Notes from Underground

What It Is

A short book, published in 1864 in Epoch, the journal Dostoevsky was running with his brother. It is barely a novel. It comes in two parts, in two very different modes, delivered by a narrator who keeps interrupting himself. The two halves are doing very different work, and the join is where the book lives.

It was written in the worst year of his life, and against a specific target. Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? had appeared in 1863, preaching a rational egoism in which enlightened self-interest would arrange human beings into happiness like glass in a greenhouse. Dostoevsky detested it. This book is his answer.

One thing to know, because it shapes what you hold in your hand: the censor cut a passage from the first part that Dostoevsky thought essential. He never restored it. The book we have is not the one he set out to write, and it is stronger for the loss.

Why It Matters

The claim underneath it is simple and ruinous. It is aimed straight at the belief that human beings can be reasoned, or arranged, into happiness, and it is the one blow that belief has never quite recovered from. Offer him a perfect society and he will smash it, for no other reason than to demonstrate that he could.

Every attempt to engineer human happiness from above has since run into that objection. So has every optimistic theory of behaviour, from Victorian utilitarianism to the rational actor of modern economics.

Its literary consequences are just as large. This is the birth of the anti-hero, the unreliable narrator who knows he is unreliable, and the confessional voice that uses candour as a weapon. Nietzsche said Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn. Kafka, Céline, Sartre and Camus all come through this book, and so does Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, whose opening is a deliberate echo. Paul Schrader has said Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver came straight out of it.

It is also, in places, extremely funny, which almost nobody warns you about.

Before You Read

Around 130 pages. Three or four hours. The length is not the difficulty.

The first part is where readers give up. It is abstract, circular and deliberately maddening, and it is meant to be. Read it as a performance rather than as a treatise, and remember that the man is arguing with an imaginary opponent whose objections he keeps supplying himself.

The one rule that matters: do not mistake the narrator for Dostoevsky. He is a construction, and the distance between what he says and what Dostoevsky thinks is one of the things you are reading for.

Which Translation to Read

• Michael Katz (Norton Critical Edition) — recommended. The most accurate English version of a text Katz has called one of the hardest in Russian to translate, and the edition solves the book's real problem: context. You get extracts from Chernyshevsky, contemporary Russian criticism, and essays that show what Dostoevsky was fighting. Without that, half the first part is a man shouting at nobody. The cost: it is a classroom edition, plainly designed, and Katz's English is exact rather than electric. View on Amazon →
• Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage Classics, 1993). The best at catching the sputter and the comedy: the broken syntax, the self-interruptions, the sheer rudeness of the voice. The cost: their English strains, and where Dostoevsky is merely awkward they can sound simply odd. No contextual material.
• Ronald Wilks (Penguin Classics, 2009), printed with The Double. The smoothest read, cheap, with a strong introduction by Robert Louis Jackson. The cost: smoothness is not what this book wants. Wilks tidies a narrator whose derangement is the point.

Take Katz to understand the book, Pevear and Volokhonsky to hear it. Avoid Constance Garnett here: her Edwardian manners put a collar and tie on a man who is spitting.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the first part twice before going on. It takes ninety minutes, and the second pass is where the jokes appear.

Read the Chernyshevsky extract in the Norton edition. Ten pages of the thing Dostoevsky was attacking will teach you more than any introduction.

Save the introduction for afterwards. Every one of them discusses the whole book.

And do not try to like him. Readers who require a narrator they can root for are reading a novel Dostoevsky did not write. The discomfort is the instrument.