CHATTER AND CATASTROPHE: ON NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

This trip into the centre of a perverse psyche is well worth the time

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Because we lived in a small house, many of my father’s books were kept on shelves in my bedroom. And so, to relieve the extraordinary boredom of life in the suburbs in the mid-1960s, and to have something to do when I was skiving off school, I would read French and Russian novels in translation. I must have been in my mid-teens when I found the most bizarre and extraordinary text in my father’s library. I read it right through at least twice. It was Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and to say I was knocked out by it is almost an understatement.

I mean, I didn’t believe such a strange, original first-person text—a sort of extended comedic, acid-tongued, rancid rant—had actually been created by a writer from the mid-nineteenth century. It was so modern it could have been written yesterday. And despite its dark, miserable protagonist—a depressive to say the least—it was fresh and alive in ways I’d never experienced in literature.

I had, I think, already read Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, written about thirty years before Notes from Underground, in 1835. I’d certainly seen it dramatized on television, because I can remember a neighbour being appalled and lamenting the state of the BBC—always a promising sign. But Gogol’s madman really is psychotic, and soon descends into complete delirium and hallucination. Dostoevsky’s madman, if he really was mad—though “crazy” would be a better word—is always at least half coherent, and has a lot to say which is so thoughtful and interesting that the work was admired by Nietzsche, who read it in French. And it is still interesting: this trip into the centre of a perverse psyche is well worth the time. Comedy, misery, and madness—there is something honest, hard, and recognisable to all of us there. And if you thought for a moment, as many people do, that human beings are motivated by self-love, you’re in for a lesson.

Another compelling factor in my fondness for this text was Dostoevsky’s mention of Crystal Palace—not something I expected to find in a book by a nineteenth-century Russian. Crystal Palace was a South London suburb a short bus ride from my family’s house, with a lovely park which is also home to several dinosaur sculptures. Rougher than our suburb, and a place where you’d be advised to keep your eyes peeled, school friends and I went to see Crystal Palace FC play on Saturday afternoons. The football ground itself was built on the site of the original Crystal Palace Exposition, which opened in 1851 and burned down in 1936.

The Crystal Palace was a huge structure of steel and glass: with its pagoda-like towers and cupolas, it was a demonstration of imperial, military, and political power, and was visited by thousands of people every day. When Dostoevsky went to London in 1862 for eight days—as part of a long-anticipated European tour—the Great Exhibition had quite an effect on him—a negative effect. Clearly, there’s more than a touch of envy here, but somehow the whole experience made him even more miserable, a misery which entertainingly entered his writing not long after.

Dostoevsky loathed this Crystal Palace as soon as he saw it. If Russia was behind Europe in terms of progress, Dostoevsky wanted none of it. He didn’t want to be modern. For him, these advances were an example of utopianism, collective agency, pointless technological advance, and ‘socialism’. Science, it was believed, would enable people to create the best possible society; this would be quantifiable, because science was objective and could be applied to everything from molecules to men. Societies could be designed according to the best measures, and politicians would be mere technocrats. Brand new people with better tools would emerge from this form of utopianism.

However, for Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, science is not neutral. It might claim to be, but it is really an ideology of constraint. The Underground Man is nothing if not individual. This alienated character would never want to be improved or to resemble anyone else. Nor has he ever felt the slightest desire for collaboration, identification, or solidarity. He doesn’t like humanity; he doesn’t even like himself. He hates himself—and what science could ever grasp that? Surely this is what literature is for: to get to grips with complexity and contradiction. Dostoevsky is, of course, a writer—whom D.H. Lawrence referred to as “a rat, slithering along in hate”—but his alter ego, the Underground Man, has no regard for art of any kind and would never admit to liking anything.

One thing the Underground Man is ardent about, from the start, is telling us what a shit he is. Loaded with hilarious and recognisable self-hate, he informs us that he is a filthy, warped, and pathetic fellow with no social values. Not only that, it’s essential we know that, since he retired from the civil service and has inherited a little money from a relative, he leads an utterly wretched life alone in a dingy apartment, with a miserable and badly paid servant whom he constantly tries to humiliate.