as service, and we all agree inwardly that it is better according to the book. And why do we sometimes fuss, what do we bless, what do we ask? We don't know what. It will be worse for us if our blessed requests are fulfilled. Well, try, well, give us, for example, more independence, untie any of our hands, expand the range of activities, weaken guardianship, and we ... yes, I assure you: we will immediately ask to return to guardianship. I know that you, perhaps, will be angry with me for this, shout, stamp your feet: “Speak, they say, about yourself alone and about your miserable people in the underground, and don’t dare to say: "all of us"". Excuse me, gentlemen, I'm not justifying myself with this omnipotence. As far as I am concerned, after all, I only brought in my life to the extreme what you did not dare to bring even to half, and besides, you took your cowardice for prudence, and thus consoled yourself, deceiving yourself. So I, perhaps, come out even more “alive” than you. Yes, take a closer look! After all, we don’t even know where the living thing lives now and what it is, what is it called? Leave us alone, without a book, and we will immediately become confused, lost, - we will not know where to join, what to stick to; what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise? We are even weary of being people, - people with a real, own body and blood; we are ashamed of this, we consider it a disgrace and strive to be some kind of unprecedented common people. We are stillborn, and besides, we have been born for a long time not from living fathers, and we like this more and more. We get into the taste. Soon we will invent to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write "from the Underground" anymore...
However, the “notes” of this paradoxicalist do not end here. He couldn't resist and continued on. But we also think that we can stop here.
Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Russian Literature, referred to Notes from the Underground as a "picture" that best reflects the main themes and creative method of Dostoevsky. I completely agree with this assessment of this work.
"Notes from the Underground" are written in the first person, they are written by a forty-year-old retired collegiate assessor. He did not like the service, but was forced to serve. When he became the owner of a small inheritance, he decided to retire. His inheritance is small, he is just enough to live on, he has no money for entertainment, and he himself is not prone to excesses. The subject of his pride is that he has nothing to do with people who are stupid and uneducated. This forty-year-old man has inflated self-esteem, but he spends time aimlessly in his room, which he calls "underground". It is unlikely that he can be satisfied with his life. Nor does he have a close friend to whom he could open his heart. And so he has to diligently write sad and funny "notes" addressed to an unknown reader.
It is unbearable for a person to live without a sympathetic interlocutor, he must have at least someone with whom he could exchange a word. The hero of Notes from the Underground is from the same series of "strange creatures" as Makar Devushkin from Poor Folk and Golyadkin from The Double. He is one of those people that Dostoevsky constantly writes about, those people who passionately dream that other people "discovered" and recognized their existence.
Our hero certifies himself in this way: “I am a sick person ... I am an evil person. I am an unattractive person. I think my liver hurts." He is like a low-grade slug using his body as bait to attract viewers. He watches their reactions and flirts with them.
Such an unpleasant person belongs to Notes from the Underground. Meanwhile, the first chapter of the work is devoted to a controversy with "reasonable egoism."
"Reasonable egoism" is the ideology he sang in his utopian novel What Is To Be Done? N. G. Chernyshevsky is the ruler of the thoughts of the progressives of the sixties. The essence of this doctrine is as follows.
Although a person acts unconsciously, he still strives to behave in such a way as to ensure his own interests and benefits; therefore, what is condemned as selfishness actually corresponds to human nature; if all people act in accordance with their true interests, this will lead to the development of each person, to his recognition of the interests of other people and to their development, and thus the interests of all people will be mutually considered.
In general, this is quite an optimistic view of a person. We can say that this is a manifestation of Darwinism in its idealistic version.
The hero of Notes from the Underground, clinging to the arguments of the unnamed but implied Chernyshevsky, enters into an argument with him. He asks: does a person really live in accordance with pragmatic considerations? Everyone says that two and two is true, but if everything is calculated in a person and he has no choice, then it is better to go crazy. To understand that something is unprofitable, and to consciously make a disadvantageous choice - this is what the human ...
However, the main theme of the story is clarified in the revelations of the author, which he tells us in the second part of Notes from the Underground. The hero talks about the love incident that happened to him when he was twenty-four years old.
The hero then served in one institution, he had no friends there, former classmates did not communicate with him, he had no one to talk to, and he suffered from loneliness. In any society, he turned out to be a stranger.
And then suddenly the hero receives the sympathy of a young and ingenuous prostitute named Lisa. Between them there is a sincere and ardent love feeling. It seems to the hero that he finally managed to live up to that moment of beautiful and high love, which he had dreamed of for so long. It always seemed to him that no one loves him, that he will never have a cordial friend, but now visions of a warm and comfortable life are opening before him.
However, when Lisa comes to the hero to announce that she wants to share her fate with him, for some reason he becomes very annoyed. And now he perceives Lisa's love as a burden, their relationship becomes painful, and swearing breaks from his lips, unexpectedly for him. Lisa has no choice but to silently leave.
As in "Weak Heart", here we meet with the motive of fear of one's own happiness. When the desired love and marriage are so close, when dreams are ready to come true, in a strange way the hero has a fear of the possibility of realizing his dreams, and he, unable to cope with the horror, refuses his happiness.
What is the nature of this fear? Why, when love is so close to being realized, does the hero fall upon Lisa with curses? In Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky explains to us that the reason lies in the hero's unaccustomed to "living life", and this makes coexistence with Lisa painful. “It was just unbearably hard for me that she was here. I wanted her to disappear. "Calm" I wished to remain alone in the underground wished. "Living life" unaccustomedly crushed me to the point that it became difficult to even breathe.
Dostoevsky distinguished between people with "living life" and people with "dead life". People with "dead life" are miscarriages in cold and gloomy solitude. They are unable to cry or laugh with others. They cannot be sincere and talk to others as equals. These stillborn miscarriages are jealous of the owners of "living life", they passionately desire to approach them, but the dead bonds do not let them go, and they are not able to break them. This is exactly what the hero of Notes from the Underground is like: he is accustomed to a “dead life”, in which he feels “calm”.
The man who forgave Lisa dreamed of beautiful love, but he is a spiritual impotent who cannot cope with it. He has no choice but to recognize what his true nature is.
It may seem to the reader of the first part of Notes from the Underground that Dostoevsky, trying to bring out a “strange” character (like Devushkin and Golyadkin), the writer, attracted by journalistic enthusiasm, deviates from the topic and wastes his heat on polemics with Chernyshevsky. But this is a misleading impression.
In a footnote to the first part of "Notes from the Underground" - "Underground" - Dostoevsky argues that "persons such as the writer of such notes not only can, but even must exist in our society." By this, Fyodor Mikhailovich wants to say that with the help of such theories as “reasonable egoism”, it is impossible to understand the person of “our society”, that the “modern” person has turned into a “stillborn” person - and this must be recognized.
In his letter to N.N. Strakhov (dated March 18, 1869), Dostoevsky, explaining the idea of Notes from the Underground and The Eternal Husband, admitted that “it is completely different in form, although the essence is the same, my eternal essence.”
The hero of The Eternal Husband, Trusotsky, is filled with lofty dreams of friendship that will bind all people, but in fact he is an enslaved nature, he is completely subordinate to his despotic wife, without whose order he cannot take a step. When buying gifts, he cannot make a choice, he needs someone strong to make this choice for him. Being henpecked for him is a joy, only in this state can he find peace. His wife changes lovers one by one, and he is ready to serve even them devotedly. But then the wife suddenly dies, and he marries again, but his choice again falls on a woman with the same despotic character, he obeys her. She also takes a lover, and he is still ready to serve both of them with joy. His quiet destiny is to be the eternal friend of his wife's lovers.
Both the hero of Notes from the Underground and Trusotsky dream of love and friendship connecting people, but neither of them is able to build relationships based on the principle of equality. These people are not capable of becoming heroes, winners, successful and happy people. They find themselves and their peace of mind only when they are on the sidelines, being sufferers, defeatists, losers, in a word, “stillborn”. For some reason, it is unbearable for them to be heroes and winners; they are not capable of living in this capacity.
To wish for happiness and fear it... To admire the strong and remain weak... To bow before "living life", but not be able to endure it... These are the people who are the core of Dostoevsky's creativity. This is his "permanent essence", a theme that he developed throughout his life.
Doesn't this mean that in Dostoevsky's own soul there was a feeling that he shouldn't be happy, that fear of this happiness lived in him too?
