"Notes From Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Forget Constance Garnett -- the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation makes the most cryptic of existential cult classics stranger, funnier and more alive than ever

By Allen Barra

May 27, 2004 | There are a handful of books that have the power to create secret societies among their readers, books that make you feel like a cult member. I don't just mean the popular "subversive books" such as "Catcher in the Rye" or "The Trial" or "Catch-22." However personal our relationship to them, they are all comfortable literature-class staples. I mean books that are accepted classics but that some teachers shy away from, if only because they can't be served up (as even the great earthshaking fictions of Tolstoy can) in neat little packages of meaning.

I mean books that even if you studied them in college didn't quite seem to fit. Books you probably stumbled across on your own or through a close friend, and after you read them, you felt you had been drawn to them, as if by a tractor beam in a sci-fi movie. Albert Camus' "The Stranger" is one of these; so is Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities." For the most part, such books were lumped together under the heading of "existential," whether the label applied literally or not.

The heavyweight champion of "existential fiction" is Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground." (In recent translations, it's no longer "the Underground.") As anyone who has read it can attest, it's one of the oddest little books in all of literature (110-120 pages in most editions, a novella, really). It's divided into two parts, the first a roughly 40-page exposition featuring a nameless character whom we have come to refer to only as "Underground Man" ranting away about everything that society holds dear in what V.S. Pritchett once called "an amazing performance of bad humor." ("I will not introduce any order or system," the unnamed narrator says in the new edition from Everyman's Library, "whatever I recall, I will write down.")

The second part, about twice as long, is a narrative in which U.G. Man tries to assert himself along the lines of the nihilist principles expressed in Part 1. He succeeds only at humiliating himself further. The former college classmates he nurses grudges against and even the total strangers he tries to pick fights with don't consider him important enough to be insulted. In the last few pages, he turns to a prostitute, Liza, whose simplicity and sincerity expose to us, if not entirely to UGM, the shallowness of his own philosophy.

That's it. Not much of a synopsis for a classic. You certainly can't get a sense of it from CliffsNotes; you have to be there. As the great Russian scholar D.S. Mirsky wrote in his "History of Russian Literature," "Notes From Underground" "transcends art and literature, and its place is among the great mystical revelations of mankind." I found that quote from Mirsky when I was 18 and made a beeline for the book. I should have read the rest of the passage, which I didn't get around to doing until years later. "It cannot be recommended," he wrote, "to those who are not either sufficiently strong to overcome it or sufficiently innocent to remain unpoisoned. It is a strong poison, which is most safely left untouched."

He got that right. I first read "Notes From Underground" on a crosstown bus; it shook me up so much I missed my stop and walked four miles home in a daze. You can't, I would find, read "Notes From Underground" at 18 and go on studying pre-law. Later, I would feel myself bonding with other souls who had similar reactions. W.H. Auden, for one, who, when he first read Dostoevsky, found himself exclaiming, "My God, this man is bonkers!" Nietzsche, who drank deep from its poison, thought the book had "the voice of blood in it."

I shudder to think what Auden's or Nietzsche's or my own reaction would have been had we first read "Notes From Underground" in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in the new Everyman's Library edition. When I was growing up, the great Russian writers were only available in translation by an Englishwoman named Constance Garnett, about whom I know nothing except that she made Russians sound like Edwardian Englishmen. (I don't know any Russian, but even as a freshman in college I knew something about bad English.)

The 1970s brought Penguin Classics and Dostoevsky translations from another Englishwoman, Jessie Coulson, which were only a mild improvement, often sounding like something translated from Russian to Esperanto to English. Dostoevsky's Underground Man is one of the first characters in literature infected with the modern disease of alienation, but rendered in such stilted English prose, it's amazing that he seemed modern at all to us.

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