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Notes from Underground
In the eyes of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries, the protagonist of this work appeared to be merely one of the many little grey people mousing through nineteenth century Russian literature. The first “little man” was noticed by the critics in a short story by Pushkin and right away some more of them sneaked out of Gogol’s work, where even a nose became a full size character and enjoyed the rights of any other citizen.
Dostoevsky wrote under both of these masters’ influence during the first half of his career, which culminated in the Notes from Underground. Then he became the possessed author of some of the greatest, although badly written, novels in the history of literature.
We are still Dostoevsky’s contemporaries — that is always the surprise we get when we read him. But, from this present we can look further back in time and our post-postmodern perspective shows us the underground man as one of the first to become self-aware as a character. The very first self-aware character in world literature was, of course, Don Quixote. We know that Dostoevsky considered Don Quixote “the saddest book” ever written and that Cervantes influenced him as deeply as Pushkin and Gogol.
But if we broaden more our perspective, to encompass not just literature but the entire field…
