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Going Underground

Going Underground. HUM 2052: Civilization II Spring 2012 Dr. Perdigao March 14-19, 2012. Dostoevsky’s Frames. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) Father, a doctor at the Hospital for the Poor, killed by one of his peasants in a quarrel (1250)

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Going Underground

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  1. Going Underground HUM 2052: Civilization II Spring 2012 Dr. Perdigao March 14-19, 2012

  2. Dostoevsky’s Frames • Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) • Father, a doctor at the Hospital for the Poor, killed by one of his peasants in a quarrel (1250) • Dostoevsky sent to Military Engineering Academy in St. Petersburg, graduated in 1843, became a civil servant, draftsman in the St. Petersburg Engineering Corps but resigned • Petrashevsky circle: secret society with antigovernment and socialist tendencies • December 22, 1849, led to public execution, reprieved, sent to Siberia • 1854: released from Siberia, became common soldier, received promotions, restored rank of nobility • Returns 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

  3. Dostoevsky’s Frames • Dostoevsky as religious philosopher, political commentator, psychologist, and novelist (1251) • Critic of the Enlightenment, liberal and socialist views • Rather than seeing man as “innately good, responsive to reason’s promptings, and capable of constructing the good society through reason,” he “perceives human beings as being innately depraved, irrational, and rebellious” (Perry 682) • Connection to Orthodox Christianity, looking for return to faith • 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”; socialist 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)

  4. Revisions of Forms • Dostoevsky had belonged to a revolutionary group; ideas about Russian underground worked into his novels • Play 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) • Notes from Underground divided into two parts—monologue and confession • Theme of fallen woman

  5. Regarding the Underground • 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 • “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) • Rebels against rationalists, humanists, positivists, liberals, and socialists (Perry 682) • Critique of revolutionary novel N. G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done (1863): utilitarianism and utopianism • “Science means to him (and to Dostoevsky) the victory of the doctrine of fatality, of iron necessity, of determinism, and finally of death” (1253)

  6. Sickness and Spitefulness • Underground man as “intellectual divorced from the soil and his nation” and “modern humanity, even Everyman” (1253) • 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 • The Underground Man is free because he “Struggles to defines his existence according to his own needs rather than the standards and values created by others” (Perry 683) • Hated utopia—images of ant heap, hen house, block of tenements, Crystal Palace (1253) • Chernyshevsky’s heroine’s utopian dream based on Charles Fourier, French socialist, Dostoevsky grows to hate

  7. Contextualization • Seeking freedom as ultimate goal • Utopian schemes as luring us “into the yoke of slavery” (1254) • Censorship of solution in presence of Christ • Nature and civilization—Rousseau • Importance of acting in accordance with the dictates of reason and science (1267) • Freedom versus reason and desire (1269-1270): “reason is a fine thing, gentlemen, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s only reason, and it satisfies only man’s rational faculty, whereas desire is a manifestation of all life, that is, of all human life, which includes both reason, as well as all of life’s itches and scratches” (1269). • “Man needs only one thing—his independent desire, whatever that independence might cost and wherever it might lead” (1268). • Crystal Palace, anthills (1267, 1272-1273)

  8. Changing Tides Crystal Palace: international Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London, May 1, 1851 As “symbol of this age of industrial transformation,” an “iron-and-glass building” giving an “aura of fantasy,” a “government-sponsored spectacle of what industry, hard work, and technological imagination could produce” (MW 685).

  9. The Great Exhibition, London, 1851

  10. The Crystal Palace

  11. Anti-Romantic? • “Literary” language, connection to Don Quixote? (1281) • Desire to escape into “all that was beautiful and sublime” (1285) • Simonov and Zverkov (1287) • Liza’s role, women’s place in society (1305) • Speaking “like a book” (1312) • horror and pity (1313) of his sentimentality with Liza • Borrows money from Anton Antonych • “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)

  12. The Sense of an Ending “. . . 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)

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