Notes from the Underground

Allen Berra reviewed this book in Salon on May 2004:

May 27, 2004 | There are a handful of books that have the power to create secret societies among their readers, books that make you feel like a cult member. I don't just mean the popular "subversive books" such as "Catcher in the Rye" or "The Trial" or "Catch-22." However personal our relationship to them, they are all comfortable literature-class staples. I mean books that are accepted classics but that some teachers shy away from, if only because they can't be served up (as even the great earthshaking fictions of Tolstoy can) in neat little packages of meaning.

I mean books that even if you studied them in college didn't quite seem to fit. Books you probably stumbled across on your own or through a close friend, and after you read them, you felt you had been drawn to them, as if by a tractor beam in a sci-fi movie. Albert Camus' "The Stranger" is one of these; so is Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities." For the most part, such books were lumped together under the heading of "existential," whether the label applied literally or not.

The heavyweight champion of "existential fiction" is Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground." (In recent translations, it's no longer "theUnderground.") As anyone who has read it can attest, it's one of the oddest little books in all of literature (110-120 pages in most editions, a novella, really). It's divided into two parts, the first a roughly 40-page exposition featuring a nameless character whom we have come to refer to only as "Underground Man" ranting away about everything that society holds dear in what V.S. Pritchett once called "an amazing performance of bad humor." ("I will not introduce any order or system," the unnamed narrator says in the new edition from Everyman's Library, "whatever I recall, I will write down.")

The second part, about twice as long, is a narrative in which U.G. Man tries to assert himself along the lines of the nihilist principles expressed in Part 1. He succeeds only at humiliating himself further. The former college classmates he nurses grudges against and even the total strangers he tries to pick fights with don't consider him important enough to be insulted. In the last few pages, he turns to a prostitute, Liza, whose simplicity and sincerity expose to us, if not entirely to UGM, the shallowness of his own philosophy.

"Notes From Underground"

By Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky