On Dostoievsky's Notes from Underground

The Underground Man. Do you want to know him? Prepare to enter a sharp, claustrophobic, hot and stifling mental basement; prepare to meet someone who can smell the cancer of mediocrity and the moral tumors that most of us possess. You really want to go down into this stinking and acid grave? Ok, here we go. But first, let's talk a little bit of the author of the book: Dostoievsky.

Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are usually mentioned together in the volumes of history of literature as some kind of two genius brothers, two companions in greatness. This view is exaggerated, because Tolstoy is a superior artist, endowed with greater technical expertise, stricter organizational ability and better formal perfectionism. Moreover, the scope of the work of Tolstoy is greater than that of Dostoievsky: the characters are more varied, there is a greater number of philosophies; female figures are more perfect, sick young man are exposed at the same time that healthy young man, there is a greater variety of scenes, places and situations. In Dostoevsky, however, we are always among the same type of figures (troubled minds, sick spirits), the scenes are constantly repeated: always the same places, the same atmosphere. Tolstoy excels Dostoevsky in this regard: variety.

Justice, however, has to be done. There is a very important aspect of literature in which Dostoyevsky surpasses Tolstoy: psychological depth. Dostoevsky's characters are gigantic figures, as if the man invites us to walk through the mazes of his creatures brains, over the mental veins of his characters. Tolstoy never penetrates so deeply into the bowels of his creations; we never become this familiar with their souls, as if we could smell and taste them: only in Dostoevsky this phenomenon occurs. Dostoevsky opens a deep incision in the flesh of those who he creates; he opens the skin, the muscles, exposing the organs, and then pushes us into the cavity: he makes us plunging into the flesh, into the guts of his creations.

One of the most appropriate comparisons in terms of art is that between Dostoyevsky and Michelangelo, and although such a comparison contrasts two arts that are in principle so different from one another, it seems to me that Michelangelo is the closest twin to Dostoevsky, closer than any other writer in the history of world literature.

Dostoyevsky and Michelangelo have much in common as artists. Both are fascinated by human beings, and make them the central theme of their works. But it is not a normal humanity, the humanity of people around us, the humanity of our daily acts, no, not even the humanity we find in our own thinking about ourselves, the humanity that we shredded to ourselves when we lie down in our beds at night, this warm and sleepy picture modeled by auto-contemplating the actions that we did during the day; it is not the humanity of an eventual philosophical activity, a simple indigestion of self-analysis, it is not that more intimate portrait of ourselves, that image in which we pride, that depth which we all believe to have: no! Humanity portrayed by such artists is huge, enormous, magnanimous. Mountains of muscular meat collide and weave in the frescoes of Michelangelo, embrace themselves, become enmeshed, devouring space with its tentacles of flesh, swallowing with starving nostrils all the existing oxygen; his sculptures throb with swollen muscles, gorged with blood, as if itching from extreme and recent effort, where exposed veins run like the sap of some kind of primordial rivers. The anatomy of these behemoths and leviathans is not biologically possible; the mind of Michelangelo fed nature with his own dreams, made her eat the bread of his visions, and so he mixed the blood of men to that of the giants, of the titans; human flesh germinated, as if fertilized by the seeds of beasts and angels.

So Dostoyevsky. His main characters in their monologues, in their moments of ecstasy and fever, in his meditations about heaven and hell, possessed by the intestines and the bowels or the most delicate veil of soul and spirit, speak a language that will never be spoke by common mankind. The mouths spew torrents of incandescent words, sometimes balmy, sometimes toxic, such as volcanoes spitting out lava; metaphors and images gallop out of the throats, over the tongues, filling the air with thoughts never conceived by normal minds. The neurons of the characters of Dostoyevsky are eternally attacked by the plague of a strange fever, a particular craziness, at the same time bestial and cherubic: its majestic storms are crystallized and frozen by the author in wonderful passages of dialogue. Dostoevsky seems to have paced the deepest depths of silt and mud of the obscure deep, he seems to have paced over the clouds in the chilly air of the atmosphere: the details collected in such trips were those with which he tempered his main creations, whose roars, howls, prayers, confessions and threats will be forever remembered. Like Darwin, he examined in detail all the landscapes of the human spirit, collecting beetles, worms, crustaceans, reptiles, mammals and birds nested in hidden burrows of the spirit, unknown, strange, but at the same time wonderful.

Michelangelo and Dostoevsky: here we have two brothers in the art of sculpting monsters and angels. It is not strange that their works disdain landscapes, forests and mountains, cities with buildings, streets, avenues; such details appear as little as possible, only when absolutely necessary: there is no room for scenery, for useless details, for titanic humanity, in its hunger, devours any spaces, requiring all the light and all the focus to itself.

As for the book Notes from Underground, firstly it should be noted that it is divided into two sections: the first is a great monologue of the main character (not named in the book), and the second a kind of short story, also in first person, in which the very narrator is also the main character.

The first part is rather confuse, convulsive: a garbled of sentences and thoughts that do not follow a rigidly logical and linear progress. This effect seems, at first, to be sought by the writer, but the knowledge of the works of Dostoyevsky reveals that this confusion is one of his mais characteristics: it is as if the author had several things to say but could not find the time or patience to do it neatly. In certain cases, such as the Underground Man, the convulsive style fits that purpose well: it reflects the personality of the sitter. On other occasions, however, the style of Dostoevsky does not appear to have a functional character and resembles more mere sloppiness. That was something that bothered Tolstoy, as you can see by reading some of the notes in their journals:

October 12, 1910. (...) After dinner I read Dostoyevsky. The descriptions are good, although some jokes, very talkative and not very funny, stand in the way. But the talks are impossible, completely unnatural. (...)

October 18, 1910. (...) I read Dostoyevsky and was impressed with his sloppy way, artificiality and manufacturing (...)

October 19, 1910. (...) I read superficially the first volume of the Brothers Karamazov and finished it. There are many good things in the book, but it is so disorganized. The Great Inquisitor and Zossima's farewell.

In the opening monologue of Notes from Underground the narrator's character seems to deal with three main ideas: first his suffering and his desire to suffer, as well as his desire to make others have to tolerate his pain and anguish, to force them to bear his agony cries; a second idea deals with the inertia, with inaction, characterizing them as one of the defining characteristics of the superior man, as the superior man perceives that there is no reason to act, so that all men of action are actually lower than the passive beings who base their inaction on major philosophical truths; there is also, in the initial monologue, a critical to reason based on logic and scientific truths, where the underground man argues that anyone at anytime can decide to act the way he wants without guide his actions by any logical and mathematical truths.

The second part of the book, entitled Apropos of the Wet Snow, chronicles the relationship of the narrator's character with some men known to him in high school, with his butler and a young prostitute. In passages truly distressing, we realize how difficult it is for the underground man to relate to others. One gets the impression that a too acute intelligence captures the defects of all people in all situations, and an extremely rigid moral sense is unable to forgive such faults.

The underground man suffers, it seems, because he cannot bear the stains on the character that are, in society, concealed and omitted. Normal people (in so that they can relate themselves) pretend not to notice faults in others, and also not punish themselves for their own defects; the underground man, however, cannot pretend that there is no such blemishes, and also does not condone his own faults, his own mediocrity.

The tolerance that everyone have in order to be able to keep in pursuit of their interests is something that does not exist in the underground man; for example, to position themselves well in society, many of his friends pretend to like other influential friends, pretending to have fun with their jokes, pretending to enjoy their company, pretending to like to hear their stories, pretending to be happy for the success of others; as for the underground man, he cannot pretend, he cannot hide de rotten taste that some people make him feel in his heart, and the perception that others pretend is something that makes him even more ferocious.

The social relations actually require a large degree of tolerance, because we are naturally selfish (we generally don't care about success of others, about the achievements of others); even more complex is the situation for someone with wide intelligence, someone who can read, behind every act or phrase, the hidden and occult intentions: to such mind the capacity to discern the thoughts of others and tolerate them is very challenging, and the underground man is not able to do so. The notion of our own mediocrity is also something that is more present in broad minds: the knowledge of human history and its main geniuses and exponents shows how far the human mind can reach, and how small it is usually in the overwhelming majority of the existences. The underground man never loses track of his mediocrity, and, because he is not able to tolerate falsehoods, he tortures himself all the time by chewing his own faults and weaknesses, without ever dreaming of hiding them. If at times he demonstrates pride in his intellect, he soon reports again how wrong was that auto-compliment, grumbling one more time about how he is incapable and mediocre; it seems that to exhibit his intelligence is a kind of defense mechanism used by the narrator at all times that his reasoning borders on sheer desperation.

The underground man seems to be, in short, a soul scarred by the general mediocrity of the human race, being also an angry soul, whose hatred stems from the fact that everyone feels proud to be who they are, without any regard or preoccupation for their own limitations. It irritates him the fact that people in general think that they are important, that they are irreplaceable, that they have qualities, and that, to be treated with respect by others, one should pretend to like them and have fun with them: the narrator cannot stand that everyone simply do not despair by contemplating their own inferiority; it irritates him to the extreme that people are mediocre but do not realize it: he seems to want everyone to perceive their one lack of value, their one lack of meaning and importance, in such a way that everyone would sink once and for all in the sadness and despair that they deserve for being so limited, so empty of qualities.

One cannot say that the underground man is mad: it's just a man with great intelligence and a keen perception, lacking, however, the tolerance and the ability to accept things, serenely, as they are. If someone wants to accuse this unhappy being: to say that he cannot point the mediocrity of others since he himself is mediocre, that will just make him smile with bitterness, because he himself is aware of his mediocrity, while we tend to forget our own.