SUSAN MCREYNOLDS
97
nals brought about the "regeneration of my convictions," the pilgrim–
age to the holy sites of Western culture was a journey of disenchant–
ment. Dostoevsky was throughout his life a believer, exchanging one
object of veneration for another. In Siberia, he acquired one-the Russ–
ian people-and in Europe, he discarded another-the "Baal" he now
believed was the idol of the materialism he had temporarily succumbed
to, the cause of the moral decay destroying Europe and threatening Rus–
sia as well.
The spiritual vitality displayed by some of the Russian prisoners con–
trasts to the torpor and depravity caused by material values in the West.
Spiritual death haunts whole nations in
Winter Notes
and hangs over
the Underground Man of
Notes from Underground.
These two com–
plementary works emerged directly from Dostoevsky's personal encoun–
ters with Europe.
Notes from Underground
(published serially in
Epoch,
the magazine published by Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky
after difficulties with the censors forced the cessation of
Time
in
1863)
explores the impact of Western materialism and lack of faith on an edu–
cated Russian;
Winter Notes
studies the effects of Western ideas within
their native environment. The narrator of
Winter Notes
wanders
through the capitals of Europe, while the Underground Man stews in
self-imposed seclusion back home in Russia. The existential dilemmas of
the lonely Underground Man understandably have found greater reso–
nance with American readers, but Dostoevsky was also concerned with
man as the maker and member of communities, and his eyewitness
impressions of communal suffering, gathered on the streets of Paris and
London, complement the Underground Man's soliloquies from his
mouse-hole.
The possibility of an ending, of a final curtain on history in the form
of the crystal palaces and of the utopias dreamt of by Western bourgeois
and socialist materialists, fills the Underground Man with dread. Life in
the West, Dostoevsky writes in
Winter Notes,
has reached the end of the
road. "Everything has been resolved, signed, and sealed," he remarks on
arriving in Paris: the bourgeoisie "have struggled to the point where
they have convinced themselves that they are completely happy, and...
and ...they ha ve stopped at that. The road goes no further."
Observing the "half-naked, savage, and hungry population" of Lon–
don, "a city bustling day and night, as immense as the sea,"
Winter
Notes
emphasizes the discrepancy between the vibrant wealth of the
city, "with its millions and its world-wide trade," and the individual's
benumbed acquiescence to his spiritual and physical impoverishment.
The road has ended in the West because its godless populations have
