Notes from UndergroundFyodor Dostoyevsky
About Notes from Underground
Dostoyevsky's , published in 1864 in the journal Epoch, is a short novel in two parts. Part One, "Underground," is a monologue by a retired St. Petersburg clerk who refuses every consolation of the progressive age. Part Two, "Apropos of the Wet Snow," recounts episodes from his earlier life: a petty clash with an officer, a disastrous dinner with old schoolfellows, and a night with the prostitute Liza that ends in cruelty and shame.
The Underground Man attacks the idea that human beings will act rationally once their true interests are known. He answers the utopian confidence of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? and the image of the Crystal Palace. Reason does not rule. People will reject the finished, rational building, he insists, simply to prove they are free. Two times two is four is a stone wall; the will may spit on the wall for no better reason than that it is a wall. Inertia, spite, and the pleasure of humiliation are facts his opponents' systems leave out.
The book prepares the ground for and . It is the tradition's fiercest modern statement that will and liberty cannot be reduced to calculation, and that a soul cut off from love will theorize its own sickness with terrible clarity.