Reading Notes from Underground: Part Seven – Frank's Biography

Joseph Frank's impressive, abridgement of his multi-volume biography.

[Part One]  [Part Two]  [Part Three] [Part Four]  [Part Five] [Part Six]

As I stated in Part One of this series on Notes from Underground, I was immediately drawn to Joseph Frank's massive, abridged biography Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2012) to obtain some context for what I was reading in Constance Garnett's translation.  I ended up reading Frank's entire biography as I read and reread Notes from Underground.  I purchased the Ronald Wilks translation to fine-tune my understanding of the work.  The essay accompanying that translation was also helpful, which I have already written about.  Once again, for a period of weeks, Dostoevsky became an obsession of my life.

To come full circle and close out my consideration of Notes from Underground, I want to offer a detailed review of the sections of Frank's biography that pertain to Dostoevsky around the time he wrote his famous novella.  As I have said before, I find Dostoevsky's life in many ways more interesting than almost anything he ever wrote (The Brothers Karamazov excepted) and have already indicated such interest when I was reading and considering Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.  Now, I want to cover the author's challenging life at the time up to and including his composition of the world's “first existential novel.”

We have to join Frank's story two years prior to the writing of Notes from Underground.  Dostoevsky wanted to leave Russia to tour Europe.  He was well aware of the European influence upon Russia and he was critical of it.  So, he wanted to see these countries for himself.  Franks says: “Long before he had departed on his journey, Dostoevsky had been persuaded that Europe was a dying culture that had lost its spiritual bond of unity.  It was thus a simple matter for him to pierce through the illusions of the glittering European surface and instantly detect the corruption lying concealed underneath.” (page 373)

He shared with readers his impressions in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, a series printed in Epoch, the literary journal that he edited at the time.  He saved his staunchest criticism for the notes on his trip to London in 1862.  For Dostoevsky, London was “the city in which the soulessness and heartlessness of Western life – its crass materialism, it unashamed contempt for anything other than the sordid pursuit of worldly gain – was mirrored in the most arrogantly brazen fashion.  The chapter on London bears as its title the single, flamboyant name of the false god of the flesh execrated in the Old Testament, 'Baal.'  It is this god, transposed into a symbol of modern materialism, before whom all of Western civilization now bows down in prostrate worship […] London is nothing but a pitiless wilderness of wild, half-naked, besotted proletarians gloomily drowning their despair in debauchery and gin.” (page 376)

“During his eight days in London, Dostoevsky paid an obligatory visit to the famous Crystal Palace to see the second London World's Fair, which had opened in May 1862 and was dedicated to exhibiting the latest triumphs of science and technology […] The Crystal Palace thus became for Dostoevsky an image of the unholy spirit of modernity that brooded malevolently over London; and in his imagination this spirit takes on the form of the monstrous Beast whose coming prophesied the Apocalypse.” (page 376)

One can scarcely imagine a more negative reaction to what most Westerners held as a marvel of the future.  Dostoevsky saw nothing but a monstrous, hallow ruin.  He wrote: “here everything was so colossal, so striking. That you seemed to grasp tangibly what up to now you had only imagined.  Here you no longer see a people, but the systematic, submissive and induced lack of consciousness.” (page 378)

Upon his return to Russia, where his wife was gravely ill, he continued with his editorial duties, wrote his chapters for Winter Notes and managed, not for the first or last time, to get into an affair with a young woman half his age.  Frank points out that very little is known during this time period about either his relationship with his wife or his mistress.  Dostoevsky simply did not write anything about either one of them.  As far as his wife is concerned there are only “fleeting references” to her spending time in other cities due to her illness and living “largely in seclusion.”  

As for the mistress, Apollinaria Suslov, she was a bright, independent young woman who contributed some minor pieces to Dostoevsky's magazine.  They apparently began a liaison in late 1862 and early 1863.  Frank says that things “did not go smoothly after the first excitement of possession and novelty wore off. […] It is difficult to imagine that he could have made a satisfactory lover for an ardent and inexperienced young girl, and one suspects that he aroused Suslova's sensuality without being able to satisfy it entirely.” (page 386)

For reasons that, given his wife's illness, admittedly confound me and that Frank never really explains, he decided to travel to Europe again the next summer with Apollinaria, I suspect he desired just to be with his young lover away from the prying eyes of St. Petersburg.  But it did not go well.  For one thing, Dostoevsky had a four-day stopover in Germany where he overindulged (yet again) in his addiction to gambling, specifically the roulette wheel.  Although he won over 10,000 francs almost immediately, he lost half of it after being unable to control himself at the table.

By the time he finally arrived in Paris, he found his would-be mistress had taken up with another man.  She remained fond of Dostoevsky, however, and the two carried on with their plans to travel Italy together, albeit now as friends and confidantes rather than lovers.  Frank suggests that Suslov was merely toying with Dostoevsky and, in fact, she was not serious about any man in particular during this entire time.  Whether or not that is true, she haunted Dostoevsky and he did not get over her when it became obvious he was going to have to return to Russia without her.

The friction that developed in the relationship would serve as the basis for part of a future novel by Dostoevsky.  “The fluctuations of Dostoevsky's affair with Suslova seemed to have reached a new phase in Rome, and her diary entries, which reveal the strange duel in which the pair were no engaged, already prefigure some of the situations of The Gambler.  Dostoevsky now openly begins to protest against Suslov's attitude toward him, and bluntly accuses him of moral sadism. […] The serio-comic flavor of the contest between the two is close to the tonality of The Gambler.”  (page 395)

Meanwhile, Dostoevsky's career was in limbo.  His previous magazine was censored for reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay.  His brother (and business partner) Mikhail worked diligently to get it reinstated.  Instead, they had to settle for an entirely new magazine which would have to build its subscription base up from scratch.  In the meantime, a competitive journal began publication, serializing Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done?, which Frank describes as “one of the most successful works of propaganda ever written in fictional form.”

Chernyshevsky espoused “socialist utopian rational egoism” as “the final key to all human complexities.”  Obviously, this did not set well with Dostoevsky for a variety of reasons.  He not only detested the perspective but also the very instrument in which it was printed, as a competitor to his own publication.  Moreover, Chernyshevsky made a fateful choice for his outstanding example of this Utopian future.  It was viewed as adversarial on every level.  

“For Dostoevsky who had just written House of the Dead and Winter Notes, Chernyshevsky's novel, with its touchingly naive faith in Utilitarian reason, could hardly have been felt except as a challenge. […] To make matters worse, Chernyshevsky had selected as an icon of this glorious world of fulfillment the Crystal Palace of the London World's Fair...” (page 402) 

The result of all this, once Epoch was launched, was Notes from Underground, serialized in the journal.  I have already discussed how Part One, Chapter 10 was, according to Frank, “mutilated.”  The biography goes into some detail as to Dostoevsky's ardent version of Christianity and how whatever he wrote that was censored from that chapter might have robbed the entire work of a fundamental message he wished to convey.  

As I have said, I have my doubts since there is no trace of anything like this in the rest of the piece but Dostoevsky himself was quite disappointed and felt it would be better not to have included the chapter at all, which suggests something was radically altered.  Moreover, he ridiculed the censors for leaving the sleeping with a prostitute and other similar questionable behaviors untouched while taking out something he intended as more spiritual in nature.  Frank can only guess what it might be.  One of the most curious aspects of the novella from my perspective is that Dostoevsky never attempted to restore the Chapter in later editions.  In fact, he dropped the piece altogether to rework The Double (a novella from the 1840's) and to write Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.  So, his plate was full anyway.  (I blogged about the amazing story of his life during this time here.)

Frank's explanation of Dostoevsky's Christianity bears noting and gives us a few clues as to what might have been censored.  The author himself famously wrote: “if someone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and that in reality the truth was outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than the truth.”  But Frank qualifies what Dostoevsky meant.  “Indeed, the sole significance of Christ, as Dostoevsky now speaks of him, is to serve as the divine enunciator of this morality; he fulfills no other purpose, not even the traditional one of redeeming mankind from the wages of sin and death.” (page 408, all emphasis Frank's quotes are his)

“The highest aim of Dostoevsky's Christianity, though, is not personal salvation but the fusion of the individual ego with the community in a symbiosis of love, and the only sin that Dostoevsky appears to recognize is the failure to fulfill this law of love.  Suffering arises from the consciousness of such a failure, and Dostoevsky's words help us to grasp not only why suffering plays such a prominent role in his works, but also why it is misleading to infer that he believes any kind of suffering to be necessarily good.” (page 410)  One gets the sense that Frank believes whatever was censored from the novella had something to do with this set of personal beliefs.

Regardless of what was taken out, Notes from Underground was written as a response to what Dostoevsky saw as the distinctly European “rational egoism” which he felt was the central crisis of his time.  “Excessive consciousness” was the antithesis of humanity's irrational nature and a clear threat to human spirituality as Dostoevsky understood it.

Frank does not shy away from stating the fundamental importance of Notes from Underground in world literature, comparing it to Hamlet and Don Quixote.  He states that the work has “entered into the very warp and woof of modern culture in a fashion testifying to the philosophical suggestiveness and hypnotic power of this first great creation of Dostoevsky's post-Siberian years.” (page 413)  Although Frank admits that, at the time, it was hardly noticed by readers or critics.  No one had anything special to say about it.  In my opinion, Notes from Underground is does not justify consideration with those two lofty works.

I have already stated that Frank contextualizes the work as parody and satire, which went basically unnoticed in 1864 and, as I have also stated, completely escaped me as I began to read it.  But what exactly was Dostoevsky thinking, beyond the obvious attempt to rebut  Chernyshevsky's novel?  According to Frank: “If we are interested in grasping Dostoevsky's own point of view, as far as this can be reconstructed, then we must take Notes from Underground for what it was initially meant to be – a brilliantly Swiftian satire, remarkable for the finesse of its conception and the brio of its execution, which dramatizes the dilemmas of a representative Russian personality attempting to live by the two European codes whose unhappy effects Dostoevsky explores.” (page 416)  These Frank distinguishes as the “self-interest and 'reason' in Part I” and “his altruistic (or at least amiably social) impulses in Part II.”

“For it turns out that the contradictory impulses struggling within him have literally paralyzed his character.”  Frank, once again, uses the term “hyperconscious” to describe the turmoil of the Underground Man.  “This strange state of moral impotence which the underground man both defends and despises, is complicated by the further admission that he positively enjoys the experience of his own self degradation.” (page 418)

I want to restate here an opinion I have already discussed.  These two “contradictions” as Dostoevsky frames them and not as inherently contradictory as Dostoevsky advances.  For me, the whole of this inner conflictedness is an incredibly weak aspect of the novella.  The Underground Man is not really a victim of anything other than his own neurosis.  I find Dostoevsky's central critique to be astonishingly naive.  But that's just me and it does not necessarily detract from the accomplished writing on display here.

As we have seen, Chernyshevsky's elevation of the Crystal Palace in London was basically symbolic blasphemy for Dostoevsky.  Notes from Underground mentions it five times over the course of two pages.  Without sufficient background, or reading What Is To Be Done?, which I have not attempted, the uninitiated reader will easily overlook its special significance.  For Dostoevsky it had “apocalyptic” connotations and was the false god of “Baal.”  Frank turns to Dostoevsky's correspondence for a better understanding, since the apparent intent of Part One, Chapter 10 was to specifically respond to this manifestation of Baal.

“Dostoevsky, we may speculate, must have attempted here to indicate the nature of a true Crystal Palace, or mansion, or edifice (his terminology is not consistent), and to contrast it to the false one that was really a chicken coop.  From his letter, we know he did so in a way to identify a true Crystal Palace with the 'the need for faith and Christ,' but such an attempt may well have confused and frightened the censors, still terrified out of their wits by the recent blunder over What Is To Be Done? and now accustomed to view the Crystal Palace as the abhorrent image of atheistic Socialism.  Hence, they would have excised the sentences which Dostoevsky tried to give his own Christian significance to this symbol, perhaps considering them both subversive and blasphemous.  These suppositions would explain the strange history of Dostoevsky's text and would account for the flagrant contradiction, clearly evident on close reading, that provoked his indignant outcry that his entire meaning had been distorted.” (page 427)  It is ironic that, according to Frank, Chernyshevsky's work, which inspired Dostoevsky's satirical polemic, was what made the censors skittish enough to censor Part One, Chapter 10 so heavily.

Frank largely sees Part Two as comic, which I have alluded to in my own analysis.  But the comic satire is transformed by Liza's humane act of responding to the Underground Man's repulsive behavior toward her with – compassion, if not love itself.  For Frank, this is an “unprecedented” moment.  “[I]nstead of flaring up herself and hitting back, Liza throws herself into his arms to console him.  Both forget themselves entirely and break into tears, but the uncontrollable vanity of the underground man, which incapacitates him from responding selflessly and spontaneously to others, soon regains the upper hand...” (page 437, Frank's emphsis)

Frank is clear, this is a vanity born of “Western” influences.  The Underground Man's “moral sensitivities” are still present but they are subdued by his “hyperconscious” acceptance of rationalism.  “It was his brain, nourished by the education he had so thoroughly absorbed – an education based upon Western prototypes, and on the images of such prototypes assimilated into Russian literature – that had perverted his character and was responsible for his despicable act.” (page 438)
For the first time, Dostoevsky motivates the actions of a major character “entirely in terms of a psychology shaped by radical ideology; every feature of the text serves to bring out the consequences in personal behavior of certain ideas, and the world that Dostoevsky creates is entirely conceived as a function of this purpose.  Psychology has now become strictly subordinate to ideology...” (page 439)  

Notes from Underground is a breakthrough work, according to Frank.  It is the essential prelude to all the great novels that followed.  That is plain to see in hindsight.  But, at the time, Dostoevsky did not see it that way, of course.  “It is very likely that he considered the work a failure – as indeed it was, if we use as a measure its total lack of effectiveness as a polemic.” (page 440)

Dostoevsky's wife died upon the publication of Part Two.  He remained haunted by his failed liaison with Suslova.  A few weeks later his brother, Mikhail, died unexpectedly.  Epoch did not survive the turmoil and soon ceased publication (Mikhail was co-owner and had managed the already fragile business side of things).  In almost every respect, Dostoevsky was a deeply troubled man.  But he remained true to his faith as Frank has described.  Most assuredly this was his only comfort when faced with multiple existential crises.  His gambling continued to be an unshakable and costly addiction.  His debts became mountainous.  He was not a broken man but he was surely a suffering one.  

To that extent, Notes from Underground does not reflect the turmoil that he intimately experienced.  As a satirical work of fiction it was a statement about the larger crisis confronting his beloved Russia – to salvage its uniqueness from the unholy influences of European radicalism.  But by so deeply plumbing the psychology of the Underground Man, Dostoevsky established the platform by which he would create far more relatable characters in the near future.  There would have been no Raskolnikov and probably no Crime and Punishment, his next major work.

From what seemed like a wreckage of a life, Dostoevsky rose up in triumph.  That story I have posted about elsewhere on this blog.  I turned to Frank for context of Dostoevsky's first truly significant work.  Not only did I attain that objective but I ended up exploring Dostoevsky's entire life as covered in this marvelous biography.  As I have said, in many ways Dostoevsky's life is more interesting to me than his novels.  But his ideas are the summit of it all and those are to be found in his fiction and not in the bizarre circumstances and existential suffering of his life.  Indeed, those ideas, even if some of them strike me as naive, transcend his life.  Among the reading public, the story of his gambling addiction and preferences for younger women and all the rest does not survive the test of time in the same way as the ideas he explores so brilliantly in his later novels.  

Notes from Underground is not remarkable in its circumstances nor even in its execution, though it deserves the moniker of “the first existentialist novel.”  It is rather significant in that it makes psychology the cornerstone for his exploration of characters in a manner that no one else can touch.  Not Camus, not Faulkner, certainly not Tolstoy, no one can render the inner psyche of a character the way Dostoevsky can.  Notes from Underground was the birth of a lofty brilliance that was unrecognizable at the time, especially to Dostoevsky himself.  This brilliance only became apparent when he decided to build a grander narrative off of the fascinating and repulsive psychology that had not succeeded as he intended.  That would not be the case with his next novel, nor indeed with any work of fiction he created for the rest of his life.

(Written with assistance by Claude except Part Six which was assisted by ChatGPT.)