Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

Why I Picked It Up

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Dostoevsky (Dostoyevsky) is my most "performative" read alongside McCarthy, indicating that there is a stubborn pride within me determined to be seen at my full intellectual capacity. Despite me thinking that derision towards genre is frankly bullshit, I still ended up down the rabbit hole of older literary fiction—partly because during [redacted book process], I knew reading contemporary books would make me overthink how my own manuscript held up to industry patterns. One day, I looked up and I was in the middle of The Idiot, Notes from Underground, and Crime and Punishment?

I have thoughts on each so far, but Notes is the one I finished most recently and can therefore critique. It's a funky read, both in format and emotion, and I do think people read it with a generosity they wouldn't necessarily give to the same book if the author name were anonymous. But such is history and the lit scene, my friends.

About 'Notes from Underground'

Overall, the main character (antihero) of Notes is meant to be the kind of guy causing his own problems—who tanks his social connections and can't entirely see it because he's so angry over his isolation.

The first half of the book is a scattering of various lines and musings (conversational, overwhelming, considered) while the second details the narrator poor, frustrated, and fumbling in his interactions.

Some of his misfortune is bad luck, sure, but some of it's him deflecting responsibility for his own feelings and reactions. In the first half of the book, I liked him musing about suffering and consciousness, giving someone a way out of their self-pity, and the "beautiful and lofty."

I think a lot about studies showing that defensiveness and pride are basically the emotional states that completely stop, neurologically, the processes of listening required to feel like you're connected with others. (See: You're Not Listening, The Love Prescription, Why We Click, etc.)

It's not that everyone is lonely so much as that everyone is talking over each other, and the cycle is vicious. Basically, as soon as you've gotten defensive or wrapped up in your own ego, you've lost the ability to actually meet someone on the level you need to click. And working against defensiveness has to be a conscious choice, because at first you will absorb the perceived ego hit.

In the second half of the novella, where the plot really begins, the character starts by nursing his hurt and frustration from growing up on the outskirts and essentially insulates himself by becoming as well-read and well-studied as he possibly can. That feeds a sense of superiority over others, so that when they exclude him, he can console himself with thoughts that he is so much better than everyone he was encountering. The pendulum swings from desperation for their approval to resentment and hatred both of them and of himself, believing others have nefarious—or at least, ungenerous—intentions. But because he lives inside his own head so entirely, nobody can touch him or reach him even as he creates his own suffering.

“So much have we lost touch with 'real life' that we occasionally feel a kind of disgust for it and so can't bear to be reminded of it. For we have arrived at the point where we look on 'real life' as toil, almost as compulsory service, and all of us privately agree that 'life' as we find it in book is better.”

When he missteps or lashes out in cruelty, he then spirals in shame which then feeds the need to only go between these two extremes: "I need them to notice me and care about me in the way I fantasize about" to "I'm so much better than everyone that I'm going to barricade myself away from all of them or tell them how terrible and shitty they are because they made me feel this way." The underground man doesn't take responsibility for himself or his feelings, but instead blames others.

Those he encounters are not angelic either (there was a flash of familiarity many might recognize in the friends-who-aren't-really-friends anecdotes of when you're trying to worm your way into a group that really doesn't care about you), but it's not their fault that his reactions and behavior to the unevenness of that dynamic exacerbate their desire to avoid him too.

The dynamic of still wanting is baffling in its immaturity but undeniably human; his desperation for approval becomes more about proving he hadn't fucked up previously than about actual connection, but the underground man doesn't recognize that he's acting like an ostracized teenager in that way. Scoffing at socialization entirely (defensively, again) is still structuring your life around others' approval, just rejecting them before they can reject you.

It can be exhausting to be so fixated on warped dynamics like the dinner party depicted here, and the narrator's clearly backed himself in a corner. So I have grace, despite flinching. His method is not a very pleasant way of living (although ideally something you grow out of eventually) and the novella emphasizes his loneliness even when he doesn't admit it to himself.

“In every man’s memories there are such things as he will reveal not to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also such as he will reveal not even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. Then, finally, there are such as a man is afraid to reveal even to himself, and every decent man will have accumulated quite a few things of this sort.”

There's some odd humor in his need for validation or superiority too (beyond this tendency which I recognize from having been a teenage girl at one point.) For example, one of the anecdotes in the second half of the novella involves Dostoevsky writing pages about playing chicken with a specific guy in the streets. Others always swerved for him, and the narrator psychs himself up for pages and pages to not swerve, because this will prove to him that they are equals. He's obsessive; the other guy is just walking.

And then when he's talking with others, he gets so much pleasure from ironing out his ideas in front of them and feeling smart that he really does not give a damn about what the conversation does or whether he feels connected to someone—which is where he goes wrong. He'd rather talk at someone than to them.

Notes from Underground depicts the locked away, repressed, separate, and there's a reason we're largely meant to be social creatures. Despite my own emphasis on independence and self-sufficiency, we do ultimately need to feel like others see us and vice versa, and need the humility to be able to accept that in combination.

Within the voice, there's a fundamental paranoia and distrust below each line of the work, and the narrator's fear of judgement is blatantly obvious. He's pretty damn cruel and self-important, and maybe some of that's innate beyond what's caused by his initial social impressions. He feels everything far too deeply, and takes it all as a slight, so then he lashes out in response. Later, he wallows and hates himself for all of it, which is often deeply painful and bitter. (I think a lot about assuming others' intentions and how we misstep in that regard.)

“It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.”

For that reason, the book is a good read because you can analyze the hurt on both sides of the equation. There's what you feel about another person, and then there's taking responsibility for your role in that emotion's construction i.e. what you're projecting. There are multiple instances of the narrator taking a small instance as a reason to spiral and go dark, versus maintaining the peace by letting it go. Suspicion can be self-fulfilling prophecy.

As an optimist, I'd like to think that conflict like this could be smoothed out if someone were tough enough to let the waves and spirals break over them for long enough without offense. It's a tricky balance in that you shouldn't take verbal abuse and you should want to spend time with people who make you feel good, but I do think sometimes characters like this prove the necessity of letting someone unravel their own self-sabotage within a negative feedback loop. Basically (as corny as it sounds), it takes a lot of strength to let someone treat you as weak and to know that's not true, but the patience of letting them run out their defense mechanisms might be all that interrupts the loops. (Of course, there's a line.)

There's some learned toxicity built up in sheer isolationism, but it started with feeling cut off from others in the first place and learning to double down on that as a fundamental point of identity. Dostoevsky's underground man thinks he's wired the same forever, which is why he perpetuates his situation.

“It was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.”

A pillar like that's not just going to disappear overnight, but I don't think he's automatically doomed, so this is where I diverge from any fatalism in the novella. He can react differently at any point, and his curse is just that he refuses to admit he has the choice to.

And then again, I've always loved Flannery O'Connor's definition of a "moment of grace" being something almost violent because it changes your worldview in a way that upsets your natural desire for the status quo. "The devil you know" and all that. I think Dostoevsky would agree with considering his views on masochism and autonomy.

“Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn't count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he'd see that there's enough of both lots for him.”

The book has the same bleak loneliness I feel from writers like John Kaag and David Foster Wallace—like they're just going in circles and circles that trap them in the inevitability of solitude that's no longer a choice.

Apologies to the men out there if I'm making Dostoevsky sound too "soft" (lol.) I might just always believe in redemption and active choice. Maybe that makes me a pushover, but I'll probably always be gentle about a book that deals with fundamental loneliness and a belief there's no way out of that. (I love neuroplasticity.)

Patterns are definitely worth considering, and the discipline of emotional evenness is important to cultivate beyond the easy out of blaming others for your feelings. But Dostoevsky addresses the paradoxical awareness of this misery too—how man, in his view, would rather make a choice that makes him miserable (but fully autonomous) rather than feel that he had in any way compromised with another person for his happiness. The key is the shift in viewing compromise as necessary for love of any kind, which is a lot to ask from someone who's convinced himself that others must always be the problem and he is forever separate from them.

“What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and whatever it may lead.”

“...if it were even proved to him mathematically and by natural science, he would still not come to reason, but would do something contrary on purpose, solely out of ingratitude alone; essentially to have his own way.”

Each of the writers I mention go to extremes from the "I can't see anybody else beyond me" to the "I feel so bad and lonely and trapped I want to die" which invite questions about how to reintroduce interdependence and co-regulation when you've walled yourself off for so long from others as a viable source of homeostasis.

Of course defensiveness is going to bubble up first when you try to pierce that, and I feel like the trap of that instinct is what the novella speaks to most.

In that sense, it's a book about the mechanics of isolation and how it can be self-perpetuating once you get paranoid about the viability of connecting at all. Which is, in itself, a valuable conversation even if you find the story and its emotions to be hard to read. The particular strength of self-sabotage.

Lines & Bits That Struck Me

“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”

“But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.”

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.”

“Achieving he likes, but having achieved he does not quite like, and that, of course, is terribly funny.”

“Is it possible to be perfectly candid with oneself and not be afraid of the whole truth?”

For fans of:

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami; Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (and yes, there's literally an essay on Dostoevsky in it); Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (I'm liking it on audio); American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag; Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes; etc.

If perhaps the thoughts feel familiar, I'd recommend East of Eden for a look at how we carry shame, and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger for catching yourself on your own spirals.