synopsis:

The anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground is a bitter, misanthropic man living alone in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. He is a veteran of the Russian civil service who has recently been able to retire because he has inherited some money. The novel consists of the "notes" that the man writes, a confused and often contradictory set of memoirs or confessions describing and explaining his alienation from modern society.'Notes from Underground' is divided into two sections. The first, 'Underground', is shorter and set in the 1860s, when the Underground Man is forty years old. This section serves as an introduction to the character of the Underground Man, explaining his theories about his antagonistic position toward society.

The first words we hear from the Underground Man tell us that he is "a sick man... a wicked man... an unattractive man" whose self-loathing and spite has crippled and corrupted him. He is a well-read and highly intelligent man, and he believes that this fact accounts for his misery. The Underground Man explains that, in modern society, all conscious and educated men should be as miserable as he is. He has become disillusioned with all philosophy. He has appreciation for the sublime, Romantic idea of "the beautiful and lofty", but he is aware of its absurdity in the context of his narrow, mundane existence.

The Underground Man has great contempt for nineteenth-century utilitarianism, a school of thought that attempted to use mathematical formulas and logical proofs to align man's desires with his best interests. The Underground Man complains that man's primary desire is to exercise his free will, whether or not it is in his best interests. In the face of utilitarianism, man will do nasty and unproductive things simply to prove that his free will is unpredictable and therefore completely free. This assertion partially explains the Underground Man's insistence that he takes pleasure in his own toothaches or liver pains: such pleasure in pain is a way of spiting the comfortable predictability of life in modern society, which accepts without question the value of going to the doctor.

The second fragment of 'Notes from Underground', entitled "Apropos of the Wet Snow", describes specific events in the Underground Man's life in the 1840s, when he was twenty-four years old. In a sense, this section serves as a practical illustration of the more abstract ideas the Underground Man sets forth in the first section. This second section reveals the narrator's progression from his youthful perspective, influenced by Romanticism and ideals of "the beautiful and lofty", to his mature perspective in 1860, which is purely cynical about beauty, loftiness, and literariness in general."Apropos of the Wet Snow" describes interactions between the Underground Man and various people who inhabit his world: soldiers, former schoolmates, and prostitutes. The Underground Man is so alienated from these people that he is completely incapable of normal interaction with them. He treats them with a mixture of disgust and fear that results in his own effacement or humiliation - which in turn result in remorse and self-loathing.in the end the Underground Man decides to end his notes. In a footnote at the end of the novel, Dostoevsky reveals that the Underground Man fails to make even this simple decision to stop writing, as Dostoevsky says that the manuscript of the notes goes on for many pages beyond the point at which he has chosen to cut it off.

on this book:

'Notes from the Underground' is a quite complicated piece of writing that requires a bit of untangling to find all of Dostoevsky's possible themes.

During Dostoevsky's lifetime, the rational philosophies of naturalism and scientism swept through Europe and Russia. These ideas appeared most specifically in Chernyshevsky's 'What Is to Be Done?', which advances a kind of socialist utopianism that Dostoevsky, though at one time he embraced, absolutely despised. Basically Chernyshevsky advances the notion that man is good, and when governed by reason and science, he can form an ideal society. The Underground Man, however, disagrees with the idea that he is simply a piece of material confined to act only according to the laws of rationalism. Dostoevsky held that man is irrational and even evil by nature, that he isn't predetermined to act in any way.

In many ways, Dostoevsky advances a kind of existentialism throughout 'Notes from the Underground'. The Underground Man strongly attacks any notions of central planning as he throws rocks at the Crystal Palace of Chernyshevsky and others. Because our choices mean something, we have meaning too, Dostoevsky argues. Though the decisions we make may be irrational, and even wrong, they are still decisions of our conscious free will. This free will, Dostoevsky maintains, is the most advantageous advantage, for this separates man from the beasts, making him truly human, not just a piano key or an organ stop.

The necessary drawback to this free will, however, is the suffering that must indelibly accompany it. Yet to Dostoevsky, certain things are gained through such suffering that cannot be gained without it. Truth, for one, Dostoevsky suggests can only be a result of a kind of extensive physical and mental torture. The ultimate example of such beneficial suffering, such selfless love, however, is the crucifixion of Christ, who of course heaped a limitless benefit on mankind by sacrificing himself. Christianity, to Dostoevsky, defied reason: it wasn't reasonable for Christ to die on the cross, yet His death was the most "beautiful and sublime" thing imaginable. Though the Underground Man, as confused, alienated and alone as he is, certainly doesn't know what is to be done, Dostoevsky explains that his only answer is in Christian mysticism, not rationalism or scientism.