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The underground brings out the rivalry hidden behind romantic sentiments and ideals, the exchanges of pride and humiliation that govern the relations between people and even within the singular person, who turns out to be multiple. Spiritual pride, the separation from one’s fellow creatures, the will to autonomy, produces the rival, and thus brings about its own humiliation. The scale of this imitative rivalry is a richly chromatic one, ru
The present collection represents, in miniature, the i
These portraits are still single, anecdotal figures. Their opposition is mainly social and external. In the underground, the divisions become internal and rivalry acquires a metaphysical dimension. This is shown clearly in The Eternal Husband, written in 1870. Dostoevsky said at the time, in a letter to his friend and editor N. Strakhov: “I thought of writing this story four years ago, the year of my brother’s death, in response to the words of Apollon Grigoriev, who praised my Notes from Underground and said to me then: ‘That is how you should write.’ But this is not Notes from Underground, it is quite different in form, though the essence is the same, my usual essence, if only you, Nikolai Nikolaevich, will acknowledge that, as a writer, I have some particular essence of my own.” The more spectacular ideological elements of Dostoevsky’s work, such as the polemical monologue of the man from underground or the “poem” of the Grand Inquisitor, which have drawn so much commentary from critics and philosophers, are entirely absent from The Eternal Husband. They are not of the essence, then. What is of the essence, of his “usual essence,” is the mechanism of metaphysical rivalry and deviated transcendence, which is portrayed here in its purest form, as a kind of duel, almost a prizefight, its rounds signaled by the ringing of bells.
There is a certain way in which the double makes his appearance in Dostoevsky’s work. Raskolnikov, in acute anguish at the end of the third part of Crime and Punishment, dreams that he is murdering the old woman again, but this time she does not die but instead laughs wildly at him. Terrified, he attempts to cry out and wakes up:
He drew a deep breath—yet, strangely, it was as if the dream were still going on: his door was wide open, and a man completely unknown to him was standing on the threshold, studying him intently.
Raskolnikov had not yet managed to open his eyes fully, and he instantly closed them again. He lay on his back without stirring. “Is this the dream still going on, or not?” he thought, and again imperceptibly parted his eyelashes a little: the stranger was standing in the same place and was still peering at him!… Finally it became unbearable: Raskolnikov raised himself all at once and sat up on the sofa.
“Speak, then. What do you want?”
“Ah, I just knew you were not asleep, but only pretending,” the unknown man answered strangely, with a quiet laugh. “Allow me to introduce myself: Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov.…”
Similarly, Ivan Karamazov finds himself in an inexplicable state of anguish as he approaches his father’s house:
Above all this anguish was vexing and a
On the bench by the gate, idly enjoying the cool of the evening, sat the lackey Smerdyakov, and Ivan Fyodorovich realized at the first sight of him that the lackey Smerdyakov was also sitting in his soul, and that it was precisely this man that his soul could not bear.
Or there is the moment a little later in the same novel when Alyosha, in great grief and temptation over the death and “disgrace” of the elder Zosima, meets the dubious novice Rakitin: