Weekend Short: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

Author’s note: “Weekend Short” features a short story or novella. Analysis from the readership is encouraged in the comments section. If there’s a short story you’d like to see discussed in the coming weeks, please send your suggestion to label@nationalreview.com.

Happy Sunday!

Introduction and Excerpt

A man cannot read Russian literature without making it the rest of the world’s problem — rules are rules. Therefore, we’re back with Dostoevsky after considering his “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” two years ago:

Born in 1821, Dostoevsky was exposed to the rotten axis of depravity and deprivation through his father’s work as a doctor at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor. Dostoevsky’s later imprisonment and mock execution after protesting krepostnoe pravo (Russian serfdom) were owed to actions taken informed by his childhood experiences and Christian egalitarianism.

A used book with oodles of marginalia is the best kind, especially if the marginalia belong to someone one admires. This is the case with my garage copy of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, which was originally owned by a Foucauldian professor of mine at Lawrence University.

Perhaps deciphering not only the original text but also the notes, underlinings, and addenda satisfies some primal Straussian instinct. Like cake, the more layers the better.

Upon Professor Cohen’s retirement, he called me up and asked if I’d like any of the books from his office library. A short time later, this Bantam Classic copy (originally $2.95), translated by Mirra Ginsburg, was one of the many books I hauled out of the AC-free Main Hall on that June day. Shout-out to the unattended furniture dolly in the basement.

Notes from Underground begins much the same as “Ridiculous Man.” Or, rather, “Ridiculous Man,” written more than a decade after Underground, is a sort of science fiction alternative to Underground. In each, Dostoevsky’s narrator is a self-loathing bastard of a man, whose intelligence and vanity conspire to make him a miserable cuss.

If I have not yet sold you on Underground, consider this: It’s a tenth the length of Joyce’s Ulysses and makes many of the same points concerning man’s struggle with modernity, sexual frustration, and status, and does so much more beautifully. Save yourself — send Joyce to your worst enemy, and pick up Dostoevsky.

The Russian writes:

Look around you: blood runs in rivers, and  in the jolliest manner, as if it were champagne. Take this whole nineteenth century of ours, in which Buckle has also lived. Take Napoleon — both the great one, and the present one. Take North America, that eternal union. Take, finally, that absurd little caricature, Schleswig-Holstein. . . . And what is it that civilization softens in us? Civilization merely develops man’s capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and . . . absolutely nothing else. And, through the development of this capacity, man may yet come to find pleasure in the spilling of blood. Indeed, this has already happened. Have you noticed that the most refined bloodletters have almost all been most civilized gentlemen, beside whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins often look like mere amateurs? And if they do not strike the eye as sharply as Attila and Stenka Razin, it is precisely because we see so many of them, because they are too ordinary, we’ve grown too accustomed to them.

You can read the rest here, listen to it here, and purchase a copy here.

Rumination (Spoilers Ho!)

The end of this passage caught my eye because it echoed something I had read in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, her report “on the banality of evil” as she observed the prosecution of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had escaped capture for 15 years after the fall of Hitler’s reich before the Israelis tracked him down. A core contention of Arendt’s is that there was nothing particularly noteworthy about Eichmann. He looked like some middle manager. Reading this in college, I thought it was a useful reminder of original sin and the range of human morality and its consequences — especially when the man who is ordering the deaths of others does not need to go about the chore of actually killing those on whom his judgment rests.

So to see Arendt’s thesis preceded by a century was a dark delight. Writing during the height of the American Civil War, which explains the snarky “eternal union” descriptor for North America — not to mention having the Napoleonic Wars and their 6 million dead within living memory — Dostoevsky has little patience or evidence for the notion that modern man is any less savage than his predecessors. If anything, he’s one of many unremarkable butchers adding bodies to the total.

This particular chapter acts as the narrator’s defense of his nihilism, as he assumes the reader to be the prosecutor and demands that he explain why he is such a miserable, unproductive, and immobile offense to his countrymen. While the narrator is ultimately incorrect about modernity’s producing nothing beyond sensation — the vast reduction of poverty we enjoy today began around the time of Dostoevsky’s birth (presumably unrelated) — he is correct that the machinery of the state would shift the murder of millions from the steppes to tables and reports.

I couldn’t find a direct connection between Arendt and Dostoevsky, but I want to believe that she read him at some point. Please share if you know.

Wisconsin Postcard

It is the type of spring that involves a lawn chair, an umbrella, and a snowsuit. Rain follows hot flashes, followed by two feet of snow.

On the upside, we have family visiting, and I’m working on tearing out the carpet in the bedroom to uncover the three-quarter-inch red oak floors beneath. Once the multiple Maginot Lines of staples are prized (there’s no Belgium in carpentry), we should be all set for some sanding.

Luther’s Latest

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