Context
Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned
as one of the world's greatest novelists and literary
psychologists. Born in Moscow in 1821, the
son of a doctor, Dostoevsky was educated first at home and then
at a boarding school. When he was a young boy, his father sent him
to the St. Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering, from which
he graduated in 1843. Dostoevsky had long
been interested in writing, and after graduation he immediately
resigned from his minor military post to devote his time to his
craft. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846),
was immediately popular with critics.
Dostoevsky's early view of the world was shaped by his
experiences with social injustice. At the age of twenty-six, Dostoevsky became
active in socialist circles, largely because of his opposition to the
institution of serfdom. His political opinions were influenced by his
experiences as a young boy—his father was murdered by his own serfs
while Dostoevsky was away at school. Another experience that greatly
affected Dostevsky, and that found its way into his writing, was
the time he spent in prison. In April 1849,
Dostoevsky was arrested for his participation in a group that illegally
printed and distributed socialist propaganda. After spending eight
months in prison, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death and was led,
with other members of the group, to be shot. But the execution turned
out to be only a show, meant to punish the prisoners psychologically.
After his brush with death, Dostoevsky spent four years at a Siberian labor
camp and then served in the military for another four years. During
his time in prison, he rejected his extreme socialist views in favor
of an adherence to traditional, conservative Russian values—a change
in ideology that is evident throughout his later works.
Dostoevsky spent most of the 1860s
in western Europe, immersing himself in the European culture that
he believed was encroaching on Russia—an issue he explores in Notes
from Underground. These years in Europe were a difficult
time for Dostoevsky, as he struggled with poverty, epilepsy, and
an addiction to gambling. The publication of Crime and Punishment (1866),
however, brought him a reversal of fortune, earning him popular
and critical success and rescuing him from financial disaster. His
later novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
brought him further critical success.
Dostoevsky was one of the pioneers of realism in the modern novel,
and Notes from Underground (1864),
along with his later novels, belongs to this genre. Realist writers—Honoré
de Balzac in France, Charles Dickens in England, and Nikolai Gogol
and Dostoevsky in Russia, among others—reexamined the entire purpose
of the novel. Realism focused on “real” people, generally city dwellers, prostitutes,
poor students, lowly craftsmen, and other types of characters who
had been merely subjects of ridicule or providers of comic relief
in previous literature. Prior to realism, everyday life had been
considered below literature, which was meant to rise above the mundane.
Dostoevsky's work, often seen as the culmination of realism, aims
not to rise above reality, but to portray it in all its complexity
and difficulty.
Notes from Underground played an important
role in the development of realist fiction. The novel probes the
mind of an individual on the margins of modern society, and examines
the effects modern life has on that man's personality. The protagonist
is a low-ranking civil servant in 1860s St.
Petersburg who has gradually gone mad over a lifetime of inability
to cope with the society around him. The Underground Man is an antihero,
the kind of downtrodden, indecisive victim of society that Dostoevsky
would continue to explore in his later works.
Dostoevsky may have been prompted to write Notes
from Underground in response to a revolutionary novel called What
Is to Be Done? (1863), written by
the “rational egoist” N. G. Chernyshevsky. Rational egoism held
that life could be perfected solely through the application of reason
and enlightened self-interest. Along with many other radical social
thinkers of the 1860s, the rational egoists
put great emphasis on the powers of reason and natural law—principles
ostensibly derived from inherent properties of the world. The rational
egoists' theories grew out of the social liberalism of the 1840s,
in which Dostoevsky was interested.
During his prison time in Siberia, however, Dostoevsky
learned that the peasants and undereducated workers of Russia associated progressive
thinkers with the upper classes that oppressed them and limited
their freedom. He decided that the theorists of the 1860s were
too absorbed in European culture, and too far removed from inherently
Russian values. Dostoevsky grew to believe that the way to create
harmony among all Russian people was through a return to traditional
Russian values, such as personal responsibility, religion, brotherly
love, and the family. He believed that theories that seek universal
social laws to explain and govern human behavior ignore the fundamental
individuality of the human soul, the complexity of human personality,
and the power of free will.
The Underground Man in Notes from Underground is
both a mouthpiece for Dostoevsky's ideas and an example of the kind
of problems that modern Russian society inevitably produced. Like Dostoevsky,
the Underground Man is critical of rational egoism and other dangerously
totalitarian visions of utopia. He is extremely critical of dogmatism
of any kind. At the same time, he is a victim of the modern Russian
urban experience. Deprived of positive social interactions, the
Underground Man tries to relate to the world according to the codes
and examples he finds in European literature. The failure of these
attempts makes him even more bitter and isolated, driving him deeper
underground.
