Dostoevsky's spiteful Underground Man demands the freedom to say two plus two makes five
In 1864 Dostoevsky published a short book narrated by a bitter retired clerk hiding in a St. Petersburg flat. He sneers at reason, science and the dream of a perfect society, insisting people will act against their own interest just to prove they are free. Notes from Underground turned that grudge into a philosophical argument.
The novella first appeared in the journal Epoch, where Dostoevsky had announced it under the working title A Confession. Its nameless narrator, whom critics call the Underground Man, writes what claim to be extracts from his memoirs. Even in the monologue of Part 1 he argues constantly with an imagined listener; Mikhail Bakhtin remarked that not one of his words stands firm and undivided, since each one anticipates somebody else's reply.
His main target is determinism, the belief that human will can be reduced to the laws of nature and mathematics. He mocks Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, whose utopia of rational self-interest is symbolised by the Crystal Palace. Anyone, he says, may choose at any moment to act against their own advantage, simply to confirm they exist as individuals. The laws of nature become a Stone Wall: two times two equalling four enrages him because he wants the liberty to answer five. Dostoevsky was also taking aim at nihilism and at the rationalism behind Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism.
Part 2, titled Apropos of the Wet Snow, turns to episodes from his past. He fixates on an officer who once snubbed him in a pub, borrows money for a smart overcoat and deliberately bumps into the man, who barely notices. He gatecrashes a farewell dinner for a schoolfellow, Zverkov, quarrels with everyone, then follows them to a brothel, where he meets a young woman named Liza.
He moves her with a grim picture of her future and gives her his address, then panics when she actually turns up at his shabby rooms. He abuses her, breaks down, and forces money on her; she leaves the five rubles lying on his table and disappears for good. His parting jab at the reader is that he has only pushed to the limit what they never dared take even halfway. The book came out in a Russia torn between Westernizers and Slavophiles, three years after Tsar Alexander freed the serfs in 1861.
Source: Notes from Underground
