![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps, as WB Yeats wrote, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. In response, he would rather be thought of as malevolent, hurting people’s feelings at will, but he says the truth is that: “I couldn’t make myself anything … neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect”. He knows “the highest and the best”, but he accepts that he’s not one of them and that the standards they set are unattainable, even though he was the only civil servant he knew not to be taking bribes. In chapter 1, The Underground, he directly addresses the readers, trying to win them over to his viewpoint. In particular, he wrote in reaction against Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done? (1863), which argued for the means of production to be reorganised according to co-operative ideals.ĭostoevsky’s central character, however, will not work readily with anyone. Dostoevsky rejected the idea that people act in accordance to reason or their best interests and asserted the need for them to be able to behave as they choose, without fitting into Enlightenment ideas of “progress”. ![]() Certainly, the author identified strongly with his protagonist, calling him the “real man of the Russian majority”. As well as referring to Notes from Underground as the first existential novel, some critics, including Leonid Grossman, have ascribed Underground Man’s opinions to Dostoevsky. ![]()
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