Writing in his own voice, in letters, notebooks, and diaries, Fyodor Dostoevsky frequently attacked the philosophy of the Russian "nihilists," as he typically called them--Nikolay Chernyshevsky, Dmitry Pisarev, and other representatives of the radical Russian intelligentsia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But because Dostoevsky also used fiction to argue against them, if we wish to discern the full contours of his opposition, we must turn to his stories and novels; and there we face the problem of determining to what extent, if any, the statements of his narrators and characters express his own views.

This problem is particularly challenging in regard to the radicals' "Rational Egoism," to use the label by which the Russian variant of the theory of enlightened egoism came to be known. Dostoevsky's most sustained and spirited attack on that aspect of "nihilist" philosophy is found in Part One of Notes from Underground (1864), but it is voiced by one of the darkest, least sympathetic of all his characters--the nameless narrator and protagonist known as the Underground Man. Was this repellent creature speaking for Dostoevsky?

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In the 1860s Dostoevsky's interest in the phenomenon of egoism was powerfully fed by his conviction that a narrow focus on the ego or self--something he considered endemic in Western civilization--was a plague that increasingly threatened Russia. We know from many sources that he regarded the spread of egoism in his homeland as a direct consequence of the Westernization of Russia and a prime moral, even mortal, danger. A tour through Europe in the summer of 1862 confirmed his negative opinion of the Western character, and in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (published in 1863, one year before Notes from Underground) he gave his most explicit and critical analysis of the egoistic principle, virtually equating it with immorality; it is, he writes,

the personal principle, the principle of isolation, of intense self-preservation, of self-solicitousness, of the self-determination of the I, of opposing this I to all nature and all other people as a separate, autonomous principle entirely equal and equivalent to everything that exists outside itself.

Just as such self-absorption was a cardinal moral failing, so the selfless love of others--to the point of self-sacrifice, if need be--was the height of moral nobility. In the same work Dostoevsky stated that a sign of the highest development of personality was "voluntary, fully conscious self-sacrifice ... sacrifice of one's entire self for the benefit of all." To be genuine the giving of oneself cannot spring from any calculations of self-interest: "there must be love," he insisted.

Given this attitude, we can imagine Dostoevsky's reaction when in the same year of 1863 the leader of Russian radical opinion, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, published his novel What Is to Be Done?, in which he not merely endorsed "egoism" but made it the model of admirable individual behavior and the key to harmonious social relations. Chernyshevsky's principal characters see themselves as complete egoists, claiming to be guided in their behavior by nothing but informed calculations of their own interests; at the same time, however, they bring great benefit to others and in general behave like paragons of virtue, thus exhibiting the magically benign effects of an "enlightened" or "rational" egoism. To Dostoevsky this picture must have seemed the grossest distortion of reality. These virtuous fictional creations were not the genuine, flesh-and-blood egoists whose growing presence in Russia Dostoevsky feared. Yet the doctrine these pseudo-egoists advanced--Rational Egoism--was a genuine danger, because by glorifying the self it could turn the minds of impressionable young people away from sound values and push them in the direction of a true, immoral, destructive egoism.

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The Underground Man displays all the earmarks of egoism (not Rational Egoism, but the real thing) as Dostoevsky had sketched it in Winter Notes. Unlike Chernyshevsky's gregarious heroes, the Underground Man isolates himself, festering in his corner with little social connection; he has lost contact with his Russian "soil," with the Russian people, even by and large with educated society. He carries what Dostoevsky in Winter Notes called "the self-determination of the I " to the point of obsession. In solitude or in society he is totally "self-solicitous," constantly preoccupied with his own ailments, concerns, fears, choices, aims, intentions, and gratification. But perhaps the deepest sign of the Underground Man's egoism, confirmed with full dramatic force in Part Two at the end of the story, is his inability to love, even when presented with an outpouring of love from another person. "She fully understood," he says despairingly of Liza, "that I was a loathsome man and, above all, incapable of loving her".

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But of course the Underground Man is not a melodrama villain; he would not be a believably wicked human being if he were a caricature of evil. Dostoevsky was firmly convinced that no human depravity is so profound that it extinguishes all conscience and all recognition of morality. Yet he portrays the Underground Man as someone who did not follow and could not even adequately conceptualize the promptings of conscience to which he, like all human beings, was subject. [...]

James P. Scanlan: "The Case against Rational Egoism in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, " Journal of the History of Ideas 60.3 (1999) 549-567; quotes from pp. 549, 553-55.