Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

'Let me out, good people, let me out into the light to live a little! I've lived without ever seeing any life, my life was nothing but a dirty rag, it was drunk away in a tavern on Sennaya. Let me out, kind people, to have another try at living in the world!...'

It's impossible to overpraise this book. It may be best described as a psychological portrait of a misanthrope, but because it's so craftily devised, that seems a bloodless phrase. Dostoevsky plays with form so nimbly, it's as if he marshals the confession and the diary, sets them against one another, and then marches them off the page. Every epistolary novel has its bar set uncommonly high by this book. But how was that bar raised so high? Of what material is it made?

In answer, I'd say character, for there is no story here after all. An old embittered man, hiding away in plain sight, buried by his own spite, telling a story of his misliving to no one at all... where's the story in that? There is no hero here for us to admire, no fair damsel in distress, no villain who deserves the reader's scorn heaped upon his sly back. Above all, there's no urgency to the tale; it's never-ending, or never-beginning... maybe, maybe always in-the-middling. Which is not to say that it's middling in any way. In fact, the balance it achieves--between confession and diary, between moralizing tale and ambiguous philosophy--makes it seem self-sustaining, a living, breathing, thinking thing, something that exists between pure fiction and pure fact. For there is something convincing about it, after all, something that seems to dispel the knowledge (slipped into the beginning as a footnote by the author) that the book is all illustrative of a real but imagined type. And if it's not the story, it must be the character who regales us, the unnamed narrator, the encoffined man.

And what do we know of this character? Nothing, really. He's unreliable; yes, he tells us as much. He's spiteful; it's one of the first things out of his mouth. He's weak, needlessly defensive, excessively verbose. None of these traits seem to recommend him all that much to the reader. But is that true? Perhaps not. There is in the last, I think, the key to it all.

Because despite all his many flaws and his vileness of character, he speaks so wonderfully well. He is because he has his voice. It reaches up, out from underground, up and off the page, and it describes, despite his best efforts to have it muddle and obfuscate, the man in his entirety. What need do we have for the shape of his mouth, the part in his hair, or a decent image of how straight his nose? His voice describes his soul. I'm not saying that the unnamed narrator describes himself; he does give you descriptions, page-long metaphors, snippets of events in his life, catalogs of insults, lilting paeans to the life of the educated mind, the wilted flowers of life spent above ground. But through the cracks seeps the sorrow that we can all relate to, the human being belied by the carapace of spite, so that, as above, when he's mocking some poor harlot, telling her that one day she'll be carried out of the whorehouse in a cheap coffin destined for a boggy grave, and he cries out, in her voice, Let me out!, it's not her that he's mocking, and it's not her he so misguidedly is trying to save.

And isn't this what Dostoevsky, with a Russian wink, gives to us as readers? He says, Here, here is a type that is fictional, but could very easily exist in this world; listen to him describe himself, watch him interact with other people, hear him tell of his descent into some hellish solipsism. And we can say that Dostoevsky has created an idea of a man of contradiction, quite wonderfully, quite well. Or we can say, here, look, he has made a man.