Notes from Underground

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 i

*

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 ru

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, ca

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 Mi