Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground
I am a sick man--but 'sick' in the cool way...
Welcome to the Solenoid notebooks. This is a series of letters based on my readings for a review piece of the latest meganovel in translation from the Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu, courtesy of Deep Vellum press. This book has gotten a ton of buzz within certain literary corners.
There’s a lot going on within Solenoid, which presents itself as a document containing the notebooks of a reclusive and deeply unhappy Romanian schoolteacher in the 80s, who also experiences marvelous and surreal events that continue to escalate. Solenoid is an esoteric novel packing in history, mathematics, philosophy, and mysticism.
It also contains autobiographical elements, including a massive field of literary references, that constitute the narrator’s literary upbringing as he recalls books and authors. I ended up reading most if not all of the texts mentioned (I couldn’t make time for Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy) but I hope the resulting series of letters will be illuminating.
For this series, everything after the section break at the bottom will deal briefly with the given book’s consonance with Solenoid.
I hope to share my essay on Solenoid soon. Check out some other reviews on YouTube by Rambling Raconteur, Leaf x Leaf, and Travel Through Stories.
And now, the first letter of the Solenoid Notebooks, on a text that’s absolutely foundational to the novel’s themes and presentation.
Two short books from the 19th century that stamped their imprints on the 20th century more than most: the Communist Manifesto and Notes From Undergound. The former elaborated systematically the fundamental principles of proletarian class interest and thought on a historic scale; the latter elaborated something similar from a different class perspective, a kind of emotional and philosophical roadmap of the petty-bourgeoisie.
Dostoevsky was plugged into the debates in the Russian literary scene on the question of western European influence and in particular petty-bourgeois socialism, in a period where autocratic Russia had done so much to make the democratic aspirations of 1848 go unfulfilled across Europe. The Russian peasantry was brutally locked to the land they tilled for their masters in a fashion that had already been reformed out of western Europe. They were emancipated (and burdened with redemption payments) in 1861. Reform movements were divided on whether progress in an increasingly backward Russia (bulwark of continental reaction) was to be found in the scientific and cultural knowledge of the west—the political advance of the republican uprisings in France and the philosophical advance of German idealism—or to be firmly rooted in a pan-Slavic movement, based on its historical particularities like the old agrarian communes.
Throughout the mid 19th century—a period of incessant peasant uprisings and social instability—the Russian masters produced novels, stories, and poetry that traded on these debates through rather transparent allegories.
Turgenev, in Fathers in Children, embodied the modern and western valorization of rational thought in Bazarov, a self-described “nihilist” but more like an amplified 19th century positivist. Chernychevsky’s What Is to Be Done? features petty-bourgeois socialists as larger-than-life superheroes that you might find in shonen manga, uppercutting snooty aristocrats off their feet in the middle of the street. And Dostoevsky intervened with his underground man figure, who accepted western ideas, turning away from the simplicity of the Christian Russian soul, and tying himself up in knots in the process.
Another, structural point of commonality between the Manifesto and Underground is that both texts are divided into two parts, the first one being more abstract, didactic, and more quotable, and the second one much more concrete, dramatic, relatively “bizarre” in its details, yet not as well remembered or understood. Everyone knows the lines by Marx and Engels about the bourgeoisie creating the gravediggers of capitalism in the proletariat, the bourgeoisie’s inability to handle the development of productive forces it had itself engendered like the sorcerer’s apprentice, and how the bourgeoisie imposes its mode of production on the globe.
But do we read with equal care the concern the authors took with the particularities of France, Switzerland, Poland, Germany, and the different types of political parties supported by Communists in the months leading up to the social storms of 1848, from the Swiss Radicals to the French Social-Democrats, and even bourgeois democrats in Germany? Do we pay attention to how the messy and variegated continental politics as Marx and Engels observed it resonates with the “theoretical” front half of the Manifesto?
Anyway, a similar thing may be happening with Dostoevsky’s own—reactionary—ideological book.
The underground man writes the first part as a kind of ruminative essay, and his journaling prompts the remembrance of the events of the second part, which reads as a conventional first person narrative. During the first part, he carries on an imaginary dialogue with a figure standing in for rational scientific knowledge, where so many of the most memorable lines come from, such as these:
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
When all you really have is your own ego and its capacity to assert and express itself, why would you ever surrender it to niggling things like material facts?
The crude economic conditions (the UM’s basement apartment as well as our current situation, going broke from inflation with a recession on the way), the distrust of science (consider the anti-vaxxers), the withdrawal into the self out of material weakness, and the surly contempt directed at society—there is a reason Dostoevsky’s petty-bourgeois representations resonate to this day; the class conditions share an essence across hemispheres and over a century of capitalist history.
How far is the libertarianism of the ego willing to go? To the point of madness? The narrator certainly thinks so. Humans are not determined by their objective conditions, as the materialists say, like piano keys by the pianist. Even if definitive empirical proof that this was so existed, man “will devise destruction and chaos, will devise sufferings of all sorts, and will insist on getting his way!”
It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself—as though that were so necessary—that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.
The socialists talk of a common historical movement, bigger than any of our petty egos, that will culminate in the construction of an ideal harmonious society, presented here as a Crystal Palace, evoking the fashionable cast iron and plate-glass architecture of mid 19th century western Europe.
But while I am alive and have desires I would rather my hand were withered off than bring one brick to such a building! Don’t remind me that I have just rejected the palace of crystal for the sole reason that one cannot put out one’s tongue at it. I did not say because I am so fond of putting my tongue out. Perhaps the thing I resented was, that of all your edifices there has not been one at which one could not put out one’s tongue.
The third volume of Joseph Frank’s great biography of Dostoevsky devotes a couple of long chapters to Underground and the contextual debate, and it’s a wonderful reading that highlights the tendency of the “revolt of freedom” toward self-destruction, a condemnation of militant politics, in favor of the “simplicity” of the Russian Christian soul.
The common cause of the underground man’s inner turmoil and the chaos he impulsively starts in the second part is “the revolt of the personality against a world in which free will (and hence moral categories of any kid) has no further reason for being.” And he clarifies that the revolt is not itself a value but merely “a last-ditch defense against the hypothetical accomplishment of the Crystal Palace ideal.”
Notes From Underground isn’t mentioned explicitly when it comes to the literary upbringing of the narrator of Solenoid.
The narrator shares one of the poems he’d written “when I still believed in literature,” which includes the lines:
maybe the world can be described fold over fold, like the statues at tanagra; maybe the theory of catastrophes, maybe cantor arepo but i, curled up like a mouse inside your splendor a Chrystal Palace for the people, mouth gaping like a nerod among your barrels of jewels-- what will describe my wrinkles?
In the last third of the novel, the narrator moves into a discussion of Nicolae Vaschide, a famous Romanian psychologist from the turn of the 20th century. Vaschide has a role to play in the broader historical conspiracy unfolding before the narrator. But at this point in the text the narrator has also truly gone into the weeds with his philosophical reflections. His lionizing of subjective idealism, the “palace” within the mind, has led him to doubting objective reality altogether.
“You can’t sow the world with dreams,” according the narrator, as Vaschide was trying to do, “because the world itself was a dream.”
What follows is an extended riff on the intellectual history of early 20th century Europe. In the footsteps of the Romantics,
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky dug deeper, against the grain of the inept progressivism of their age, to unveil the abyss of the mind, unsoundable like karst complexes, the shame, embarrassment, hopelessness, animal fear, hate, cupdity, and evil that lie within us, the perverted will that deforms the crystal palace of thought.
For “inept progressivism,” read socialism! The intrinsic badness of human nature makes any political project or class struggle a waste of energy, because the internal life of each individual is too chaotic and leads to destructive choices. Hence the need for capitalism and state power as punishment for our “nature.”
This is why existentialism is dangerous, folks. It leads back to Christianity.
The crystal palace can never exist as a vision of the future. It can only serve as a metaphor for the ossified condition of the internal mental world, an “interior palace of frozen marble.”
There’s a lot more to be said about the built environments described in Solenoid. For the next letter, we turn another tributary vein: the surrealism of De Chirico.