Dostoevsky (93 page)

The opening pages of the second part recall the beginning of the first. The conflict between the impulse to dominate and the desire to enter into a more amicable relation with others was not developed at all earlier, but it now comes to the fore and provides a more intimate background to the relative abstractions of Part I. The underground man, consumed by boundless vanity, is so acutely self-conscious that he cannot enter into normal social relations with anyone: “All my fellow clerks I, of course, hated from first to last, and I despised them all, and yet at the same time I was, as it were, afraid of them. . . . Somehow it then turned out this way quite suddenly: one moment I despised them, the next I placed them much above me” (5: 125). The underground man’s vanity convinces him of his own superiority and he despises everyone, but since he desires such superiority to be
recognized
by others, he hates the world for its indifference and falls into self-loathing at his own humiliating dependence. This is the psychological dialectic of a self-conscious egoism that seeks to conquer recognition from the world and only arouses dislike and hostility in return. Such a dialectic of vanity parallels the dialectic of determinism in the first part and has the same effect of immuring the ego in a world alienated from any human contact. Just as determinism dissolves the possibility of human response in the first part, so vanity blocks all social fraternity in the second.

Besides portraying this dialectic of vanity in action, Dostoevsky also traces it back to the general cultural atmosphere of the 1840s, which fostered a forced and artificial Romantic egoism and a sense of superiority to ordinary Russian life that the underground man absorbed through every pore. Indeed, what distinguishes him from the very earliest years is his marked intellectual prowess. “Moreover, they [his school fellows] all began to grasp slowly,” he writes, “that I was already reading books none of them could read, and understood things . . . of which they had not even heard.” Describing his later life, he says: “at home I spent most of my time reading. . . . I tried to stifle all that was continually seething
within me by . . . reading. Reading, of course, was a great help” (5: 140, 127). Books are thus responsible for keeping the
real
feelings of the underground man bottled up—the feelings opposed to his vanity and desire to dominate. Books interpose a network of acquired and artificial responses between himself and other people, and, since we are in the world of the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, these books could only have been the works of the French Utopian Socialists and the Social Romantics and their Russian disciples on which Dostoevsky himself had then battened.

Over and over again Dostoevsky stresses the connection between the dialectic of vanity in which the underground man is caught and his intellectual culture. “A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain,” he remarks, “without setting an inordinately high standard for himself, and without despising himself at certain moments to the point of hatred.” Comparing his features with those of other clerks in his office, he thinks, “Let my face even be ugly . . . but let it be noble, expressive, and, above all,
extremely
intelligent” (5: 125, 124). As a result of imbibing the European culture popular in Russia in the 1840s, the underground man has lost any capacity for simple and direct human feeling in relation to others. Instead, his vanity and sense of self-importance have become inflated to a degree out of all proportion to his actual social situation, and the conflicts engendered by this discrepancy provide a comic analogue to the fratricidal war of all against all arising in Western European society from the dominance of the principle of egoistic individualism.

Dostoevsky is a master at portraying the psychology of pride and humiliation, and when the humiliation springs from some genuine oppression or suffering, he knows how to make it intensely moving, but it would be a flagrant misreading to take the underground man as such a victim. For he lives in a purely imaginary world and distorts and exaggerates everything with which he comes into contact. “It is perfectly clear to me now,” he says, “that, owing to my unbounded vanity and, probably, to the high standard I set for myself, I very often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same view to everyone” (5: 141).

Even if his humiliations are entirely self-caused, their effect on him is no less distressing. His inability to enter into human contact with other people plunges him into a savage isolation, and he is acutely aware that his behavior is debasing and degrading: “I indulged my vice in solitude at night, furtively, timidly, filthily, with a feeling of shame that never deserted me, even at the most loathsome moments, and which at such moments drove me to curses. Even then I already had the underground in my soul” (5: 128). The reference to vice at this point foreshadows the all-important Liza episode, but in these earlier chapters, filled with comic grotesquerie, the emphasis falls on the underground man’s efforts to break out of his solitude through purely social (rather than sexual) intercourse.

All these episodes display the torments of the underground man as he attempts to assert his existence as an ego who desires above all that someone—anyone—recognize him in a fashion compatible with his absurdly inflated self-image. It is for this reason that he becomes involved in the slapstick, mock-heroic farce of trying to summon up enough courage to bump into an officer on the Nevsky Prospect. His preoccupation with this ridiculous problem merely illustrates the picayune obsessiveness of his vanity; but the episode is also a parody of an incident in
What Is To Be Done?
One of the heroes of that book takes a solemn resolution not to yield the right of way in the street to “dignitaries,” and when an outraged gentleman begins to berate the poorly dressed student for bumping into
him
, the dignitary promptly ends up with his face in the mud.

Ironically reversing the scale of values manifested by this democratic protest against the public humiliations of inequality, Dostoevsky depicts the frantic desire of the underground man to assert his “equality” as ludicrous vanity rather than staunchly independent self-respect. The parody of Chernyshevsky is coupled with an allusion to Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” which Dostoevsky slips in at the point where the underground man, feverishly preparing the proper costume for his epical encounter, decides to replace the hideous raccoon collar on his overcoat with a more dignified one of beaver. Not only does this detail thicken the period atmosphere (Gogol’s story was published in 1842), it also enriches the ideological implications of the incident, since Gogol’s work provided the initial inspiration for the philanthropic thematics of the Natural School of young writers to which Dostoevsky had once belonged.

The theme of masochism, so prominent in Part I, reappears again in this first chapter of the second part. For as he walks along the Nevsky Prospect, the underground man experiences “a regular martyrdom, a continual, intolerable humiliation at the thought, which passed into an incessant and direct sensation, that I was a fly in the eyes of this whole world, a nasty, disgusting fly—more intelligent, more cultured, more noble than any of them, of course, but a fly that was continually making way for everyone, insulted and humiliated by everyone. . . . Already then I began to experience a rush of the enjoyment of which I spoke in the first chapter [of the first part]” (5: 130). Once again, however, we must be careful not to take this psychological characterization as self-explanatory. The underground man’s masochism is a part of the dialectic of vanity, and it has a more complex function than merely to illustrate a taste for self-abasement.

Masochism is assigned much the same function in both parts of the work—just as it had led to suffering in
Part II
it also acquires a positive significance. The seemingly pathological cultivation of masochistic “enjoyment” by the underground man ultimately buttresses his ego, which refuses to submit docilely to the judgment of the world. Such self-assertion is precisely what enables the underground man, twenty years
later, to resist the temptations of a Crystal Palace in which the laws of nature have simply abolished the human personality altogether. Hence, in both parts of the work, Dostoevsky assigns a
relative
value—the value of protecting the autonomy of the personality—to the ideology of the 1840s, regardless of its weaknesses and shortcomings in other respects.

Chapter 2
of
Part II
finally brings into relief the true target of Dostoevsky’s satire. At last we discover—of course, in the form of a carefully distorted caricature—what the underground man has been reading in the books that have shaped his vision. For here he takes on the features of the Romantic dreamer whom Dostoevsky had depicted in his early works and whose literary fantasies had been contrasted with the moral-social claims of “real life” from which he had taken refuge. In the second part of
Notes from Underground
, the dreamer is manhandled very harshly indeed. He is no longer a purely literary Romantic lost in exotic fantasies of erotic gratification and artistic glory, as in Dostoevsky’s pre-Siberian works; he has become a Social Romantic filled with grandiose plans for transforming the world. But his new social mission has not succeeded in altering the dreamer’s endemic self-preoccupation, and his failure to meet the moral demands of real life becomes all the more unforgivable in view of the social conscience by which he believes himself to be inspired.

In this chapter, we observe what occurs when, exhausted by the seesaws of the dialectic of vanity, the underground man has recourse “to a means of escape that reconciled everything,” that is, when he finds “a refuge in ‘the sublime and the beautiful,’ in dreams”:

During such delightful interludes, the underground man felt “that suddenly a vista of suitable activity—the beneficial, good, and above all
ready-made
(what sort of activity I had no idea, but the great thing was that it should all be ready for me)—would rise up before me, and I should come into the light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel.” These dreams, of course, replace any actual moral effort on his part; even more, they stifle any awareness that such effort could exist otherwise than in hackneyed, “ready-made” forms. At such moments the underground man felt an overwhelming love for humanity, and, “though it was never applied to anything human in reality, yet there was so much of this love that afterward one did not even feel the impulse to apply it in reality; that would have been a superfluous luxury.” Also, these lofty visions of magnanimity happily served as a sop to the stirrings of conscience, because to “an ordinary man, say, it is shameful to defile himself . . . [while] a hero is too noble to be utterly defiled, and so he is permitted to defile himself.” The underground man, as he himself remarks, “had a noble loophole for everything” (5: 133).

Yet he cannot long remain content with these delectations of his solitude; inevitably he feels the need to exhibit them (and himself) to the admiring eyes of humanity. After three months of dreaming, his dreams invariably “reached such a state of bliss that it became essential to embrace my fellows and all mankind immediately. And for that purpose I needed one human being at hand who actually existed” (5: 134). These words prelude the grotesquely amusing episode (
Chapters 3
and 4) relating the encounter of the underground man with his old schoolfellows. The moment he catches sight of real people, of course, the underground man’s exorbitant demands for esteem invariably lead to a rebuff. Only too ready to embrace mankind, he discovers that mankind would rather shake hands and keep a polite distance; and this rejection brings on the dialectics of vanity, with its accompanying duel for domination. The surrealistic comedy of the underground man’s meeting with his erstwhile comrades derives from his hopeless yet irresistible impulse to “subjugate them all.” After forcing himself on their friendly little party, he insults Zverkov, the guest of honor, simply out of resentment and envy, and then parades up and down the room for three solid hours while the others disregard him entirely and continue their festivities.

The whole group of celebrating schoolfellows eventually departs for a brothel to finish off the evening, leaving the underground man in solitary possession of the debris of the feast. By this time, he has gotten it into his head that only a duel will satisfy his injured honor—and besides, a duel can be the occasion for all sorts of noble reconciliations! “Either they’ll all fall down on their knees to beg for my friendship—or I will give Zverkov a slap in the face!” (5: 148). The mention of a duel at once unleashes a flood of literary references (Russian literature
is filled with famous duels), and the underground man pursues his companions in a mood that parodies Pushkin’s story “The Shot.”

Imagining what might happen if he carries out his plan to insult Zverkov, the underground man muses: