Notes from Underground: A Man Who Cannot Even Be Wicked

Russian literature has three great mountains. Tolstoy paints the vast sweep of Russian society like an enormous canvas; Chekhov fixes his eye on the small people of ordinary life and etches their absurdity and sorrow with terrifying precision.

Dostoevsky is different from both. His world is more like a dark mine sunk into the mind — he keeps digging inward, deeper and deeper, and drags up resentment, shame, guilt, self-torment and the ugly, shadowed appetites, holding all of it up to the light without apology.

Notes from Underground is that psychological condition taken to its limit. In contemporary slang, it is a novel of “dark crawling”: the rambling notebook of a patient locked in a basement for years, written in a state of confused and distorted consciousness. You turn the pages and sometimes think he may have a point, and sometimes think what a twisted, self-punishing creature this man is — and yet you cannot put it down.

A Patient Who Will Not Be a Proper Villain

The narrator is a retired minor official who lives in a basement somewhere in St. Petersburg.

The novel opens with him describing himself without the slightest concealment:

I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I used to be a government clerk, and I took particular pleasure in making things difficult for the people who came to my desk; there was nothing I liked better than watching someone squirm.

A few lines later he overturns himself: when I call myself spiteful, I am lying. I am no thoroughgoing villain — I only like frightening little sparrows to pass the time. If someone showed me the smallest kindness, handed me a glass of tea with sugar in it, I might soften at once and become quite agreeable.

In a few short paragraphs, an utterly contradictory, utterly knotted man stands up in front of us.

He wants to present himself as a villain, a brute who cares nothing for other people’s opinion of him; and at the same time he knows perfectly well that his wickedness is not thorough at all, that he lacks even the courage to do wrong. He wants to seem cold and ruthless, yet can hardly bring himself to be hard-hearted.

Put plainly, he is no cold-blooded monster. He is simply weak, self-loathing, ashamed, sensitive, and burdened with an excess of self-consciousness.

What hurts him most is neither poverty nor illness, but the sense that he is incapable of accomplishing anything:

I could not be a spiteful man, and I could not be any other kind of man either. I could not be bad and I could not be good; I could not be a scoundrel and I could not be an honest man; I was neither a hero nor a louse.

That is the underground man’s disease — a perfect incapacity for everything. He cannot be wholeheartedly bad or honourably good; he cannot commit himself to action, and he cannot truly rise above it. He is stuck forever in the middle, forever doubting, denying and overturning himself.

He is just as perverse about his own body. He believes his liver is diseased and that the pain is severe, and he refuses to see a doctor. Not because he is too poor, not because he distrusts medicine, not because he is unafraid of death — he is in fact quite afraid of dying. He is simply digging in his heels: if the liver hurts, then let it hurt worse.

It is a kind of self-harming revenge, as if to say: fine, the world makes me miserable, so I may as well destroy myself too.

Two Times Two Makes Four

The underground man’s darkness is, in fact, full of philosophy.

He is not merely opposing one person or one moral standard. What he is really fighting is a view of life that grew steadily more fashionable through the nineteenth century — the worship of reason, science, order and progress.

That creed believed human beings to be rational animals: let society grow more advanced, institutions more perfect and science more developed, and people would grow happier; and since human beings naturally seek advantage and avoid harm, they would always carefully calculate what benefited them, what was more reasonable, what was more correct.

Does that not sound strikingly modern? Many of us still believe the same logic today.

It makes the underground man furious. In his view, human beings are nothing of the kind.

People do not always pursue their own interest. Very often a man knows perfectly well which choice would be more advantageous and still contrives to ruin everything; knows which road is more correct and still takes the long way round. Sometimes a person wants nothing at all except to prove that he is not a machine without feelings, and so deliberately does something stupid, something bad, something he will later regret.

That is why the sentence he hates most is: two times two makes four.

Two times two equals four is, of course, correct. But to him the correct answer is detestable. What it stands for is not arithmetic but a life already designed in advance — no margin of error, no accident, no wilfulness, no resistance, everything arranged neatly by the standard answer.

Two times two makes four is no longer life; it is the beginning of death.

The meaning is this: if the whole of human life were governed by reason and correctness, then we would no longer be living people but a machine functioning properly. What you ought to like and ought not to like; what you ought to do and ought not to do; what counts as success, happiness, normality, decency — all of it would already have been settled in advance.

The underground man will not accept it.

He says ants are thoroughly admirable creatures. They are industrious, practical, clear about their goals; they begin life in the anthill and end it in the anthill, living with remarkable efficiency, remarkable reasonableness, and remarkable honour. The trouble is that human beings are not ants.

Human beings are frivolous, shameful, capricious. A man knows there is a wall in front of him and insists on walking into it; knows a road leads nowhere near happiness and insists on taking it. Sometimes what a person pursues is not even the goal but the process itself — the doubt, the confusion, the torment, the endless consuming of himself.

So the underground man concludes: what human beings truly love is not happiness alone. Perhaps they love suffering just as much.

People move toward pain of their own accord, chew over their humiliations, grow addicted to their failures, as though the ache itself proved: I am still alive; I am not a screw tightened by the rules of society.

He is not, of course, praising wickedness or preaching self-destruction. What he means is this: if a society permits only “two times two makes four,” only what is correct, useful, rational and efficient, then human beings will lose the most disordered and most human parts of themselves — doubt, wilfulness, suffering, negation, revolt, and the freedom to make a mistake and answer for it themselves.

The Mouse

To the underground man, consciousness itself grows out of pain.

Suffering is not noble, and pain is not something to celebrate. But the reason people cling so stubbornly to their pain is precisely that pain makes them aware that they are still thinking, still struggling — not a hollow shell operated by rules and interests.

He has a classic image for himself: he is a mouse.

This mouse has been insulted, and its heart is full of resentment; it has thought about revenge. The trouble is that it is too lucid. It rages and doubts whether its rage is justified; it plans revenge and decides it has neither the courage nor the right; it hates the people who humiliated it and, in its own head, humiliates itself again and again, doubling the dose. In the end it accomplishes nothing. It can only slink back into its dirty, stinking basement and sink into endless hatred, self-reproach and imagined revenge.

What is more distorted still: over time it begins to extract a strange pleasure from the humiliation and the torment. It is not only in pain — it becomes slightly addicted to its pain; it is not only ashamed — it keeps pushing itself back into shame; it knows perfectly well that living this way is pathological, and yet feels that only because the pathology exists is it alive at all.

And this is exactly why the underground man, extreme, repellent and pathological, is also unbearably real.

Because somewhere in each of us there is probably a basement like that.

Late at night we replay some glance, some sentence, some pause from the day that someone else never noticed; we pretend during the day that it does not matter, and at home the shame grows: did I say something wrong? Did I look stupid? Why did that person look at me like that? Did I ruin something that was perfectly fine?

The underground man is the one who breaks the window and lets the air in.

The Officer: A Comic War Over Dignity

So is the underground man a rebellious hero?

He lives in a basement and wages furious war on modern civilisation itself, declaring that a man is not a bead on an abacus, not a key on a piano, not a rational animal that only pursues advantage; that human free will outweighs everything.

And yet in real life he is a man in an office who cannot even meet a colleague’s eye. He does not want to see their faces, because he is convinced they are watching him with disgust.

So was he really isolated and bullied by his colleagues?

Not necessarily. Even he knows that other people may not actually dislike him — he disliked himself first, and then projected that look onto the whole world.

This is the underground man’s characteristic state: extreme inferiority and extreme vanity at once.

One evening he passes a small tavern and through the window sees a group of gentlemen brawling around a billiard table; one of them is thrown bodily out of the window. Such a scene ought to disgust him. Instead his reaction is bizarre — he begins to envy the man who was thrown out.

Why? Because even being thrown out, in his eyes, is a conflict in which someone has acknowledged you. You have collided with another person head-on, which proves you are part of this world. He, by contrast, is a passer-by with his tail between his legs, invisible to everyone, not even qualified to be thrown out of a window.

So he drifts into the tavern, thinking: if only someone would push me out of that window.

What actually happens is worse than a beating.

He is merely standing in the way. An officer walks up, says nothing, barely even glances at him, takes him by the shoulders, moves him aside, and walks on as if nothing had occurred.

The underground man is beside himself:

If you had beaten me, I could have forgiven you the brutality. But you simply lifted me aside?

This is not the conflict he wanted. He would rather the man look him in the eye and knock him down than move him out of the way like a table or a chair.

The injury is small; the insult is enormous. He turns it over and over in his mind, hating the man more with every pass, grinding his teeth, determined on revenge.

So he begins following him through the streets, finding out his name and address, even writing a thinly veiled exposé in order to make him a laughing stock in literature. Later he drafts an elegant, passionate letter challenging him to a duel — in his fantasy the stranger will be moved by his prose, come to apologise, and the two of them will shake hands and become intimate friends. In the end, of course, he never finds the courage to send it.

Then he invents another peculiar form of revenge: since the officer once moved him aside like a piece of furniture, he will simply walk down the street and ram him shoulder to shoulder. This time he will not step aside.

It sounds ridiculous, but to the underground man the plan is epic. He rehearses the collision over and over, and even buys new gloves and a new hat so that he will be more respectably dressed for it.

He is like a knight about to enter the lists; every preparation is solemn. In his imagination this is no ordinary bumping of shoulders but a war for dignity, a war for existence — the question of whether he can stand upright in the world as a man.

In reality he tries again and again, and every time he is about to collide he loses his nerve, ducks his head, steps aside automatically, and slides away like an eel.

At last he steels himself and does bump shoulders with the officer. And just as he had imagined, he holds himself rigid and does not yield an inch. The officer does not react at all, does not even look back, and walks on as if nothing had happened.

The underground man is ecstatic — he has defended his dignity, he has succeeded.

It is painfully ironic. He talks endlessly about the importance of human free will, and in real life he is a pathetic creature who has consumed himself to dust in fear and shame.

He longs for equal treatment and can achieve a moral victory only through frantic fantasy; he wants revenge on the people who insult him and can only torment himself instead; his head is full of rebellion and he has no capacity for action whatsoever, terrified out of his wits by the slightest disturbance.

And yet this “dark crawling” pattern of mind should be familiar to modern people. Other people may never have given you a thought, and you cannot stop yourself from chewing over some tiny moment, embellishing it, replaying it, until it swells into a humiliation that negates your entire character.

From that angle the underground man is certainly no rebel hero. He is closer to an ordinary person trapped by shame. He never really rebelled against the world; most of the time all he can do is crawl slowly through dark places, dreaming of glorious revenge while his endless fantasies flay him alive.

The Schoolfellows’ Dinner: A Complete Social Disaster

The underground man does, in fact, sometimes want to belong.

One day he remembers a schoolfellow named Simonov and goes to visit him. The moment he walks in he stumbles into an excruciating scene.

Besides Simonov there are two other former schoolmates in the room. They are eagerly discussing a farewell dinner for another old classmate who is leaving for a provincial post. That man is none other than Zverkov, the person the underground man has always hated most.

Zverkov possesses everything the underground man despises: good looks, a smooth tongue, frivolity, social ease, self-satisfaction, a habit of boasting about his charm and his prospects. At school he was already a popular golden boy.

The underground man thinks: Zverkov is shallow and pleased with himself, and that is bad enough — but you fools are actually willing to applaud that shallowness.

And yet when they begin dividing the bill and someone suggests that the three of them put in seven roubles each, he cannot stop himself from interrupting: “If you count me in, it will not be twenty-one roubles but twenty-eight.”

Everyone pauses. Simonov asks outright: “What, do you want to come too?”

The underground man nods. In the end Simonov reluctantly agrees to include him.

But the next day is the real catastrophe.

He has been told five o’clock. He arrives on time and finds the private room empty. The waiter tells him the dinner has been moved to six. Which means everyone knew about the change — and he alone was deliberately left out.

Worse still, once the meal begins everyone is merry together, talking and laughing and drinking. The underground man sits at the table and no one addresses a word to him.

When he has drunk enough, he can hold back no longer. He suddenly stands and delivers a deranged speech at Zverkov: “I detest men with ready tongues and rakish habits; I love truth, honesty, thought and true friendship…” Then he raises his glass and says stiffly: “Zverkov, whatever else, I wish you good health!”

No one at the table is impressed. To them it is simply a joke.

In the end the underground man stops speaking altogether. He walks alone along the wall, from the table to the fireplace, from the fireplace back to the table, for three full hours. As he walks he deliberately stamps his boots so that they thud, as if proving: look, this is how I shall walk, and no one can forbid me.

But no one wants to forbid him.

Afterwards he is ashamed of all of it, and his face burns. He says that in ten, twenty, forty years he will still remember that evening with disgust and humiliation — himself pacing like a ghost around the private room, knowing he is degrading himself, unable to stop.

When the dinner ends and the others prepare to go on somewhere else, he swallows his pride and begs to be taken along. In the end he is left standing in the street.

The scene is unbearably awkward. He longs to be seen and respected, to have others discover that he is cleverer, deeper, nobler. But the more he tries to prove it, the deeper he sinks into shame and abjection.

The underground man is not a man who has seen through the world at all. On the contrary, he desperately wants to enter it and has no idea how to live with it. Again and again he tries to join in, and again and again he is thrown back with his head bloodied.

Liza: At Last He Becomes the Brute

After the dinner, the underground man has been stripped of every shred of dignity. Then he goes to a brothel and meets Liza.

They sleep together, and afterwards lie in the dark with almost nothing to say. Into that suffocating silence he suddenly puts a question to her in a tone close to rudeness: Where are you from? How long have you been here? How old are you? Why did you leave home?

And then he begins to lecture, endlessly.

He tells her she will die one day, like the consumptive prostitute who has just died. She is young and pretty now, and people treat her as a treasure, but in a year or two she will be sold down the line, moved from a slightly respectable house to a lower one, and end in a damp, dark basement. She will fall ill, grow old, be drained dry by the madam, rejected by the customers, and die alone. No one will cry for her, no one will pray for her, no one will visit her grave; the whole world will forget her name.

He is, of course, telling the truth. In one sense he is exposing the most brutal reality of a prostitute’s condition at the time. But the problem is that he is not helping Liza understand her situation; he is driving a knife into her with the violence of that language.

For the first time the underground man feels that he too can be the one who insults and wounds other people. That he too has the power to push another human being to the edge of collapse. In that moment Liza’s tears and pain give him something like the shudder of a crime.

And yet, even as he speaks, he begins to feel something genuine.

He tells Liza about the warmth of a home: however poor a girl’s family may be, however imperfect her parents, as long as someone there loves her — even if only once a year — it is still her own home.

And that is exactly what moves Liza. She is not unaware of the condescension in his voice, but those words about love, home, dignity, about a woman not being used up like a rag, are precisely what she has been starving to hear.

But is the underground man really moved by compassion?

Even he admits that in that moment his sincerity and his cruelty are tangled together. As he speaks he already knows that he is turning her soul inside out and tearing her heart. He even feels a dangerous excitement — the more vividly he perceives her feelings, the more viciously he wants to hurt her.

When Liza actually comes to visit him in his basement, something crueller happens.

In the brothel he could play the decent man, the good man who talks about love and the soul and fate. But once Liza enters his real life, the performance collapses. Because what Liza will see is a wretch living in a filthy room, penniless and defeated.

So he shouts at her:

Why did you come to me? What do you want here? Did you think I meant to save you that day? You are wrong — I was laughing at you. Because I had been humiliated first, I had to humiliate someone else; because they treated me like a rag, I had to find someone weaker to show my power over. You simply happened to walk into the line of fire. I was only taking it out on you!

When he has finished, the underground man collapses too. He reviles Liza and in the same breath calls himself a base creature, a scoundrel, the most despicable and ridiculous and envious insect in the world.

And Liza does not strike back in anger. What she sees is a pitiful man who has tortured himself out of human shape. So she reaches out both hands to comfort him.

In that moment her noble soul shakes him to the core.

He has always boasted of the loftiness of his ideas, the depth of his suffering, the refinement of his feelings. But the person who shows the most powerful compassion is Liza — a young woman trampled by society, who a moment earlier was the target of his rage.

Liza is a mirror in which he sees his own face: he hates the people who humiliate him, but given the chance he will immediately repeat exactly the same cruelty. A wounded person who cannot deal with his own wound will turn the wound into a weapon against others.

A Cold Mirror

Novels usually give us a hero, someone worth admiring, understanding, perhaps imitating. Notes from Underground does the opposite. Dostoevsky deliberately puts an antihero at the centre of the stage and lets him expose his resentment, vanity, cowardice, shame and cruelty. This man has many dark thoughts, and that is exactly why he feels so real.

In him we see, more or less, a shadow of ourselves. We long for a real life and are afraid to walk out into the real world; we despise our own cowardice and mediocrity and hide in familiar corners, unwilling to take a single step.

By the end, the book is perhaps not merely the raving monologue of a minor official in St. Petersburg but a cold mirror. What it reflects is not other people but the basement inside each of us — dark, ashamed, sensitive, always at war with itself.

Dostoevsky offers no cure. He simply turns on the light and shows you what the room looks like. And before you can see it clearly, you have to admit at least this much: it is really there.