RATIONALISM, MOTIVATION, AND TIME IN DOSTOEVSKY'S "NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND"

Gary Rosenshield, University of Wisconsin – Madison

Among the most perplexing, but infrequently treated, questions relating to Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" is the origin of the Underground Man's rationalism, a question which, as we shall see, is especially important because of its bearing on the role of métonymie motivation in the novel and on the often baffling relationship between present and past events and narrative planes. The reason this question has received so little attention is that despite Joseph Frank's convincing demonstration of the Underground Man's rationalism in the first chapters of Part One of the novel, the Underground Man is still generally viewed as an out-and-out irrationalist and an implacable foe of rationalism in all its forms. (1) But the Underground Man's rationalism is unmistakable, and as I have attempted to show elsewhere, it appears not only in the first few chapters of Part One but throughout the entire first part. (2) The polemic that the Underground Man engages in with his ideological opponents, "the gentlemen (gospoda), " on the question of the limitations of the rational intellect and man's need for freedom is really an expression of an internal polemic raging within himself, in which he pretends to be playing only one of the two roles, that of the irrationalist. The reason that the Underground Man rages at the gentlemen who advance the deterministic arguments of the Socialists is that he senses that he, too, is still a rationalist and thus cannot free himself of the very beliefs that his irrational self finds so demeaning and simplistic.

In addition to pointing out the Underground Man's rationalism, Frank also offered an explanation of its origin in nineteenth-century Russian intellectual history, arguing that the Underground Man is a figure representing two stages in the development of the Russian intelligentsia. Whereas in Part Two the Underground Man is presented as a romantic idealist of the 1840's, a member of a generation which attempted to escape the sordidness of reality by retreating to an ideal world "of the good and the beautiful, " Schiller's "das Schöne und Erhabene" ; in Part One, he emerges as a representative of the next, the second stage in the development of the Russian intelligentsia, in which it succumbed to the influence of nihilism: that is the rationalistic philosophy of Chernyshevskij and his followers. (3) As Frank says, "Dostoevsky assimilates the major doctrines of Russian Nihilism in the life of the underground man. . . The first section shows the underground man in the ideological grip of the Nihilism of the Sixties; the second, as a perfect product of the social Romanticism of the Forties. " (4)

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The main problem with Frank's thesis, it seems to me, is the interpretation of the Underground Man as a representative of the nihilism of the 1860's. The ideological transformation that the Underground Man would have had to undergo to become a nihilist was not one experienced by many Russian intellectuals of the forties. Indeed, when this generation of intellectuals in middle age dramatically altered its political philosophy, it almost invariably discarded its liberal and radical ideas for conservative or even reactionary ones - needless to say, a phenomenon not unique to nineteenth-century Russia. (5) Moreover, even in fiction, the Russian romantics of the forties did not become the nihilists of the sixties: the Stepan Trofimoviches may have laid the groundwork for Bazarov, Stavrogin, and Petr Verkhovenskij - a view which Dostoevsky argues in "The Possessed" - but they did not themselves become nihilists; and as Turgenev shows in "Fathers and Sons" the romantic idealists of the forties were generally of a different class from the radical intelligentsia of the sixties.

Frank does not present the older Underground Man as a perfect representative of Chernyshevskian ideology; in fact, he argues that the Underground Man's rebellion against determinism in Part One is evidence of the continued existence in his personality of the emotions, morality, and ideology of the romantic idealist of the forties, and it is this rebellion that constitutes the drama of the novel. But the Underground Man's rationalism, his even partial acceptance of the rationalist views of Chernyshevskij, does not seem psychologically and historically credible given the personality of the Underground Man and the times in which he lives.

The only way to interpret the Underground Man both as a man of the forties and a man of the sixties - which Frank ends up doing - is to conceive of him not primarily as a psychological figure but as an ideological type, the main function of which is to dramatize the satiric intentions of the author. If such is the case, there clearly is no need to motivate metonymically - that is, in terms of psychology and environment - the Underground Man's change from the ideals of the forties to the determinism of the sixties. (6) The problem, however, is that this ideological view of the Underground Man is inconsistent with Frank's almost exclusive reliance on psychology to interpret the nature of the Underground Man's revolt against determinism in the first chapters of Part One. But just as important, by partly reducing the Underground Man to an ideological type - and a composite one at that - Frank robs him of the psychological complexity that gives immediacy and meaning to the very philosophical positions that represent in Frank's view the heart of the novel.

But if Dostoevsky did not motivate the Underground Man's rationalism in Russian intellectual history - or did not do it well - it is natural to assume that he must have grounded this rationalism in the Underground Man's psychological development, much as he did the Underground Man's irra-

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tionalism. The Underground Man's irrationalism, even his insistence that man ought to act irrationally on purpose to prove himself free, can be seen to stem logically from an honest attempt to understand his own irrational behavior, sixteen years earlier, in Part Two. But his conclusions seem consistent even if one interprets them as rationalizations of his past reprehensible actions, that is, as an attempt of a thoroughgoing rationalist to pass himself off as an irrationalist in order to exonerate himself of responsibility in his own eyes and the eyes of the reader for the "crime" he committed against the innocent and defenseless Liza - the implied argument being that he was bound to act as he did because man is by nature irrational and thus he cannot help but act against his own interest; (7) or that he was bound to act against his own interest because only by doing so could he really prove to himself that he was free, much as Kirillov believed he was compelled to commit suicide to prove that he was God. Furthermore, a good case can be made to show that it is not only the Underground Man's present irrational ideas that are motivated by the past, but his present irrational behavior as well. After the frustrating and humiliating experiences of sixteen years earlier, one expects to find the Underground Man even less rational; for humiliation and frustration, as we see in Part Two, only exacerbate his irrational proclivities.

Whereas, however, the link between the Underground Man's past irrational behavior and his present irrationalist philosophy is apparent, the rationalist arguments of the forty-year-old narrator, so evident in his deterministic explanations of his own behavior in the first half of Part One, seem to be almost completely absent in his presentation of his younger self in Part Two. For want of any other evidence one is tempted to see the Underground Man's rationalism as the end product of his great, even excessive dependence on the intellect in youth. But there is no evidence in Part Two that the Underground Man's intellect either at sixteen (the time of his early years at school) or at twenty-four (the time of his encounters with Zverkov and Liza) was essentially a rational one or that it was its rational character that created the Underground Man's numerous problems. This is substantiated by all the major episodes of Part Two. For example, the incident with the officer by whom the Underground Man is humiliated - or by whom he thinks he was humiliated - and on whom he seeks to revenge himself, would seem to be tailor-made for proving the Underground Man's rationalist theories of Part One. He had argued there that man cannot act because he thinks too much; for the more he thinks the more he realizes that there can be no just reason for exacting revenge (revenge being the strongest motivation for action that the Underground Man can think of); that those responsible for insulting you are not to blame, since, not having free will, they acted as they had to, as the laws of nature demanded. Classical determinism is used to explain and justify inertia. And in fact, the Underground Man does not take action against the officer because he cannot stop thinking and just act. When he finally collides with the officer on the street, it is by accident, and only after having in his own mind given up on the project. Many reasons could be given for the Underground Man's long period of inaction; but nowhere does the narrator indicate or even imply that his failure to act promptly

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resulted from his belief that action was pointless in a world governed by the laws of nature; he does not even mention the laws of nature, determinism, or rationalism. To be sure, the Underground Man's inertia may be ascribed to thinking too much, but not to thinking in that rationalistic manner which in the early sections of Part One is shown to lead directly to inertia.

The Underground Man's head is largely responsible for the misfortunes that occur to him in the two remaining incidents of Part Two, the Zverkov and Liza episodes. Again, however, it is not the rational intellect that guides his actions, but his irrational impulses and drives. Both episodes, like the one with the officer treated above, are perfect examples of that irrational, self-destructive behavior discussed in detail by the older Underground Man in the second half of Part One. It is not that the behavior of twenty-four-year olds in fiction cannot be ruled by rationalistic thinking; "Crime and Punishment, " written one year after "Notes from the Underground, " presents in Raskol'nikov a young man of twenty-four, similar to the Underground Man in many ways, whose actions are shown to be the direct result of rationalistic thinking carried to the logical extreme. Of course, it is not inconceivable that the Underground Man was a rationalist, too, at twenty-four; however, we are not told or shown it. Moreover, since the events in Part Two take place sometime in the late 1840's and the Underground Man at that time was somewhat of a romantic idealist, although already having undergone significant disillusionment, he must have developed his rationalist side, if we still want to understand the Underground Man's development against the historical background, a good deal after: that is, in the early sixties.

The Jack of psychological motivation of the Underground Man's rationalism may at first seem an anomaly in Dostoevsky's major fiction, but it appears much less so when we actually look closely at his handling of the past in his other novels, and compare it with the treatment of past events in the novels of his contemporaries.

Russian realists tend to provide psychological motivations for the behavior of their characters in the fictional present, but they differ significantly - sometimes being poles apart - in their methods of linking the action proper of the novel with preceding events. At one extreme we find Tolstoj, who spends hundreds of pages in "Anna Karenina" delving into the situation and psychology of Anna and her husband, but devotes only a few paragraphs to their past lives. At the other extreme, Turgenev, showing a great affinity to such French realists as Balzac and Flaubert, often takes pains to explain his characters' present in terms of their past, devoting, for example, over one-fifth of his "Nest of Gentlefolk" ("Dvorjanskoe gnezdo") to a flashback in which he recounts in copious detail, from his own person, the upbringing and education of his hero, Lavreckij. (His other novels have similar flashbacks and Vorgeschichten). Dostoevsky's method in his later novels is somewhere midway between that of Turgenev and Tolstoj. We get more background than in Tolstoj, and it is for the most part causally related to the action proper, but it is still

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relatively brief and does not play a significant role in the novel in terms of motivation. In "The Idiot, " the prehistory of Prince Myshkin's stay in Switzerland, from which he leaves with his health considerably improved, does not lead directly to his physical and mental collapse once back in Russia; in "The Possessed, " there are a few pages on the upbringing and the education of Stavrogin under the tutelage of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovenskij, but Stepan Trofimovich, despite his ideological responsibility for the devils, had little lasting influence on the mature Stavrogin; and in "The Brothers Karamazov, " there are a few chapters at the beginning sketching the early years of the brothers, but here the past is not shown to have had a determining role on the development of character. Ivan and Alesha had the same parents, and they were brought up in the same environment, first at home and then at the Polenovs; but from their earliest years they differed widely in mental outlook and temperament, and of course, they turn out quite differently. In "Crime and Punishment, " the work chronologically and thematically nearest to "Notes from the Underground, " we learn very little of Raskolnikov's past, and the little we learn of it (for example, in Raskol'nikov's first nightmare and in his mother's letter in Part One) has to do only with his early childhood. That the religious, compassionate, ten-year-old Raskol'nikov who sheds tears over his grandmother's grave could turn into the rational theorist and murderer of the novel proper is certainly possible; but, on the other hand, it is by no means probable and the novel does not attempt to make it seem so. Dostoevsky, for example, spends no time whatever describing the process of Raskol'nikov's corruption as Balzac does with Rastignac and Flaubert with Emma Bovary; Raskol'nikov is already seriously infected with Western rationalistic ideas the first time we meet him and Dostoevsky takes him from there.

"Notes from the Underground, " however, because of its complex narrative and temporal structure, differs greatly from Dostoevsky's other major novels in its integration of past and present. It covers three distinct and unusually presented periods in the life of its hero: the first encompassing the Underground Man's years at a boarding school where he met Zverkov, but focusing on his sixteenth year; the second, the activities of the Underground Man some eight years later, recounted in the "officer, " Zverkov, and Liza episodes; and the third, the time of Part One and the narration of Part Two. The first period constitutes only several pages of the second part, but it provides a solid psychological foundation for understanding the twenty-four-year-old Underground Man's situation eight years later in Petersburg. In fact, there is curiously a much more direct causal relationship between the first and second periods than between the second and third. In Part Two we have a narrator writing in the present showing how several of his most significant experiences sixteen years earlier (second period) were directly related to even earlier experiences at school (first period). We must, of course, be wary of what the Underground Man relates about his past - he is not the most reliable of narrators - nevertheless, there is much that he recounts about his childhood that we need not question. The Underground Man was an orphan unloved by the distant relatives who brought him up. He was sent away to

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school where his hypersensitivity, pride, and consciousness of his social and physical inferiority - he was short, plain, and thin - made his life as painful as an adolescent as it soon would be as a young adult. He was somewhat able to overcome his sense of inferiority by becoming one of the best students at school. But however much he convinced himself that he was beyond the other boys, he remained as vulnerable to their opinions as before and even more resentful of what he thought was their undeserved power over him. His feeling of powerlessness fostered the desire for domination, and when the occasion arose in which he could lord it over one of his schoolmates he took full advantage of it. He recalls in this regard a friendship he had at school. "Once I did have a friend. But I was already a despot at heart; I wanted to wield unlimited power over his soul; I sought to instill in him contempt for his surroundings; I demanded his complete and disdainful break with these surroundings. I frightened him off with my passionate friendship; I'd reduce him to tears, to convulsions. He was a naive and devoted soul; but when he submitted himself to me completely, I immediately began to detest him and repulsed him - as though all I needed him for was merely to conquer, to subjugate him. " (8)

It is not difficult to see that the Underground Man's character at twenty-four, as presented by the forty-year-old narrator, differs little from his character at sixteen: he is plagued by the same problems and resorts to the same counterproductive solutions. The twenty-four-year-old Underground Man differs only in that he seems to have taken various of the negative aspects of his personality at sixteen to their logical conclusions. The incidents with the "officer" and with Zverkov call to mind the Underground Man's acute sense of social and physical inferiority and his need to show himself morally - that is, intellectually and culturally -superior to his adversaries. His relationship with his one friend at school, which shows his need to humiliate and subject another human being to his will as compensation for his own frequent humiliations, exactly parallels his relationship with Liza, whom the Underground Man humiliates for the humiliation he experienced at the going-away party for Zverkov. One of the functions of the portrayal of the sixteen-year-old Underground Man is to show how he failed to grow and mature, how he remained emotionally at twenty-four the same person he was at sixteen. But the portrayal is also predictive: the behavior of the adult is prefigured in the behavior of the adolescent, and even more important, it is shown logically, if not necessarily, to arise out of it. What was to happen to the twenty-four-old Underground Man is presented as not only possible but even probable.

An unfortunate consequence, perhaps, of presenting a strict correlation between the past time periods in Part Two is that one expects a similarly close correlation between periods two and three, between the relatively more recent past and the present. If the behavior of the twenty-four-year-old Underground Man arises consistently from the behavior of his sixteen-year-old counterpart, should not the rationalism of the forty-year-old hero arise just as consistently from his twenty-four-year-old counterpart. As we have seen such a connection between the twenty-four-

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and forty-year-old Underground Man does not exist; and the fact that it does not is underlined by the existence of the obviously close connection between the sixteen- and twenty-four-year-old Underground Man. One way out of this dilemma, of course, is to argue that the older Underground Man's rationalism is insincere, that he uses deterministic reasoning merely to rationalize his reprehensible behavior sixteen years earlier. Clearly if rationalism has no foundation in the older Underground Man's personality the whole question of the Underground Man's early rationalism is simply without point. The argument, however that the Underground Man's rationalism is only a means of justifying his past actions - that is, not taking responsibility for them - is seriously undercut by the Underground Man's passionate belief in free will and the need to take responsibility, even, as he says, when one is clearly not responsible according to the laws of nature.

Another argument that might be advanced to account for the absence of any psychological motivation for the Underground Man's rationalism, an argument that is perhaps implied in some of the philosophical interpretations of the novel, is that the "Notes" is not really a novel at all, but a combination of a philosophical tale and a confession, genres whose aesthetic laws differ from that of the novel, and thus are not conducive to being evaluated by criteria - metonymic motivation, for example - which are inappropriate to it. (9) One would certainly not use the same approach for Voltaire's "Candide" as one would for "Crime and Punishment. " But despite the first-person form and the polemical and philosophical content of Part One, the "Notes" does not differ from Dostoevsky's later novels in its method of integrating psychology and action; in fact, its method is almost identical to the one used in "Crime and Punishment" to present Raskol'nikov. And as we have seen, with the exception of his rationalism, most of the Underground Man's actions and ideas seem well motivated in terms of psychology and environment. The form of the "Notes" is to be sure an unusual one for a novel, but it is a novel nevertheless, and any attempt to deal with it as if it were not will probably create more problems than it will solve.

One might also argue that the novel is constructed so as to frustrate our attempts to discover the seeds of the Underground Man's rationalism in his youth; and further, that the novel actively works against any reconciliation of Parts One and Two in an imaginative synthesis. According to such a view, the point that the novel makes is that there exists no necessary relationship between past and present and any attempt to argue such a relationship is doomed to failure, for the novel itself is about life's resistance to the imposition on it of any abstract or logical categories, even that of the self, a personal entity that maintains its identity through time. (10)

But does the "Notes" really make us reconsider our notions of causality, or at least, fictional causality? One perhaps could make a good case for such a view in Gogol's "Dead Souls" in which it seems that by presenting Chichikov's background near the end of the novel, Gogol' is in part making

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fun at the growing Tendency in French literature to employ more realistic motivation, particularly by means of long introductions crammed with detailed background information on the characters and their times. With regard to the "Notes, " however, such a view is undercut by the psychological links between periods one and two in Part Two and that between the irrational selves of the Underground Man in periods one through three. Nevertheless, although it does not seem that the "Notes" is working to frustrate any attempts to reconcile past and present, it is still evident that if one is to understand the Underground Man's rationalism in the present it is perhaps vain, given the evidence, to insist on deriving it from his past experiences. Once, however, we have established the absence of any strong psychological motivation of the Underground Man's rationalism, we can ask in what other ways might this rationalism be motivated and what harm, if any, does this absence of psychological motivation do to the novel.

One of the reasons that Dostoevsky did not, it seems to me, motivate the Underground Man's rationalism of Part One in terms of psychology and environment is that the large time period between the two parts made it unnecessary. I have already noted that in his later novels there is little strict cause and effect relationship between the past as represented in background information and the action proper of the present. With regard to the presentation of rationalism, the "Notes" differs from these novels not in that the causal relationship between the past and present is significantly weaker, but that the past constitutes the largest part of the novel and its occurrence after the present naturally places on it a great deal of emphasis. Yet it seems that in Dostoevsky's later fiction what is most important in determining whether the past is to be directly and causally related to the present is not so much the emphasis that the past receives but the gap that physically and temporally separates it from the present. In Part Two, for example, periods one and two are causally related because period one is used to explain the Underground Man's situation in period two when the Underground Man was twenty-four years old. Period one is not separated from period two in the text by any formal means, but is included in the discussion of period two. We would expect periods one and two to be directly related because the Underground Man cites his behavior in period one in order to throw light on his behavior in period two. Periods two "and three, however, are separated by a formal division. In addition, there is little or no interpolated material in Part One (period three) in which period two is used to explain the Underground Man's behavior in period three.

The temporal and formal gap that we find in the "Notes" and the way Dostoevsky handles it is not unique in his later work. We find similar gaps in the epilogues of "The Idiot" and "Crime and Punishment. " In the second chapter of the epilogue of "Crime and Punishment, " which takes place nine months after Raskolnikov's trial, a relatively long period of time considering the entire novel proper occupies only about two weeks, Raskol'nikov experiences a resurrection from the dead. Since it is presented as a miracle, it is not treated, and cannot be treated, in

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psychological terms, other than by showing in the novel proper that the ground had been receptive for it. If it had been probable, it would not, of course, have been a miracle; one cannot have miracles and psychological probabilities at the same time. Yet there are critics who have taken Dostoevsky to task for not motivating Raskolnikov's rebirth in the same slow and detailed psychological manner that he motivated Raskolnikov's murder and his consequent suffering. (11) Although Dostoevsky did not and could not use the same motivation for the murder and the miracle, he does not at all imply that nothing important was going on in Raskolnikov's psyche all those months spent in prison before his spiritual awakening. It was simply unnecessary to show the process of the rebirth - even if it could be showed - as long as it was still a possibility. The same approach seems to hold for the motivation of the Underground Man's rationalism in Part One. It does not seem at all probable that the Underground Man's reliance on and high regard for his intellect would have had to develop into the rationalism of Part One, but the possibility - at least psychologically, if not historically - certainly cannot be denied; and it is not a question here of the smallest mathematical possibility, but possibility well grounded in fictional verisimilitude. The novel asks us to accept that sometime during the sixteen year gap between Parts One and Two the Underground Man's intellectual development took a course that led to the rationalism of the first chapters of Part One.

Furthermore, the reversed chronology of the two parts, somewhat surprisingly, does not really increase the emphasis on causation. In fact, it seems more likely that the two parts are in reverse chronological order primarily for the sake of presenting the Underground Man's formal argument against determinism - the generalizations of the shorter Part One preceding, as we might expect, the detailed proof of Part Two. The gap, however, between Parts One and Two, so unconducive to establishing necessary causal relations between the younger and older hero, is not at all detrimental to the Underground Man's attempt to prove man's irrationality, for which events from any time would be equally relevant. The thesis and demonstration form of the "Notes" also partially explains why there is no mention in Part Two of the Underground Man's rationalistic views: the Underground Man chooses to write Part Two as proof of only the irrationalistic propositions of the second half of Part One; therefore he understandably focuses only on those events in his own experience that demonstrate man's irrationality. One would hardly expect him, given his point of view, to dwell on factors which might be interpreted as strictly determining his development.

But the origins of the Underground Man's rationalism are of comparatively little significance in the "Notes" most of all because the focus of the work, despite the detailed recounting of the past, is not on the past and causation (in the sense of the psychological and environmental determinants of his behavior), but on the present and on the dynamics of becoming. The point of view of most of Part Two is primarily not the consciousness of the younger Underground Man, but that of the older hero, who is telling the story of his past from the perspective of a more

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experienced and relatively wiser man, or at least one who is able to marvel at his past ignorance and cruelty. He repeatedly alludes, for example, to his failure to understand Liza:

I did not even understand that she was deliberately hiding behind a mask of mockery, that this is usually the last subterfuge of people who are modest and chaste of heart in the face of rude, importunate attempts to probe their soul, and who refuse to yield to the very end out of pride and fear of showing their true feelings. I should have guessed it from the very timidity with which she tried, repeatedly, to utter her mocking words, until she finally ventured to speak them. But I did not guess, and a vindictive anger flared up in me. (p. 115)

I know, I will be told that this is incredible - that it's impossible to be as cruel and stupid as I was; people may even add that it would be impossible not to love her, or at least appreciate her love. . . Besides, what is so incredible about it, when I had already managed to reach such a state of moral corruption, to lose all touch with "living life" so completely, that only a little earlier I could reproach and shame her with the accusation that she had come to me to listen to "pathetic words. " And it didn't even occur to me that she had come, not at all to listen to pathetic words, but to love me, for in love a woman finds all resurrection, all salvation from any kind of ruin, all renewal; indeed, it cannot manifest itself in any other way but this. (pp. 147-148)

Except for the sections of dialogue, most of the descriptions and analyses of Part Two are presented from the point of view of the older Underground Man. Expressions like "I did not know then, " "I did not understand, " "I could not see, " and so forth are common. There is good reason for this: the Underground Man is not telling about the past only to prove something to himself about his earlier years or about the nature of man -he knows these things only too well - he is writing primarily for himself and for himself now. He is interested in the past, over which he experiences so much guilt and remorse, because he sees, or at least senses, that by understanding it and coming to terms with it he can achieve relief from his spiritual torment and perhaps even find a way out of his seemingly desperate situation. "Even now, so many years after, the memory of all this is somehow too distressing. Many memories distress me now, but. . . shouldn't I perhaps conclude my 'Notes' at this point? It seems to me that it was a mistake to start them. At any rate, I have felt ashamed throughout the writing of this story: hence this is no longer literature, but corrective punishment (ispravitel'noe n a k a z a n i e ). " (p. 151) For Dostoevsky's great intellectual heroes, in particular Raskol'nikov and Ivan Karamazov, corrective self-punishment is indeed one of the essential steps on the road to spiritual recovery. Nor is it chance that the turning point for both Raskol'nikov and Ivan Karamazov is the confession each makes toward the end of his respective novel, a sort of self-inflicted corrective punishment, and one that greatly resembles the "private" confession that the Underground Man makes in the writing of his notes.

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The Underground Man, then, reviews the past much less to establish the inevitability of his present situation, than to assess its significance for the present. Far from being a determinant of his present behavior, the past provides the Underground Man with the means by which he can overcome the present and begin for the first time to look to the future. The "Notes" is unlike many confessions in which the sinner, having found his way, can describe the past as past, a stage in his development that is no longer relevant for this future. The Underground Man is a sinner who has not yet found the way; and so for him the past is still a vital and haunting present, the significance of which must be unravelled so he may overcome his present intolerable situation.

The Underground Man's implied insistence in Part One that man must take responsibility for his actions, despite all rational proof that man is not and cannot be responsible for them, is really an argument against using the past as an excuse for present behavior. Furthermore, since the Underground Man at forty, though more perceptive now than sixteen years before, is essentially the same person with the same problems as he was at twenty-four, his analysis of the past is tantamount to an analysis of his personality and situation in the present. The causal relationship between Parts One and Two is, as it were, erased as the past and present become one and the interest of the Underground Man as well as of the reader in Part Two becomes the Underground Man in the present. It is not that the novel denies the existence or importance of causes, but that it does not present them as determinants of behavior. How the Underground Man got into his present morass becomes less important than how he can make the guilt, suffering, and knowledge resulting from his past experiences serve as the basis for spiritual renewal.

The origins of the Underground Man's rationalism must be considered to be relatively unimportant in the "Notes" ; but the search for these origins reveals a great deal about the focus and the point of view of the novel. It reveals that the causes of the Underground Man's irrationalism, though more consistently motivated in terms of psychology and environment are no more important ultimately than the causes of his rationalism, for if the "Notes" is at all a novel about the past, it is not about its determining effect on the Underground Man's present, but about the solution to his problems that has lain buried in it. The Underground Man, the novel implies, can be saved only when he fully appreciates and accepts the significance of Liza's love and compassion, when he fully understands that salvation and the highest affirmation of the self are to be found in the free surrender of the self to others. (12) The Underground Man, of course, has not yet come to such an understanding, but as the confession shows, he is much closer to it than before he began his confession, before he began actively to seek a solution to the riddle of his unhappy state. (13)

NOTES

1. Joseph Frank, "Nihilism and 'Notes from Underground" , " Sewanee Review, 69 (1961), 4-12.

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2. Gary Rosenshield, "Artistic Consistency in 'Notes from the Underground' - Part One. " This article is to appear in early 1983.
3. Frank here confuses, as Dostoevsky himself was wont to do, the nihilists of the sixties with the socialists of the sixties, the followers of Pisarev with the followers of Chernyshevskij. Since the distinction is of little practical importance for this study, I have merely interpreted Frank's statement that the Underground Man is "in the ideological grip of the Nihilism of the Sixties" to mean that the Underground Man has accepted the rationalism and determinism of Chernyshevskij's "What Is to Be Done?" It also should be noted that there is no indication at all that the Underground Man ever entertained the social or political views of the more prominent nihilists or socialists.
4. Frank, p. 5. Rudolf Neuhäuser - "Romanticism in the Post-Romantic Age: A Typological Study of the Antecedents of Dostoevskii's Man from Underground, " Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 8 (1974), 333-358 - who has done important work on the ideological antecedents of the Underground Man, is perhaps more accurate in describing the Underground Man as a representative of the disillusioned late romantics of the forties rather than the still "illusioned" earlier romantics. Nevertheless, because of the Underground Man's complexity there are numerous instances in Part Two where we find both of these romantics side by side. The Underground Man seems simultaneously to believe and disbelieve many of the sentimental and romantic ideas that he discusses.
5. Turgenev and Herzen, two prominent romantic idealists of the forties did not become conservative as they grew older; but they did not become nihilists either. Turgenev remained a moderate liberal; Herzen a socialist, but in no way a rationalist and determinist of the Chernyshevskian variety.
6. For a discussion of métonymie motivation as the essential characteristic of realism in prose fiction, see Dmitrij Chizhevskij, "Chto takoe realizm?" Novyj zhurnal, No. 75 (March 1964), pp 131-147.
7. This is the converse of the more obvious argument that the Underground Man's deterministic and rationalistic explanations of human behavior are merely his attempts to prove that he was not responsible for his actions in Part Two, since they were determined by the laws of nature. See, for example, Bernard I. Paris, " 'Notes from Underground' : A Horneyan Analysis, " PMLA (1973), 519.
8. "Notes from Underground, " tr. Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Bantam, 1974), p. 80. All translations have been checked with the original in F. M. Dostoevskij, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij, ed. by V. G. Bazanov et al. (30 vols. ; L. : Nauka, 1972), V, 99-179, and revised when necessary. Further references to the English translation appear in the text.
9. A theoretical justification for this approach is argued by Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1967), pp. 303-326.
10. This is the argument of various structural and deconstructionist interpretations of the "Notes" which have appeared during the last ten years. See James H. Holquist, "Plot and Counter-Plot in 'Notes

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    from Underground' , " Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 6 (1972), 225-238; Thomas M. Kavanagh, "Dostoevsky's 'Notes from Underground' : The Form of the Fiction, " Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 14 (1972), 491-501; Wolfgang W. Holdheim, "Die Struktur von Dostoevskijs 'Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kellerloch', " Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 47 (1973), 310-323; Scott Consigny, "The Paradox of Textuality: Writing as Entrapment and Deliverance in 'Notes from the Underground' , " Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 12 (1978), 341-352. 
    

11. See, for example, Ernest J. Simmons, Dostoevsky: The Making of a Novelist (1940; rpt. London: John Lehmann, 1950), pp. 152-153; Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, tr. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), p. 312.
12. On 6 April 1864, one day after his wife's death, Dostoevsky, in the midst of his work on Part Two of the "Notes, " recorded in his notebook the following thoughts on the realization of the self. "Masha is lying on the table. Will I see her again? To love a person a s one's self according to the commandment of Christ is impossible. The law of personality on earth prevents it. The I stands in the way. Only Christ was able, but Christ was eternal, an ideal towards which man strives and must strive according to the law of nature. Yet after the appearance of Christ, as the ideal of man in the flesh, it became as clear as day that the highest and ultimate development of the personality (when it has reached its final stage, its goal) must occur when man realizes and becomes convinced with all his being that the greatest use he can make of his personality, of his I in its fullest development, is, as it were, to destroy that I, to surrender it completely to one and all, undividedly and wholeheartedly. This is the greatest happiness. . . So man strives on earth to attain an ideal which is contrary to his nature. When man does not fulfill the law of striving toward the ideal, that is, does not through love offer his I in sacrifice to people or to another being (Masha and I) he experiences suffering and calls this condition sin. And so man continually must experience suffering, which is balanced by the heavenly joy of fulfilling the law through self-sacrifice. " Neizdannyj Dostoevskij: Zapisnye knizhki i tetradi, 1860-1881 gg. (M. : Nauka, 1971), pp. 173-175.
13. The majority of critics has held the confession to be ineffective as therapy. See, for example, Ralph E. Matlaw, "Structure and Integra tion in 'Notes form the Underground' , " PMLA, 73 (1958), 102; Paris, 516; Paul Cardaci, "Dostoevsky's Underground as Allusion and Sym bol, " Symposium, 28 (1974), 257; Irene Kirk, "Dramatization of Consciousness in Albert Camus' 'La Chute' and Dostoevsky's 'Notes from Underground' , " Bucknell Review, 16 (1968), 98. Barbara Howard, "The Rhetoric of Confessions: Dostoevsky's 'Notes from the Under ground" and Rousseau's 'Confession' , " Slavic and East-European Jour nal, 25 (1981), 129, argues that "the very form of confession frustrates the author's attempt to give a genuine account of himself, independent of external judgment. " In much of the latest literary criticism, in which the validity of the self as a concept has been

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    repeatedly questioned, characters' attempts to discover their true selves are for the most part seen as exercises in futility. See especially the articles on the "Notes" cited in note 10.