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  Which was a splendid Russian joke that the students did not find particularly funny. A number of them said that the Underground Man’s intelligence was limited. “Intellect is less about knowing things than understanding other people’s opinions,” said Maud. “He’s unable to see what other people think,” she said, which was a contemporary liberal-humanistic definition of intelligence, and about as far from Dostoevsky’s temperament as you could get. Justin, looking up, added, “His intelligence has rid him of his sense of optimism,” which was obviously true of Justin himself. When would Justin’s gloom lift? “I don’t have much respect for my family,” he had said in a confessional moment. “And they don’t have much respect for me.” I looked at him with the eyes of an anxious uncle: he was out of shape, physically disconsolate, extremely bright; he needed friends, though it would take brave people to put up with his dark days.

  Some of the students thought the Underground Man was spiteful because he had been sent off by relatives to a boarding school. “He never enjoyed family love, anyone’s love,” Maud said, and Nino added, “He’s very sad, there’s no one on his side, no one understands his real intentions.” They were trying to rationalize the Underground Man’s outlandish, cruel, and self-annihilating behavior; they redefined and penned up his chaos into their morally coherent notion of how things worked. Jane, the girl whom Mr. Leon had shocked when we were reading “The Minister’s Black Veil” by saying “The whole time, it’s been about you”—Jane now said, “The underground man is representative of a lot of different minorities. His rebellion can be generalized to what minorities face, and what we face as individuals. We don’t fit in.”

  Liberals! Give them a ratty, arrogant, and malicious man, a worm outfitted with peacock feathers, and they will turn him into a persecuted minority. The Underground Man was a minority of one, persecuted by no one but himself. Notes from Underground was an antiliberal text in every sense of the word. The hero inveighs against rational planning, social improvement, “the greatest good for the greatest number.” Human beings were perverse, he believed, they didn’t want to be bettered. As for the students, they were kind, but they weren’t quite zeroing in on Dostoevsky’s creation. Mr. Leon didn’t criticize their youth and goodness because, of course, he couldn’t, even if he had wanted to. Notes from Underground was his assignment, and they were doing their best to hang in there.

  “Why would Dostoevsky create a character in this way?” he asked, and Marina, who was wearing a leopard-skin shawl that day, aimed and fired—and hit herself. “We go through a process,” she said, “and then we destroy ourselves. It’s powerful to realize that you’re being told something about yourself you don’t want to hear. We mess things up for ourselves. I do think subconsciously as much as consciously. You struggle to make your life work, but you mess things up.”

  Which left the room silent. She was struggling for clarity in her own life, and no one wanted to intrude. A month earlier, in front of the class, she had said, “I’m leaving next year. I hate this school. I tried to kill myself. I’ve had people in this school tell me to kill myself, saying ‘You bitch.’ Everyone says I have an abrasive personality. But I have a reason for how I am.”

  She was a brilliant girl, self-willed, hard to argue with. For her, what mattered was that she was able to assert herself and take action, even if the action hurt her. She was a Dostoevskian creature right before us, a sister of the Underground Man. (Soon after this class, I pleaded with her to stay at Beacon as her best chance to get into a good college, but I got nowhere. You could say I was administered a Dostoevskian lesson in perverse will.) After a bit, Mr. Leon said, “This idea that you don’t necessarily act in your own best interests struck me very hard when I first read Dostoevsky. Each man may choose to do things against his own interests because it preserves his personality.”

  At that moment, the question I had been asking for the entire year—who does he look like?—suddenly had an answer. The thin beard, the pronounced forehead, the penetrating stare. He was from Derry by way of Louisiana, he had some Italian in him, but his appearance was Russian—or at least my idea of what educated Russians looked like in nineteenth-century novels. He could have been Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov joined together, skeptic and saint. I remembered now that he had asked, in the Vonnegut classes, how God could allow the Dresden bombing, which was not so different from Ivan’s question to Alyosha: How could God allow the torture of children? He was forty, and his appearance had been shaped by his obsessions, which shaped soul and body. Yet Mr. Leon was as far from the Underground Man in temperament as could be imagined—relentless, definitely, but kindly and enormously useful to others. Practical, too. He could have been a plant manager, a banker, an executive, perhaps a wealthy and powerful man. He had the energy and concentration that produce success. Driving to his point, he asked, “Is Dostoevsky saying it’s better to go through life as a man who doesn’t think—the man of action? Or is it better to go through life as an Underground Man who thinks and thinks, and gets nothing done?”

  Nino perked up, smiled, and said, “The man of action doesn’t get anything done, either. Russia was a backward society, well behind other countries.” A nifty remark, and Nino read a passage in which Dostoevsky generalized about the Russian character. They were all doing that now, picking passages as a way of answering Mr. Leon’s questions, reading the words aloud, often passionately—the mumbling was gone—and then saying whatever it was they wanted to say. Hasan, for instance, who had told me earlier that he read very little—Hasan was the media king, at 238 hours a week—spoke in detail about dueling and how it fit into Russian traditions. He probably picked that up somewhere on the Internet, which was fine. Hasan the nonreader was becoming a student. As they spoke, they went beyond impressions and settled on key moments—something Mr. Leon had trained them to do, starting with Brave New World. He would usually knit these remarks together, but this time, as once or twice before, he let his leading question go unanswered for the moment, and allowed the conversation to run free, a trainer watching his horses gallop across a field.

  The students were actually sympathetic to the Underground Man, which was no surprise, for here was a man who, however unpleasantly, had struck off chains, an individual not just in society but against it. Clare, ready with empathy, said, “He exposes himself, all his flaws, and it’s okay to acknowledge them.” They understood—though they didn’t put it this way—that he was a hero of authenticity, that great uncomfortable modern virtue, whose dictates, stringent as those of any religion, required that you acknowledge what’s inside yourself, evil as well as good. This ferocious little book had a driving force: some of the students—Adam, Marina, Clare—were becoming more complicated people as they read it. Sitting there, I admired them a great deal.

  * * *

  For some weeks, Mr. Leon had been moving the students toward their final essays. At the end of the year, they would not take an exam. Instead, in Beacon style, they would put together the complicated project known as a PBA, the Performance Based Assessment. In tenth-grade English, the PBA work was part essay (a compare-and-contrast paper), part creative effort of some sort (poem, video, collage, etc.), and part defense of the essay in a one-on-one session with Mr. Leon lasting fifteen minutes—private sessions, and outside my view.

  “The first five to seven minutes you’re presenting,” he said. “It’s a defense. I must see that you’re prepared. Bring in note cards. Jump right into your thesis. I’ve read it, so take me through the thought process. Why you chose those two texts, why those arguments, what makes it a compelling argument.” The students were very quiet. “The last eight minutes belong to me. I’m going to ask you questions, challenge your arguments. My job is not to expose you, but to give you a chance to flex your intellectual muscle. If you’re nervous, that’s normal. Take your time to work it out. Breathe, don’t rush through your points. You can use your last minute, you can talk about your creative project.”

  They came in wi
th the creative projects now—all based on one of the books, or perhaps two joined together. They made paintings or pencil drawings or collages; they created dioramas and placed them inside wooden or glass boxes, and pinned their poems to one side of the scene. Marisa made a large, fractured globe—a utopian society with people caught in wheels and gears on one side, and Big Brother, a plastic figure, watching from the other. Adam the moralist made a line drawing of a man reading the Wall Street Journal and lamenting his devotion to moneymaking (a journey theme); Jared Bennett created a collage in which the Underground Man had mirrored eyes like Orwellian disks; he wrote a poem in the Underground Man’s voice that attacked those “oblivious that their lives are structured like a teacher’s lesson plan,” which could be considered a hostile way of summing up English 10G (Mr. Leon, however, beamed). Jane, alert to victims, made a painting of people behind bars. The poems were mainly devoted to existential themes—creation, paths, knowledge, imprisonment, escape.

  * * *

  Having given us rant, the Underground Man then offers experience. He recounts some strange incidents from his early life—his jealousies and grievances, his rage over an officer who treats him rudely in a tavern, and then a detailed account of a mortifying dinner party thrown by some old school classmates. The scene, in burlesque-catastrophic mode, is one of Dostoevsky’s greatest. Our hero invites himself to the gathering, drinks a great deal, and insults everyone. He’s accurate in his judgment of the four young men, a handsome doltish officer and three government bureaucrats like himself. They are just as unpleasant and shallow as he says. Still, he longs for their respect, and the more they refuse it, the more completely he wants it.

  “He only likes the idea of a friend,” Nino commented. “He’s jealous and envious and worries about how other people see him.” The students were making remarks of a psychological acuity that they couldn’t have come close to at the beginning of the year. Lauren, whose name no one could remember on opening day, observed shrewdly: “When you criticize other people that hard, you desire to have what they have,” which put abandonment in the light of Freudian psychology. And melancholy Justin, who, as he had revealed before, knew something about defending himself, added, “He’s learned to hate people before they hate him.” The more the year went on, the more I’d come to appreciate Justin’s sullen clarity. Intellectual pride, I was sure, would carry him through his troubles.

  At the end of the disastrous dinner party, the Underground Man winds up visiting a brothel and sleeping with a young prostitute, Liza, a smart, decent girl in desperate straits. At last, someone he can easily dominate! He lectures her, describing in punishing detail her likely end in illness and poverty, and then he holds forth absurdly on the joys of family life. He leaves his address, and suddenly there’s some suspense: Will she come to him at home, make a man out of him? He needs her just as much as she needs him.

  Mr. Leon had asked them to talk about certain issues raised by the text, with the appropriate quoted passages, and make presentations to the class. Adam led off as presenter. He was a slender, straight, unsmiling—he had become a good Sean Leon student, as serious as an oak sapling. He did some exposition of the dinner party scene, read a passage, and asked what the Underground Man was talking about in his contempt for the other young men. The students mentioned his nonconformity and the hatred of materialism—the disgust he feels for the others, who were seeking promotions and status. Was the Underground Man a hero or not? Yes, he was a hero of a certain kind. Adam went on: “You need to go through desire, which leads to suffering, to get to consciousness.” He was answering Mr. Leon’s earlier question about too much consciousness leading to inertia. The Underground Man was not inert, Adam insisted. He suffered. Pushing a little further, Adam said, “We all need reasoning and the desire for things we can’t have. Buddhists may want to remove desire to get to consciousness, but Siddhartha needs to suffer to get to consciousness, and so does the Underground Man,” which neatly tied the two books together. Adam had certainly come close to Mr. Leon’s point of view, which was a mixture of Christian soulfulness and existentialism. Consciousness was the goal, even in “excess.” In class 10G, the Underground Man, however rancorous and self-defeating, had become a hero. The students found him fascinating.

  Liza does come to the Underground Man’s apartment, but it’s hopeless. She wants to be with him, but he can’t possibly give anything of himself. In the brothel, he had roused her hopes and then humiliated her, and now his uncontrollable contrariness—and his longing for misery—kills any possibility of love between them. But Mr. Leon, to my surprise, didn’t consider the ending as terribly unhappy. He read the last page of the book, after Liza leaves. The Underground Man, having set all this down, claims a kind of moral victory:

  All I did was carry to the limit what you haven’t dared to push even halfway—taking your cowardice for reasonableness, thus making yourself feel better. So I may turn out to be more alive than you in the end. Come on, have another look at it. Why, today, we don’t even know where real life is, and what it is, or what it’s called! Left alone without literature [and here Mr. Leon added, “without the Internet and movies”], we immediately become entangled and lost—we don’t know what to join, what to keep up with; what to love, what to hate; what to respect, what to despise!

  Mr. Leon said, “Earlier he was pointing a finger at himself. Now he’s talking directly to you, pointing a finger directly at us. If he were sitting in front of you, what would you say to him? Okay, write on this subject for fifteen minutes. Read him, be him. Write what he means and what it says about you.” He was working toward something. After they had written down their thoughts, he said, “You’re talking to the Underground Man. Someone is going to play him, and someone else is going to talk to him.”

  Now it was clear. He was going to bring the Underground Man into the room.

  Nobody but me seemed particularly surprised. Quickly, they formed the tables into an inner rectangle, as they had for the Plath poetry session months ago. The inside of the rectangle would be a theater. Mr. Leon then appointed Clare—sweet-tempered Clare!—as the Underground Man, and Marina as the questioner, what he called “the Interlocutor.” Earlier, he had asked them what the hero looked like. (Like you, I now thought to myself.) Well, here was the Underground Man, a lovely girl of fifteen or sixteen with a soft smile, and his questioner—the class’s representative—a fiery girl of Puerto Rican and Dutch descent with decidedly strong opinions.

  Marina (Interlocutor): “Why do you have so little faith in humanity? You attribute your poison to ourselves, your sickness to us.”

  Clare (Underground Man): “I like to watch, not to be part of society.”

  Marina (I): “If you had gotten to know humans—”

  Clare (UM): “I’ve gotten to know humans.”

  Marina (I): “How can you say you weren’t formed by society?”

  Clare (UM): “I’ve chosen to seclude myself.”

  With a wave from Mr. Leon, Hasan jumped in as the Interlocutor. And Sean Leon jumped in as the second Underground Man. So now there were two of them in each role.

  Hasan (I): “We choose our society and how to look at things. You’re living through books.”

  Mr. Leon looked at Marina, the Interlocutor, and asked, “Are you living your life as you want or as society wants you to live?”

  Marina (I): “Everyone is subject to society.”

  Mr. Leon (UM): “Living through a book is better. Is there any principle you would sacrifice yourself for?”

  Marina (I): “I know who I am. I wouldn’t sacrifice myself.”

  Jane now joined the above-ground party, Marco the underground party. Three on each side.

  Marco (UM): “You say you don’t hate your life. But you do.”

  Jane (I): “I live as I want. I do what I want.”

  Vanessa threw herself in as an additional underground person, which made the roster Underground Man four, Interlocutor three. The students played the ro
les, risking something of themselves every time they spoke. But Vanessa underground?

  Vanessa (UM): “Why are you going to college? Are you doing it to earn a living—or because everyone wants you to?”

  Hold on a second. We seem to have left fiction and mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg and have come close to Beacon students and their current concerns. But they were into it, and Mr. Leon showed no sign of calling it to a halt.

  Jane (I): “I want to continue my education, to learn more.”

  Vanessa (UM): “Aren’t you just reading a book in college, taking notes? You’re not talking to a professor over coffee. You’re fooling yourself.”

  Jane (I): “I’m not just taking notes. That’s not what college is.”

  Mr. Leon (UM): “Poor Jane! You’re really deceiving yourself, giving pat answers. You’re saying what everyone else is saying about college. You call me sad, pathetic, but at least I’m leading my life as I want.”

  Marina (I): “Who are you to say society is wrong?”

  Mr. Leon (UM): “I am pointing out that you are not living your life. I’m staying true to myself in a world that says I should be doing something else, chasing after money.”

  Marina (I): “I repeat, who are you to say that society is wrong?”

  Mr. Leon (UM): “What are you going to do in two years?”

  Marina (I): “Whatever the fuck I want to do!”

  Everyone gaped at the two of them. Marina was livid, but Mr. Leon smiled at her. This was what he wanted. Excitement in the room, many students laughing nervously—what else was there to do but laugh? Seeing where this was going, Mr. Leon straightened things out a little. “It’s intense. I’m just playing a role. I don’t mean any of this,” he said to everyone. The students drew a deep breath. He didn’t mean it, but, at some level, he did mean it. He was challenging their college-marriage-bourgeois life track again. More and more students jumped in, on one side or another—Nino as the Underground Man and Vanessa, changing sides, as an Interlocutor. Also Jose, a very quiet boy, as another Interlocutor. The class had become a kind of mad Russian musical chairs. Students not on one side or the other were revving themselves up, going up and down on their toes, holding their sides or digging their hands through their hair.