Why I Love Notes from Underground

Fellow Russian author, Vladimir Nabokov, lectured that “Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one - with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.” That may be true, but it doesn’t matter. Dostoevsky isn’t great because of his literary style, which, like his protagonists, is usually half crazed and brutal. Dostoevsky is great because he’s a firebrand. He’s a raging, consuming, purifying fire, thinly veiled in skin and literary platitudes.

Nabokov’s lecture reminds me of reading one star reviews for books I really like. Most of them are just ‘this sucks’, but occasionally there will be a one star review that’s really insightful to the work, understanding everything the author is trying to do, but just hates it. Nabokov clearly identifies all the distinctives of Dostoevsky, but just thinks they’re what makes his writing bad. I, however, think they’re great. Dostoevsky doesn’t put much physical detail into the world. His characters are more the embodiment of ideas then actual characters which change over the course of the narrative. As Nabokov says, “What landscape there is, is a landscape of ideas, a moral landscape. The weather does not exist in his world, so it does not much matter how people dress. Dostoevsky characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples.”

Dostoevsky is a philosopher driven by the strict censorship of the Russian Empire to channel his ideas through novels. Notes from Underground is nothing like War and Peace. Tolstoy writes an elegant dance of a novel, which starts with an external event causing one of the characters to change. That character then interacts with the other characters differently, which causes them to change, and these transformations feedback into each other in an ever shifting network tilted by Tolstoy towards joy. Notes from Underground is an argument with the unnamed narrator as the point, and the prostitute Liza as the counterpoint. Tolstoy’s characters will change their actions based on decisions they make. Dostoevsky’s characters will largely act the same way but will shift who they interact with, and because the characters represent ideas, different relationships reflect different internal states.

Notes from Underground is the most stripped down form of Dostoevsky’s style. The narrator is the sick degenerate who is conscious that his choices have no meaning. Hated and humiliated by the world, he boils over with spite. Liza, too, is despised and beaten down. But she represents love, salvation, and resurrection. She still sees goodness, and holds onto hope in her destitute and dissolute world. The narrator draws nearer and nearer to Liza, opening himself little by little, but in the end breaks utterly all connection they could have had, rejecting Liza and the hope of resurrection that she represents. The narrator is not just a single man, but is a representation of the men who must live in Petersburg during Dostoevsky’s day. Tolstoy deals with characters with recognizable appearances, mannerisms, and quirks. Dostoevsky crafts archetypes, angels, and demons. We could never physically recognize his characters in the seedy, yellow streets of Petersburg, but we know all the intricacies of their beliefs and what they represent in the story.

Dostoevsky’s gravest shortcoming for Nabokov is that Dostoevsky cannot balance what he sees as arts defining element: a divine game. Art is divine because the artist becomes a fellow creator. But art is a game “because it remains art only as long as we are allowed to remember that, after all, it is all make-believe.” I’m sure, however, that Dostoevsky would scoff at such a dismissive description of art. Dostoevsky is a prophet, and his art is how he prophecies. One of his characters proclaims, “Beauty alone will save the world.” Art is not a game. Nothing is a game; all is divine.

And that’s why I love Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky views the world as I do. When I first read Notes from Underground I though, ‘Finally, someone gets it.’ Everything is theologically and sociologically important: everything we say, everything we think, and everything we do. And when the whole world tells him he’s wrong, Dostoevsky doesn’t move. His characters are madmen because he sees that the world has gone mad, and knows that only grace will redeem it. With a philosopher’s argument, and a prophet’s spiritual conviction, Dostoevsky delivers a scorching diatribe against the archetypal Petersburg man, while holding up the burning, pure light of God’s Love. As the narrator comes to realizes in his rejection of it, “it is in love that all resurrection, all salvation from ruin of whatever sort, and all regeneration consist, nor can it reveal itself in anything else but this.”