¹ While the central position of the Notes in Dostoevsky's canon was recognized as early as 1882 by N. K. Mikhailovsky, V. V. Rozanov's essay on the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor (1890) ushered in the modern emphasis on Dostoevsky as thinker. Subsequent critics invariably accept Rozanov's emphasis on, if not his interpretation of, Pt. i of the Notes. Leon Edel, The Psychological Novel (1900–1950) (New York: Lippincott, 1955), p. 59, implies a more analytic approach to the work's “content”: “in the first paragraph [Dostoevsky] had semaphored the reader, not with flags but with klieg lights that here was the mind of an eccentric, if not a madman.” Even the best attempt to date to combine ideological appreciation with analysis of novelistic technique, K. Mochul'sky, Dostoevsky (Paris: YMCA Press, 1947), pp. 202–215, fails to account for the effect of the narrator's personality on the philosophy he proffers. In the present essay the Notes are quoted as translated by Constance Garnett, with some changes for accuracy and consistency.

² It is noteworthy that in his periodical, the Epoch, Dostoevsky announced the forthcoming publication of this work, then entitled Confession (Ispoved'). However, when the work appeared it bore the title by which we know it. In his letters Dostoevsky also insisted that the whole piece would have to appear in one issue, but he had only completed the first part in time.

³ The first two sentences of the Notes also contain a false start and, in peto, expose the narrator's personality: “I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am a repulsive man.” The first clause apparently strikes the narrator as a request for sympathy. Since he denies such desires he restarts, now attempting to alienate the reader (“I am a spiteful man”), and then extends his hostility (“I am a repulsive man”). This is more clearly marked in the original, because in Russian, unlike English, the first person singular pronoun is not usually capitalized, so that the second clause, following interpunction, is more clearly a new beginning. The psychological movement is also more sharply marked. A literal rendering of the opening is: “I man sick ... I spiteful man. Repulsive I man.” All three clauses are stylistically correct in Russian, but the shift in emphasis and tone is unmistakable.

⁴ In this respect the relationship of the two parts may be formulated as follows: in Pt. i the psychology is turned into a polemic and is directed against an imaginary reader; in Pt. ii it is externalized, projected onto characters and situations.

⁵ Also to be noted (although it is a difficult matter to illustrate, particularly in limited space) are these attitudes: in addition to those connected with insect imagery—and recurrent in Dostoevsky's later fiction—those of stuffiness, dreams, physical movement accompanied by mental development, and pain, particularly physical pain (the toothache as symbol of corruption).

⁶ Parts of rooms, “corners,” were let so that a room might be shared by a number of lodgers. The scurrying of the mouse, incidentally, is analogous to the scurrying and wriggling on the Nevsky.

⁷ The reader has in the meantime noted that tables assume an analogous function for the narrator. He tries to discomfit petitioners from his official position behind a table; he becomes involved in the Nevsky episode because he is out of place at a billiard table; he sits alone at table while waiting for Zverkov, is ignored by his schoolmates when they arrive, and leaves the conviviality of the table in order to pace the room; he secretes his money in a table drawer; glares at Apollon who sits behind his own table; and, of course, it is across a table that he communicates with the future reader of his “notes.”

⁸ I am assuming that the Russian word was current in the 1860's with this political meaning. There is only one significant literary use of the word before Dostoevsky, in Pushkin's The Covetous Knight: “Let him force my father to treat me as a son, not as a mouse bred in the underground.” The knight's treasure is, however, kept in the cellar (podval). Underground appears with political overtones in correspondence during the late 1860's, as well as in the title Podpol'noe Slovo (The Underground Word), an émigré periodical published in Geneva in 1866. It seems unlikely to me that the use of the word in the Notes could have introduced this meaning.

⁹ The Notes is in many places a parody of the romantic and sentimental tale. One should note particularly the paragraph on romantics in Pt. ii, and Dostoevsky's use of a sentimental epigraph from Nekrasov in two places, which he coldly breaks off after the first few fines. The subject of this poem (“When from the gloom of corruption”), the regeneration of a prostitute, provides the subject for the Liza episode.