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This is the foreword by Dostoevsky:
* The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living. In this fragment, entitled “Underground,” this person introduces himself and his views, and, as it were, tries to explain the causes owing to which he has made his appearance and was bound to make his appearance in our midst. In the second fragment there are added the actual notes of this person concerning certain events in his life.—AUTHOR’S NOTE.
Introduction: Notes From Underground, or sometimes translated as Letters from the Underworld, is a Novella published by Dostoevsky in the literary journal called "Epoch" in 1864, (which was founded by him and his brother.) The novella is a first person narration in the form of a confession about an unknown mans life and his struggles with society and suffering. The original work by Dostoevsky was announcing the aforementioned literary journal by Dostoevsky under the title of "A confession." The novella is presented as a memoir of a bitter, sad, depressed, angry, and rather funny old narrator who you never know the name of, but mostly people have just referred to the man as the "underground man". The underground man is a retired civil servant who lives in St Petersburg in a terrible and dilapidated apartment building and shuts himself off from society and stays in his own hyperconsciousness by himself after he had inherited some money. The novella can be interpreted as a critique of the doctrine of determinism, which banishes the idea of free will and claims that it does not exist and that every single person, creature, and atom can be boiled down to the laws of science and mathematics, basically you have no choice over your actions and they can all be determined and calculated in the bigger picture and you have the illusion of free will but don't really have it. The first half of the Novella takes the form of a extended monologue and the underground man jumps from one thought to another in a to and fro motion with no sense of coherence or sense of mind. But just because the man rants randomly does not mean that his words are entirely meaningless, quite on the contrary, his thoughts in the book are what the world had been gifted by Dostoevsky in the form of a novella, and this novella is considered to be the first work of existentialism and is held in high regard by many of the great existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and pretty much all existentialists in general have been inspired by Dostoevsky's work's and this work especially because it marks the first existential book by Fyodor Dostoevsky and one of his earliest works in general. Their can be seen a rather different writing style and different disposition by this Dostoevsky work and ones beforehand because they were all before when he was sent to Siberia for political crimes under the Tsar. His thoughts are like a internal polemical debate with himself where he doesn't win or lose in his mind but just thinks, (although his thoughts are on his journal as a medium.) Each word anticipates another one and in a everlasting movement of thought and existential questions. The novel is divided into two parts, the first one titled "underground" and the second one titled "Apropos of the wet snow" The man has not left his apartment for many years and had written these notes from the underground, which he had never intended to publish, but keep secret. In the second part of the novella he sees wet snow which reminds him of his embarrassing and depressing past that haunts him, which he recounts because he has nothing else to do. Which are the events when he was 24 years old and could not fit into society and could not form relationships properly, thus he turned underground and wrote these notes.
Underground:
"I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!"
This is what the first paragraph of the novella reads. From the first words of the book we are greeted by the troubled psyche of this man and his thoughts. His existence is the definition of the "anti-hero" and is also under the category and cliche of the troubled narrator. He describes himself as being extremely jealous and envious of what he calls the "man of action", which is what he calls somebody with little intellectual ability, cognition, and reasoning. He think that the men of action are free of doubts and thoughts of questions that are too intellectual for them to understand, so they sleep walk through life without thinking and seeing the bigger picture of things nor thinking for themselves. He thinks that these people do not question and think about the things he thinks about in his hyperconsciousness in his underground apartment. He is superior than them, (or at least that is what he thinks is true.) He envies these so called "men of action" for their ignorance of greater things in the world, but at the same time he finds a solace in his underground world of his echo chamber of his intellectual ideas and thoughts, because he thinks that he is indeed superior than other people and that gives him comfort. But in consequence of his intellectualism he was never able to make any relationships and does not interact with the outside world because of his over analyzation of every single thing in the world. The underground man was an orphan and because of this he had never in his life had a loving relationship with anyone, he rather spends his time reading literature and reflecting upon reality; he is a aware of the absurdity of the world and this alienates him even more from society. The themes of his intellectuality and loathing blend together to alchemize a truly dreadful character, who is also at the same relatable to our own life's in many ways. His palette of emotions is not a very vast one: Greed, anger, humiliation, hatred, spite, and revenge. The underground man describes listening to people like listening to people from a hole in some floor boards where he is underneath them, like a rodent. Dostoevsky points out in the aforementioned quote at the top of the essay, (which is the foreword), that people like the underground must exist in the world and that they have to exist because of the climate of our own society. The foreword was wrote in the 19th century and the context was the climate of Russian St Petersburg, in which people would of done this type of thing, but if you think about people are doing this sort of thing even more often in the 21st century, alot more so than the 19th century, but I will come back back to that idea later.
The underground man observes the rise of a utopian society, (one of extreme utilitarian beliefs, but one also cannot ignore the resemblance to the USSR in the way he talks about before it happened and eventually fell), a society which seeks to remove suffering and pain in its entirety and have only pleasure and or happiness inside of it. But what the underground man argues is that people desire both pleasure and pain in themselves, everybody desires both of them and nobody really wants only pleasure, but on the contrary, people desire suffering and pain lustfully and crave it like an addiction and he argues that people can be in love with pain and obsess about it. Although we do indeed crave pleasure in our life's, he argues that people have a special ability to make themselves miserable and desire to do so. The underground man attacks the 19th century doctrine of utilitarianism, (which is the belief that one can measure the amount of suffering vs the amount of pleasure and make judgments based on the idea that pleasure should be attained no matter what.)
"Man is sometimes extraordinary, passionately in love with suffering: that is a fact.[...]The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts." The underground man.
The underground man argues that people will always rebel against society's commonly imposed idea of good and the idea of a utopia/paradise. This is because he argues that there is a hidden, but rather palpable part of humanity that is in nature irrational, unreasonable, and animalistic. As individuals he argues that sometimes we do not act in our own self interest, and rebel against ourself simply to invalidate our own existence, and exercise our own free will because we can do so. The underground man attacks the idea of enlightened self interest. He despises the idea that people and society can have cultural and legislative systems which rely on the doctrine of "Rational Egoism". He argues that a utilitarian and predictable life would restrict peoples freedom to exercise what they want to do: life would become so rational that life would so utterly dull and meaningless without the freedom of irrationality and free thinking. This explains why the underground man can find enjoyment in his own pain and suffering such as his toothaches and liver problems, (which he finds rather pleasing), he finds pleasure in these things because he can find pleasure in them and he has the choice to, although he does not respect himself for doing so and is not proud of his rather useless behavior. He does so to go against the cultural predictability of life and the societal norms that people abide by. In other words, the rule that 2+2=4 angers him, he wants the freedom and choice to be able to say that 2+2=5 or that 2+2=283, or whatever the number may be. He blames himself that he is not wicked or evil enough to become a scoundrel, but not lowly and useless enough to become a cockroach, he can become neither because of how he is.
"I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness."
" 'Ha! Ha! Ha! Next you will be finding pleasure in a tooth ache!' 'And why not? There is also pleasure in a tooth ache.' "
He says that people don't want what is rather disadvantageous for themselves, but they would rather have free will and freedom rather than having happiness, even if the freedom to do whatever they want ends up causing certain harm to others. But there is no guarantee that when people have freedom to do whatever they please they will do it in a non harming way. Just taking one look at history show how people will do whatever they what if they get the chance to do it and get away with it, and that also history suggests the contrary of the idea that they will use their freedom for non harming things, it is that humans want more than anything to have the destruction and death of their fellow humans because they want to. People can say whatever the hell they want about the history of the world, but what cannot be said is that humans are rational and do rational things.
"In any case civilization has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves."
"Shower upon man every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface, give him economic prosperity such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of the species. And even out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play some nasty trick."
People are not reasonable and even if they were reasonable they would just do something perverse just because they can do it and have the choice. Humans like to build skyscrapers and pave roads, (in other words we love to create things), but we all also have a passion for destruction. Maybe humans only like the buildings, roads, achievements, from a distance where they are not yet complete and are yet to be finished. We humans like to create things that are uncreatable and things that are unachievable, we desire things that are indeed desirable, but not attainable, so we can in consequence never get the things we want because we will be utterly disappointed by them, and once we do get these things that we thought we wanted, we will spit in the face of the person whom gave them to us...just because we can, and that the things we want, and that means literally anything you could desire for no matter how utterly outlandish or farfetched they may be, will always disappoint us because we in reality want to keep wanting the things we desire, and when we get them we are, (as the underground man put it), ungrateful and will play some nasty trick. Humans are irrational in nature...
Apropos of the Wet Snow: This second part of the Novella serves as a narration writing style and paints a picture of what the underground man used to do before he retreated underground. It shows his vexation for society and why he had absconded from it. It serves as a illustration for the abstract ideas from the first half of the book, in which he describes specific events in his life when he was a 24-year-old at the time. It is divided into three parts, the first part is the story from his life when he finds himself obsessed with an officer who has disrespected him in a tavern. The underground man describes how he often saw the officer on the streets of St Petersburg and how the officer would never acknowledge his existence in the tiniest bit. The underground man ends up borrowing money so he can spend it on a expensive overcoat so he can bump into the officer to assert his equality to him. But instead of what he thought would happen, (that being the officer acknowledging his existence and recognizing him as a equal person), the officer does not even flinch at the underground man and just keeps on walking like he wasn't there. The underground man would of preferred to be utterly humiliated by the officer, which actually gives him a sense of power and satisfaction, but not to be utterly humiliated by himself and only himself for buying a coat and getting into debt for nothing, with the main aim, (being recognized), not even being achieved. As long as the underground man can exercise his will, it does not matter if the outcome is positive or negative.
The second part of the second half of the book revolves around a dinner party with some old friends from university, who he craves the attention of but was not even invited to and actually invited himself to the dinner. But in the restaurant he was humiliated by the old friends coming a full hour late then what they planned, being already furious when they arrive he ends up getting into an argument with them and declares all of his hatred for society and uses them as a representation of it. After the dinner the men abandon the underground man and all go to a secret brothel. The underground man who is still in a rage follows them. In the brothel the man encounters a proustite named Liza and goes to bed with her.
The third section starts off with him in the dark with the women in the bed and he confronts her about her utopian dreams. He chastises the poor women and convinces her that she will meet a terrible fate and that she will become slowly useless and a nobody in society and will die alone. The underground man gives her his address and leaves. The underground man is coated with anxiety and anguish from the thought of her actually visiting his dilapidated apartment. She arrives while having an argument with the underground mans servant, but once the underground man realizes that she had come to visit him out of pity and because she actually felt bad for the man, he consequently belittles and verbally abuses her and says that he was in fact laughing at her. The underground man then wells up into tears after saying that he just wanted to have power over her. The underground man who was an orphan never learnt how to love anybody or have a normal relationship with anyone. In his sick mind he thinks that the only way to love somebody to assert your power over them. He then starts to insult himself and says that he is indeed horrified at his own existence, he runs after her when she leaves but cant find her.
Conclusion: The book "notes from the Underground" critiques all of the ideology's which claim to bring a utopian world and will eliminate suffering, (such as the USSR). It explains that if there was a revolution like the ones he explains, there would not be an eradication of suffering but merely there will be different things to worry about. We will only be happy once we admit the suffering in our own life's and embrace it.
I also said that in response to Dostoevsky's foreword that there is indeed more people doing this exact thing these days than back in the 19th century. For example, the Japanese phenomenon called "Hikikomori", in which young men and middle age men lock themselves in their apartment's for years on end and give up on interacting with society. There has been an estimates one million men in total who do this type of thing in this day and age. This shows how not only the underground man was relevant back then in the 19th century, but also shows that the short but condensed novel shows insights into our life's in the 21st century. It was the first existentialist novel in the world and it has many influences today in the very situation we are in. It shows us insights at this time in history even more so than it could of done back in the 19th century...Dostoevsky is by definition timeless.