Notes from Underground

Fathers and Sons comes after a tumultuous time which reached its peak in May 1862 with the publication of the leaflet Young Russia. The leaflet demanded a bloody and pitiless revolution that would change everything down to the roots. The leaflet was accompanied by a series of fires in St. Petersburg. In Fathers and Sons, Turgenev introduces the character of the new school, the raznochintsy Nihilist. The term Nihilism is thus introduced to Russia. The book immediately became the center of a storm surrounding his Nihilist character Bazarov, leading to a rift between the radical camp itself. One side lifted up Bazarov as a proto-Nietzschean superman ideal and praised his character. 

Chernyshevsky's camp saw Bazarov as a complete insult and caricature of the young radicals of whom he was at the head. To them, Bazarov was nothing but a hit job on their belief in rational egoism. His novel inaugurates the theme that would dominate for the next decade—the conflict between the rationalism and materialism of the new generation against all the "irrational" feelings and values whose reality they deny. Bazarov denied all general prinicples making his only principle negation. This is different than what the radicals it lampoons believed as they saw social justice as the top priority and the subversion of principles as the means to this end. Dostoevsky admired this work deeply. Only he and his journal offered a port in the middle of the storm it caused. 

Readings

1.  Chapters 5-6: Bazarov and the definition of Nihilism introduced to Russia (10 pgs)

2. Chapters 9-10: Bazarov interacts with older generation (16 pgs) 

3. Turgenev's interpretation of nihilistic psychology and bitterness (10 pgs)

4. Bazarov death scene (3 pgs)

Part I of Notes began as an essay written in direct response to What is to be Done?  Not only are Notes's arguments dependent on Chernyshevsky's arguments but some major episodes are parodies of scenes from What is to be Done?  The selections below cover both examples of Chernyshevsky's arguments in act and the scenes that Dostoevsky will parody in Notes. 

As mentioned above, What is to be Done?  is a refutation of Fathers and Sons and takes its plot and characters from the same line. In this utopian novel, we see rational egoism play out as the wonder working talisman that provided the final key to all human complexities: relations between sexes, the establishment of new social institutions, success in private life, and the total transformation of mankind both physically and spiritually into a future earthly paradise. All one had to do was accept a rigorous egoism and believe that a rational egoism compels one, by sheer force of logic, always to identify self-interest with that of the greatest good of the greatest number. 

This rational egoism would dissipate the irrational elements of man and the emotions and passions would always respond in a manner compatible with the injunctions of enlightened reason which would then act in favor of others. Rational egoism was a self-renunciatory and social value but this virtue was attained through utter selfishness. Chernyshevsky’s utopian vision in What is to be Done? turns out to look an awful lot like the socialism espoused by Fourier, an image that certainly would have reminded Dostoevsky of his younger days in the Petrashevsky circle. Chernyshevsky chose the same Crystal Palace as his icon for his glorious utopian world; the same edifice that Dostoevsky compared to a modern-day Baal, the monstrous incarnation of modern materialism in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863). 

Character Cheat Sheet

Katz and Wagner Introduction (18 pgs) Includes more discussion of the philosophical issues at hand. 

Readings 

1. Preface, example of narrator talking to the reader. (3 pgs)

2. Rational egoism example (5 pgs)

3. Vera's 1st dream (leaving the cellar) (3 pgs)

4. Example of "the women question" and rational egoism (7 pgs)

5. Vera's 2nd dream (wickedness of environment) (9 pgs)

6. Vera's workshop description and Chernyshevsky's economic theory (9 pgs)

7. Men of action and bumping incident (5 pgs)

8. Kirsanov redeems a prostitute (8 pgs)

9. Vera's 3rd dream (8 pgs)

10. A theoretical conversation about Vera (8 pgs)

11. Description of the new normal people and the underworld (7 pgs)

12. Vera's 4th dream, Chernyshevsky's utopia, and the Crystal Palace (22 pgs)

In June 1862 Dostoevsky headed abroad to Europe for the first time. His travels and impressions are recorded in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.  This work can be seen as a prelude to or even early draft of Notes from the Underground. It also fits into the important Russian genre of travel literature. This work explored his own national individuality by comparing Russia with Europe. He saw Europe as morally bankrupt and a decadent dying culture with no unity. He felt a strong difference was not that Russia was moral but that Russians were conscious of their immorality and felt a troubling disquietude about it, still preserving the indispensable basis of morality. He uses the tactic of inverted irony with his audience in a manner that will be perfected in the Underground Man. The Crystal Palace in London became an image of the unholy spirit of modernity and takes on the form of the monstrous Beast whose coming was prophesied in the Apocalypse (see text 1 below).

In text 2 below, we see a discussion on ego as opposite of brotherhood and unity. Dostoevsky thought this self-negating and self-sacrificing instinct of brotherhood was destroyed in Europe by ego and individuality, only surviving in the Russian commons and localities of the peasants. He saw a problem with government-imposed socialism vs the grass roots and instinctual socialism of the Russian peasants. Both encroach on the personality and the ego, but the latter fulfills the individual as his sacrifice does not feel unnatural. Instead, he feels the riches of brotherhood rather than the encroachment of an outside force. One wells up from within, the other is imposed from the outside and crushes. This human need to impose the ego is why the rational egoism of Chernyshevsky and the radicals were bound to fail. 

Only a religious community could succeed through compassion and love as bond instead of reason and thought. Dostoevsky wholly believed that faced with the choice of full autonomy and personality or surrendering part of it in order to obtain some kind of self-advantage, mankind would choose suffering and hardship for the sake of freedom. If any commune was to work, it would be on a principle rooted in Christian ethic of voluntary self-sacrifice rather than a Utilitarian doctrine of self-interest as self-interest can only destroy the first by polluting a pure motive. 

Readings

1. Chapter 5: London, Baal, and the Crystal Palace (11 pgs)

2. Chapter 6: Freedom, individuality, and brotherhood (8 pgs)

3. Joseph Frank: Will I ever see Masha again? (5 pgs)

Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Crocodile 

Only one installment of The Crocodile was published before Dostoevsky's journal Epoch went under. It remains uncompleted. it is written in the style of Gogol's more fantastic stories like The Nose; however, it is more of a direct satire on his political enemies than a real literary story. 

Although Dostoevsky denied it, some accused him of parodying Cherneshevsky's imprisonment and his wife's flirty infidelity. Joseph Frank argues that Dostoevsky's real target was not Cherneshevsky but the "immoderate nihilists" like Pisarev who held to a cold belief in Capitalism and economics. If Frank is right, then this is a turning point. Dostoevsky now has a new ideological target of for his next three major novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons. 

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