Themes And Ideas In Dotoyevsky's Notes From The Underground By Dostoevsky

Freedom of expression in literature is often a sensitive subject because of the great impact it has on the public sphere. With its function of enabling discussion, the public sphere is essential in the shaping of a free, individual opinion. This is not the case for authoritarian regimes, which try to silence polyphony by establishing general principles. The Soviet Union also made use of this practice, becoming especially apparent by the way the Communist Party dealt with the literary works of the great Russian writers. These all too often had to undergo censorship in order to become conform. However, the establishment of an official party line was sometimes difficult, as it was the case with Dostoevsky´s writings in the first half of the Union´s

In order to understand his beliefs, it is essential to put his concepts and ideas into perspective. The book was written in 1864; it was a period that faced the consequences of an intellectual revolution which produced the intellectual´s position of the dreamer in the 1860s.2 What Dostoevsky did was to reflect upon these developments in his writing by creating a psychologically complex character called the Underground Man, who is believed to be the first literary anti-hero. The main point of Dostoevsky´s writing forms the protagonist´s conversion from a romantic idealist in the 1840s to the cynical Underground Man twenty years later. The reason for this feigned belief in romantic-idealistic notions was the dichotomy between the

However, this critical stance was not always the case as the author even participated temporarily in the socialist movement called Petrashevsky´s Cricle. Forced to go into exile because of his participation, Dostoevsky changed his mind about socialism during that time, being afterward a foe of socialist atheism and materialism. The reason why Dostoevsky opposed to this concept was because revolutionary socialism is focused on material goods, whereas for the writer the individual person had the greatest value. The result was that Dostoevsky was more concerned with the fate of the individual than with social schemes, which is also becoming apparent in Notes from the Underground.11 Moreover, he criticized the socialist morality as it is based on class character and defined by the utility to revolution.12 For Dostoevsky, who was a convinced Christian, all moral principles should be based upon the Christian ideal of personal self-perfection because this moral foundation would provide society with a functioning structure in the long-term. With the strict atheism propagated in the Soviet Union, the author´s demand for a religious basis of social life was undoubtedly a major conflicting notion. Apart from Dostoevsky´s problematic religious views, the writer was often criticized for his conservative, reactionary and pessimistic position. Gorky, for example, attacked