The following article was written and presented as in-class lectures two years ago, during the height of the pandemic lockdowns, by Peter Winsky. It is published here, for the first time.
As the pandemic wears on, we have begun to enter into a new routine of day-to-day life. With a tangible threat to our and our neighbors’ well-being, masking and vaccination regulations are being imposed on state, federal, local, and community levels in order to provide protection according to the latest scientific findings. And as these ever-improving advancements encroach into our everyday practice and consciousness, an inevitable questioning of the limits of personal freedom and social responsibility rises up into the horizon of our being. We begin to ask questions such as: How are we to deal with the changes imposed on us by the biological constraints of necessity and desire while maintaining our personal freedom? And is that freedom defined solely by our ability to act according to our own ego-centric urges, or is there a greater, deeper freedom inherent in the depths of the person—one defined by our loving self-offering to our neighbor?
The paradoxical content of freedom—as an inherent quality of humanity that resides in the loving suppression of self-will—is a central tenet of Orthodox thought, and one picked up on in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The novella, written as a response to the utopian socialist ideology of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?, should be picked up and (re)read by anyone interested in the state of our lives as free persons living during a public health crisis. At this point in the pandemic, Dostoevsky’s polemic with Chernyshevsky serves as an invaluable parallel with our current situation. The text presents two problematic oppositions of modern life. On the one hand, the novella is a stark reminder of the dangers of blind devotion to rationally organized social programs that promise material gains in exchange for submission of the will. In these types of systems, the self-offering of the person is foundational, but force becomes necessary to achieve its goals when confronted with the inevitability of post-lapsarian human ego-centricity. On the other, the unlimited freedom of the person manifests as irrational spite in the person of the Underground Man. Here, loving self-offering is rejected and the inherent freedom of the person, which is necessary to the authentic being and soteriological telos of humanity, prevents those ends through its own self-indulgence. This struggle is played out within Notes. However, within its pages Dostoevsky leaves both paths unresolved, but hints at the possibility of an Orthodox reply to the all-too-human response of blind submission to one ideological pole or the other.
Let’s take a closer look at the text and expose precisely how vital the work is to our contemporary lives. As Dostoevsky explicitly notes, the Underground Man represents “people [who] not only may, but actually must exist in our society, considering the general circumstances under which our society was formed.”[1] Within the context of the novella, the “general circumstances” are the imported Western Enlightenment and materialist philosophies imported into Russia by Peter the Great and the other Empresses and Emperors who followed him. Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? expresses the utopian socialist concept derived from these tendencies that proclaims: “One has only to be rational, to know how to organize, and to learn how to use resources most advantageously,”[2] in order to bring about a paradise in which everyone works for the benefit of the greater good, and all social and biological ills can be handled. However, most importantly, Chernyshevsky’s philosophy avers that people will retain free will once they are educated about their own advantage. Education guarantees, according to the utopian philosophy, selflessness.
But the Underground Man, a contemporary and educated person crushed by the oppression of modernity and the unfulfilled promises of philosophical pretension, rejects the laws of nature and inevitability of utopia as presented by Chernyshevsky. As many scholars and philosophers have noted, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man represents the possibility of free will acting in direct opposition to the foundations of utopian socialism. The person who knows their advantage lies in working for their neighbor will just as quickly reject that advantage as work for it. The paradox of the Underground Man arises in his inability to unify his love of and desire for the “beautiful and sublime” nature of selfless thought and action with his free will. When presented with selflessness as a natural law, as an unstoppable force of the history of the world, the Underground Man gnashes his teeth and subjects himself to pain and loneliness out of spite. However, he dives so deeply into the ocean of freedom that he drowns under the ballast of the ego that keeps him under the surface. He is no longer capable of loving or freely self-offering himself, and as a result he is left to suffer in his self-made hell of isolation.
The brilliance of Dostoevsky’s response to Chernyshevsky lies in the spitefulness and grotesque nature of the Underground Man’s reaction to the world of the Crystal Palace—the metaphor for the telos of utopian socialist ideology. Dostoevsky does not present a positive alternative to Chernyshevsky’s utopian socialism. Instead, he depicts with full force the simplest answer to the question of the viability of an earthly paradise: free will enacted through spite. But is there more to the thrust of the novella than the freedom of this deformed, anxious, isolated, and spiteful protagonist? Could Dostoevsky truly be on the side of the Underground Man without caveat? Although he rejects the utopian aspect of Chernyshevsky’s writing, surely he is not advocating for the type of absolute egoism and selfish individual freedom the Underground Man represents, rather than the Orthodox Christian commandment to “love one’s neighbor as oneself” (Mt. 22:39) that defines his later novels and yet is either alien or repulsive to this protagonist? As his March 26, 1864 letter to his brother Mikhail reveals, indeed there is something more to the text than egocentric freedom, but it is lost due to censorship that show where Dostoevsky “deduced from all [the blasphemy of the Underground Man’s rantings] the necessity of faith and Christ.”[3]
Without the presence of Dostoevsky’s belief in Christ and the commandment to “love one’s neighbor,” all we can learn from the Underground Man is the psychology of the person willing to do anything to maintain their ego; an idea that would come to stand as the central premises of isolation and absurdity in existentialist philosophy. This type of reading and these ideas are clearly presented in a short article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, in which Professor Randy Rosenthal argues that the novel most suitable for our times, living within the COVID-19 pandemic, is not Camus’ The Plague or Boccaccio’s Decameron, but rather Dostoevsky’s Notes. He briefly outlines how spite as a representation of the egocentric cry of free will is present in those who do not mask, antivaxxers, and others who reject scientific data and medical analysis of experts. He concludes by noting: “What’s really mortifying, Dostoyevsky adds, is that this man would certainly find followers. Case closed.”[4] In Rosenthal’s reading, the foundational quality of human freedom in the Underground Man is exposed, but all we can see in the novel is the ugliness and egocentric nature of the Underground Man and his “followers.”
The difference, however, between the Underground Man and the modern underground men or “followers,” as Rosenthal paints them, is that the former pruned himself from society. Upon entering the underground, he cuts off all contact with the world—except to fulfill absolute necessities dictated by human biology. The Notes themselves are a rant, or confession, that the Underground Man specifically notes “aren’t published and given to other people to read”[5]—hence his imaginary “gentlemen” interlocutors. The Underground Man presents no danger to society or his neighbor because he is actively and consciously aware of the danger his hyperconsciousness and egocentrism presents to the other. The novella would be very different if blogging, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, etc., were available in mid-nineteenth century Russia, and perhaps Dostoevsky would have presented the Underground Man differently had the technology and freedom of expression we possess in the present-day existed.
But besides the clear image of a reprehensible form of unrestrained egocentric freedom, is there another message in Notes that Rosenthal has missed? Because of the censored content in the penultimate chapter to Part I of the novella, which, unfortunately, has never been found, the onus on the reader to interpret Dostoevsky’s intent is significant heavier, like reading a cipher without a cryptographic key. Are we to sympathize with the Underground Man, and if so, to what extent? Or are we to completely reject him and leave him to wallow in his self-imposed isolation? Here, by turning to our contemporary situation, the answer becomes clearer. There are many who assert that masking and vaccination mandates are an assault on the inherent freedom of the person. Likewise, there are those who insist that governmental mandates are the only answer that can lead to the conclusion of the public health crisis. Many see either no other option or anything less than adherence to one pole as a betrayal of moral principle.
In this way, the pandemic forces us to face our position in society, and evaluate what level of material freedom we are willing to sacrifice for personal and societal advantage. Are we Underground people, devoted to our egocentric autonomy and willing to resort to spite to prove we are not cogs in the machinery of history, nature, and government? Or are we willing to act as pawns in the service of a utopian cessation of suffering through collective response? In a recent Op-Ed regarding the pandemic, Slavoi Žižek writes: “It is not enough to resist whatever we perceive as the establishment on behalf of some more authentic mode of existence: one should also mobilize the mechanism of the ‘critique of critique’ and problematize the ‘authentic’ position on behalf of which we resist.” He then continues to say:
We should learn to trust science: it is only with the help of science that we can overcome our problems (caused, among other things, by science in the service of power). We should learn to trust public authority: only such an authority makes it possible to confront dangers like pandemics and environmental catastrophes by way of imposing necessary measures. We should learn to trust “the big Other,” the shared space of basic values: without it, solidarity is not possible.We don’t need the freedom to be different, we need the freedom to choose how to be the same in a new way. And, perhaps most difficult, we should be ready to abandon many of the common-sense beliefs and practices that form our way of life.[6]
While Žižek and Dostoevsky’s means may diverge, in a manner similar to which Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky differ, end goal of bettering the world through selfless acts remains the same. While Dostoevsky would love to see certain aspects of the earthly paradise of “Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream” come to fruition, he knows of the impossibility of its construction through education and revolution.
But Dostoevsky does not stop there, or at least he would not have had the censors not been “swine.”[7] There are not merely two paths to the goal of “loving one’s neighbor.” In Dostoevsky’s works, in order for any chance of even a semblance of the New Jerusalem to be established on Earth, people must be able to find the image of Christ in even the most deformed, anxious, isolated, and spiteful people. What seems to be missing from the text of Notes is an explicit depiction of the compassion and love for one’s neighbor that would allow for an active and productive building toward a personal experience of paradise on Earth through relation with and love for the unique and free other. In the meeting between the Underground Man and the prostitute Liza in the second half of the novella, Dostoevsky permits fleeting glimmers of the Underground Man’s capacity for self-emptying love, or at least his capacity for acknowledging the complete and invaluable personhood of the other. With these moments in mind, rather than reifying egocentricity as the essential aspect of human existence Dostoevsky provides certitude that even the most grotesque person, blinded to the love and care for their neighbor through their egocentrically driven desires can be opened to that self-emptying love which will bring paradise to Earth, even if only momentarily. But to do so one must be compassionate to those with whom one disagrees. To convince the other that there is something greater than their egocentric desires, that giving up the self for the other will indeed benefit them, one must be loving, and empty oneself in return. This is not merely a repudiation of the Underground Man, but also of those who blindly follow the utopian ideologies against whom the protagonist rails.
Inherent in the personalist vision of human being there is a compromise, or better a natural contradiction of truths, between personal freedom and the good of one’s neighbor. Herein lies the tragedy of the censor’s removing the Christian themes in Part I of the novella. Without the act of Christ’s kenotic self-sacrifice at the Crucifixion and the Resurrection at the forefront, as Dostoevsky intended to illuminate in the text, it is impossible to rationally convince an underground man that his freedom and spite are greater than the love of the other. Dostoevsky wrote in Summer Notes on Winter Impressions:
So then, you will say to me, must one be without individuality in order to be happy? Does salvation lie in impersonality? On the contrary, on the contrary, I say, not only is it unnecessary to be without individuality, but it is even essential to achieve an even greater degree of individuality than actually exists now in the West. Understand me: voluntary, completely self-conscious, and totally unconstrained sacrifice of one’s entire self for the good of everyone is, in my opinion, a sign of the highest development of individuality, of its greatest power, its greatest self-mastery, the greatest freedom of its own will. To lay down one’s life willingly for others, to be crucified or burned at the stake for others, can only be done at the very highest state of individuality.[8]
Here, we see the freedom Dostoevsky could not portray in the Underground Man, but that he would insist we must strive for in this pandemic-shrouded world, regardless of our ideological leanings.
Within the Orthodox worldview to which Dostoevsky adheres, and which he inscribes in his fictional worlds, the freedom to consciously love the other is not merely a choice but a commandment. When Christ is tested by a lawyer regarding the commandment to love “your neighbor as yourself,” (Lk 10:27) He tells the parable of the Good Samaritan to reinforce the necessity to care for the injured and defenseless to gain the Kingdom of Heaven. While we do not see the explicit commandment in Notes, Dostoevsky urges us toward its fulfillment through the fleeting relationship between the Underground Man and the prostitute Liza and through the Underground Man’s servant Apollon, who reads the Psalter over his master’s still-living-yet-entombed body. There is no coercion toward love in the positive aspects of these images in Dostoevsky’s work, just as there is no coercion by Christ to bring humanity into Divine relation. Similarly, during the pandemic the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church has not mandated vaccinations to their flock. However, certain members have called out the necessity to transcend the egocentric delusions of individual freedom as an act of faithfulness to the Divine by enacting the commandment to love one’s neighbor to help cease the spread of the pandemic and to allow the suffering of the world to be translated into love by following scientific evidence and advancements in order to protect other people.
While refusing to take vaccinations or mask in public does not constitute a transgression of this commandment, the consequences of a choice that elevates individual freedom over the health and well-being of the other might become a sinful act. Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Volokolamsk recently related how an act which on its own might not be a sin—due to the nature of its isolation within the confines of a single person’s thoughts or actions—can become a sin when its consequences spread to others. As reported in The Moscow Times, during an interview with the TV network Rossia 24, the Metropolitan recounted how people have been coming to priests asking how they would live with the death of their loved ones due to COVID-19. He said, “I now constantly face such situations when people come to a priest in order to repent that they did not vaccinate themselves or their loved ones and that they became the unwitting cause of another person’s death. And it is difficult even for me to say how to live with it now. You’ll have to atone your whole life for the sin you committed — that you thought about yourself and not another person.”[9] While many balked at the severity of the Metropolitan’s words, he clearly invokes the meaning of the commandment to “love one’s neighbor.”
In this, we can once again see the Underground Man’s relevance to our time. As Žižek alludes to in his Op-Ed, it is crucial that citizens of the West remain vigilant and “mobilize the mechanism of the ‘critique of critique’ and problematize the ‘authentic’ position on behalf of which we resist.”[10] Maintaining personal freedom and uniqueness is essential to prevent tyranny, isolation, and oppression. However, sacrificing the good of one’s neighbor for the sake of the primacy of freedom—particularly when authentic authority, “the Big Other,” is actually working in the interest of the welfare of both the self and one’s neighbor—leads to the shattering of relational bonds, to the presentation of the self as spiteful, deformed, and egocentric, and to the disintegration of a world in which people are willing to consciously lay down their freedom or lives for their neighbor.
The reason the Underground Man is so vile is because he has rejected any capacity to live magnanimously. He considers himself incapable of a good deed, and his orientation away from human contact and toward complete isolation prevents him from even attempting to do so. But the examples of others rejecting the Underground Man, and also our own repulsion when reading the Underground Man’s confession indicates a portion of the equation so many readers of this work have left unnoticed. If we, like Zverkov and his gang in the text, are incapable of also emptying ourselves for our neighbor, of at least showing compassion for the freedom and uniqueness of their personhood—this does not mean agreeing with them or allowing them to do whatever they please, as Metropolitan Hilarion’s anecdote indicates—then how can we expect to realize our own small glimmer of paradise on Earth, the recognition of the image and likeness of the Divine and the reification of that joy and goodness within us and our neighbors? Dostoevsky challenges us not only to see problematic elements of our own behaviors in the Underground Man, but also to try to find that Christlike kenotic love for him and those like him: to find the desire to reach out and love our neighbor no matter how despicable they may seem to us.
If we aren’t compassionate toward those who fear the loss of their personal freedom and uniqueness because of measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 then we’ll drive more people into the underground. And unfortunately, those people, unlike Dostoevsky’s original Underground Man tend to not isolate themselves in the underground, but rather spread their egocentric tendencies and endanger others for the sake of personal freedom.
[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tritsati tomakh, vol. 5, ed. V.G. Bazanov et. al. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), 99. Translations mine unless noted.
[2] Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What is to Be Done?. in Notes From the Underground, Second Norton Critical Edition, translated by Michael Katz, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 120.
[3] Dostoevsky, P.S.S. 28 (II), 73.
[4] Rosenthal, Randy. “Not ‘The Plague’ but ‘Notes from Underground,’” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 17, 2020. https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/not-plague-notes-underground/
[5] Dostoevsky, P.S.S. 5, 122.
[6] Žižek, Slavoi. “The Taliban is Proof that Our Modernity is an Unfinished Project,” RT, Spetember 7, 2021. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/534092-zizek-taliban-globalist-traditions/
[7] Dostoevsky, P.S.S. 28 (II), 73.
[8] Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions in Notes From the Underground, Second Norton Critical Edition, translated by Michael Katz, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 101.
[9] “Vaccinate or Repent Forever, Russian Orthodox Church Warns,” The Moscow Times, July 5, 2021. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/07/05/vaccinate-or-repent-forever-russian-orthodox-church-warns-a74430
[10] Žižek.
Peter Winsky received his Ph.D in Slavic Languages and Literatures in June 2021 from the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation “Dostoevsky through the Lens of Orthodox Personalism: Synergetic Anthropology and Relational Ontology as Poetic Foundations of Higher Realism” approaches the post-Siberian novels of Dostoevsky within the context of contemporary Orthodox philosophical and theological trends. His research focuses on Russian literature of the 19th century and Orthodox Personalism, as well as Russian Ornamentalist prose of the early 20th century and Yugoslav Blackwave Cinema. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California, teaching courses on Russian 19th century literature, cultural history, and religious and philosophical thought. Peter is editor of Northwestern University Studies in Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought.