Yeraltından Notlar (Notes from Underground)

Careful: this gives away the plot and the ending of the book.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote this short novel in 1864. It was published between January and April in Epoch, a magazine that came out in Petersburg. Its original Russian title is Zapiski iz podpolya, in English Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky was forty-two. Fifteen years earlier, in 1849, he had been arrested for joining a socialist reading circle, had served out penal labor and military service in Siberia, and had returned to Petersburg in 1859. After his return he was publishing a magazine together with his brother.

The book is made up of two parts. The first is called "Underground". The title of the second mentions wet snow. The narrator has no name. He is forty, a retired civil servant living in a gloomy corner of Petersburg. When a distant relative left him six thousand rubles, he quit his job.

In Turkish there are editions from a great many publishers. The editions listed on Kitapyurdu range from roughly 120 to 212 pages. I could not verify a particular translation or translator, so I am writing it under its original title. When describing the sections, I checked them against the public domain English text on Project Gutenberg (Constance Garnett's translation). The section titles and numbers in the edition you have may be slightly different.

An answer to whom

Dostoevsky put a short note at the beginning of the book. He says the narrator is fictional, but that given the conditions of the society we live in, it is inevitable that people like him exist. So this man is not a hero but an example.

Context matters. In 1860s Russia, young intellectuals believed in reason, in science and in the idea of "enlightened self-interest". If a person correctly calculates what is to his own advantage, he will act rightly; science will build society flawlessly; reason will make everyone happy. Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel (in English What Is to Be Done?) was the literary banner of this view. Yeraltından Notlar (Notes from Underground) is read as an answer to it.

The answer is not a counter-theory but a person: a man who trusted reason too much and locked himself in because of it. Dostoevsky tears down the framework of reason from the inside.

Inside the pages: part one

Part one consists of eleven short sections, and almost nothing happens in it. The narrator talks.

The opening sentence is one of the best known in literature: "I am a sick man." Right after it he says his liver is diseased, but out of sheer spite he refuses to see a doctor. In the first section he introduces himself: he tells how, as a civil servant, he took pleasure in being nasty to petitioners, then adds that in fact he never managed to be wicked at all. This man takes back what he says on the very first page.

In sections two through four, the center of the book is set up. According to the narrator, being too conscious is a disease. He sees everything, weighs everything, and therefore can do nothing. He even draws a kind of sweetness from being overly aware of his own humiliation. He describes the moaning of a man with a toothache: the point of that moaning is to make the whole household hear the pain, and there is a malicious pleasure in it. Against himself he sets the "man of action" who acts directly, the man who stops when he meets a stone wall. He himself is a mouse, a mouse nursing its anger in its hole for years.

Sections five and six are about inertia. A person who thinks too much cannot decide on anything. The narrator even uses this as a cover for his own laziness, and he knows it.

From the seventh to the ninth section, the philosophical heart of the book beats. Why do people not always act in their own interest? The narrator's answer: sometimes the greatest advantage is being able to choose as you please. He imagines someone who would reduce human will to a formula and says that formula would turn people into piano keys. Twice two makes four is, for him, a wall: it may be true, but it leaves no choice. At one point he says that twice two makes five can sometimes be appealing too.

In the tenth section he comes out against the Crystal Palace, the symbol of a society built by reason. A person may prefer his unfulfilled desires to a compromise. In the last section he announces that he will withdraw into his hole underground, then confesses that he himself believes none of what he has said. Then he moves on to a memory. It is wet snow that brings that memory back.

Inside the pages: part two

Part two is ten short sections. It is the theory of part one acted out on stage.

First, the officer. For years the narrator carries inside him an officer who humiliated him in a tavern. Finally he decides to bump into him, shoulder to shoulder, on Nevsky Prospect. He even arranges a new coat for the occasion. He bumps into him, and the officer does not seem to notice. The narrator still thinks he has proved his equality.

Then the dinner. He gets himself invited to the farewell dinner for his old schoolmate Zverkov. The time has been changed, he arrives early and is humiliated while he waits. His schoolmates look down on him; he drinks, raises a toast and insults everyone, and challenges Ferfichkin to a duel. Nobody takes him seriously, and the group goes off to a brothel. The narrator follows them and there he meets Liza.

As the night wears on, he talks with Liza. He tells her what kind of life she is leading and what will become of her later on; he lectures her. Liza cries. The narrator is pleased with himself. He gives her his address and immediately regrets it: if Liza comes to his home, she will see his shabby room.

The final sections are, I think, the best-written collapse in the book. The narrator dreads Liza's coming and at the same time waits for her. He gets into an absurd power struggle with his servant Apollon. Liza arrives right in the middle of that fight. The narrator confesses in tears: he gave the lecture not out of love but because he wanted to establish power over her. Liza embraces him. In return the narrator once again tries to establish his superiority over her, and admits that he knows no way of loving other than domination. As Liza is leaving, the narrator, for the sake of cruelty, secretly presses money into her palm. Then, full of remorse, he runs after her through the snow, stops, and does not know what he would do if he caught up with her. When he gets back home, he finds the money on the table. He never sees Liza again.

In the last pages the narrator turns to people in general: he says people have broken away from real life, taken refuge in books instead of living, that all of us are in a way stillborn. You do not have to take this claim seriously, but it gives the book its tone, and it is not hard to see how self-pitying that tone is.

The book ends with the narrator describing what he has written as a punishment rather than literature, and with an editor's note: the notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, but it is enough to stop here.

Its greatest strengths

To me the book's first strength is that it shows how a voice talking to itself is built. The narrator corrects himself in every sentence, anticipates the reader's reaction and answers it in advance. That is why Mikhail Bakhtin read the book as an inner dispute, a voice always answering an "other". One moment you find the narrator right; a page later he has done something to be ashamed of.

Second, its brevity. In a book of around a hundred and fifty pages, the ideas of the great novels stand bare. Suç ve Ceza (Crime and Punishment) came out two years later. Raskolnikov building a theory and then being unable to bear it is, to my mind, the continuation of something that begins here.

Third, the critique of the Crystal Palace. Gary Saul Morson considers the book the single most important source of modern dystopia. If you have read Cesur Yeni Dünya (Brave New World), you will find here the root of the unease you feel toward a comfortably built world. Nietzsche is said to have read this book in French, and its influence reaches all the way to Kafka and Ellison.

Weaknesses and debates

Part one is hard. It is an abstract, ironic monologue that keeps turning back on itself. In the first pages the reader cannot make out what the narrator is defending, because the narrator cannot make it out either. Putting the book down at that point is an understandable reaction. As someone who studied philosophy at ODTÜ (Middle East Technical University), I think this part is less an argument than a record of a state of mind. Read as an argument, it disappoints.

The second problem is one of interpretation. The book is sometimes read as a manifesto of freedom. Dostoevsky's own note points the other way: the narrator is an example, a warning. A good reading is one that can separate what the narrator sees correctly from what he does wrong. Critics such as James Scanlan read the book as a polemic against the idea of rational egoism. Nabokov, for his part, discussed the balance between Dostoevsky's artistry and his closeness to crime reporting.

Third, Liza. I think she is the only real warmth in the book, but her own voice is barely heard. We see everything from the narrator's point of view. This may be a deliberate choice, or it may be a shortcoming. I am not sure.

Fourth, translation. In English there are many translations, from Garnett to Pevear and Volokhonsky to Natasha Randall. In Turkish, too, there are dozens of editions. In a book where the voice stands out this much, the choice of translation can make the book bearable or unbearable.

Who it is for, who it is not for

A good door for the reader who wants to start on Dostoevsky but shies away from the eight hundred pages of Suç ve Ceza. It is short, but it is not easy.

Each section ends within itself. It suits reading section by section and can be spread out over several days.

It is not for the reader looking for a calm, warm, comforting book. Those expecting to feel sympathy for the narrator may also be disappointed.

A separate note for readers with ADHD. This is not an ADHD book, and I would not try to diagnose the narrator. But some mechanisms may feel familiar: analysis paralysis, not being able to do what you know, a scene of shame replayed in your head over and over. The narrator's shame shows the opposite of what I described in the piece on shame and self-compassion: self-torment instead of self-compassion, and a pleasure drawn from it.

When you set up your reading routine, the ideas in the piece on why reading books is hard may come in handy. If I were you, I would not force my way through part one; I would read part two first, since it has more movement, and then go back to the first. This is not a rule, just a suggestion.

Its place on the shelf

On the site's philosophy and literature shelf, it connects to three places.

The first is Suç ve Ceza. The underground man carries the ideas and the state of mind all on his own; Raskolnikov lives the same thing inside the act and its consequences. It is possible to read this book as a preface to that one.

The second is Sisifos Söyleni (The Myth of Sisyphus). Camus accepts the absurd and counsels revolt. The underground man rebels too, but nothing comes of it. Reading the two books back to back helps you see in which situations revolt is a stance and in which it is an excuse. The page I wrote in the diary on akrasia is also a neighbor to the same question.

The third is Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected). Oğuz Atay's lonely, clever, maladjusted men are, to my mind, the Turkish branch of the same family as Dostoevsky's underground man.

Where I stand

I do not feel sympathy for the narrator. Recognizing him is more disturbing than sympathy. Dostoevsky does not give him a way out either: the man who comes out of the underground goes back into it in a worse state. What the book left in me is not the ideas it defends but the money Liza left on the table. However brilliant a thought may be, what you do to a person is what puts it to the test.