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ries him into the gray areas between illusion and reality. Such is the
genius of Dostoevsky that none of these neurotic strains is separated
from the more commonly observable form of suffering and alienation.
What marks him, however, as a complete Dostoevskian creation, is
that his anxieties reach into
his
social and political ideas. The under–
ground man tries to escape the Machiavellian influences of science,
reason and revolution, and at the same time he wrestles with the
anti-Christ within himself. Essentially he is a doomed man, because he
has not come to
term~
with God.
Now, most of Dostoevsky's heroes are variations of the anti–
hero. His earlier and shorter writings revolve around aborted, lonely,
but highpitched people impelled by some mania and its attendant
guilt, and wallowing in their own insecurity. Many carry the weight
of some secret, usually undefined and lying somewhere between one's
recognizable drives and the general unknown within oneself. Fre–
quently, they rise to fits of self-knowledge, where everything becomes
luminous, either in an epileptic seizure or when faced with death, or
· some psychological equivalent. Thus we see the restless, furtive, com–
pulsive figure in Polzunkov, Mr. Prohartchin, Vasya
(A Faint
Heart),
Ordynov
(The Landlady),
Ivan Ilyitch
(An Unpleasan t
Predicament),
and in the ridiculous man whose dream is a parable
of both his outlook and his fate-the type being later developed on a
grandiose scale in Prince Myshkin.
The underground man also appears in a more sinister form in
the succession of magnificent sinners, criminals and revolutionists in
Dostoevsky's later fiction . This more sinister figure can first be dis–
cerned in the mad man of will, Murin
(The Landlady),
and in the
pathological sensualist of
A Christmas Tree and a Wedding;
but he
reaches full stature in Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Dmitri Karama–
zov, all of whom are underground men in that they are ridden by
a warped psyche and a demonic idea. Dostoevsky's saints, moreover,
are cast in somewhat the same mold: for what is Alyosha Kara–
mazov but an underground man turning his face to God-and Prince
Myshkin but an underground child?
IV
If
the underground man has taken his place in modern litera–
ture, with a life of his own apart from that of his author, still the
truth is he was originally a self-portrait, a projection of Dostoevsky's
entire being. Dostoevsky held a complicated idea of literary reality,
