Facing the Self, Embracing the Flower in the Thorns
Everywhere there is laughter and merriment; never again can one see any tears hidden beneath the laughter, unseen by the world.
-- Dostoevsky, Demons
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Notes from Underground, 1864, by Dostoevsky
After savoring it carefully and closing the book, I lingered over it for a long time. A good book, and one I strongly recommend!
The novel is narrated in the first person. The story takes place in Tsarist Russia in the 1860s. "I" am a retired civil servant, intellectually developed and fond of reflection. At the age of forty, after receiving a small inheritance, I retired and then lived in the underground for twenty full years.
This Notes from Underground is precisely the protagonist's analysis of himself and recollection of the past twenty years later.
Notes begins with the uncanny monologue, "I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." It tells the story of a protagonist whose life is full of hardship: he is despised, repeatedly bullied, and filled with pain, humiliation, and resentment. He tries to establish his own individuality, yet cannot find the right path; he even loses his own identity. For this reason, the whole novel is threaded with his anxiety over identity and the anguish of being unable to identify with one.
What must be made clear is that the "underground man" is by no means a positive figure, but a marginal figure so alienated that he is nearly pathological. He lives underground like a hamster, wandering and circling in darkness and dampness.
In fact, the history of fiction has never lacked writing about repression and morbidity, and the creation of contradictory characters was never Dostoevsky's invention. But Dostoevsky successfully pushes the character to the edge of an abyss and exposes everything in the deepest reaches of the human heart, completely and without the slightest scruple.
Just like the "underground man" in Notes, he has in fact reached the brink of madness (or perhaps is already mad). He constantly puts forward ideas and constantly negates himself; he pours out his thoughts without restraint and trembles before the immense contrast between the soul and reality.
On the one hand, he deeply feels that he is exceptionally talented, far above the "ordinary people" around him, and always wants to display his individuality, so he possesses an extreme self-respect. On the other hand, he would rather suffer bullying and derive from it some unforgettable, desperate pleasure. As he himself says in Notes: "Can a man who tries to find enjoyment in his own humiliation possibly respect himself, even a little?" The answer is clear: no. Thus the protagonist, deeply trapped in identity anxiety, cannot grow accustomed to "living life" and can only distance himself from society and from the crowd, choosing "long live the underground."
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The pathological image of the "underground man" is also deeply connected with the author himself.
Dostoevsky could not escape illness throughout his life; he suffered from epilepsy from childhood. His parents both died when he was young. At twenty-eight, he was sentenced to death for suspected "anti-Tsarist activity," later commuted to exile in Siberia. In the bleak and barren Siberia, his epileptic seizures became ever more frequent. In 1864, Dostoevsky's wife and elder brother died one after another. To care for his brother's family, he was on the verge of bankruptcy; he had hoped to repay his debts through gambling but instead incurred still more debt (friends, never gamble!). He sank into depression. But in order to survive, he had to keep writing; the anxiety, pain, anger, and frenzy in his heart can be imagined. It was in this very year that Notes was born. (Later, he wrote many classic works, such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov.)
Notes bears a distinct mark of its era. The story is set in mid-nineteenth-century Petersburg. At that time, under the influence of Western Europe and the enormous pressure within Russia, the reform-minded Alexander II adopted enlightened policies and carried out reforms in many areas. In 1861, he issued a decree abolishing serfdom and began implementing reforms such as local self-government and judicial reform, granting local governments a degree of autonomy and formulating a plan to transform the Russian monarchy into a constitutional monarchy, slowly moving toward democratization.
During the reform period, Russian industry developed more quickly, urbanization accelerated, civic education spread, and public media such as newspapers and magazines gradually increased. Society underwent drastic changes, leading to the disappearance of the stable life and stable identities found in traditional society.
At the same time, the Great Reforms brought great openness. Capitalist ideas powerfully entered Russia and spread rapidly, while various Western currents of thought also poured in. Faced with this enormous shock and impact, traditional Russian culture was utterly powerless, even collapsing.
Therefore, Russian society in the second half of the nineteenth century was both unprecedentedly active and unprecedentedly chaotic (at this moment, just like that moment; manual doge). People's spirits were unprecedentedly open and widely receptive, yet therefore often at a loss and unprecedentedly bewildered. The whole society lacked faith, lost moral norms, and every kind of thought went its own way.
It is against this grand historical background that Notes, through the protagonist's highly dialogic inner monologue, lets the inner world of a lonely monster produced by chaotic, grotesque urban life twitch and convulse before the reader, incoherent, contradictory, and repetitive. He hesitates, yet is also excited and verbose about everything he confesses; almost every sentence refutes and mocks the previous one. And it is precisely the abrupt, inexplicable ecstasy and extreme despair contained in each sentence that makes readers feel both annoyed and excited, both stimulated and confused: what kind of person is this "I"? In this way, the author expresses ahead of his time the identity anxiety and identity crisis unique to modern people, giving the work a modernity, even a contemporaneity, all its own.
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As readers feel the waves of madness and contradiction that keep coming from the "underground man," they inevitably encounter a more realistic question: the "underground man" cannot provide help to people who share his experiences and thoughts. What he can provide is only a pathological emotional release. If that is so, what is the use of reading Dostoevsky?
When every day we are packed like sardines in the vast sea of people, busy yet not knowing where we are going
When we are trapped between school advancement and grades, forced to face the fact that our skills are inferior or the reality that work is hard to find
When we finish late-night self-study and walk along a neon-flashing but empty street
When we approach classmates with kindness and humility, only to receive scheming or contemptuous coldness
When we exhaust every ounce of strength yet still cannot change the class we are in, cannot let our loved ones live with greater dignity
When the college entrance exam ends and youth leaves the stage, we discover that even if we enter a decent university, perhaps we still cannot obtain a ticket to happiness. At such times, Dostoevsky and his works may indeed be out of place, because to us they are no different from adding frost to snow. We do need chicken soup and "a bright tail."
But although we can pretend to be happy, although we can force ourselves to keep our spirits up, there will always be a voice echoing inside us -- is all this forced smiling really our life? Where there is light, there is darkness. The meaning of life does not lie in the technique of escape, but in calm, direct facing. This is exactly what Dostoevsky brings us: he lets us understand that no matter what darkness we are in, we can always discover subterranean fire in the depths of the dark. It has no light, yet it burns. This is precisely the essence of Dostoevsky's thought and fiction --
We do not want a whitewashed utopia; we want the little flower blooming among the thorns.
- END
References:
Baomu Xiao. Dostoevsky: Subterranean Fire Burns in the Darkness. Douban, 2017.6.8.
Zeng Siyi. Identity Anxiety and Identity Recognition -- On Notes from Underground [M]. Notes from Underground, first edition, May 2020. Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 2020.5: 185-209.