Equivocality

Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

I must admit, I was somewhat disappointed by this book. It failed to blow my head off quite as much as it seems to have done for other readers. It is not that this is a bad book; in fact, I am duly impressed by the energy, depth of topic and character, and deliberately strange style of the writing. However, I confess that many of the ideas in this book I personally had simply seen before, and for others I am sorely lacking context. I think I am simply the wrong person at the wrong time.

The book is divided into two parts, one a polemic penned by the unnamed “underground man” in the 1860s, the other a recounting of various events of the same life which took place in the 1840s.

The first part establishes the character’s essential cowardice, despair, spite, pride, and general complexity of feeling. He understands how “bad” he is—indeed, the famous opening line of “I am a sick man — I am a wicked man” establishes the tone right away. He goes on to give various examples of his spite, such as his obstinacy and the way he enjoys pedantically tormenting the clients who come to see him at the mid-level bureaucratic post he holds. He says he does not care what anyone thinks of him, yet constantly panders and justifies himself, then immediately goes back and angrily denounces his justification. Clearly, Underground Man hates himself, but he also hates everyone else. Eventually the first section settles down into a critique of a utopian society based upon the ideals of reason and enlightened self-interest. I gather that such visions were common in the socialist literature of the era, and it is to such authors that Dostoyevsky is really responding, according to the introduction by Richard Pevear. Essentially, Underground Man’s argument is that no system of perfect reason can ever satisfy real human beings, because we will insist on exerting our free will, even if it is to our detriment. In fact, he says, we enjoy working against our own interests now and again. It satisfies us and in some way proves our humanity.

I will add that these critiques of a society based on pure order and reason now seem unnecessary. Dostoyevsky wrote at a time when science appeared to have the potential to explain the entire universe, when pure materialism was perhaps at its most probable, and the contradictions of determinism and free will were not yet well worked out. In fact, there are many explicitly pseudo-scientific references to determinism in the text. Nowadays these problems seem almost quaint. First of all, the quantified indeterminacies of quantum mechanics restored uncertainty to the sciences. Some decades later, chaos theory showed the impossibility of long-term predictions of the state of a complex system, such as a person or a society. The universe may indeed be deterministic, but this fact has little predictive value. Finally, modern philosophical notions of consciousness allow that free will might be a complex but necessary and intrinsically human illusion, something that we have to believe in order to function well, and what, really, is the problem with that?

The second part of the book details Underground Man’s misadventures during his youth. We learn that Underground Man was raised in a boarding school without parents, and as an adult has become isolated, in fact deliberately cut off from essentially all real human contact; he confesses that he had a friend once in school but it didn’t last long, that he lost interest as soon as he was able to gain control over this other boy. Typically, Underground Man is both contemptuous and terrified of other people. His main escape is reading the heroic literature of the era, and this strange romantic pseudo-world becomes the stuff of his daydreams and fantasy life. He doesn’t know how to interact with anyone except through bizarre attempts to live in a literary style that in practice oscillates between haughtiness and self-abuse. The pretentiousness and hypocrisy of the existing social order are also a main theme here, but this was Imperial Russia at a time when the size of an estate was measured in “souls”, i.e. serfs. True, the episodes in this section are detailed, interesting, and show a great complexity of character, but for a modern audience I’m not sure how much will be new, or decodable outside of its original context.

The first part of the book seems to me to be perhaps a despairing cry for freedom. If we are going to discuss classics in the literature of freedom, I personally found Kerouac’s ebullient On The Road far more energetic and convincing. The second part of the book is a portrait of a complex but deranged and socially crippled personality. This I will admit was fascinating. I find the complex self-loathing of the protagonist to be unique among all the books I’ve read. Still, I feel that I’ve actually met enough people with genuine social disorders, and I’m comfortable enough with the complexity and fluidity of real personalities to find that, again, there’s wasn’t that much for me here. Yet, obviously, there is quite something to this little novel. Nietzsche loved it, for example, calling Dostoyevsky “the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn.” Perhaps I should have read the book ten years ago, during a more formative period. Perhaps I should read other literature of the time and place, to give myself context for what was then no doubt an extraordinary work.

Your mileage may vary.

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