The Ego and Its Own was on young Dostoyevsky’s bookshelves. And the book passed around the Petrashevsky Circle, the perversely innocent group of subversives that would be broken up at gunpoint by the officers of Nicholas I, before being lost among the “houses of the dead.” In Dostoyevsky’s relationship to Stirner we find something far more serious than a mere legacy of ideas: the anthropological monstrum presented by Stirner will live on in Dostoyevsky’s novels. The Ego and Its Own infuses a violent reagent into psychology: something that causes a detachment from all that is put forward as Law: above all, identity, the system of equivalences—and gradually everything as far as roles, class conventions, established feelings. In Dostoyevsky’s novels there is a similar disruption among all that is human, the breath of whim, a turbid fluctuation between characters, an impossibility of tracing clearly defined lines. The mind escapes from every cleft in the form of a cloud and envelops the city. The being that Stirner calls the ego is primarily a shapeless hollow: Dostoyevsky evokes from that hollow a multitude of faces: the underground man, who in his rightful anonymity incorporates to a certain extent all of them, but also Raskolnikov, Kirillov, Ivan.

Dostoyevsky lives underground in the same way that Zarathustra lives in his mountain cave. But he’ll invite no “superior men” there. Instead, he waits for Stirner’s Unmensch, for all that shuns the domesticated canon of the human, which the humanist torturers, upholders of “science and good sense,” try to impose on humanity in the belief they are doing it good. From there his calm and devastating questions ring out: “But what makes you so sure not only that man can, but that he must be transformed?”; “Might it then be possible that man doesn’t like well-being?”

Having reached Russia, having cast off his Hegelian cloak, Stirner could hardly resist a discussion “about sodden snow.” The tone of the underground man comes from the sarcasm that the first readers of The Ego and Its Own in Berlin hadn’t even noticed, so little had they understood the facts of life, and here it culminates: “We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.⁵⁴³ We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.” The style has become more insinuating, but we immediately recognize the voice of the ego. Here, too, as in Stirner, we are invaded by an element of constructed brutality, an unnatural immediacy, that is directed against l’homme de la nature et de la vérité (who is l’homme dans toute la vérité de la nature at the Beginning of Rousseau’s Confessions). The underground man is in fact a product of alchemy, “not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort”: But the artifice makes him even more violent, since he is more civilized (“The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely nothing more”), it takes away that inborn stupidity of men who “persuade themselves, more quickly and easily than other people do, that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity.” While he tosses and turns in his fetid clothes, the Underground Man, a perfect Western creation, still has the vice of epistemology: with a diamond chip he cruelly engraves the diaphanous matter of thoughts. He discovers that he is the subject of the rootlessness, Shestov’s bespočvennost’ (Bodenlosigkeit, déracinement in Boris de Schloezer’s French translation), and he protests: “Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from?” Like Stirner, the Underground Man has “founded his cause on nothing”—and there is a shrillness even in his voice.⁵⁴⁴