Going Underground

HUM 2052: Civilization IISummer 2009Dr. Perdigao

June 16, 2009

Dostoevsky’s FramesFyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Petrashevsky circle: antigovernment and socialist tendenciesDecember 22, 1849, led to public execution, reprieved1854: common soldier, promotions, restored rank of nobilityReturns to Russia after 10 years in Siberia

Writing when in exile (Cervantes connection?)Nationalistic and conservative, still writing suppressed in 1863

Attempts at journalistic writing fail, later meets success with The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov

Crime and Punishment (1866); The Idiot (1868); The Possessed

(1871-72); The Brothers Karamazov (1880), with Notes from Underground (1864) as a type of prologue

Revisions of FormsPlay with the autobiography, prototype for Ellison’s Invisible Man,

confessional model we see in Augustine, Rousseau (Confessions and Émile)—reading Dostoevsky’s life into the works

Uses conventions of French sensational novel—“most shocking crimes and the most horrible disasters and scandals” (1251)

Religion as “personal version of extreme mystical Christianity,” “humanity is fallen but is free to choose between evil and Christ” (1251)

West in “complete decay,” as only Russia “has preserved Christianity in its original form” (1251)

West as Catholic, bourgeois, or socialist:All problematic—Catholicism by “forcing salvation by magic and

authority”; bourgeois as “materialistic and fallen away from Christ”; socialism which is “identical with atheism since it dreams of a utopia in which human beings would not be free to choose even at the expense of suffering” (1251)

On Freedom, the SelfThe Brothers Karamazov—question of what best serves the

human condition

No idealism—runs through every intellectual thought in the world—all lost, killed off

“love life more than meaning?”—question Western tradition

Intellectual must cut self off from God?

Grand Inquisitor, questions faith, reason

All are responsible for all—universal guilt (return with Arendt)

Suffering is death, resurrection, rebirth of real and free human being

Though limited, we are free—Luther’s Freedom of a Christian

Brings heaven to earth, grounding faith and philosophical ideals

The Underground man—individual in relation to larger society

Cruelty of man“hyperconscious man”Self-criticism, self-doubt

Series of rejections: Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress; utopian socialism; notion that Man exists as a creature independent of God; rejection of God popularized by Nietzsche; Romantic creeds; Romantic hero

Critique of revolutionary novel N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done (1863): utilitarianism and utopianism (Candide?)

“Science means to him (and to Dostoevsky) the victory of the doctrine of fatality, of iron necessity, of determinism, and finally of death” (1253)

Regarding the Underground

• Underground man looks at freedom as being greater than the perfectly organized society; all “utopian schemes seem to him devices to lure us into the yoke of slavery” (1254)

• Question of man’s rationality and irrationality

• Dystopia/dystopic

• “criticism of the optimistic, utilitarian, utopian, progressive view of humanity that was spreading to Russia from the West during the nineteenth century and that found its most devoted adherents in the Russian revolutionaries” (1254)

Sickness and Spitefulness

• Nature and civilization—Rousseau

• Reason and science (1267)

• Freedom versus reason and desire (1269-1270)

• Crystal Palace, anthills (1267, 1272-1273)

Contextualization

http://www.williams.edu/history/courses/pages/140/classpictures/newPictures/GeLast_Supper.jpg

N. N. Ge’s The Last Supper (1863)

• “Literary” language, connection to Don Quixote? (1281)

• “all that was beautiful and sublime” (1285)

• Liza’s role, women’s place in society (1305)

• horror and pity (1313)

• “I’d become so accustomed to inventing and imagining everything according to books, and picturing everything on earth to myself just as I’d conceived of it in my dreams” (1323)

Anti-Romantic?

“. . . perhaps I should end these Notes here? I think that I made a mistake in

beginning to write them. At least, I was ashamed all the time I was writing

this tale: consequently, it’s not really literature, but corrective punishment.

After all, to tell you long stories about how, for example, I ruined my life through moral decay in my corner, by the lack of appropriate

surroundings, by isolation from any living beings, and by futile malice in the underground

—so help me God, that’s not very interesting. A novel needs a hero, whereas

here all the traits of an anti-hero have been assembled deliberately; but the

most important thing is that all this produces an extremely unpleasant

impression because we’ve all become estranged from life, we’re all cripples, every

one of us, more or less. We’ve become so estranged that at times we feel

some kind of revolutions for genuine ‘real life,’ and therefore we can’t bear to be reminded of it” (1326-27).

The Sense of an Ending