Classics of Russian Literature | Near Mortality, Prison, and an Underground (Lecture 11)

Lecture 11: Shortly after Dostoevsky’s auspicious beginnings, Belinsky hurt the young man deeply by sharply rejecting The Double. The author then drifted into a mildly revolutionary circle of moderate liberals. In 1848, early in the morning, he was awakened by the tsar’s police and placed under arrest. In December of 1849, he was led, together with his fellow liberals, out into the bitter St. Petersburg cold, under sentence of execution by firing squad. At the very last second, the soldiers lowered their rifles, and the condemned men heard a prearranged tsarist stay of execution. The young writer served four years in chains, working in a Siberian prison camp. This experience received much literary treatment in his subsequent work. After marrying a widow in Siberia, he returned to European Russia in 1859. The marriage was an uneasy one, and his first wife died. In 1864, with her corpse, according to Russian custom, still on the table, he wrote one of his most disturbing, moving, and penetrating works: a novella, Notes from the Underground. If you read it and then sleep normally for the next week, you have not read it properly. The Underground Man, a compendium of everything deep within ourselves that we try to hide but know all too well, makes an impassioned and embittered cry for human freedom but without human joy and love.

Suggested Reading:
Fedor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, Three Short Novels of Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett and revised by Avrahm Yarmolinsky.
Robert L. Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature; a dissenting, critical view of Dostoevsky.