Notes from Underground

Part One is a monologue directed less at the reader than at Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, the rational-egoist utopianism that assumed self-interest, properly understood, would make people behave well; the Underground Man's whole argument is that a person will wreck his own advantage on purpose, will choose suffering and self-destruction, simply to prove he's not a piano key that plays whatever tune reason dictates. 'Twice two makes four,' he says, 'is no longer life, but the beginning of death,' insisting that free will, even irrational and self-harming free will, matters more than any Crystal Palace of engineered contentment.

That argument stays abstract and almost bearable in Part One; Part Two, 'Apropos of the Wet Snow,' tests it on an actual person. Humiliated at a dinner he forces his way into with old schoolmates who despise him, the Underground Man follows them to a brothel afterward and meets Liza, a young prostitute he lectures, with real eloquence, about the ruin awaiting her, a performance more for his own vanity than her benefit, though it lands, and she takes it to heart far more sincerely than he intended.

The Crystal Palace, the glass-and-iron exhibition hall Dostoevsky had actually seen in London on a trip to Europe that left him contemptuous of Western rationalism generally, becomes his shorthand for every rationalist utopia that promises to organize human need out of existence: a world so perfectly engineered for satisfaction that spite, waste, and self-sabotage would become literally impossible. The Underground Man treats that promise as the real threat, not because comfort is bad, but because a species stripped of the freedom to act against its own interest has been stripped of the only thing, in his account, that makes it human rather than an organ stop. Dostoevsky wrote the novella not long after his own years in Siberian exile, and his narrator's contempt for progressive theorizing carries the particular bitterness of a man who had once been a radical himself.