It was this that gave his work its historical depth and resonance. Behind these tales of the most ordinary, obscure lives, there are the broader features of the menippea—the free use of the fantastic, the polemicizing with conflicting ideas, and, above all, the testing of truths in extreme situations. Yet we also hear, suddenly, the tones of high tragedy. The Meek One reaches, in the end, the harrowing grief of Lear’s last scene with the dead Cordelia (the story has, in fact, not a little in common with King Lear). At the same time, precisely in this story we also have one of Dostoevsky’s boldest experiments in fictional form, what may be the first appearance in literature of the “stream of consciousness”—a point the writer himself comments on in his opening note. Most of Dostoevsky’s writings contain direct or hidden comments on their own “poetics.” There are no outpourings of psychic magma here, but the explorations of a highly conscious artist. Like each of his novels, each of these stories is formally unique, each is a fresh response to the expressive challenge posed by the thematic materials of his art.

The development of Dostoevsky’s work was by no means the smooth, orderly unfolding of a successful writer’s career. Here the biographical factor, to which I have already alluded, comes to the fore again. The turbulence of Dostoevsky’s life is well known: his involvement in revolutionary politics during the late 1840s, his arrest together with other members of the Petrashevsky circle in 1849, his mock execution, stayed at the last minute on orders from the emperor, his four years at hard labor in the prison of Omsk, followed by six years of service “in the ranks” in Semipalatinsk, his return to Petersburg and literary activity in 1859, the painful difficulties that ensued (deaths in the family, the failures of two magazines he edited with his brother, the accumulation of debts, the beginning of his addiction to gambling), his flight abroad in 1866 to escape his creditors, the precarious and nomadic existence he led there with his second wife, gambling away everything including her wedding ring and writing all the while (The Idiot, The Eternal Husband, the first drafts of Demons), his return to Russia in 1871, to find relative peace and eventual fame, which was at its height when he died in 1881 at the age of sixty. Yet the decisive break in this much-disrupted life is not to be found in any of these external events, not even the break in his career caused by ten years of prison and exile. Dostoevsky went on writing in more or less the same way after those ten years as before. The decisive break occurred in his “spiritual biography” some five years after his return, with the sudden discovery of what he called the “underground.”

The emergence of the underground is the turning point in Dostoevsky’s work. What he wrote before Notes from Underground was talented, certainly. What he wrote after was far more than talented. The shift in tone that signals the emergence of the underground indicates a deeper shift, an inner displacement, a peripeteia. As René Girard explains it, the love triangles and dreamers of Dostoevsky’s early work reflect a certain state of affairs (not peculiar to Dostoevsky); with the underground, the reality behind that state of affairs is revealed for the first time. Error gives form to the truth that corrects it. The underground appears doubly in Notes, through the nameless hero as he tells his story, and through the author as he portrays this “man from underground.” Despite the markedly personal tone of the writing, the two are not the same. The narrator is in the underground, Dostoevsky is some way out of it.

The underground brings out the rivalry hidden behind romantic sentiments and ideals, the exchanges of pride and humiliation that govern the relations between people and even within the singular person, who turns out to be multiple. Spiritual pride, the separation from one’s fellow creatures, the will to autonomy, produces the rival, and thus brings about its own humiliation. The scale of this imitative rivalry is a richly chromatic one, running through all degrees of envy, jealousy, and duplicity, conscious and unconscious. But the question, finally, is of the place of imitation in human life. Here matters of art and education come together with the highest spiritual endeavor, because the ideal offered to the Christian is also a way of imitation—the imitatio Christi, the “imitation of Christ.” The sheer original does not exist; we cannot escape imitation. René Girard observes: “In the universe structured by the Gospel revelation, individual existence remains essentially imitative, even, and perhaps above all, when it rejects with horror any thought of imitation. The Fathers of the Church held as evident a truth that later became obscured and that the novelist wins back step by step through the terrible consequences of that obscuring” (Dostoïevski, du double à l’unité). The way of imitation revealed by the Gospels may be denied, rejected, but the structure remains, only turned another way. The original model is exchanged for another. Girard’s term for this exchange is “deviated transcendence.” The most extreme example in Dostoevsky is furnished by Kirillov in Demons, whose suicide for the salvation of mankind is a parody rather than an imitation of Christ, betraying the demonic wrenching of the deviation. Dostoevsky did not expound this as a whole and ready-made truth in his work; he came to it precisely step by step on his way through the underground.

The present collection represents, in miniature, the inner development of Dostoevsky’s later work. The stories here, with one exception, were written after Notes from Underground.