We know from his books, diary and other writings that Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as a writer, was a man whose vital situation at every moment of his life determined this or that kind of story.. While writing, on the contrary, he could not get rid of his inner world, his feelings and passions, which are almost always reflected in the relevant story. A paradigmatic example of this is ‘Memories of the Underground’, which Alba Editorial reworked in a flawless edition with a translation by Fernando Otero. Around 1863, the author seems to be following bad luck: suffering from hemorrhoids; his wife, Maria Dmitrieva, was dying of tuberculosis and died soon after; His love of roulette put him in financial trouble once again, and his magazine was shut down. Everything is hostile to him. But it also marks the beginning of the years named after the great biographer Joseph Frank. Despite these serious economic, family and conscientious problems, the “miraculous years” in which he achieved great novel success; The years that started with ‘Memories from Underground’ expanded with ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘Stupid’ and ‘Fools’.
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. Dostoevsky visits dirty wells of your personality willing to bring his black bullshit to light in an admirable psychoanalysis session.
this is how they show up bitter, desolate and mocking pages “I’m a charlatan,” in which the hero is cornered in his underground lair. But what can be done if the most pressing and single goal of every intelligent person is quackery, that is, deliberately turning the wheel.
This is one of Dostoevsky’s shortest stories, but is most important for his later works such as ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘The Player’ and its influence on 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 underground is a critique of western philosophy, rationalism and individualism, a critique in the author’s own mind that he will continue to develop in his later novels, such as ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘Stupid’. 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 ‘Memories from Underground’, where the crisis of Russia’s modernization is evident.
Being taken underground, being removed from society voluntarily, is a result of the perceived rejection in others. selfish attitudeDespite being a victim of his own egomania, he turns this rejection into a virtue and convinces himself that it is his intellectual superiority that fosters this neutrality.
‘Memoirs of the Underground’ points to Dostoevsky first appearance of demons inside, hidden in their 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 game, the psychological scheme of which is the same that the author would later draw in a more complex way, for example, in the gloomy Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment” or in “Fool”.
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 happens the antithesis of the light of the soul.
In its first part, an unidentified official addresses an imaginary audience like a speaker in a long internal monologue: In his long self-talk, we discover a violent, contradictory, sick, society-hating type; He sees himself as disgusting, deplorable, and vulgar, while proudly admitting that he is isolated 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. This is a essentially stage story where 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.”
There is a second section, ‘About wet snow’, which has a more organized structure. and in accordance with the classic story, in which the narrator recalls an incident that occurred in his youth and the humiliation suffered by one of his schoolmates, which provides a justification for his subsequent behavior. An endless array of characters of all sorts appear in this new monologue, including Liza, a prostitute she invites into her home and eventually offends and humiliates and walks away from her by crying and cursing her silence.
A true romantic writer, Dostoevsky has a life as passionate and shocking as his works, and as reflected in ‘Memories from Underground’, he has a tortured life underground, in that basement where his subconscious mind houses its demons.