The man from underground refutes his opponents with the results of having carried their own ideas to an extreme in his life. These results are himself. This self, however, as the reader discovers at once, is not a monolithic personality, but an inner plurality in constant motion. The plurality of the person, without any ideological additions, is already a refutation of l'homme de la nature et de la verite, the healthy, undivided man of action who was both the instrument and the object of radical social theory. Unity is not singularity but wholeness, a holding together, a harmony, all of which imply plurality. What the principle of this harmony is, the underground man cannot say; he has never found it. But he knows he has not found it; he knows, because his inner disharmony, his dividedness, which is the source of his suffering, is also the source of consciousness. Here we come upon one of the deep springs of Dostoevsky's later work - not his thinking (Dostoevsky was not a thinker, or, rather, he was a plurality of thinkers), but his artistic embodiment of reality. The one quality his negative characters share, and almost the only negative his world view allows, is inner fixity, a sort of death-in-life, which can take many forms and tonalities, from the broadly comic to the tragic, from the mechanical to the corpselike, from Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin to Nikolai Stavrogin. Inner movement, on the other hand, is always a condition of spiritual good, though it may also be a source of suffering, division, disharmony, in this life. What moves may always rise. Dostoevsky never portrays the completion of this movement; it extends beyond the end of the given book. We see it in characters like Raskolnikov and Mitya Karamazov, but first of all in the man from underground.
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How much the mere tone of Notes from Underground is worth!
LEV SHESTOV
The philosopher Shestov, the critic Mochulsky, and most Russian readers agree that the style of Notes from Underground is, in Shestov's words, "very strange." Bakhtin describes it as "deliberately clumsy," though "subject to a certain artistic logic." A detailed discussion of the matter is not possible here, but we can offer a few comments on the style of our translation, pointing to qualities in the original that we have sought to keep in English for the sake of "mere tone," where they have been lost in earlier translations.
Though he likes to philosophize, the underground man has no use for philosophical terminology. When he picks up such words, it is to make fun of them; otherwise he couches his thought in the most blunt and even crude terms. An example is his use of the rare word khoteniye, a verbal noun formed from khotet', "to want." It is a simple, elemental word, with an almost physical, appetitive immediacy. The English equivalent is "wanting," which is how we have translated it. The primitive quality of the word appears to have alarmed our predecessors, who translate it as "wishing," "desire," "will," "intention," "choice," "volition," and render it variously at various times. The underground man invariably says "wanting" and "to want." He plays on the different uses of the word ("Who wants to want according to a little table?"); there is one passage running from the end of Chapter VII to the start of Chapter VIII in the first part where "want" and "wanting" appear eighteen times in two paragraphs - the stylistic point of which is blunted when other words are used.
Another of the underground man's words is vygoda, which means "profit" (gain, benefit), and only secondarily "advan- tage," as it is most often translated. "Profit" has very nearly the same range of uses in English as vygoda has in Russian. It is also a direct, unambiguous word, with an almost tactile quality: you have an advantage, but you get a profit. And like vygoda, with its strongly accented first syllable, "profit" leaps from the mouth almost with the force of an expletive, quite unlike the more unctuous "advantage" or its Russian equivalent preimushchestvo. Again, the narrator insists on his word and plays with it. Thus we arrive at the full music of this underground oratorio:
And where did all these sages get the idea that man needs some normal, some virtuous wanting? What made them necessarily imagine that what man needs is necessarily a reasonably profitable wanting? Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
Repetition is of the essence here. When the underground man speaks of consciousness and heightened consciousness, it is always the same word: "consciousness," not "intellectual activity" as one translator has it, not "awareness" as another offers, and never some mixture of the three. The editorial precept of avoiding repetitions, of gracefully varying one's vocabulary, cannot be applied to this writer. His writing is emphatic, heavy-handed, rude: "This is my wanting, this is my desire. You will scrape it out of me only when you change my desires." To translate the scullery verb v yskoblit' ("to scrape out") as "eradicate" or "expunge," as has been done, to exchange the "collar of lard" the narrator bestows on the wretched clerk in Part Two for one that is merely "greasy," is to chasten and thus distort the voice of this man who is nothing but a voice.
There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Motes from Underground that raises something more than a question of "mere tone." The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovek, has most often been rendered as "I am a spiteful man." Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for "spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning "wicked," "bad," "evil." The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zlaya ved'ma (zlaya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dobryi, "good," as in "good fairy" (dobraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at the start to the outburst close to the end: "They won't let me… I can't be… good!" We can talk forever about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, nor is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky. Besides, "wicked" has the lucky gift of picking up the internal rhyme in the first two sentences of the original.
Richard Pevear
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
mikhail bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985. The classic study of Dostoevsky's formal innovations and the place of his work in the traditions of Menippean satire and carnival humor. Joseph frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation 1860-1863, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 1986. Volume three of Frank's five-volume socio-cultural biography of Dostoevsky, covering the period of composition of Notes from Underground. rene girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Fedor Dostoevsky, translated by James G. Williams, Crossroad, New York, 1997. A translation of Dostoievski, du double a I'unite (Plon, Paris, 1963), especially interesting for its analysis of the erotic/mimetic aspects of Dostoevsky's work. Robert louis jackson, Dostoevsky's Underground Man in Russian Literature, Greenwood Publishers, Westport, CT, 1981. w. j. leatherbarrow, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevsky, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2002. A collection of essays by various hands dealing with Dostoevsky's works mainly in terms of their cultural context. olga meerson, Dostoevsky's Taboos, Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden University Press, Dresden-Munich, 1998. A penetrating study of the metapsychology of tabooing and the meanings of the unsaid in Dostoevsky. konstantin mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, translated by Michael A. Minihan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1967. The work of a distinguished emigre scholar, first published in 1947 and still the best one-volume critical biography of Dostoevsky. Harriet murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1992. Richard peace, Dostoevsky's "Notesfrom Underground": Critical Studies in Russian Literature, Bristol Classical Press, London, 1993. james p. scanlan, Dostoevsky the Thinker, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2002. lev shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, translated by Bernard Martin and Spencer Roberts, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1967. Essays by one of the major Russian thinkers of the twentieth century. lev shestov, In Job's Balances, translated by Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney, J. M. Dent and Sons, London, 1932. Contains an important essay on Dostoevsky and Notes from Underground - "The Conquest of the Self-Evident." victor terras, Reading Dostoevsky, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1999. A summing up by one of the most important Dostoevsky scholars of our time.