Cherie Fernandes '21 — The Trappings of Love and Literature

The Trappings of Love and Literature

Cherie Fernandes ’21

In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky pulls the reader into mid-1800s St. Petersburg, a world colored by a bitter, misanthropic smog courtesy of the book’s anonymous narrator heretofore referred to as “the Underground Man.” Among other oddities, the Underground Man is preoccupied with Romantic literature, and such ideals ultimately hinder his ability to meaningfully connect with other people. Although this obsession is overtly a manifestation of his desire to feel acknowledged by other characters, it also illustrates a need to control, or in other words, polish, his reality, a self-contradicting tendency towards inauthenticity that becomes a source of tension between the Underground Man’s behavior and the message Dostoyevsky communicates.

Among the biggest obstacles to the Underground Man’s experience of friendship and love is his inability to separate reality from fiction of his own design. The tendency is first played for comedy through his earnest account of provoking an officer via a much-labored-over exposé that was not published, as such works were “well out of fashion” (Dostoyevsky 32). The bizarre lengths to which he goes, only to come off as dated and a little pathetic, highlight the extent to which the Underground Man’s fascination with Romantic literature has left him disconnected from society. Similarly, he challenges Ferfichkin to an honest-to-god duel — much to the others’ amusement — once again conflating staples of literature with the way one ought to behave in reality. After the encounter with Zverkov, he conjures up an elaborate revenge fantasy, complete with dialogue, only to recognize that he “was actually about to cry, even though [he] knew for a fact at that very moment that all this was straight out of Silvio and Lermontov’s Masquerade” (59). The Underground Man wants to be perceived as a bold individual worthy of attention, and he insists on accomplishing it via offbeat ideas that, while compelling to him, do not align with reality. His obsession with grand acts in literature is indeed a manifestation of his desire to be acknowledged and empowered by others — case in point, the masochistic desire to be pummeled in a bar fight — but it also shows that he is only open to such a thing when it occurs on his own terms. This tendency is best exemplified in his interactions with Liza, toward whom he shows both care and horrible cruelty in turns.

His first attempt at personal engagement with Liza is something straight out of an archetypal “redeemed prostitute” story-arc — complete with florid speeches about purity and offers to save her — except Liza does not do him the favor of deferring to the script. She instead recognizes this tendency of his, musing, “You somehow… it sounds just like a book” (69). The Underground Man had been pouring genuine emotion into his speech, “blushing” and “speaking with considerable feeling,” but the second she does not react in the way he expects, he closes off and begins verbally tearing into her, leaving her in tears. As he does so, he bitterly recognizes, “I knew that I was speaking clumsily, artificially, even bookishly; in short, I didn’t know how to speak except ‘like a book,’” once again demonstrating the extent to which his obsession alienates him from reality (71). After the event, he regrets giving Liza his address and is outright “tormented” by the prospect of her arrival, but later begins to “daydream sweetly” about how the visit might go. He describes tenderly telling Liza he is aware of her love for him and “dares not be first to make a claim on [her] heart because [he] had such influence over her [and]. . . didn’t want that because it would be . . . despotism,” a striking contrast to his previous and subsequent cruelty, where he insists that his conception of love is limited to control of others (78). The speech is also, of course, marked by his usual florid style, and he describes “launching on some European, George Sandian, inexplicably lofty subtleties” as he speaks to this mental picture of Liza (78). It is telling that the Underground Man only resumes his fantasies days after the interaction, when he is “reassured” that there is no danger of Liza actually showing up. Such behavior is illustrative of the disconnect between his delusions about people — both Liza and himself — and how they act in reality. He can lose himself in fantasizing about literature, but dreads having the real Liza’s arrival shatter the picture he has conjured.

Regardless of what the Underground Man would prefer to tell himself, his is not so much the story of a misunderstood intellectual as it is one of a romantic who cannot tear himself away from the comfort of his delusions. He craves the idea of a healthy relationship with Liza, but only in an idealized world where he can dictate the setting and script: a world that only exists in his mind. Indeed, the second he no longer has control over the situation as he does his daydreams, he is a mess. His actual interaction with her begins with his “crushing humiliation and abominable shame” at being caught in a state of poverty and emotional neediness — this particular show of vulnerability was hardly in his plans — and so he reverts back to cruelty and subjugation (82). He refuses to engage with the discomfort and unpredictability the real world offers, instead attempting to control it and the actions of others. In the Underground Man’s own words, “we’ve all agreed in private that [life] is better in books,” and thus, Dostoyevsky shows us, he remains ultimately disconnected from — and even fearful of — reality itself (91).

This message is thematically in line with Dostoyevsky’s other works, such as The Brothers Karamazov’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” in which the eponymous religious leader explains that glorifying unattainable purity and perfection is, at best, ineffectual, and at worst, damaging. Even Notes from Underground settles around this theme, particularly through the Underground Man’s discussion of a hypothetical “Crystal Palace” in Part 1 (20). The palace represents a utopian society constructed on the much-extolled principles of modernity, and the Underground Man is less than impressed; he feels that such a thing would be reductive, and instead champions the “irrationality” and “free will” that allow humans to live outside of restrictive structure. It would not be possible to “stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture” when beholding such a thing, because its existence leaves no room for the gritty, indelicate truths of human nature (22). Furthermore, these truths cannot be overruled — a state of unsullied perfection and contentment simply cannot exist, says the Underground Man, because human nature will not allow it. Oddly, our protagonist is capable of eloquent criticism of these ideals while at the same time turning around to disguise the qualities he perceives as unattractive and superimpose this “better” grand Romantic literature over his every interaction. Perhaps this tension between author and protagonist represents a limitation on the Underground Man’s understanding of imperfection; he himself derives a perverse sort of joy from acting spitefully and irrationally, exemplifying imperfection, but he fails to embrace the “imperfection” inherent to the world he inhabits. He refuses to appreciate a social interaction without orchestrating it first, to take unpredictable events in stride, or even to spare as neutral an object as a clock from his derision. Instead, he insists on fruitlessly shaping the world to his grand literary fantasies, imposing a sort of restrictive structure of his own on those in his relationships — himself included.

Thus, through the Underground Man’s failings in his relationships with others, Dostoyevsky communicates the importance of accepting the imperfect realities of life. The final page of the text seems to address this question more explicitly: the Underground Man states that this is not truly a novel, as his reader has been denied a hero to root for while “all the traits of an anti-hero have been assembled deliberately” (91). It is difficult to determine whether this line is a display of self-awareness on the Underground Man’s part, a hint of meta messaging from Dostoyevsky, or a mix of both, but the lesson is clear: Notes from Underground is about as far from “real” literature as a story can be. It is gritty and unsatisfying, but those very same qualities render it compelling and veristic. So too is the truth of deep personal connections that Dostoyevsky shows us. Love is seldom capital-R Romantic; rather, it is messy, human, and real.

Works Cited

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes From Underground. W W Norton, 2021.