![]() He did uniformly badly in lessons … but succeeded in passing his final examinations because he had influential friends”. He especially hates Zverkov: “I disliked him even in the lower forms, precisely because he was good-looking and lively. ![]() His next encounter is more sustained, with some old classmates whom he thoroughly despises for their “triviality” and “stupidity”. His subsequent attempts to convince himself that his gesture has made any impact are tragicomic: “He did not even glance round, and pretended he had not noticed but he was only pretending, I am certain.” Their shoulders clash: the officer walks on. After much deliberation, he eventually squares up to the officer. Underground Man becomes obsessed with setting up a confrontation, in which he will not yield. Furious at this minor humiliation, Underground Man starts to stalk the military man, who, it transpires, often walks around Petersburg’s crowded Nevsky Prospect, pushing anyone he considers inferior out of his path. An officer silently grabs his shoulders and moves him out of the way. He decides to fight whoever is in the tavern, but then stands around, unable to do anythingĮntering a tavern, he decides to fight whoever is there, but then stands around, unable to do anything. The first anecdote is the funniest, showing just how much effort he must make to carry out the smallest act of rebellion in a world in which the most “civilised” shed the most blood. This is where he demonstrates the spite and inertia that he has discussed, writing about his 24-year-old self, who felt that “Every decent man in this age is, and must be, a coward and a slave”. Underground Man states that he was “ashamed” of the second, main chapter of the book, subtitled A Story of the Falling Sleet. He labels himself an “ineffective, irritating windbag”, but he would prefer to be this than a man of deeds: these people may set the terms for “good” and “bad” character, but they are stupid and limited, “taking immediate, but secondary, causes for primary ones, and thus they are more quickly and easily convinced than other people that they have found indisputable grounds for their action”. Both are true of Underground Man: he fulminates against the values of 19th-century Russia before declaring that he doesn’t believe a single word of his (incredibly persuasive) opening monologue. Perhaps, as WB Yeats wrote, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. In response, he would rather be thought of as malevolent, hurting people’s feelings at will, but he says the truth is that: “I couldn’t make myself anything … neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect”. He knows “the highest and the best”, but he accepts that he’s not one of them and that the standards they set are unattainable, even though he was the only civil servant he knew not to be taking bribes. ![]() In chapter 1, The Underground, he directly addresses the readers, trying to win them over to his viewpoint. In particular, he wrote in reaction against Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done? (1863), which argued for the means of production to be reorganised according to co-operative ideals.ĭostoevsky’s central character, however, will not work readily with anyone. Dostoevsky rejected the idea that people act in accordance to reason or their best interests and asserted the need for them to be able to behave as they choose, without fitting into Enlightenment ideas of “progress”. ![]() Certainly, the author identified strongly with his protagonist, calling him the “real man of the Russian majority”. As well as referring to Notes from Underground as the first existential novel, some critics, including Leonid Grossman, have ascribed Underground Man’s opinions to Dostoevsky.
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