Torments and Tormenticules: A Review of Notes from Underground

“The sauce here consisted of contradiction and suffering, of tormenting inner analysis, and all of these torments and tormenticules…”

All of Dostoevsky’s books are uncomfortable. Entering the thoughts of one of his antiheroes is like donning a hair shirt. Or perhaps that assessment is too harsh, because in spite of the discomfort there is something enjoyable about reading Dostoevsky that comes from the quick and cunning sense of humor which flashes here and there amongst all that scratchy hair like strands of silver thread---it isn’t comforting so much as it is delightful to behold, made shinier by contrast. There is the golden thread of intelligence here as well, binding up the seams, fastening the reader more tightly into the odious garment. So perhaps the hair shirt analogy is apt after all, especially in light of Dostoevsky’s recurrent obsession with suffering, even of the most banal variety, as a process by which the soul is distilled.
In Part One of Notes from Underground, the narrator introduces himself as “a sick man” and “a wicked man.” His tone is hostile, he feels persecuted, wallows in self-pity, then will not permit himself to wallow, his mind swarms with bitter fantasies of revenge, he chokes on a sense of his superiority but finding no evidence of it within himself he contents himself with finding fault in others, he spurs himself spitefully onward, he is crippled by paroxysms of humiliation and personal failure. He launches into a diatribe against Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? then stabs halfheartedly at Buckle, Burke, and Rousseau (among others) before returning to rancorous allusions to Russians like N.N. Ge, and A.E. Anaevsky whose work, I confess (another of Dostoevsky’s preoccupations in this book: the need to confess) I am not familiar with. The torturous content of Part One is stitched together with arguments against utopian idealism, the assertion that free will trumps innate goodness, and a quickly sketched outline of a philosophy of contrariness. Part Two: Apropos of Wet Snow continues to make tangential and often critical references to other Russian authors while the narrator revisits three sordid memories. He remembers a soldier who inadvertently insulted him by brusquely passing him in a bar (and insulted him further by never noticing him.) Then he recalls a going away dinner some of his former classmates had for a friend of theirs, how he invited himself, and behaved obnoxiously out of a muddled sense of superiority, inferiority, and desperation for friendship. His most painful memory however centers on Liza, the heart of his garrulous narrative, a young prostitute he meets at a brothel after the going away dinner, and the contemptible way he treats her that night and again later when she shows up at his house. By sending her away his heartlessness becomes irreparable.
When the underground man introduces himself to the reader Dostoevsky appears briefly at the door, speaking through the keyhole of a footnote while the underground man continues, oblivious to the authors presence, importunately addressing the reader through the floorboards. Dostoevsky asserts that while the underground man is fictional this type of man “not only may, but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.” If I am to take him at his word then this is a critique of the social ills that produce such a miserable little man and the ideas that beleaguer his festering brain. Dostoevsky says nothing about Liza but he has used a hapless prostitute before (Sonya, in Crime and Punishment) for the dual purpose of yardstick by which the reader can measure the antiheros sin, and as the bringer of love, more suffering, and the possibility of salvation, although the underground man opts to take his suffering without love or salvation.
The social ills, the “circumstances” that Dostoevsky mentions are different than those that I would enumerate, and the clues are in the underground man’s reading material. I suspect the underground man is a precursor to Antonin Artaud, a sort of self-loathing madman whose mind has been polluted by the decadence of western culture. The underground man is such a champion of free will however, that I would hold him more personally accountable than Dostoevsky does. The underground man has all kinds of opportunities but he prefers to sulk alone, and while I empathize with him because he suffers I stop short of blaming society, as Dostoevsky would have me do. Besides, there is Liza, who is a far more plausible victim of “circumstances” and she seems solely to exist in the memory of the underground man, in his narrative, and in the book so that she can be abused. At the end of Notes from Underground the underground man momentarily comforts himself with the thought that perhaps the suffering he has caused her will purify her soul, will grant her access to salvation, but he dismisses the thought unwilling to grant himself that comfort, and I dismiss that idea as well although I don’t think Dostoevsky intends for his reader to cleave suffering and salvation in two so easily.
Dostoevsky is a great chronicler of “torments and tormenticules” as his bestiary of characters can easily attest. He writes a great internal monologue, keeps the rooms bare of all but the most necessary props and then fills up space with internal demons projected outwards. He is at his artistic best with the full-fledged “torments” in the big books, like the Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Punishment. He depicts the “tormenticules” in exquisite detail in stories like The Double, but he is too earnest he cannot carry the tragic in one hand and the comic in the other as Gogol did in Dead Souls. Dostoevsky lacks the agility needed for satire, becoming bogged down instead in suffering and psychosis. He can be funny but he fumbles with his sense of humor and drops it entirely when he starts chasing salvation. Notes from Underground has some of strengths as the longer books, forceful descriptions of a man struggling with his conscience, examination of philosophical, spiritual, and emotional abnegation of goodness, and a pathos that he somehow manages to dredge up for the most disagreeable characters. It is this pathos, finally, that I find most compelling in Dostoevsky’s work, because personal suffering is just suffering, what is meaningful is the ability to cast a kind eye on the suffering of others.