The two parts of Notes from Underground were first published in 1864, in the January and April issues of Epoch, a magazine edited by Dostoevsky's brother Mikhail, the successor to their magazine Time, which had been suppressed by the censors in
1863. The note Dostoevsky added to the first part insists on the social and typical, as opposed to personal and psychological, aspects of the man from underground: "such persons as the writer of such notes not only may but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed." His view of those circumstances would have been familiar to readers of his articles in Time over the previous few years, particularly "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions," an account of his first trip to Europe in 1862, which had appeared in the February and March issues of Time for 1863. There he discussed Russia's "captivation" with the West:
Why, everything, unquestionably almost everything that we have -of development, science, art, civic-mindedness, humanity, everything, everything comes from there - from that same land of holy wonders! Why, our entire life, even from very childhood itself, has been set up along European lines.
Russian society had been formed by decades of imported "development" and "enlightenment," words that acquire a sharply ironic inflection in Dostoevsky's later work. Some sources of this ideology have already been mentioned - Rousseau, Schiller, Kant. To this list may be added the names of such French social romantics as Victor Hugo, Eugene Sue, George Sand, and the Utopian socialists Fourier and Saint-Simon. In Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, Joseph Frank points to the presence of these "influences" in the theme of the redeemed prostitute, which was a favorite among Russian liberals of the 1840s (the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, for example), and which Dostoevsky parodies brilliantly in the second part of Notes from Underground. The parody is, of course, Dostoevsky's, not the underground man's. The latter, on the contrary, had taken all these influences to heart; they had made him into a "developed man of the nineteenth century," a man of "heightened consciousness." It was the attempt to live by them that drove him "underground." In the social displacement of an imported culture, Dostoevsky perceived a more profound human displacement, a spiritual void filled with foreign content.
A second theme from "Winter Notes" reappears in Motes from Underground - that of the "crystal palace," which is as central to the polemics of the novel's first part as the redeemed prostitute is to the parody of the second. The crystal palace in the travel article is the cast-iron and glass exhibition hall built in London in 1851 for the Great Exhibition. It appeared to Dostoevsky as a terrifying structure, a symbol of false unity, of "the full triumph of Baal, the ultimate organization of an anthill." The tones in which he speaks of it will be echoed almost twenty years later by the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov:
But if you saw how proud is that mighty spirit who created this colossal setting and how proudly convinced this spirit is of its victory and of its triumph, then you would shudder for its pride, obstinacy, and blindness, but you would shudder also for those over whom this proud spirit hovers and reigns.
This mighty spirit is the spirit of industrial capitalism, and the crystal palace is its temple. In Motes from Underground the same structure comes to stand for the future organization of socialism. It remains an image of false unity, but is denounced in rather different terms: the underground man puts his tongue out at it, calls it a tenement house and a chicken coop.
The two time periods of the novel represent two stages in the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia: the sentimental, literary 1840s and the rational and utilitarian 1860s; the time of the liberals and the time of the nihilists. One of Dostoevsky's constant preoccupations in his later work was the responsibility of the liberal generation for the emergence of the nihilists, an idea he embodied literally in the novel Demons (1871-72) in the figures of the dreamy individualist Stepan Verkhovensky and his deadly utilitarian son Pyotr. In Motes from Underground the same evolution is reflected in the mind of one man: the polemicist of the first part grew out of the defeated dreamer of the second. The inverted time sequence of the two parts seems to lead us to this discovery.
However, the underground man is hardly a typical "rational egoist," any more than he had been a typical romantic. There is a quality in him that sets him apart, which he himself defines on the last page of the book: "Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway." Submitted to the testing of full acceptance, the testing of this irreducible human existence, the "heightened consciousness" of the rationalist, like the sentimental impulses of the romantic, runs into disastrous and comic reversals. Hence the paradoxically defiant double-mindedness of the underground man, and his intransitive dilemma.
The "gentlemen" he addresses throughout his notes, when they are not a more indeterminate "you," are typical intellectuals of the 1860s. More specifically, they are presumed to be followers of the writer Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, the chief spokesman and ideologist of the young radicals. N. G. Chernyshevsky was the author of a number of critical works, notably The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (1860), in which he propounded the abovementioned doctrine of "rational egoism," an adaptation of the "enlightened self-interest" of the English utilitarians. His programmatic Utopian novel What Is to Be Done?, written in prison following his arrest in 1862 for revolutionary activities and published in 1863, immediately became a manual for social activists. Several decades later, V. I. Lenin, who dubbed Dostoevsky a "superlatively bad" writer, could testify that What Is to Be Done? had made him into a confirmed revolutionary. The nature of Chernyshevsky's hero and his ideas may be deduced from the following passage:
Yes, I will always do what I want. I will never sacrifice anything, not even a whim, for the sake of something I do not desire. What I want, with all my heart, is to make people happy. In this lies my happiness. Mine! Can you hear that, you, in your underground hole?
This is the voice of the healthy rational egoist, the ingenuous man of action. Dostoevsky took up the challenge.
Though Chernyshevsky is not mentioned by name in Motes from Underground, his theories, and in particular his novel, are the most immediate targets both of the underground man's diatribes and of Dostoevsky's subtler, more penetrating parody. Dostoevsky had intended originally to write a critical review of What Is to Be Done? for the first issue of Epoch, but was unable to produce anything. The strained conditions of his personal life at that time and the problems of starting the new magazine do not explain the difficulty he faced. Evidently it was not enough for him simply to counter Chernyshevsky's arguments; more was at stake than a conflict of ideas - there was a question of the very nature of the human being who was to be so forcibly made happy. Dostoevsky's response had to take artistic form. He was challenged to reveal "the man in man," precisely in and through the ideas of the new radicals themselves.
The counterarguments of the "gentlemen" in the later chapters of the first part, for example, are clearly Cherny-shevskian, based on his notions of normal interests, natural law, and the denial of free will. The crystal palace, too, in its reappearance here, has been transmuted by its passage through "The Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna," the section of What Is to Be Done? that presents Chernyshevsky's vision of mankind made happy. The pseudoscientific terms and even a certain clumsy use of parentheses, as Joseph Frank has shown, are the narrator's deliberate mockery of Chernyshevsky's writing. Frank has also shown that the attack is not limited to Part One: two of the three main episodes in the second part of Notes - the episode of the bumped officer and the episode with the prostitute Liza - are in fact parodic developments of episodes from Chernyshevsky's novel. The latter episode, which is the climactic episode of the novel as a whole, gives fullest play to Dostoevsky's criticism through comic reversal. But the reversal is not a simple contrary; it is the puncturing of a literary cliche by a truth drawn from a different source, from what the narrator comes in the end to call "living life."