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capitulated to the "stone walls" the Underground Man protests, "the
laws of nature" that justify the rational egoism at the basis of Western
capitalism and socialism. "Once it's proved to you that, essentially
speaking, one little drop of your own fat should be dearer to you than
a hundred thousand of your fellow men," the Underground Man says,
bitterly paraphrasing his contemporaries' philosophy of rational ego–
ism, "go ahead and accept it, there's nothing to be done." The Under–
ground Man refuses "to live only for not getting wet," refuses, that is,
to believe that man lives "according to the laws of nature," and so
should be equally content with a "chicken coop," "palace," or "tene–
ment house" as shelter from the rain.
The Underground Man expresses elements of his author's dissatisfac–
tion with materialism, but Dostoevsky wisely refrains from making his
character a mouthpiece for his growing belief that only Russian Ortho–
dox faith can be the basis of freedom. Without faith, the Underground
Man can only criticize, not create. He senses that something is wrong
with a world that calculates human needs from "an average of statisti–
cal figures and scientific-economic formulas," and has the courage to
ask, "is reason not perhaps mistaken as to profits? Maybe man does not
love well-being only?" His dissatisfaction with a flawed world elevates
him above the Western bourgeois, who evades all such questions and
lives in dread lest anyone "might think that the ideal had not been
attained, that in Paris there is still no earthly paradise, that there might
be something more to desire." As an incomplete figure of negation, capa–
ble of criticizing materialism but incapable of achieving its opposite, the
freedom of Christian faith, the Underground Man knows that he wants
something that is neither the crystal palace, nor the tenement house, nor
his underground reaction against them: "I myself know, like two times
two, that it is not the underground that is better, but something differ–
ent, completely different, that I search for but can never find!"
The search has ended in the West, where the countervailing influence
of Orthodoxy, still alive in the Russian people, is missing. Paris and
London present Dostoevsky with two superficially different forms of
materialist civilization whose common essence is stasis and death. Paris
is orderly, London seemingly disorderly. "What order!" he exclaims in
Paris. "What regimentation! Understand me: not so much external reg–
imentation, which is unimportant (comparatively, of course), but a
colossal internal, spiritual regimentation stemming from the soul"; with
just "a little more" order, Paris will be "fossilized."
In
London, "bold–
ness of enterprise" and "individuality" are "unregulated": "every
abruptness, every contradiction, gets along with its antithesis and stub-
