About Notes from Underground

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Notes on Notes*

I. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man is a modern man. As a literary character he is one of the first of his kind. But he is also a product of his time: a nineteenth-century Russian man. Some claim the Underground Man's rants are pure satire, Dostoevsky's attack on nineteenth-century Russian scholars and philosophers. Others believe that Dostoevsky depicts the all-too-real underground of the human psyche.

II. Before going underground, Dostoevsky's protagonist abandoned his post as a civil servant. Through this profession, Dostoevsky furthers a favorite Russian literary archetype: the government clerk. In an empire without a middle class, these educated men occupy the lowest ranks of the upper class, the last rung of genteel society before the steep drop into poverty and serfdom. Despite his endless, mundane labor, the clerk has no possibility for upward mobility; he must either go into debt to enjoy moments of a finer life or resign himself to his place.

III. During 1864, the year that Dostoevsky wrote Notes, tragedy dogged him with the deaths of his first wife Maria Dmitrevna, his brother Mikhail, and his beloved colleague and editor Apollon Grigorev. In a letter to Mikhail in April of that year, he described the conditions under which he wrote the novella: "My friend, I was sick for the greater part of a month…My nerves are on edge…My torments of all sorts are so hard to bear that I don’t want to mention them…My wife is dying, literally…nevertheless I write and write."

IV. Tsar Nicholas I, who led Russia into a bleak period of terror and oppression from 1825–1855, developed a network of spies, informants, and censors across his empire, and he stamped out any inkling of revolutionary activity or thought. Young intellectuals of the 1840s avoided confrontation with Nicholas’s regime. Instead of using their education to inspire active revolution, they turned to dreaming and embraced what they considered “the beautiful and lofty” ideals of French romanticism, preferring to read the novels of Victor Hugo than to affect change in their native Russia.

V. Dostoevsky once socialized with, and was embraced by, these naïve Russian romantics. His first major work, Poor Folk (1845–46), earned him entrance into the most elite salons, and hopes abounded that he would continue to champion the Russian peasant in realistic prose. However, in his sophomore work, The Double (1846), Dostoevsky experimented with form and characterological psychology. The story's lukewarm reception dampened Dostoevsky’s popularity. He soon found himself on the fringes of Russian intellectual life and in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of radicals that flirted with actually converting their revolutionary thought into action.

VI. In 1849, Dostoevsky and other members of the Petrashevsky Circle were sentenced to death, a common punishment in the last fear-filled years of Nicholas I’s reign. But, in a plot twist worthy of melodrama, the prisoners were granted a last-minute reprieve as they faced the firing squad. Although his life was spared, Dostoevsky was sentenced to five years in a Siberian labor camp and five years living the brutal life of a common soldier. After the House of the Dead (1862), a novel that chronicled his time in Siberia, Notes from Underground was Dostoevsky’s first major work after paying for his "crimes" against the Tsar.

VII. Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) wrote the proto-socialist treatise, What Is To Be Done?, in 1863. Once just outside of the Petrashevsky Circle, he hoped to galvanize the young intelligentsia into action, calling on them to lead the masses and build a new Russian utopia, founded on reason and intellect. What Is to Be Done? includes a favorite plot of nineteenth-century Russian literature: one of the heroes saves a fallen woman from a life of destitution and debauchery. With the Liza subplot in Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky takes direct aim at Chernyshevsky’s clichés.

VIII. Dostoevsky visited the Crystal Palace in 1862 during London's second World's Fair. He despised the looming iron and glass construction, believing it to be not only a monstrosity but a symbol of apocalypse. He wrote about his travels abroad in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, but compared to other Russian writers who thrived on trips to Paris and London, Dostoevsky found his inspiration in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

IX. Dostoevsky shared a fundamental belief in and respect for the Russian people and their enduring spirit. He rejected the hegemony of Western European culture, and he worried about the increasing egoism and materialism invading Russia. A true Slavophile, the author looked to define a true Russian character to find salvation for an empire on the brink of destruction.

X. The Russian translation of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species hit St. Petersburg in 1864. The theory of evolution sparked debates that pitted science against religion, man’s free will against man's biological destiny; man's pursuit of his own pleasure and profits as a biological imperative. Dostoevsky himself was a devout follower of the Russian Orthodox Church. Some critics have speculated that, in Notes, he would have proposed a Christian alternative to the Underground Man's nihilistic views, but references to Christ and anything resembling religious philosophy would have ended up on the censor's scrap heap.

XI. The Underground Man not only endures, but he has become the spokesman for philosophical and aesthetic movements since Dostoevsky created him. The character, seen as a harbinger of modernism, has been said to embody Nietzsche's amoralism and nihilism, Sartre's existentialism, and Freud's perfect subject for psychoanalysis. He seems ripped from the pages of twentieth-century literature, foreshadowing the language of Kafka, Camus, and Beckett.

The final end? In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky creates more than just a satire of Russian thinkers, who are paralyzed by the sheer brilliance of their own thoughts. The Underground Man, with his labyrinthine intellectual arguments, is also a real man who suffers the pain of humiliation and rejection.

—AMY BORATKO, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG

*The author constructed his novella in two parts. In Part I: "Notes from Underground," set in the 1860s, the Underground Man delivers a first-person argument in eleven chapters. In Part II: "Apropos of the Wet Snow," the clerk describes incidents sixteen years before, when, at the age of twenty four, he still lived among his peers, a time when he did not yet live in the underground but 'only bore it in his soul.'