“Memories from Underground” opens Dostoevsky’s miraculous years

That darkness, in which the author plunges his gaze into his own inner abyss, is threatened by those emotional upheavals. It is in the depths of his conscience that those inner demons that one avoids move. In an awe-inspiring psychoanalysis session, Dostoevsky visits the dirty wells of his personality, eager to bring his black trash to light.

This is how these painful, desolate and cynical pages emerge, in which the hero is cornered in his underground lair: “I am a charlatan. But what if the most immediate, single destiny of every intelligent person is quackery, that is, deliberately turning the wheel?

This is one of Dostoevsky’s shortest stories, but is more significant in that it influenced later works such as Crime and Punishment or The Player, and Russian literature. This is because the author knows better than any of the author’s other works how to concentrate a significant portion of his philosophical content on these few pages, and it is here that the most extreme questions a human can be asked are asked, such as: rationality, free will, the inner contradiction between thinking, feeling and doing, or goodness and goodness. the other among freedom; Disappointment or doubts that people dominated by moral passions can move society forward, these are all reflections of Dostoevsky’s own vital judgment. The monologue of the man from the underworld is a critique of Western philosophy, rationalism, and individualism, a critique that was in the author’s own mind and that he would continue to develop in his later novels, such as Crime and Punishment and The Fool. And the Brothers Karamazov. In them, Dostoevsky introduces his unique definition of the enlightened mind and questions whether this is the basis of a good society. This discussion is very open and passionate in Memoirs from Underground, where the crisis of Russia’s modernization is made clear.

His descent into the underworld, his voluntarily removal from society is the result of perceived rejection in others due to his selfish attitude, although he is the victim of his own egomania, he turns this rejection into a virtue and convinces himself that his intellectual superiority is the most important thing. This breeds separation.

Memoirs from Underground marks the first appearance of the demons in Dostoevsky, which had been hidden in his literature until then. The nameless man from the underworld is that demonic beast that we all carry inside and that the author unleashed in this story.

The reaction play, its psychological schema, is the same as the author would later draw, for example in the bleak Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment or The Idiot.

With this anonymous and marginalized anti-hero, Dostoevsky manages to create one of the finest and most impressive sinister characters in his enormous production of novels; a distorted and miserable subject hiding under the ground, an underground to be understood in a figurative sense, the underground of the soul, the deep and dark region where the worst instincts are hidden. Everything that is the antithesis of the light of the soul.

In its first episode, an unidentified officer addresses an imaginary audience as a speaker in a long internal monologue. In his long self-talk we discover a violent, contradictory, sick man, disgusted with society, initiating violent interrogations, constant reproaches, even though he finds himself disgusting, deplorable, and vulgar as he proudly confesses his isolation from society. “I’m a sick man…a bad man,” he admits at the beginning of his monologue. In any case, it is not a plot with a linear discourse because the narrator is not aware of this and his different arguments compete and even contradict each other. It is essentially a stage story, in which the narrator’s conversations move from one crisis to the next. Something very similar to the author’s own life. In the introduction, Dostoevsky himself says, “It is my intention to present one of the characteristic types of the recent past to the public more conspicuously than ever before.” It serves as a guide to Wet Snow, a second part, more organized and appropriate to the classic story, in which the narrator recounts an incident in his youth and the humiliation suffered by a school friend. for him, the justification for his next action. An endless number of characters of all kinds appear in this new monologue, including Liza, a prostitute whom he invites into his home and who eventually offends and humiliates him and walks away from him by crying and cursing his silence.

A true romantic writer, Dostoevsky has a life as exciting and shocking as his works, a tortured life in that underground where the subconscious houses its demons, as reflected in Memories from Underground.