Tw o Demonic Figures:
Kierkegaard's Merm an and Dostoevsky's
Underground Man
C yrena N orm an P ondrom , W isconsin
Literary scholars have often described Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as sources
or precursors of a tradition that continues with many variations through Rilke,
Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and the writers of the absurd.1 However, although a
plenitude of essays concern the influence of either Kierkegaard or Dostoev­
sky on some contemporary figure, little attention has been directed to precise
textual comparisons of the two nineteenth-century writers themselves. One
reason for this is clear: one cannot do a straightforward “influence” study of
connections between the two, for we have no evidence that Dostoevsky had
read Kierkegaard or even heard of him. Further, much of the attention to
Kierkegaard in the past has emphasized his philosophical or theological
writing rather than the prominent literary element in his work. Whatever
the causes, the result of the omission is a lack of clarity about precise paral­
lels in Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and an unsatisfying vagueness concerning
the way these two writers, taken together (as they very often have been),2
function in the intellectual milieu of the twentieth century. T hat they share
general concern with the familiar themes of alienation, subjectivity, and
1. For example, Ralph Harper, The Seventh Solitude: Man’s Isolation in Kierkegaard,
Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche (Baltimore 1965); William Hubben, Four Prophets of Our
Destiny (New York, 1952); Nathan Scott, The Broken Circle (New Haven, 1966), pp. 1819. Philosophers who comment on this tradition have been more reluctant to include
Dostoevsky. He is not discussed, for example, by Jean Wahl, Esquisse pour une Histoire
de ”l’Existentialisme“ (Paris, 1949) or by Marjorie Grene, Introduction to Existentialism
(Chicago, 1963). Hazel E. Barnes, however, in Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature
of Possibility (Lincoln, 1965), comments regarding the influence of other novelists on
Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, ”Of all previous writers, Dostoyevsky has had the most
profound influence.11 (p. 374).
2. Kafka, for example, refers to Dostoevsky in his diary entry for July 21, 1913, and to
Kierkegaard (for the first time) only a month later, August 21, 1913. Tagebiicher 19101923, ed. Max Brod (New York, 1949), pp. 310, 318. Camus writes of both Kierkegaard
(pp. 56-61) and Dostoevsky (pp. 142-152) in Le M ythe de Sisyphe (Paris, 1942), and
alludes to both in his journal: Carnets Mai 1935-Février 1942 (Paris, 1962), pp. 38, 42, 83,
118, 141.
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anxiety is of course quite clear: but are their conceptions distinctly different,
though compatible, or very closely similar?
One of Kierkegaard’s many fictional narratives, the “Legend of the Merm an” in Fear and Trembling, corresponds in plot and basic m etaphor to the
Liza section of Dostoevsky’s N otes from Underground. Comparison of these
two episodes demonstrates that the two writers conceive of man in strikingly
similar terms. The analysis shows, further, that the category Kierkegaard
calls the dem onic is broadly applicable to the behavior of Dostoevsky’s
underground man.
It must be specified at the outset that the word dem onic will be used
(as Kierkegaard uses it) to represent one among many choices of human
behavior. In this context it is not a definition of the sine qua non of the
character’s existence, but the definition of a possibility realized in the actions
of the character. George A. Panichas has argued that Dostoevsky in The
D evils does make the devil appear within the character of Stavrogin, “in
persona ... [as] an ontological reality,” and S. Serrano Poncela has called
Stavrogin “un poder demomaco puro, representacion de la nada metafisica al
modo heideggeriano.” 3 The underground man is not such a figure, taken
over by the artist to represent a metaphysical reality with fundamentally nonhuman purity. He is rather, like the merman, a man who must choose among
possibilities with metaphysical implications.
The volumes in which these two figures appears, Fear and Trembling
(1843) and N otes from Underground (1864), are short, lyrical, intense texts,
full of the tension between abstract statement and narrative detail. In both,
a man, in some sense a seducer, encounters a tru sting girl who puts in question his being as a deceiver. The merman rises from ocean depths for the
encounter; the underground man emerges from underground to recount the
meeting shortly before he went underground. Both stories use symbolically
the antitheses between depth and height, the schemer and the innocent. Both
use the m etaphor of ascent to suggest the moral implications of the m an’s
experience, and both use the figure of a young woman to represent spiritual
innocence. The merman and the underground man attempt to bend the girls
3. George A. Panichas, “Dostoevski and Satanism,” Journal of Religion, XLV, 1 (January,
1965), 20; S. Serrano Poncela, “Los ’Demonios’ de Dostoievski,” Revista nacional de cultura, XXIV, 150 (Enero-Febrero, 1962), 36. Panichas’ article, although it does not refer to
the underground man, contains a pertinent discussion of the Russian Orthodox conception
of the real character of the devil.
Two Dem onic Figures
163
to their wishes, and both fail, but not because of the unwillingness or shrewdness of the women. Neither man can submit to love, and hence neither can
move beyond initial failure to experience the saving quality of the innocent
love of the women. Fundamentally, both stories emphazise the reality of
demonic behavior as an ineradicable part of human experience. In so doing,
both represent the reaction to the midcentury’s naive social and philosophical
assumptions about progress and rational human choice of the good. (One
thinks, for example, of the post-Hegelian professors influential in the academies of Denmark and Russia, like the Danes Martenson and Heiberg, and
of the socialist utopians such as Chernyshevsky.4) The similarity is far greater,
however, than a mutual assertion that man has the possibility of preferring
his own ill, for the episodes reveal much the same conception of the demonic
condition.
Kierkegaard uses the dense “Legend of the M erman,” which consumes
only eight pages of Fear and Trembling, as a “poetic” parallel to his explication of the Biblical tale of the sacrifice of Isaac. In the process, he specifies
that the merman is an illustration of a man in the state of the demoniacal.
One year later, in The Concept of Dread, Kierkegaard offered an extended
philosophical interpretation of the state of the demoniacal, and this commentary serves well to elucidate the enigmatic density of the merman story as it
appears in Fear and Trembling.
In The Concept of Dread Kierkegaard defines the demoniacal as the
“dread of the good.” 5 He distinguishes the “bondage of sin” from the demo­
niacal, and goes on to explain:
So soon as sin is posited and the individual rem ains in sin there are two form a­
tions . . . [first] the individual is in sin, and he is in dread of th e evil. This fo r­
m ation, vewed from a higher standpoint, is in the good, and fo r this reason the
individual is in dread of the evil. The oth er form ation is the dem oniacal. The
in dividu al is in th e evil and he is in dread o f the good. T he bondage of sin is
an unfree relation to the evil, b u t the dem on iacal is an unfree relation to the
good.®
4. Further comment on the relationship of these ideas to the intellectual and cultural milieux
of the writers is available in the numerous biographies of the two and in, for example, the
following: Liselotte Richter, “Kierkegaard’s Position in His Religio-Sociological Situation,”
and Howard A. Johnson, “Kierkegaard and Politics,” both in A Kierkegaard Critique, ed.
Howard A. Johnson and Niels Thulstrup (New York, 1962), and Charles Corbet, “Dostoievski dans son temps,” Cahiers du Sud, LII, Nos. 383-384, 19-31.
5. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, tr. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1957), p. 106.
6. Ibid., italics my own.
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Cyrena Norman Pondrom
164
In other words, a good man may sin, and so long as he dreads the evil,
he remains, as S. K. says, “in the good.” He is caught in sin even though he
would leave it, and he is thus in an “unfree relation to the evil.” Though a
sinner, he is not a demonic man. The terms are reversed for the demonic man.
He sins, he is “in the evil,” but he does not dread this State; rather he dreads
the good that threatens to take him out of the evil and make him other than
the sinner he is.
Both the merman and the narrator of N otes from Underground meet the
criteria for the demoniacal formation: both stand (unfreely) in dread of the
good. In S. K.’s rendering of the legend of Agnes and the merman, the m er­
man, who has shot up from the depths to seduce Agnes, has succeeded in
enticing a response from the girl and is poised to plunge back to the depths
with his victim, when she looks at him one more time. “Then Agnes looks
at him once more, not timidly, not doubtingly, not proud of her good fortune,
not intoxicated by pleasure, but with absolute faith in him, with absolute
humility ... by this look she entrusts to him with absolute confidence her
whole fate.” 7 Agnes here is clearly “the good.” Faced with this innocence,
the merman cannot seduce Agnes. Thus he is in an unfree relation to the good.
He is saved against his will from being a seducer, but he must decide be­
tween two alternatives which seek him: “repentance; and Agnes and repentance.” 8 In his response to these alternatives the merman shows that he
dreads the good and stands thus in the formation of the demoniacal.
An exegesis of the whole episode will show the logical progression of the
m erm an’s entry into the demoniacal and what that implies concerning the
conception of man. If the merman chooses Agnes and repentance he must
talk, S. K. says, he must reveal everything to Agnes, he must let himself be
saved by Agnes: saved not from being a seducer - he is already saved from
that by Agnes’ innocence - but saved to love and have Agnes again, to marry
Agnes.9 This would make him for Kierkegaard:
the greatest m an I can picture to myself; fo r it is only the aesthetic w riter who
thinks lightm indedly th at he extols the power of love by letting the lost m an be
loved by an innocent girl and thereby saved, it is only the aesthetic w riter who
sees amiss and believes that the girl is the heroine, instead of the m an being
the hero.10
7.
8.
9.
10.
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, tr. Walter Lowrie (Garden City, [1954]), p. 104.
Ibid., p. 105.
Ibid., pp. 107-108.
Ibid., p. 109.
Two Dem onic Figures
165
Such a statement suggests Kierkegaard’s dialectical conception of the na­
ture of man. The merman’s demonic possibilities are fully revealed only in
confrontation with the good, in a human relationship; but it is simultaneously
true that the possibility of salvation is offered in that relationship. Both
dialectical extremes of human actions are possibilities in the encounter of one
person with another. This emphasis on the possibilities afforded by human
encounter reappears in Dostoevsky (and subsequently in K afka’s emphasis
on the value of love and marriage and Camus’ description in La Feste of
Rieux and T arrou’s ocean swim n ). The surrender to love is itself an act
of the will, something which must be chosen. But for Kierkegaard, choice
alone, without reference to that which transcends man, is not enough to
accomplish self-surrender. S. K. stipulates that the merman can do what is
necessary to obtain Agnes and repentance only by virtue of the absurd.
(That is, to go more deeply into S. K .’s idiom, he must become the individ­
ual standing in an absolute relation to the absolute, for once he has by guilt
left the universal, he can return to the universal only by virtue of the absurd,
the paradox, e. g. the finite individual standing unmediated by ethical categories over against the infinite absolute. He can return to the universal only
by the paradox, Kierkegaard explains, because he uses up all his finite
strength by the movement of repentance and cannot return to grasp reality
without the paradox.) In other words, to choose Agnes and repentance the
merman must acquire something very like the strength of grace and faith.
The merman can choose repentance alone by means of his own strength.
In this case, he does not explain what has happened to him (“he is hidden”),
he makes Agnes, who loved him, unhappy, he makes himself unhappy, and
he adds to his unhappiness the guilt of making Agnes unhappy. (Still a
further variant is possible; the merman may talk, but have resigned himself
to crushing Agnes by his confession. This would make him a tragic hero.)
Now if the merman chooses repentance alone he may be tempted by the
demoniacal element in repentance.12 This demoniacal element will suggest to
him that the guilt and unhappiness that accompany his repentance are punishment for faults of his pre-existent state, the story says, and will incite him to
increase his torture. He thus may try to “save” Agnes from the unhappiness
11. v. Kafka, Tagebiicher 1910-1923, p. 475, and Camus, La Peste (Paris, 1951), pp. 276-278.
12. He may also repent, remain concealed, refrain from trying by shrewdness to save Agnes,
and “find repose in the counter-paradox that the diety will save Agnes.” This is the move­
ment of the cloister. Fear and Trembling, p. 107.
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of loving futilely by trying to arouse her disgust for him. Of this alternative
Kierkegaard writes:
The m erm an has too m uch sense to depend upon the notion that an open-hearted
confession would awaken her disgust. H e will therefore try perhaps to incite in
her all dark passions, will scorn her, will mock her, hold up her love to ridicule,
if possible he will stir up her pride. H e will not spare him self any torm ent.13
Such action represents neither the heroic humility (possible by virtue of
the absurd) of permitting himself to be saved to love and have Agnes, nor the
movement of repentance alone. R ather it is the attem pt by shrewdness to
go beyond the universal by virtue of the demoniacal. That the merman, so
acting, would express the demoniacal Kierkegaard explicitly states in Fear
and Trem bling .14 It is also clear that such actions on the part of the merman
would illustrate the State of the demoniacal as Kierkegaard elaborates it in
The Concept of Dread. The merman as a seducer and certainly a sinner was
not yet the demoniacal before he met Agnes. It was after his confrontation
with innocence that he could reveal his dread of the good, his unwillingness
to be saved by Agnes. When Kierkegaard makes this point in The Concept
of D read he goes on to explain the significance of the good to the de­
moniacal:
T he dem oniacal becomes thoroughly evident only when it is touched by the
good, which now comes to its confines from the outside. . . T he good of course
signifies to it the reintegration of freedom , redem ption, salvation, or whatever
nam e one m ay give it.15
The m erm an’s actions testify to the significance of the good. In viewing
himself as obliged to expiate the sins of a pre-existent State by arousing
Agnes’ disgust the merman is rejecting his freedom with the same movement
in which he rejects Agnes. That this is true is clear from the faet that the
merman sees himself as obliged to expiation when the reader is aware of the
multiplicity of alternative courses of action.
Further, confronted with the good, the demoniacal may manifest itself
either by silence or cries.16 In some sense the merm an’s demoniacal behavior
13.
14.
15.
16.
Ibid., p. 106.
Ibid.
The Concept of Dread, p. 106.
Ibid.
T w o Dem onic Figures
167
manifests itself by both. The merman is silent about what has happened to
him, although he could speak and be understood, and this silence is a de­
monic silence. He utters, however, the cries of deception as he shrewdly
tries to “save” Agnes from her love by holding her up to ridicule.
The total effect of the story is to emphasize - paradoxically - both the
significance of will and the necessity of a movement beyond rational choice
alone (a movement “by virtue of the absurd”) in order to achieve the highest
goal. The effect is also to reveal that it is not the situation that determines
what the merman is - for the situation in all the variants is that of a seducer
who cannot seduce the good - but the m an’s choice of action within the
situation. According to his choice the merman may become a demon, a cloistered soul (to allude to still another variant), or a man saved to love and have
Agnes by virtue of the absurd. W hat a man is may be related not to result
but to the movement of the will. The action may be internal, not adequately
accessible to judgment by the passing crowd,17 and thus “result,” emphasized both by the Hegelian docents and the bourgeosie men-of-action, has
little meaning. Presiding over the entire dialectic is the innocent girl who
holds out the elusive promise of meaningfulness if her love may ever be
genuinely experienced. It is the irrational, passionate, commitment to this love
(even though this means perm itting himself to be saved) which would be
“salvation” for the merman, or as S. K. says elsewhere: “The conclusions of
passion are the only reliable ones, that is, the only convincing conclusions.“ 18
Despite superficial differences, in many striking respects the underground
m an’s experience with Liza, the prostitute, is analogous to the merm an’s
actions in the state of the demonic. The similarities exist in image and structure, as well as concept, and go beyond the initially obvious similarities of
“plot.” The underground m an’s encounter with Liza begins with her stare
at him (as the merm an’s recognition of innocence begins with the gaze of
Agnes), and successive levels of their relationship are initiated with continued stares. H e met Liza:
I looked mechanically at the girl who had come in and had a glimpse of a
fresh, young, rather pale face, with straight, dark eyebrows, and w ith a grave,
as it were amazed glance, eyes th at attracted me at once.19
17. v. Fear and Trembling, p. 73, for elaboration of this point.
18. Ibid., p. 109.
19. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, tr. Ralph E. Matlaw (New York, 1960),
p. 76. Future references to this edition will be contained in the text.
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He awoke in the brothel bedroom: “Suddenly I saw beside me two wideopen eyes scrutinizing me curiously and persistently.” (77) Having stripped
her psychologically and moved her to despair, he lit a candle and “Liza
sprang up, sat up in bed, and with a contorted face, with a half-insane smile,
looked at me almost senselessly.” (92) She ran off to return in a moment
with the letter which is the token of her complete trust:
H er look was now im ploring, soft, and at the same tim e trustful, caressing,
tim id children look that way at people they are very fond of, of whom they are
asking a favor. H er eyes were a light hazel, they were lovely eyes, full of life,
capable of expressing love as well as sullen hatred. (92-93)
Liza has through these successive stages been revealed as a figure of spi­
ritual innocence parallel to Agnes, despite the bitterness of her real experience. That the underground man perceives her as the good, and, furthermore as “the reintegration of freedom, redemption, salvation ...” is clear
from his subsequent statements. “The damnable romanticism of these pure
hearts!” he bursts out as he fearfully awaits for her to come to his room
several days after the encounter in the brothel.20 “And how few, how few
words ... were needed ... T hat’s innocence for you!” (98) And to his servant
he exclaims after Liza has arrived, “You don’t know what this woman is.
This is - everything!” (105) (She is everything in a sense which the under­
ground man is not prepared really to understand, for she is both the good
which can save him and the good which will be the occasion of his rejection
of salvation.) Notwithstanding the despicableness of the underground man
in the previous encounters he narrated, it is the encounter with Liza - with
the good - that fully reveals his behavior not merely as strange, but as
demonic. Here, as in the merman legend, the intensely personal encounter
with another holds open the door to both the demonic and divine.
Once the central figure has been confronted with the good, one of the
striking qualities of both narratives is the multiplicity of possible actions
which present themselves to the hero. In Dostoevsky as in Kierkegaard, so
many variant actions and interpretations of actions emphasize the range of
choices open to the human will. It also reveals the foundation of such a range
of contradictory choices: the paradoxical human personality, with its mixture
of finite and infinite. It is essential to the thought of both Kierkegaard and
20. Ibid., p. 97. Italics in the text.
Two Demonic Figures
169
Dostoevsky that the human individual contains a spark of the infinite amid
the finite. “In innocence there can be no question of the demoniacal,” Kierke­
gaard writes. “On the other hand, we must give up every fantastic notion of a
pact with the devil, etc., whereby a man becomes absolutely e v il. . . .The de­
moniacal is a state. Out of this state the particular sinful act can break forth
perpetually. But the state is a possibility,.. .”21 So the merman, confronted
with innocence, was saved from being a seducer and could choose to enter the
demoniacal through the demoniacal element of repentance. And evil as he
has been portrayed, the underground man, meditating on his first encounter
with Liza, is driven to acknowledge, “something was not dead within me, in
the depths of my heart and conscience it would not die, and it expressed
itself as burning anguish.” (96) This anguish [or depression: Toskå] can be
related to angest or angst, dread, and it is the dread of the good which is the
hallmark of the demoniacal. But, paradoxically, the depression or anguish
attendant upon meeting the good is clearly for Dostoevsky a testimony to that
spark of the infinite in the underground man that offers the faint brief glim­
mer of the possibility of his salvation. This paradox parallels Kierkegaard’s
assertion that the demoniacal does not offer an example of a man who is
absolutely evil.
Thus the two stories move in much the same direction: both the merman
and the underground man, confronted with innocence, contain the possibility
of accepting the salvation contained in this confrontation. But neither the
underground man nor the merman who tries to save Agnes by his own
shrewdness accepts the salvation, and their rejection of salvation involves rejection of their freedom.
That this is true for the merman is clear both from his story and from
Kierkegaard’s commentary on the demoniacal. In another place S. K. also
specifically identifies the good with freedom: “The good cannot be defined.
The good is freedom. The first distinction between good and evil is for and
in freedom, and this distinction is never in abstracto but always in concreto T 22 In the concrete encounter with Liza, the underground man, too,
refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. He bursts out in great anguish
at the climax of his abandoned self-revelation before Liza, “They won’t let
me - I can’t be - good!” (109) A t this he falls sobbing in hysterics from
which he arises to drive Liza away with the final searing insult and misre21. The Concept of Dread, p. 109.
22. Ibid., p. 99, n.
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presentation of their real relationship - the gift of money which implies that
her visit has been part of her trade as a prostitute. It is of great significance
that as he falls into hysterics he implicitly rejects the possibility of his permitting Liza to save him by placing the blame beyond himself - by rejecting
his freedom (“They won’t let m e .. .”). When he later says “by then I was
incapable of love,” he is as much adumbrating his rejection of his freedom as
he is describing a psychological state.
Further interpretation of his action is suggested by Kierkegaard’s descrip­
tion of the relation of the demoniacal to freedom:
The dem oniacal is dread of the good. In the state of innocence freedom was not
posited as freedom , its possibility appears in the dread of individuality. In the
dem oniacal the situation is reversed. F reedom is p o sited as unfreedom , fo r fre e ­
dom is lost, the possib ility o f freedom is in turn dread. T he difference is abso­
lute; for the possibility of freedom m anifests itself here in relation to unfreedom ,
which is a determ inant oriented tow ard freedom .23
The underground man who has espoused the cause of freedom, even at
the cost of “advantage,” throughout the N otes, is in the end self-deceived, in
the end rejects the freedom in whose name he has claimed he has been willing
to suffer so much. Like the merman, the narrator from the underground torments himself by rejecting what he loves and compounds both the rejection
and the torment by holding up to ridicule as illusion the love which Agnes
and Liza accurately perceive the two men hold for the women.24 In both
cases the anti-heroes posit their freedom as unfreedom, that is, reject the
freedom to be saved by the good precisely by denying that the freedom exists
at all - one by explaining his rejection of the woman as punishment for the
faults of a pre-existent state, the other, as denied by an unexplained “they.”
The underground man ends by coming still closer to the position of the de­
monic merman who wants to “save” Agnes from loving him, for he sees his
rejection of Liza with a five-rouble note as an outrage that will purify her.
“Will it not be better that she carry the outrage with her forever? Outrage
- why, after all, that is purification: it is the most stinging and painful con­
sciousness!” (113)
23. The Concept of Dread, p. 109. Ilalics mine. Compare italicized sentences with the underground man’s agony and his cry “They won’t let me - I can’t be - good.”
24. I do not mean to suggest that the love which the underground man shows has the quality
of the love which the merman shows. Dostoevsky is doing many things in Notes, and one
of these things is to raise some questions about the nature of love. But it is fair, I think, in
this analysis to use the word love in a broad sense.
Tw o Demonic Figures
171
The themes which clad the bare bones of plot then are very nearly the
same, and the fundamental patterns of symbolism are close analogues: the
emergence of the narrator from underground to relive in his “notes” his
encounter with the saintly Liza shortly before he went underground is like
the merman’s rise from the undersea abyss to confront the innocence of
Agnes.
There are similarities as well between the unfolding of the account in
N otes and some of the asides or variant interpretations Kierkegaard suggests
for the legend of Agnes and the merman. The merman who abandons himself
to the demoniacal tries to “save” Agnes from her futile love by holding her
love up to ridicule, for “he has too much sense to depend upon the notion
that an openhearted confession would awaken her disgust.”25 The under­
ground man, on the other hand, confesses in at least two senses when Liza
arrives at his apartm ent after the night at the brothel. H e had played the role
of sympathetic savior at the brothel and he first confessed something of his
own real misery in his room in the words “Liza, do you despise me?” (106)
Then, angry at his self-revelation, he simultaneously avenged the revelation
she has seen and confessed one facet of the real ambivalence of his behavior
at the brothel with his next tirade:
W hy did you come? . . . Y ou came because I talked fine sentim ents to you then.
So now you are soft as butter and longing fo r fine sentiments again. So you may
as well know, know th at I was laughing at you then. And I am laughing at you
now ... I had been hum iliated; I had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show
my power. (107)26
The underground man continues his confession by describing himself as a
blackguard, “the nastiest, stupidest, pettiest, absurdest and most envious of all
worms on e a rth .. . ”. (108-109) The results of these confessions is exactly what
the merman understood that a confession would cause:
Liza, wounded and crushed by me, understood a great deal m ore than I imagined. She understood from all this w hat a woman understands first of all, if
she feels genuine love; th at is, th a t I was myself unhappy. (109)
25. Fear and Trembling, p. 106.
26. This part of the confession illustrates Dostoevsky’s insight that compassion may contain a
large admixture of the vain or self-exalting. Kierkegaard, too, noted this in his parable
about the bridegroom at Delphi who could keep silent about the diaster prophesied to
follow his wedding, but give up celebrating the wedding. This, Kierkegaard says, implies
an insult to the girl. Ibid., pp. 98-100.
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This brings the underground man almost to the point of becoming the
tragic hero the merman could have become if, resigning Agnes without trying
to save her from loving him, he had revealed that he was a seducer who had
been saved from deception by her innocence.27 This would be the heroism of
Agamemnon, the heroism of the man who conforms with resignation to the
ethical universal (in this case, truthfulness) but does not expect (as Abraham
did) to receive again what he has just resigned (here, Agnes). The under­
ground man is not capable of such heroism; he spent too much strength in
the confession that could have led to repentance. There was “upheaval in [his]
heart” and he fell into Liza’s arms. But he could neither sustain the heroism
of revelation nor find the faith that would have permitted him to stand in
absolute relation to the absolute, that is, to repent completely, but to accept
Liza back again. And so it v/as at this very moment that he staggered from
Liza’s arms, denying his freedom, rejecting her love, with the words “they
won’t let me - I can’t be - good!”
The underground man never reaches the merm an’s fixed resolve to repent
and “save” Agnes. Capricious to the last, he lacks even the strength to complete the movement of repentance. It is in the context of his narration as a
whole that we see Dostoevsky’s concern with the simultaneous import of will
and what, for lack of a better term, we must call grace, symbolically present
in a human being. The underground man throughout the first part of his
narrative emphasizes both the importance of will and its potentiality for irra­
tional choice. He comments:
Y ou see, gentlemen, reason, gentleman, is an excellent thing, there is no disputing
that, but reason is only reason and can only satisfy m an’s rational faculty, while
will is a m anifestation of all life, th at is, of all hum an life including reason as
well as all impulses. And although our life, in this m anifestation of it, is often
worthless, yet it is life nevertheless . . . . (25)
For Dostoevsky as for Kierkegaard it is the movement of the will, not the
result, which defines the m an’s relation to his situation.28 The underground
man, for all the perversity of his continual lying, reveals a persistent theme
in his creator’s work when he says:
27. Ibid., pp. 106-107.
28. Further proof of this point is evident in Dostoevsky’s saintly prostitutes. Whatever their
circumstances, their inner excellence is not impaired by the external situation.
Two Demonic Figures
173
Of course I cannot break through a wall by battering my head against it if I
really do not have the strength to break through it, but I am not going to resign
m yself to it simply because it is a stone wall and I am not strong enough. (12)
Despite his appreciation of the power of will, the underground man does
not achieve success in the Liza episode. The symbolic pattern suggests, of
course, that will alone is not enough, but there is Liza as the figure of good
to which the underground man might surrender and through which he might
win grace. (Here too, we may suspect, such a surrender would take place “by
virtue of the absurd,” when we reflect that in Crime and Punishment, in which
the movements of repentance and salvation go to completion, Raskolnikov at
the moment of his salvation feels himself seized from without and flung at the
feet of Sonia.) But the underground man never reaches the point at which by
virtue of the absurd he could have been saved by Liza and kept her to love for he is deficient even in will; he is incapable of that passionate commitment
which Kierkegaard calls the source of “the only convincing conclusions.”
The narrator writes of himself:
N ot only could I not become spiteful, I could not even become anything: neither
spiteful nor honest, neither a hero n o r an insect. Now, I am living out my life in
m y corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an
intelligent m an cannot seriously become anything and that only a fool can be­
come something. (5)
In his spite the underground man reveals Dostoevsky’s distrust both of
the post-Hegelians who espoused the idea that rational men will choose the
good and the result-centered naiveté of the bourgeosie man-of-action. But
the underground man is himself a portrait of a man unable to make a pas­
sionate inner commitment of himself without the comfort of reason or the
guarantees of practical result.
Just as inspection of the context of the Liza episode in N otes shows deeper
parallels to the merman legend, there are many features of the novella as a
whole that correspond with Kierkegaard’s general description of the demo­
niacal in The Concept of Dread. Basically, Kierkegaard here describes the
demoniacal as “shut-upness [det Indesluttede, or Indeshuttedhed] unfreely
revealed . . . .The demoniacal does not shut itself up with something, but shuts
itself up; and in this lies the mystery of existence, the faet that unfreedom
makes a prisoner precisely of itself.”29 This is exactly the case of the under29. The Concept of Dread, p. 110. Italics in the text.
174
Cyrena Norman Pondrom
ground man. He has inelosed himself in his underground, not with anything
else, but simply with himself. Rejecting his freedom, he has made a prisoner
of himself. “Unfreedom becomes more and more shut-up and wants no communication. This can be observed in all spheres. It shows itself in hypochondriacs, in crotcheteers... .”30 S. K. continues. Even the choice of m etaphor is
relevant, for the underground man is a kind of hypochondriac of the spirit
and a crotcheteer of the very first order.
Nevertheless he reveals himself. “No man who has a bad conscience can
endure silence!”31 It is the way in which the shut-up, demoniacal man reveals
himself that is significant:
U nfreedom m ay will revelation to a certain degree, but keep back a vestige, only
to begin again w ith shut-upness. . . . Revelation m ay have already conquered,
shut-upness ventures to employ its last expedient and is cunning enough to
transform revelation itself into a mystification, and shut-upness has w on.32
The underground m an’s narration is an endless succession of partial-truths
which return the speaker to concealment and paradoxical assertions which
contain the truth in the form of mystification. Moreover, his entire narration
takes the form which Kierkegaard ascribes to the shut-up man - the monologue: “a shut-up . . . talks to himself.” And for all the personification of the
speakers in the dialectic which the narrator presents, these speakers remain
elements of the narrator’s mind and the narration remains a monologue: “I
. .. am writing as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it
is easier for me to write in that way. It is merely a question of form, only
an empty form - I shall never have readers.” (35) And to the “gentlemen,”
“Of course I myself have made up just now all the things you say. That, too,
is from underground.” (34) It is true that in the course of so much partialtruth, paradox and monologue, much is revealed about the underground man,
but this does not by any means remove him from Kierkegaard’s category of
the demoniacal. The demoniacal is “shut-upness . . . unfreely revealed” and
“what decides whether the phenomenon is demoniacal is the attitude of the
individual toward revelation, whether he is willing to permeate that faet with
freedom, assume the responsibility of it in freedom. If he is not willing to do
that, then the phenomenon is demoniacal.”33 The underground man surely
30.
31.
32.
33.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 111.
Ibid., p. 114.
Ibid.
1
Two Dem onic Figures
175
does not assume responsibility for his revelations; his words are no sooner out
of his m outh than he utters a retraction or contradiction. He can lead another
human being to both despair and almost boundless hope and refuse then to
acknowledge the element of humanity in his act. But though his revelations
are in a real sense involuntary, the revelations nonetheless take place. “The
most trivial contact, a glance in passing, etc. is sufficient to start that terrible
monologue; or it may be com ical.. . . ” Kierkegaard goes on, the revelation
may be “plainly declarative, or it may be indirect, as when an insane man
points to another person and says, ‘He is very objectionable to me, he’s
probably insane.’”34 And we think immediately of the underground m an’s
moving rhetoric to Liza in the brothel: “You are a slave from the start. .. .you
give up everything, your whole freedom . . . . it’s like selling your soul to the
devil.” (81)
The revelations of Dostoevsky’s narrator have the other characteristics of
the unfree revelations of Kierkegaard’s demoniacal man. They are “sudden,”
that is, they lack continuity.35 They are often “vacuous and tedious.”36 And
they return us to the insight that the demoniacal is dread of the good.37
There are certainly many areas of Dostoevsky’s thought not accounted for
in an interpretation of the underground man as a representative of the demo­
niacal described by Kierkegaard, although the interpretation documents great
similarities in the two writers’ views of man. Most important, perhaps, part of
the extensive examination of the operation of consciousness and human will in
N otes does not directly enter S. K .’s description of the demoniacal, although
he argues in many places elsewhere, particularly in Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, for the subjective and undetermined nature of human choice.
There is also, I think, a difference in emphasis in the way the two handle
common themes. Although in both texts an innocent though suffering woman
holds out the possibility of a salvation which must be willed but must nonethe­
less be accomplished by virtue of something greater than will itself, Dosto­
evsky here and elsewhere suggests the mediating power of the woman. The
woman for Kierkegaard symbolically is the good and is the occasion by which
the merman may come into an absolute relation with the absolute, but she
does not mediate the absolute relationship (a very fundamental point, for by
34.
35.
36.
37.
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 118.
Ibid., p. 120.
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Cyrena Norman Pond rom
definition the absolute relation to the absolute is unmediated). Dostoevsky,
both by his Russian Orthodox religious tradition and by symbolic conception,
yields to the woman the greater power of quasi-saintly meditation. Even
Alyosha in The Brothers K aram azov emphasizes the importance to him of
a human figure - Father Zossima - in achieving faith, and we have throughout the work of Dostoevsky greater emphasis upon incarnation, upon the
infinite present in the finite world. This may again be less a question of con­
tradiction than of emphasis, but the moment toward which S. K. points is repeatedly the paradoxical one in which, though finite, man meets the infinite
absolute. The moment of such meeting is indescribable, totally incommunicable by direct means, and there is little physical detail in S. K .’s “indirect
accounts” of these moments. Dostoevsky’s accounts, too, are indirect, in the
sense that they are symbolic, but they are accompanied by a wealth of realistic
physical details that insist upon the corporal quality of the encounter. It is,
thus, by literary technique as much as by didactic assertion that differences as
well as similarities in the two writers’ perspectives become apparent.
Underlying both perspectives and supplying the framework for the portrayal of human possibilities is a view of reality that includes god. The god
these writers envision is one whose majesty permits man only a paradoxical
significance, a god so transcendent that he may be approached by finite man
only by suffering.38
In this latter regard it is interesting to note that both Kierkegaard and
Dostoevsky regard their demonic figures with particular sympathy, precisely
because this suffering links them to the general plight of the self-aware man
and makes them closer than “ordinary” men to the highest human possibi­
lities. Of the merman S. K. writes, “H e will not spare himself any torment;
for this is the profound contradiction in the demoniacal, and in a certain
sense there dwells infinitely more good in a demoniacal than in a trivial
person.”39 The suffering of the demoniacal man is only a counterfeit of the
suffering of the man of faith, but suffering is a precious and essential element
of human experience. Kierkegaard writes in his Journal:
38. Even in their theism, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky are important forerunners of some
non-theistic as well as religious modern writers. The incommensurability of god and man,
the inscrutability of the infinite, find their echoes in Kafka’s parables of castle and court,
in Camus’ description of the pathos of rational man in an irrational world, even indirectly
in Sartre’s assertion, “Ainsi la passion de l’homme est-elle inverse de celle du Christ, car
l'homme se perd en tant qu’homme pour que Dieu naisse. Mais l’idée de Dieu est contradictoire et nous nous perdons en vain.” (L ’étre et le néant, Paris, 1943, p. 708).
39. Fear and Trembling, p. 106.
T w o Demonic Figures
177
Suffering, that there must be suffering, is connected w ith the majesty of God.
H is majesty is so infinite th at it can be characterized o r expressed only by a
paradox: it is the paradox of the majesty which is bound to m ake th e beloved
unhappy . . . Y et it is never forgotten th at this majesty is love. Suffering depends
on the faet th at G od and m an are qualitatively different, and th a t the clash of
time and eternity in time is bound to cause suffering.40
Nonetheless, the suffering of the demoniacal is only a parody or counterfeit of the suffering of faith. In N otes the underground man insists on the im­
portance of suffering, “the sole origin of consciousness” (31) and the precious
revelation of human existence to itself. But the suffering he experiences,
although a token of his superior consciousness, is nonetheless a token of sin.
As Dostoevsky explains in a comment in his notebook on April 16, 1864,
shortly after the death of his first wife and in the same year in which Notes
appeared:
M an on earth strives fo r an ideal which is contrary to his nature. W hen m an
does not carry out the law of striving fo r the ideal, th at is to say, when he does
not sacrifice his I to the love fo r other people o r another hum an being (M asha
& I), he becomes aw are of suffering and he calls this condition sin. H ence m an
is bound to suffer continuously and this suffering is balanced by the heavenly
joy of the fulfillm ent of the law, th at is, by sacrifice. This is w here the earthly
balance manifests itself. Otherwise life on earth would be meaningless.41
Finally, then, both writers anatomize the suffering attendant for the reflective man upon perceiving that there are no externally provable certainties
concerning meaning. They, like many before and after them, seize upon
precisely this capacity for suffering as a means by which human meaning may
be revealed. It is part of the paradox they perceive in men that m an’s higher
possibilities are more often negatively defined: for both it is a token of the
existence of the divine that man is able to become the demonic.
40. Søren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, ed. and tr. R. G. Smith (New
York, 1965), p. 255. And of course we recognize that the story of Agnes and the merman,
like the reworking of the Abraham story itself, is a symbolic account of S. K.’s relation­
ship with Regina Olsen.
41. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings, ed. and tr. David Magarshack
(New York, 1963), p. 306, n.
6