Old Stories: Notes from the Underground

What? Were You Expecting Something Fun? Entertaining? Well, here it is!

Before Freud and Jung, before Maslow and Skinner, there was Fyodor Dostoevsky. If you have any interest in human psychology reading Dostoevsky is a beautiful thing. And it’s not like the novels, whether Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, are difficult to read. To the contrary they are excellent page turners, entertaining on every level.

A good place to start with Dostoevsky might be Notes from the Underground (Notes). Notes, from 1864, is a short novel, less than a 100 pages. In this short space you will meet the narrator, one of the most unusual characters in all of fiction, though he is a person you have met in real life several times, I think. You first encountered him in high school, a boy who always had a bit of a sneer no matter the circumstance. He had a low opinion of the least popular kids, and yet the same low opinion of the most popular, for what reason no one knew; he was inclusive in that way. He was also equitable, equally unenthused by the most exciting day of the school year, and the most boring. In fact, his nose was turned down on the most diverse array of people and experiences imaginable. Ah, you now remember the boy I describe? Yes, him! But why, you ask? From where does a boy like that come? And where does he go?

Ah, but yes, come to think of it, you have a faint memory of running into him later, years after graduation. He was behind a counter somewhere, a government office perhaps, or an auto dealership maybe. He followed you like a hunter follows his prey, peering at you over the glasses on the end of his nose as you walk innocently toward his counter. He says nothing. There is a faint light of recognition between you, but he just stares, or glares, you’re not sure. Finally you break the ice and state your need. He summons the least possible amount of energy to respond. On it goes until you leave exhausted but with the sense that he was strangely fulfilled by the encounter.

At the ten year reunion you hear that he actually dated a girl from your class, and treated her very rudely, almost as if the object of dating was to make the other not like you, even to detest you; to see what bad behavior you could get away with before your date walked away disgusted. A complete enigma this boy, now a man in some sense, what happened to him? Always at odds with himself, with others…At any rate you already know the narrator of the story, don’t let his unfamiliar Russian life put you out. He is easily knowable for anyone who went to high school, anywhere.

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While he may be the least likable character in all of fiction, he, the narrator, still evokes your admiration for his ability to understand human psychology, and more importantly to understand it within his historical context. What would happen, he asks, if we had a group of people raised in utopia, a life not just affluent, but devoid of struggle, of challenge, of suffering; more a ‘glide’ than the bitter, difficult life humans have known for millennia? Raised in homes at the perfect temperature year around, dressed in new clothes each season, fed well and always, injected with a multitude of medicines to prevent disease, how would they live as adults after such a rational childhood? Would they choose a rational life themselves? Would they always take the next rational step to smooth an odd rough edge? Would they affirm life at every step, seeing how well their own lives unfolded? Are you sure, the narrator asks? Well, are you sure?

Is it possible they would be strangely drawn toward the obscene, the bizarre, the cruel, the life negating, the irrational, the macabre? Would they rebel against their own rational life and choose the most irrational causes and concerns? Would they upend their own history for some newfangled idea with little if any evidence? Would they attack their own family for sins never committed in the name of a new religion that offers no forgiveness?

In 1861 the Russian Czar released the serfs from their medieval subordination to the nobility - they were essentially slaves. Russia, now lit with the fire for reform, leapt forward toward some of the new ideas of the times, utilitarianism and out right utopianism. The narrator, an ugly, terrible man in his soul, is the perfect foil for these new ideas because he knows of what the human soul is capable. He hasn’t wondered through life with a sunny disposition until he finally encounters evil one hapless day, like most of us. He felt it inside himself for as long as he can remember.

Interestingly, 100 years later, in 1961, the first volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was smuggled out of Russia to the west and later published. It put an end to one of the great utopian visions of history (or so we thought). In the final draft, the three volumes told the story of the hundreds of labor camps in the Soviet Union, scattered like a long chain of islands across the vast Russian country side where human beings, men, women and children, were ground into dust. Millions upon millions of human lives lost. Why murder this many people? Take a few days to read Notes and you’ll have the answer.