![]() For those who have read Crime and Punishment: how does Liza presage Sonia, the quintessential literary prostitute who offers Raskolnikov a path to salvation and resurrection?.Joseph Frank, the preeminent biographer of Dostoevsky, wrote: “Liza’s complete disregard for her own humiliation, her whole-souled identification with his torments-in short, her capacity for selfless love-is the only way to break the sorcerer’s spell of ego-centrism.” So why does the Underground Man turn on Liza? Why can’t he be honest with her?.Is it a fair assessment of Dostoevsky’s view to say that individual freedom (as experienced by the Underground Man) leads to universal unfreedom?.Where does Dostoevsky place blame for the protagonist/narrator’s predicament? Does freedom prevent him from being happy? How does Dostoevsky suggest he can exorcise the demon of self-loathing to find happiness? The Underground Man values his individualism and free will to the exclusion of social bonds and love.Does Dostoevsky offer any characters to serve as role models for redemption? What prompts Underground Man to proclaim that he will no longer write from the underground? Many scholars view the novella as hewing closely to Dostoevsky’s personal transformation from someone who shares the views of the “Underground Man” into a person who embraces communitarian Christian values. Notes from Underground focuses on various aspects of transformation.Rather, he finds fulfillment by submitting to the demands of the community and not fixating on self-interest. In Dostoevsky’s worldview, the individual is not in conflict with society. “True” Russia, on the other hand, values community, humility, Christian morality, and the organic unity of society. ![]() The chief features of the depraved and amoral West, for Dostoevsky in particular and Slavophiles in general, are bourgeois individualism, rationalism, materialism, and freedom without responsibility. ![]() Simply put, he concluded that Russia’s Westernized elite had lost touch with the essence of Russia and Orthodox Christian morality. By the time he returned from hard labor and penal military service in Siberia (the subject of his Notes from the House of the Dead), he had jettisoned the ideas of his revolutionary youth and embraced the Christian values of the narod (common people, i.e., peasants). Most scholars believe that this near-death experience prompted Dostoevsky to turn to the Bible. A last-minute reprieve spared them, though it exacerbated Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. As a young man he belonged to a revolutionary organization, for which he and his comrades were sentenced to death by a firing squad. The greater good, he believed, would emerge as everyone achieves individual fulfillment.Īs you may know, Dostoevsky was a passionate nationalist, rabid anti-Semite, and fervent Orthodox Christian who believed that the Russian people had a messianic calling to spread the Gospel of Christ. In a socialist version of the utilitarianism proposed by Jeremy Bentham, Chernyshevskii had argued that every individual needed to pursue her rational and enlightened self-interest. In many respects, Notes from Underground is also a fervent rejection of nihilist values as represented in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and What Is to Be Done?, Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s 1863 novel that inspired a generation of Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin. Indeed, his novel The Demons is based on the life of Sergei Nechaev, a self-professed nihilist of the 1860s who advocated political terror in the service of revolution. We doubt we are giving away anything worthy of a spoiler alert when we state from the outset that Dostoevsky despised the nihilists. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, and the Rejection of Rationalism Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction. The Slavic and East European Journal 25, no. ![]() The Rhetoric of Confession: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Rousseau’s Confessions. The Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil, trans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865. Responsive Form: Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and the Confessional Tradition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.įingarette, Herbert. New York: Vintage-Random House.ĭostoevsky, Fyodor. Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Ĭoetzee, J.M. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Ĭhernyshevsky, Nikolai.
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