Insight Spring 2021

The Trappings of Love and Literature Cherie Fernandes ’21 In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky pulls the reader into mid-1800s St. Petersburg, a world colored by a bitter, misanthropic smog courtesy of the book’s anonymous narrator heretofore referred to as “the Underground Man.” Among other oddities, the Underground Man is preoccupied with Romantic literature, and such ideals ultimately hinder his ability to meaningfully connect with other people. Although this obsession is overtly a manifestation of his desire to feel acknowledged by other characters, it also illustrates a need to control, or in other words, polish, his reality, a self-contradicting tendency towards inauthenticity that becomes a source of tension between the Underground Man’s behavior and the message Dostoyevsky communicates.

Among the biggest obstacles to the Underground Man’s experience of friendship and love is his inability to separate reality from fiction of his own design. The tendency is first played for comedy through his earnest account of provoking an officer via a much-labored-over exposé that was not published, as such works were “well out of fashion” (Dostoyevsky 32).

The bizarre lengths to which he goes, only to come off as dated and a little pathetic, highlight the extent to which the Underground Man’s fascination with Romantic literature has left him disconnected from society.

Similarly, he challenges Ferfichkin to an honest-to-god duel — much to the others’ amusement — once again conflating staples of literature with the way one ought to behave in reality. After the encounter with Zverkov, he conjures up an elaborate revenge fantasy, complete with dialogue, only to recognize that he “was actually about to cry, even though [he] knew for a fact at that very moment that all this was straight out of Silvio and Lermontov’s Masquerade” (59). The Underground Man wants to be perceived as a bold individual worthy of attention, and he insists on accomplishing it via offbeat ideas that, while compelling to him, do not align with reality. His obsession with grand acts in literature is indeed a manifestation of his desire to be acknowledged and empowered by others — case in point, the masochistic desire to be pummeled in a bar fight — but it also shows that he is only open to such a thing when it occurs on his own terms. This tendency is best exemplified in his interactions with Liza, toward whom he shows both care and horrible cruelty in turns.

58