'Crime and Punishment' Dostoevsky

The candle-end had long since burned low in the twisted candlestick, dimly lighting the poverty-stricken room and the murderer and the harlot who had come together so strangely to read the eternal book.

Dostoevsky’s dark tale of murder and guilt has assumed for many readers the status of a religious parable, describing how a sinner finds redemption through faith in Christ. Crime and Punishment is the first of Dostoevsky’s novels to have an explicitly Christian message. However, if we place its Christian message within the context of the debates happening in the Russia of the time, in the context of Dostoevsky’s position in those debates, and in the context of Dostoevsky’s own Christianity, the book reveals itself as far more complex in its attitude to Christianity than a mere parable.

Dostoevsky’s Christianity

The first mention of Christianity in Dostoevsky’s writing comes in a famous letter written in 1854 to Fonvizina, a wife of one of the Decembrists. The letter was written when Dostoevsky had been just newly released from his four years in prison. The letter is a key document for understanding the development and style of Dostoevsky’s Christianity:

I have formulated my creed, wherein all is clear and holy to me. This creed is extremely simple; here is it is: I believe that there is nothing lovelier, deeper and more sympathetic, more rational, more manly and more perfect than the Saviour. I say to myself with jealous love that not only is there no one else like him, but that there could be no one. I would even say more. If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth did really exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ, and not with truth.

However, just before this statement of his creed, Dostoevsky writes:

I want to say this to you about myself, that I am a child of this age, a child of unfaith and scepticism, and probably (indeed I know it) shall remain so to the end of my life. How dreadfully it has tormented me (and torments me even now) this longing for faith which is all the stronger for the proofs I have against it….

Faith for Dostoevsky –at this time- was only intermittent, and the search for these intermittent moments of faith was tormenting, because they were against the grain and did not come easily. They were borne of suffering:

In such moments one does, like dry grass, thirst after faith, and that one finds it in the end solely and simply because one sees the truth more clearly when one is unhappy.

So we see a highly ambivalent attitude. On the one hand, rational scepticism, even atheism, and on the other a burning love for the person of Christ as a Saviour borne out of the need for solace in great suffering. This ambivalence is reflected all the way through Crime and Punishment. Christianity makes its appearance in the novel in eight different episodes. Each episode reflects the same tension between faith and unfaith as revealed in the letter to Fonvizina.

Christianity in Crime and Punishment I

First, is Marmeladov’s outburst in the pub, when he jumps to his feet in drunken ecstasy and begins to prosyletize, a garbled message covering the themes of affliction, mercy and forgiveness. There is a stunned silence, then raucous laughter and curses from the other drinkers: “There spoke the great intellect!” “What a load of rubbish!” “There’s a civil servant for you”, and so on. The second appearance is in Raskolnikov’s mother’s letter, in which she reveals herself as a devoutly religious woman. Her letter is full of the standard phrases of religiosity, and an admonishment to her son to pray. I fear that you too have become affected by the fashionable modern unbelief. If that is so, I will pray for you. Third, Raskolnikov on his way to commit the murder vacillates between doing it and not doing it. He prays to God to give him strength: “Lord, show me the way, that I may renounce this accursed fantasy of mine.". Later, he remembers, with superstitious awe, the moment as a conflation of circumstances which leads him irrevocably to the murder – the hand of God?

The fourth episode is the scene where Raskolnikov and Sonya read the gospel. Sonya is the first to broach the subject of God in their conversation, and Raskolnikov meets it with atheistic cruelty. “Perhaps God does not exist”, answered Raskolnikov with malicious enjoyment. He decides that it is her faith that sustains Sonya through her suffering. It is Raskolnikov who first suggests that Sonya read to him from the gospel, and he himself chooses the story of the raising of Lazarus. This choice is highly significant. First, it stands as sign for Raskolnikov’s remorse and regret at killing the innocent Lizaveta, whom he had not planned or intended to kill. He wishes she could walk again. Second, Lazarus’s return from the dead signifies Raskolnikov’s longing to return to human society. He has been existing in a kind of self-imposed isolation ever since the murder, separate from the rest of humanity, crushed by his loneliness, incapable of responding to the kindness shown to him by those who love him. Thirdly, the raising of Lazarus stands for the rebirth of Russia, or more specifically, for the rebirth of the Russian intelligentsia. Let’s pause here and look at this aspect of the symbol of Lazarus in more detail.

Interlude: Crime and Punishment and the debates of the 1860s

During the early 1860s Dostoevsky was engaged in a polemic between the Slavophile conservatives on the one hand, and the radical, rationalistic, nihilism of the Westernisers on the other. He was trying to steer a third way between them. He had spent the early part of the decade arguing for ‘a return to the soil’, an ambiguous term that covered a range of meanings, from the urgent call to land reform to a kind of mystical nationalism based on the values of the peasant and peasant religion, a call to unity for Russians of all classes and all political persuasions. As the decade wore on, he moved steadily to the right of the political spectrum, and to a belief that only the traditional values of Russian Orthodoxy could save Russia. This transition can be mapped out in the three published works of the early 1860s: Winter Notes on Summer Impression (1862), Notes from Underground (1864), and Crime and Punishment (1866).

Dostoevsky’s original intention for Notes from Underground, the novel immediately prior to Crime and Punishment, was to introduce Christianity into it, as an antidote to the poisonous dialectic between the underground man’s nihilism and the Westernisers’ rationalism, both of which Dostoevsky saw as dangerous for the Russian soul. However, his design was scuppered by the censor, who removed large chunks of part 1 chapter 10 in which Dostoevsky had hoped to cause the reader to deduce the need for faith and Christ, as he put it in a letter to his brother. These excisions on the part of the censor were never corrected by Dostoevsky in subsequent editions of his works, and this leaves Notes From Underground the last major work in the early part of Dostoevsky’s career where Christianity is absent.

In Crime and Punishment written two years later, Dostoevsky was much more upfront in his aim. The need for faith and Christ is not to be ‘deduced’, but is to be clearly understood, indeed is asserted at the levels of ideas, psychology, and plot. Crime and Punishment includes many of the same contemporary debates as Notes From Underground, and shares many of its same images and concerns.

➢ The debate about socialism, symbolised by the crystal palace, an image that appears also in Winter Notes, and in Notes from Underground. Here, it is (mockingly?) transformed into the name of the pub where Raskolnikov taunts the policeman. In a key scene where Raskolnikov, his friend Razhumikin, and the Examining Magistrate Porfiry discuss various topics, Razhumikin summarizes the socialists’ views on crime: crime is a protest against the unnatural structure of society… ‘the deleterious effect of the environment’. He criticises their hostility to history and their denial of nature: they do not like the living process of life, they have no use for the living soul. Dostoevsky, through the actions of the murderer Raskolnikov, and through the mouth of Razhumikin, is criticising the socialism of Chernyshevsky, and at the same time repudiating his own youthful enthusiasm for Western socialism.

➢ The motivations for Raskolnikov’s murder provide the occasion for many of the same arguments against the rational utilitarianism of the Westernisers that appear in Notes from Underground. Raskolnikov is a man motivated by a theory, largely of his own devising, but clearly an extension of the Westernisers notions of rational self- interest and utilitarianism. His theory consists of three elements. First: that a great man stands outside social norms, that he should not hesitate to grasp his destiny, even if it means killing someone who might stand in his way. Second: the greater good the great man will eventually accomplish will outweigh the lesser evils committed along the way. Third: that humanity is divided into two groups, those who are useful, and those who are not. From the first group, come the great men, while the second group provides the disposable and unimportant raw material on which great men may work. In the same scene, Porfiry, with ironically exaggerated politeness, raises the following objections to this theory: how do you distinguish the extraordinary people from the ordinary? Do signs and portents appear when they are born? I mean to say… couldn’t there be, for example, some special clothing, couldn’t they carry some kind of brand or something? Another objection Porfiry raises is, of course, that a person from the second group might mistakenly imagine himself to be a person from the first group and use this delusion as a justification for murder, which is exactly Raskolnikov’s story. (The cat and mouse games the all-knowing Porfiry plays with Raskolnikov in this scene is one of the great highpoints of suspense in the novel). Dostoevsky is keen to show in this debate the spiritual paucity and danger of such rational theories, and what they might mean if implemented.

➢ The planning and implementation of the murder allows Dostoevsky to examine the relationship between free will and chance, also one of the contemporary issues raised in Notes from Underground. In spite of his rehearsal and detailed planning, Raskolnikov makes several errors during the murder, and has to deal with several chance happenings – not least the sudden and unexpected appearance of Lizaveta. These are designed to show that the ‘ineluctable’ laws of nature are undone by the presence of both human error (irrationality) and coincidence. The novel abounds with coincidences. Raskolnikov’s encounter with Svidrigaliov just when he is thinking about him, the coincidental fact that most of the visitors to St. Petersburg are lodging in the same building. The city throws up other strange coincidences, such as the suicidal woman, and the mysterious apparition of the old man who hisses Murderer! at Raskolnikov in the street, one of the most truly terrifying episodes in 19th century Russian literature. Of course, these coincidences are part and parcel of any 19th century plot, but they are also perhaps traces of Gogolian magic.

It is the Examining Magistrate who, again, voices Dostoevsky’s concern that an exclusive reliance on Western rationalism may lead to the kind of actions that Raskolnikov commits.

This is an obscure and fantastic case, a contemporary case, something that could only happen in our day, when the heart of man has grown so troubled, when people quote sayings about ‘blood refreshing’; when the whole of life is dedicated to comfort. There are bookish dreams here, a heart troubled by theory…

On the level of action and ideas, then, the novel engages with the debates of the 1860s and acts as vehicle for Dostoevsky’s criticism of them, showing their ultimate unworkability as solutions for Russia, and for humanity in general. Now, let’s return to how the novel puts forward Christianity- Christ’s interference in the spiritual fate of Lazarus- as a solution to these various contemporary philosophical problems aired in the text.

Christianity in Crime and Punishment II

The next key appearance of Christianity in the novel is the scene where Raskolnikov confesses his crime to Sonya, and explains his motivation to her. The rational purity and logical coherence of his theory melts away like sand in the wind in the face of Sonya’s appalled, human reaction to it –“A human being a louse?” leaving Raskolnikov rather shamefaced at the fact that he had not previously seen its nullity. What strikes Sonya about it is the fact that it causes Raskolnikov himself suffering. When Raskolnikov asks for her advice her reaction is very significant. ‘Go at once this instant, stand at the crossroads, first bow down and kiss the earth you have desecrated, then bow to the whole world, to the four corners of the earth and say aloud to all the world: “I have done murder.”’ In other words, she enjoins him to reconnect with the soil of Russia, the soil from which his theories had divorced him, and to re-establish his sense of brotherhood with his fellow man. She gives him her cross to wear, an act laden with meanings symbolic of brotherhood for a Russian Orthodox (Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin also exchange crosses in the name of brotherhood in The Idiot), but Raskolnikov refuses it: he is not ready for it yet. “Better give it to me afterwards.” “Yes, yes, that will be better, much better. When you accept your suffering, you shall put it on.” Like Dostoevsky himself, Raskolnikov is slowly moving away from Western rationalism towards faith through an acceptance of suffering.

Earlier in the novel, the death of Katerina Ivanovna has provided an example through contrast of someone who rejects Christianity as a solace for suffering. On her deathbed, she rejects the suggestion of a priest. “I don’t want him. I have no sins. God ought to pardon me without the priest’s help. He knows how much I have suffered. And if he doesn’t pardon me, so much the worse!...Enough. The time has come. Goodbye poor wretch! This poor beast has been driven to death! I am finished”, she cried full of despair and hatred and her head fell heavily back on the pillow. By rejecting Christianity and by refusing to accept her own suffering in the way that Sonya has accepted hers, Katerina Ivanovna dies in anger, bitterness and hatred, a fate that awaits Raskolnikov.

The seventh appearance of Christianity in the novel is in the episode of the house painter who steps forward and ‘confesses’ to the crime. This painter is an Old Believer and belongs to one of the obscure fundamentalist sects that Russian Orthodoxy is full of, and has been instructed by his spiritual father to take on the burden of this crime that he has not committed, to undergo punishment for it so as to learn the meaning of suffering, and thereby come closer to God. Again, it is the Examining Magistrate who explains the significance of this to Raskolnikov (and us): “Do you know what some of these people mean by ‘suffering’? It is not suffering for somebody’s sake, but simply ‘suffering is necessary’ – the acceptance of suffering that means, and if it is at the hands of the authorities, so much the better.” Now, the Russian word for such an Old Believer is raskolniki. Through example and through the name of his main character, Dostoevsky makes the meaning of Christianity in the novel clear.

Finally, in prison, Raskolnikov is haunted by the persistent remnants of his rationalist fantasy. It distressed Raskolnikov that this ridiculous fantasy (is this ‘ridiculous’ Dostoevsky’s or Raskolnikov’s?) lingered so painfully and sadly in his memory. Sonya, who has voluntarily joined him in his exile, provides his final and most powerful example of someone who has accepted suffering, both her own and another’s, and found faith. Couldn’t her beliefs become my beliefs now? The closing paragraph of the novel makes it clear that Raskolnikov will accept Christianity, and by doing so show how, for all Russian intellectuals, Christianity will heal and atone for the damage done by an over-reliance on Western rationalism.

But that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, of his gradual regeneration, of his slow progress from one world to another, of how he learned to know a hitherto undreamed of reality.

I like people to talk nonsense. It is man’s unique privilege, among all other organisms. By pursuing falsehood you will arrive at truth. The fact that I am in error shows that I am human. …but we can’t even produce our errors out of our own heads. You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me, and if it’s your own, I will embrace you! It is almost better to tell your own lies than someone else’s truth. In the first case you are a man, in the second, you are no better than a parrot. Truth remains, but life can be choked up, there have been instances…


People only love God when no one else will love them.
W.H. Auden.

Dostoevsky on debauchery as an antidote to ennui

In debauchery there is at least something constant, based on nature, indeed, and not subject to fantasy, something that exists in the blood as an eternal flame, always ready to set one on fire, and not be readily extinguished, for a long time to come, perhaps for many years. You will agree that in its way it is an occupation.

'Notes from Underground' Dostoevsky

There is a whole psychology here…

Even Dostoevsky himself was awed and troubled by the power of this book. In its tone it is too strange, and the tone is bitter and savage… Sometimes I fancy that it will be rubbish, but I still write with passion; I don’t know what will emerge, he wrote to his brother while he was writing it. Notes from Underground was written as a response to particular historical circumstances in an attempt to embody specific ideas current in the Russia of the time. However, such is its remarkable power that it has since taken on a universality of its own, speaking to all kinds of readers of things never intended by its author.

At the end of 1863, Dostoevsky sat down to write a review of Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done? But what came instead from his pen was the harsh muttering of the underground man, the first major artistic expression of Dostoevsky’s disagreements with the Westernisers in general, and an attack on Chernyshevsky’s novel in particular. While it is not necessary to understand how the novel is a reaction to Chernyshevsky’s in order to be compelled and disturbed by the underground man’s voice, or to find consolation in what he says, nonetheless, an understanding of the conversation between Chernyshevsky’s book and Dostoevsky’s casts light on some of its undoubted difficulties and its strangeness of form and content.

Chernyshevsky’s novel is a didactic, clumsy attempt to embody in artistic form the main ideas of the Westernisers: an espousal of scientific rationalism as the cure for Russia’s problems. The Core Tenet of Chernyshevsky’s Western rationalism in his novel is the dialectic between ‘rational egoism’ on the one hand and ‘social altruism’ on the other. The conflict between personal life and social questions results from a constant conscious adjustment between the demands of rational self-interest – no one knowingly acts against his own self-interest- and the necessity of working towards a just society where the demands of each individual ego can be harmonised with the needs of society as a whole. This Core Tenet raises a whole host of Related Philosophical Questions: deciding exactly what self-interest is in a situation; finding the primary cause as a wellspring of action and therefore comprehending causality; establishing rational criteria for judging the greater good; working out the relationship between free will and the laws of nature, economics, history and society; understanding even the nature of the self and the workings of the mind and its motivations. These are some of the issues raised rather clumsily in What Is To Be Done?

Dostoevsky had ideological and philosophical problems with Western rationalism all his life, and he attacked it with increasing fervor from 1860 onwards. His main objections to it were that 1) reason is atomistic: rationalists divide the human ego into parcels, convenient for studying and analyzing, but ultimately reductive; 2) he saw how the proponents of rationalism discussed reason as if reason somehow existed outside the ego. Dostoevsky argued that reason is found nowhere else in the universe except in humanity, so to discuss it and analyse it as something separate from humanity, as something abstract, was absurd; 3) the danger of rationalism is that it reduces the human being to an object, and so in the face of this he asserted subjectivity (It's for this reason that he was so admired by the existentialists, especially Sartre); 4) Dostoevsky was firmly convinced that reason is only one aspect or mode of the ego, and other forces such as irrationality played a huge part, a part usually ignored or placed to one side by rationalists. Reason has proved untenable in the face of reality …there are no arguments of pure reason, … nowhere in the world does pure reason exist, he had written in his journal Time. Moreover, for Dostoevsky, a reliance on scientific rationalism was incompatible with the Russian character and unsuited to Russian problems. In his new novel, he set out to persuade his readers of the errors of rationalism, not through philosophical argument (a rational mode), but through the power of art: it is with pictures, with pictures like these that you will beguile…

Now, the theatre where Rationality and its Related Philosophical Questions are worked out, is consciousness; consciousness foregrounds itself constantly in response to and in anticipation of the actions and events we encounter. This is reflected in the structure of the work, which foregrounds the underground man’s thoughts in the first part, entitled ‘Underground’, and then describes the actions and events in his life which caused him to think the way he does, in the second part: 'Apropos of the Wet Snow'. The first part contains no action, but focuses on images and metaphors dealing with the Related Philosophical Questions, while part two describes how in his behaviour the underground man deliberately and repeatedly and in full consciousness knowingly works against his own best interests, to refute the Core Tenet of rationalism.

Part 1 ‘Underground’

You see, gentlemen, reason is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason, and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life- that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches.

Part 1 addresses the Related Philosophical Questions by means of the following images:

➢ The underground – an image of exclusion from the world of the rational. In What Is To Be Done? the central character, Vera Pavlovna, regards her former life before her marriage as having been spent in ‘a cellar’, or ‘underground’ (the word is ambiguous in Russian). In his novel, Chernyshevsky exhorts: Come up out of your godforsaken underworld, my friends, come up. It’s not so difficult… Come out into the light of day, where life is good; the path is easy and inviting. Try it: development, development. The underground man and his notes are Dostoevsky’s answer to this exhortation: he refuses to leave the underground, and asserts the validity of his choice. Throughout the novel, the underground man contrasts himself with those who have only as much consciousness for example as that by which all so-called ingenious people and active figures live¬. By this he means the revolutionaries as described by Chernyshvsky in his novel, and the Westernisers in general. To these ingenious and active people belong the voices which frequently interrupt the text, and against which the underground man argues.

➢ The path – a symbol of the right way to live. The underground man is here drawing on all the world’s religious and moral systems which seek to show man the correct path, the straight and narrow. The underground man disagrees with the notion that there is a correct path: man is predominantly a creating animal, doomed to strive consciously towards a goal… to make a road for himself that goes somewhere, and the main thing is not where it goes, but that it should be going, and he rejects a rational goal: but sometimes he may wish to swerve aside, precisely because he is doomed to open this road.

➢ The mouse – in image of the nature of the self: man as an animal endowed with consciousness. This contrasts on the one hand with the image of the insect: a creature with no consciousness, and on the other with the image of man posited by the rationalists: l’homme de la nature et de la verite, in Rousseau’s words. The mouse’s consciousness includes irrational elements, revenge for example. The mouse cannot accept rationalism, both the Core Tenet, and its Related Philosophical Questions: it has padded out the one question with so many unresolved questions, he can only reject them all, and slink back into his hole and plot revenge. This is a symbol of the underground man himself.

➢ The wall – a symbol of a fatum, the ineluctability of the laws of nature, against which developed people (Chernyshevsky’s rational egoists) stand with arms folded, accepting. The underground man asserts that understanding and accepting this wall through reason is one thing, but becoming reconciled to its presence is another: to be sure I won’t break though such a wall with a my forehead… but neither will I become reconciled to it.

➢ The moans of toothache – another fatum. Moaning makes no difference to the natural law of toothache and yet we do it anyway, a symbol of irrational behaviour. In these moans there is expressed first, all the futility of our pain, so humiliating for our consciousness, and all the lawfulness of nature…there is expressed the consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, that you are wholly the slave of your teeth...

➢ Cleopatra – a symbol of power and history and the arbitrary cruelty of which humanity is capable –further evidence of our irrationality. The underground man is particularly scathing about the way the rationalists ignore the evidence of history in their abstraction of reason from the human: What is to be done with the millions of facts testifying to how people knowingly, that is, fully understanding their real profit, would put it in second place, and throw themselves onto another path…

➢ The Crystal Palace- a symbol of a future society based on rationalism. Dostoevsky is here referring to Chernyshevsky’s use of the Crystal Palace, where it represents Utopia, and to his own previous book: Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, where it represents Baal, or the soul of Mammon. The underground man rejects this image if it cannot contain elements which are not rational, if it cannot contain elements of individuality no matter how perverse: Well, and perhaps I’m afraid of this edifice precisely because it is crystal and forever indestructible, and it will be impossible to put out one’s tongue at it, even on the sly.

➢ The anthill- related to the image of the Crystal Palace, and an image of the steadfast devotion to any cause in general, and to the cause of revolution as espoused by Chernyshevsky: ants spend their lives working on the anthill, which does great credit to their constancy and positiveness. But man is a frivolous and unseemly being…

➢ Mathematics - this is a symbol of the laws of necessity, and the denial of free will that these laws imply. What sort of will of one’s own can there be if it comes to tables and arithmetic, and the only thing going is two times two is four? Two times two will be four even without my will. As if that were any will of one’s own, says the underground man. It is also a symbol of the establishment of rational criteria for judging the greater good: you have taken your whole inventory of human profits (he means the ‘greater good’) from an average of statistical figures and scientific- economic formulas. Because profit for you is prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace and so on and so forth….

➢ The organ sprig – this is a symbol of man’s relationship to the laws of nature, and a reference to Diderot, who asserted that man is like a piano key on which nature plays. The underground man rejects this view of man as both incorrect and undesirable: who wants to want according to a little table? He will immediately turn from a man into a sprig in an organ…because what is man without desires, without will, and without wantings if not a sprig in an organ barrel?

➢ Revenge – an especially loaded symbol for the underground man, the key symbol of irrationality, this also stands for the difficulty of deciding exactly what self-interest is in a situation, as well as the problems inherent in causality. The rational man calls ‘revenge’ ‘justice’, but the underground man knows it for what it is: purposeless wickedness. A man takes revenge because he has found justice in it. That means he has found a primary cause, a basis, namely justice. …I do not see any justice here, nor do I find any virtue in it, and consequently, if I set about taking revenge, it will be solely out of wickedness.

➢ Sickness – an image of consciousness. For the underground man, too much consciousness is an illness and the result of too much consciousness is inertia.

Part 1 is undoubtedly difficult. The text is highly fractured, there seems to be no logic, no pointers to show the way. Nothing happens, the underground man rants and rages, brings in images only to drop them immediately and then develop them later. The text is interrupted by other voices against which the underground man argues, and there are many veiled references to things the modern reader has lost the knowledge of. The style is very similar to Dostoevsky’s journalism of the period, and is partly Dostoevsky’s own style, partly a conscious artistic choice: to reflect the shimmering, wayward nature of consciousness, and partly a political necessity in order to evade the ever-present censor. It must be remembered that Chernyshevsky had been arrested, that he in fact had written his novel in prison, that What Is To Be Done? was banned and could only be read in rare editions of the journal in which it had appeared and in zamizdat, and that Dostoevsky himself, as a former political prisoner, was constantly being watched and his output closely monitored. Indeed, his journal Time, which he ran with his brother, had recently been closed by the authorities. Under these circumstances, any direct reference to Chernyshevsky and his ideas was dangerous.

Chernyshevsky had –rather facilely- written: It’s pleasant to observe as a theorist the tricks that egoism plays in practice. On the contrary, Dostoevsky thought, it’s extremely unpleasant; and to show the tricks that egoism plays, he creates in the mind of the reader the fully rounded consciousness of another human being, angry, irrational, illogical, inconsequent, argumentative, cynical, sarcastic, blackly funny, and more truthfully and eternally alive than any of Chernyshevsky’s ciphers.


Part 2 ‘Apropos of the Wet Snow’

Oh, tell me, who first announced, who was the first to proclaim that man only does dirty because he doesn’t know his real interests? Oh, the babe, the pure innocent child!

Having dealt with the Related Philosophical Questions in Part 1 through images and metaphors, Dostoevsky in Part 2 attacks the Core Tenet: - man never knowingly acts against his own best interests- through actions. The underground man focuses on four episodes (and their satellite scenes) and describes each time how he deliberately acts against his own best interests in spite of himself.

First, is the episode of the officer, who moves the underground man out of the way, causing the underground man to plot a baroque revenge, involving bumping into the officer on the street. This is a reference to a specific episode from What Is To Be Done? Lopukhov refuses to yield the path to a social superior, and bumps into him. The other man curses him. Lopukhov picks up his offender, holds him over the ditch at the side of the road and says: Don’t move, or I’ll drag you out there where the mud is deeper. He then brushes his offender down, politely, and releases him. The episode is designed to show Lopukhov’s egalitarianism –he refuses to yield the path to his social superior, and his humanitarianism – he brushes him down politely and sends him on his way. In the hands of Dostoevsky this turns into a symbol of the relationship between subject and object, one of his core concerns about the dangers of rationalism. The underground man experiences himself as someone else’s object, and this causes huge tensions with his notion of himself as a subject. This slighted amour propre of a ‘little man’ features in his very first work Poor Folk, and is a typical Dostoevskyan motif, appearing again and again throughout his career. This feeling, and the revenge he lusts after is, of course, entirely irrational.

Second, is the episode of the reunion dinner, and its attendant scenes. The underground man, for some reason unknown to himself, foists himself on his classmates, even though he knows he is completely unwelcome, and humiliates himself again and again as the evening wears on: For a man to humiliate himself more shamelessly and more voluntarily was really impossible, I fully, fully, understood that, and still I went on… acting knowingly in his worst interests. The social solecism is also a key Dostoevskyan trope, through which he explores the relationship between the ego and the social sphere. As the underground man rushes out of the hotel to catch up with the others in the brothel and to slap Zverkov, he thinks: here it is at last, the encounter with reality! a joke at the expense of the Russian Hegelians, the Westernisers of the previous generation.

Thirdly, is the episode with Liza in her room. We already know from the underground man that his only previous important friendship with a school chum had been based on power and manipulation, a kind of sporting activity, with the aim of making another human being see the world as the underground man does: I wanted to have unlimited power over his soul; I wanted to instil in him a contempt for his surrounding milieu…I had needed him only to gain a victory over him, only to bring him into subjection. Now, in the darkness with Liza, the underground man tries this again, and shows us this process in action. His remarks to Liza are all designed to open her up so that she will trust him, and then he can spurn her: For a long time already I’d sensed that I had turned her whole soul over and broken her heart, and the more convinced of it I was the more I wished to reach my goal quickly and as forcefully as possible. It was the game, the game that fascinated me… To no gain for himself, irrational and cruel.

Fourthly, Liza appears in his room. The underground man, Liza and Apollon form a threesome through which relationships of power, altruism and the perversion of love are examined. Love is of course, the most irrational force in the universe, and here the underground man perverts it by cruelly paying Liza for her love, which had been offered out of friendship.

Chernyshevsky’s book, with its authorial games and didactic purpose may be seen as a kind of Russian enlightenment text, similar to one by Diderot or Rousseau. Notes from Underground, on the other hand, with its emphasis on the irrational and a more rounded, all-inclusive vision of humanity, may be seen as the last outpouring of European Romanticism, and an early precursor of modernist interiority. However, it is important to be clear about one final point. Dostoevsky is not showing up the underground man as an example; he is not proposing the underground man’s views and methods as an alternative to the Westernisers’ rationalism. The underground man lacks two main features which Dostoevsky saw as essential components of the Russian personality, namely, the emphasis on brotherhood, and love; and the episodes in part 2 are specifically designed to show how the underground man perverts both those qualities, and where his human deficiencies lie. Dostoevsky in this novel has no program of his own to assert beyond pointing out that there is more to the human soul than rationalism, and to warn of the dangers to Russia of the Westernisers’ uncritical adoption of European rationality: We are still born. And that’s just what we seem to like more and more. We are getting a taste for it. Soon we shall invent some way of being somehow or other begotten by an idea…


It’s utterly the same to me
Among what faces like a caged-in lion
I bristle, what human company
Excludes me unfailingly to the iron

Shackles of myself, my subjectivity,
Like a polar bear with no floe to sit on.
Where not to get attached (I don’t try!)
Where to degrade myself -it’s all one.

And I’ll not let the milky call
Of my own native language cheat me –
Which I’m not understood in’s all
The same to me, and those who meet me.

(That reader, swallowing his ton
Of newsprint, milker of rumours, hearsay.)
He is a twentieth century one,
I stand before any age or century.

Marina Tsvetayeva
From ‘Longing for the Motherland’

Fragment 5052010

The underground man discourses on love:

“No one should know what passes between husband and wife if they love one another. And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mother to judge between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is built on respect. And if once there has been love, if they have been married for love, why should love pass away? Surely one can keep it! It is rare that one cannot keep it. And if the husband is kind and straightforward, why should not love last? The first phase of married love will pass, it is true, but then there will come a love that is better still. Then there will be the union of souls, they will have everything in common, there will be no secrets between them.”

He is lying naked, in squalid post coitum next to a prostitute in a filthy room in pitch darkness, talking to her.

Now, amidst the situation in which it is uttered, are we to take the underground man’s discourse on love as a cynical outburst, or as a hopeful one? Is he sarcastically voicing our discontent with the myths surrounding love, or is he holding those myths up as ideals which keep us going even in the most desperate straits?

Both interpretations are equally plausible. The deliberate ambivalence in interpretation is then further underlined by the thoughts which pass through the underground man’s consciousness directly after the discourse:

“It is with pictures, with pictures like these, that you will beguile her”, I thought to myself, though, goodness knows, I spoke with real feeling, and suddenly blushed. “What if she were suddenly to burst out laughing, what should I do then?" That idea drove me to fury. Towards the end of my speech I really was excited, and now my vanity was somehow wounded. The silence continued. I almost nudged her.

It’s passages like these that account for the wide variety and passion of the differing interpretations in Dostoevsky criticism. Few writers have the ability to bring forth such vehement devotion from two opposing groups: idealists and realists alike both idolize Dostoevsky, and both see themselves reflected within his writing, much to the puzzled consternation of the other.