The complete text of this original essay by professor Martinsen is available on the DVD!


By:   
Deborah A. Martinsen

Professor Deborah A. Martinsen is Adjunct Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature, and Assistant to the Director of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. She has published a number of works on Russian literature, including Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky's Liars and Narrative Exposure, and Literary Journals in Imperial Russia, a comprehensive collection of essays about the crucial cultural transformations created and documented throughout much of Russian literary history.

Both the author of these notes, and the Notes themselves, are, it goes without saying, imaginary. Nonetheless, taking into consideration the conditions that have shaped our society, such persons as the composer of these notes not only can, but even must, exist in our society.

This authorial footnote both introduces Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and explains Gary Alan Walkow's film adaptation. Dostoevsky intends his underground man to be a representative of his time - a figure shaped by the German Idealism and European Romanticism of 1840s Russia. Yet he presciently creates a character who remains representative of our modern era: a post-industrial, urban dweller; the product of an increasingly bureaucratic government; an alienated individual who longs for community; a man crippled by self-consciousness. Dostoevsky claims that this type must exist; Walkow shows us that he still does.

What does it mean to be an underground man? Above all, the phrase `the underground' signifies a state of mind, a self-consciousness that the narrator identifies as a disease. In Dostoevsky's view, self-consciousness and its attendant egoism come from the modernizing West, a land of individualism and thus alienation and social fragmentation. Walkow fittingly transfers Dostoevsky's fictional character from nineteenth-century Petersburg to the modern West - from Peter the Great's planned, westernized city to California, a symbolic center of individualism and the culture of personality. Like Dostoevsky's, Walkow's underground man remains unnamed - an individual, yet a representative of his time...

Continued on DVD...

I AM A SICK MAN
I Am A Sick Man is taken largely from Part I of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. For cinematic purposes, Walkow draws mostly from Chapters 1 and 11, the underground man's introductory and concluding statements. While Walkow thus eschews most of Dostoevsky's polemics with Russia's radical intelligentsia, he nonetheless dramatizes the essential issue of free will...

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BECAUSE I HAD AUTHORITY
In this scene, Walkow dramatizes two episodes from the opening chapters of both parts of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground: Part I,“The Underground,” and Part II, “An Account of the Wet Snow.” The first episode recounts the underground man's uncivil service work...

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THE NEED TO EMBRACE HUMANITY
This scene dramatizes material from Part II, Chapters 2 and 3. Simonov becomes Simon; the Russo-German Ferfichkin becomes Gerry; “Trudoliubov,” literally “lover of labor,” becomes Tom; Zverkov, literally “beast,” becomes Zerkov...

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REJECTED
This scene contains materials from Part II, Chapters 3-5, of Notes from Underground. In Dostoevsky's novella, the underground man knows he's going to arrive at the restaurant first, a thought that exacerbates his self-consciousness. He does not want to seem eager, nor does he want his classmates to think he is. He suffers doubly at the thought of exposing himself in this manner. He also dwells on his poverty: he obsesses about a shiny yellow spot on his trousers, a sign that they have worn thin...

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AND YOU ARE?
These scenes derive from Notes from Underground, Part II, Chapters 5-7. Shame dominates. Feeling shame at his bestiality, feeling out of place in a whorehouse, lying naked with a virtual stranger, the underground man feels the need to reassert his dominance - this time his verbal dominance...

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FAST AND DECISIVE ACTION
This scene dramatizes Part II, Chapter 8 of Notes from Underground. The underground man uses his verbal dexterity to save face before his classmates: he uses words to excuse his social ineptitude. His letter to Simon, like the Notes themselves, and like the film project, are mediated modes of communication. Since he is not face to face with another person, the underground man can work on his self-presentation. He can cross out and start over, he can turn off the camera; he can revise and reinterpret the evening's events...

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SHE HAUNTED ME ALL NIGHT
This scene dramatizes material from Part II, Chapters 8 and 9, but it also adds a scene: Walkow stretches the scene of Liza's visit, adding a night together that includes an act of mutual lovemaking. For both novelist and filmmaker, the heart-wrenching scene where the underground man turns on the suppliant and humiliated Liza serves as the dramatic crux of his tragedy - the first part of his most shameful secret...

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SO I SEE YOU LATER THEN?
This scene elaborates the events of Part II, Chapters 9 and 10 of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. In the novella, Liza does not spend a night - she comes to visit. After he insults her, he breaks down and cries. She unexpectedly comforts him, reversing their roles...

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SO MANY UNPLEASANT MEMORIES
This scene contains material from Part II, Chapter 10, of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Walkow's underground man turns the camera back onto himself. Alone in his underground, his repressed emotions return to haunt him.

Dostoevsky wrote his novella to demonstrate that theory cannot wholly account for human behavior. To debunk contemporary theories of rational or enlightened egoism, Dostoevsky proposes acts of love and compassion...

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