Notes from Underground Summary: Dostoevsky's Confession from the Cellar
What it is about
Notes from Underground is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in the journal Epoch in 1864. Dostoevsky originally announced it under the title "A Confession", and that word fits. The book is written in the first person by a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living in St Petersburg. Critics call him the Underground Man.
The book comes in two parts. The first, titled "Underground", is a monologue in eleven sections. The narrator picks at himself and at his reader in turn. He talks about suffering and the strange pleasure people take in it. He talks about inertia, about his own inaction, about the way consciousness itself becomes a disease when there is nothing to do with it. He admits he would rather be inactive out of laziness than solve the problems that torment him.
Underneath the self-laceration is an argument. The Underground Man attacks the idea that human behaviour can be reduced to the laws of nature, science and mathematics. He takes aim at the rational egoism proposed by Nikolay Chernyshevsky in What Is to Be Done?, and at the Crystal Palace that stands in that book for a harmonious, engineered society. His objection is simple and hard to answer. A person can choose, at any moment, to act against their own interest. Some will do exactly that, purely to prove they exist as individuals rather than as the output of a formula. Two times two makes four, and the Underground Man resents it.
He also argues that a utopia which removes pain removes something people need. Take away suffering and you take away freedom. That is his claim, and he lives it badly.
The second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow", drops the abstraction and tells stories from his life. The title nods to the critic Pavel Annenkov, who said damp showers and wet snow were indispensable to Petersburg writers of the natural school. The epigraph comes from a Nekrasov poem about a woman driven to prostitution by poverty, cut off mid-quotation with "Etc., etc., etc."
The main characters
The Underground Man carries the whole book. He is forty-something, retired from the civil service, spiteful, clever and aware of it. Mikhail Bakhtin observed that in his confession there is not a single monologically firm, undissociated word. Every sentence anticipates how a reader will answer it, then argues with that answer in advance. He is never simply speaking. He is always already defending himself.
In Part Two the people around him come into focus. There is an officer who once insulted him in a pub and now walks past him in the street without seeming to see him at all. The Underground Man spends months plotting revenge, borrows money for an expensive overcoat, and engineers a collision on the pavement so that he can assert his equality. The officer appears not to notice. He celebrates anyway.
Then there are his old school friends, Zverkov among them, gathering for a farewell dinner. He hated them as a boy. He invites himself anyway. They give him the wrong time and he arrives an hour early. The evening ends with him declaring his hatred of society to their faces, using the four of them as a stand-in for all of it, and then following them to a brothel when they leave without him.
There he meets Liza, a young prostitute. The encounter with Liza, and what follows from it, closes the book.
The themes
Freedom is the central one, and Dostoevsky defines it awkwardly on purpose. Freedom here is not the freedom to flourish. It is the freedom to be perverse, to refuse, to want the wrong thing. The Underground Man thinks that any system which guarantees happiness has quietly abolished the person it was built for.
Identity runs alongside it. The narrator's spite is his proof of existence. Without it he is a function, a clerk, an object of other people's indifference. The officer who does not see him is the most wounding figure in the book.
Morality is the uncomfortable third. He is conscious of his own problems and feels the desire for revenge, but he does not find revenge virtuous. Knowing this does not stop him. He observes that society's cruelty makes people complain about their pain mainly in order to pass it on.
Why it still matters
The book is usually read as an attack on determinism, and it got there early. Long before the twentieth century made the argument fashionable, Dostoevsky put a voice on the page that refuses to be explained. Bakhtin built part of his theory of the novel on how that voice works. Writers and philosophers who came after have treated the Underground Man as a starting point for thinking about alienation, bad faith and the limits of rational planning.
It is also short, and ferociously readable in a way the big novels are not always. Anyone curious about Dostoevsky, about 1860s Russian debates over progress and reason, or about why intelligent people sabotage themselves, will find the whole argument here in miniature.
