FATE OF PLEASURE
181
line of descent back to Thersites. It is in his character of anti-hero
that he addresses the "gentlemen," as he calls them, the men of
action and reason, the lovers of the "sublime and the beautiful,"
and brags to them, "I have more life in me than you have."
More life:
perhaps it was this boast of the Underground Man
that Nietzsche recalled when he said, "Dostoevsky's Underman and
my Overman are the same person clawing his way out of the pit
[of modern thought and feeling] into the sunlight." One understands
what Nietzsche meant, but he is mistaken in the identification, for
his own imagination is bounded on one side by that word
sunlight,
by the Mediterranean world which he loved: by the tradition of
humanism with its recognition of the value of pleasure. He is in–
eluctably constrained by considerations of society and culture, however
much he may despise his own society and culture, but the Under–
ground Man is not. To be sure, the terms of the latter's experience
are, in the first instance, social; he is preoccupied by questions of
status and dignity, and he could not, we may suppose, have come
into existence if the fates of the heroes of Balzac and Stendhal had
not previously demonstrated that no object of desire or of the social
will is anything but an illusion and a source of corruption, society
being what it is. But it is the essence of the Underground Man's
position that his antagonism to society arises not in response to the
deficiencies of social life, but, rather, in response to the insult
society offers his freedom by aspiring to be beneficent, to embody
"the sublime and the beautiful" as elements of its being. The anger
Dostoevsky expresses in
Notes From Underground
was mobilized
not by the bad social condition of Russia in 1864 but by the avowed
hope of some people that a good social condition could be brought
into being. A utopian novel of the day, Chernyshevsky's
What Is To
Be Done?,s
represented to him a particularly repugnant expression of
6. "A Utopian novel of the day" does not, of course, give anything like an
adequate notion of the book's importance in the political culture of Russia.
Dostoevsky chose his antagonist with the precision that was characteristic of
him, for Chernyshevsky, who thought of himself as the heir of the French
Enlightenment, by his one novel exercised a decisive influence upon the
Russian revolutionaries of the next two generations, most notably upon
Lenin, who borrowed its title for one of his best-known pamphlets. It is worth
recalling, since freedom of one kind or another is in question, that
What Is
To Be Done?
was written during Chernyshevsky's political imprisonment.
