Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Notes From Underground

Also by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

FICTION

Poor Folk

The Double: A Petersburg Poem

Netochka Nezvanova

Uncles Dream

The Village of Stepanchikovo

Humiliated and Insulted

The House of the Dead

Crime and Punishment

The Gambler

The Idiot

The Eternal Husband

Demons

The Adolescent

The Brothers Karamazov

SHORT STORIES

Mr. Prokharchin

Novel in Nine Letters

The Landlady

The Jealous Husband

A Weak Heart

Polzunkov

The Honest Thief

The Christmas Tree and a Wedding

White Nights

A Little Hero

A Nasty Anecdote

The Crocodile

Bobok

The Heavenly Christmas Tree

The Meek One

The Peasant Marey

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

PLAYS

The Jew Yankel (unknown whether finished or not)

ESSAYS

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

A Writers Diary

Complete Letters

This new translation first published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

www.canongate.tv

This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

Translation copyright Natasha Randall
Introduction copyright DBC Pierre

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85786 021 7
eISBN 978 0 85786 128 3

Typeset in Goudy by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

INTRODUCTION

But, it also seems to us that we may stop here.

Picture the human zoo as a nervous system. Artists and thinkers drift to the nerve-endings, seeking answers in the sparks of single filaments, feeding back flickers in which we see ourselves across the complex, because were connected, because even signals from the toes reflect us. Then a writer finds the brain-stem and sends ideas so central to who we are that they light the network at once and for ever.

That for me describes the scale of this little book.

I only want to spend a sentence on the story; youll be there in a page or two anyway. Have no fear of too many surnames in a Russian salon this is a bitter tirade by one spiteful ex-civil servant who snipes at the ideas of his time from a basement in St Petersburg. The Underground Man is bizarre, brilliant, tragic, unexpected our scholars will tell us hes the first modern anti-hero, an early first-person voice, Dostoyevskys first great work, the seed of later masterpieces. And all this is true, but heres the thing: within the concept of this disaffected man, and inside all his arguments, sits one stunning idea, one I feel is more relevant today than ever, one which not only made me sense a kindred spirit, but which licensed my humanity outright.

To even begin to introduce Notes from Underground I need to position air crashes and socks in your mind as extremes on the same spectrum. Ill sketch the spectrum like this: following the tragedy of September 2001, a decades-long inquiry was completed into human responses to mortal danger. Reports from the twin towers were combined with air-crash studies to show who we really are when the chips are down. And it turns out that eighty-five per cent of us, when faced with death unless we act, will do nothing. Others will panic uselessly. So thats extreme duress. At the other end of the spectrum extreme absence of duress is me finding socks. Which is to say, finding one, wandering around, leaving it behind, taking a shoe to find the other, returning with the sock but leaving the shoe behind. This is me, whose eyes only itch when theres something on my fingers which will hurt them. I dont say this is also you. But heres the point: there are enough of me around to ask which imbecile ever thought it a good idea to base social, political, and economic systems on the assumption that humans will act purposefully and correctly, even in their own best interests. Look around us, at economies, ideologies.

All have failed because their systems assume we will do the right thing.

This is the gift of Notes from Underground. Dostoyevsky dropped a pill into the middle of the nineteenth century and the thing is still fizzing: existentialism. The notion that history is not built from purposeful steps. That we might not be interested, obliged or even able to do the correct thing that we might not know what the correct thing is, or care.

That basically we might not end up wanting to do anything at all.

Why did the teenager cross the road? Because somebody told him not to. This is the essence of the Underground Man, running the other way just to prove his autonomous existence except that in this case the philosophies grew far beyond the remit of a novel. They became ideas that continue to change the world. Notes from Underground first appeared in Russia in 1864, in the middle of one of historys most fertile periods. Of course the author was speaking to his time, addressing the discourses around him, as youll see the Underground Man do in detail, but for me two things set the work apart from its time and pull it sharply into ours. The first is that Russian novels up to this point were concerned with action; they hung on what their characters did, while Dostoyevsky became concerned with motivation, with the curious machinations of the mind. He was a psychologist before psychology existed, and his observations were acute and universal. The second is the fact that the nineteenth-century themes addressed by the Underground Man are the seedlings of the themes of our day industrialism, utopianism, western markets, the grip of science and technology on truth and for me his arguments not only still apply but have new weight.

Still, all this thought is woven through the ramblings of an unpleasant and contradictory man, making it an artwork the Underground Man spends the first section of this short novel in bitter monologue from his basement, and the second part narrating the scenes which led to his seclusion, and which may underpin his ideas. I say may as he remains an unreliable narrator throughout. Only Dostoyevsky knew how much of the Underground Man was himself, but I can give you the clues I used to reconcile the author and his character.

I always felt a particular kinship with Dostoyevsky, perhaps from our having grown up in similar, walled compounds, having been warned not to explore outside alone, having ignored the warning and seen chaos, violence and cruelty first hand, and at a young age. Perhaps we were similarly addictive, rode similar roller coasters of fortune we both took a kicking for second novels, both threw everything at our first. He even declared What matters is that my novel should cover everything. If it does not work I will hang myself.

Whereas I would have driven off a cliff.

Its easy to see historical figures as one-dimensional icons, their lives as full of aplomb as quotes by Oscar Wilde. But Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was not this way, and I realise the coincidences above are not the cause of my feeling; rather the feeling is one you and I both might have, in sharing his weaknesses. He was a sensitive man, as sensitive as a synapse, and deeply affected by life. He was insecure, by turns aloof or withdrawn, and one thing he almost certainly shared with the Underground Man was torment while he wrote this book his wife lay dying, he was almost broke, having gambled his livelihood away, and his appeal as a writer was waning.