Ritratto del 1872 ad opera
di Vasilij Perov (Galleria Tret'jakov,
Mosca) / Portrait of 1872
by Vasilij Perov (Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow)
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
dark underground
as illuminated
by Alberto Moravia
I
n Notes from Underground, Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s (1821-1881) novel, published
in 1864, the protagonist, says Alberto Moravia
in the introduction to the Italian edition,
“takes a lamp and goes down, from the
apartment on the first floor where he lived
till that moment, to the underground.”
For the first time Dostoevsky, who is the
protagonist, ruthlessly looks at himself and
has the courage to analyse himself, as Moravia
illuminates the darkest confessions of his soul.
From Notes from Underground, where the
narrator lives, a new literary character emerges,
and Moravia defines him the antihero.
An antihero who will be present, in different
ways and in places that are not as dark
as the underground, in almost all Dostoevsky’s
future works.
To live in a place described by Dostoevsky
as “almost completely dark … narrow,
cramped, low-pitched room,” is already
a choice that is totally and definitely the
opposite of living in the ritual, bourgeois,
European apartments of the Tsarist Russia.
Furthermore, “the candle end that had been
burning on the table was going out and gave
a faint flicker from time to time, in a few
minutes there would be complete darkness”,
which means that the Underground Man
chooses to be annihilated, in other words
to live outside society, in a place that enables
him to send the “respectable” people living
on the floors above his accusations,
paradoxically centred on the depravations
he indulged in “furtively, timidly, in solitude,
at night.” Dostoevsky admits, “even then
I had my underground world in my soul.
I visited various obscure haunts.”
He is sincere up to indecency, up to
mortification, because in the dark it is easier
to contemplate one’s own hell. From a sombre
recess in the underground, Dostoevsky has
created the first existentialist novel. All the
things that take place in the first part of Notes
from Underground do not occur, according to
Moravia, due to social reasons, but only due to
interior motives, which today we would define
neurotic. Also the contradictory behaviour
of the protagonist when he meets Liza, the
innocent and desecrated prostitute, is neurotic.
An unresolved neurosis, nourished by the lack
of light: “as evening came on and the twilight
grew denser … Something was not dead within
me, in the depths of my heart and conscience
it would not die.”
In the unaccomplished relation with Liza,
Moravia notes how the protagonist’s
paroxysmal sadomasochism enables
Dostoevsky, long before Sigmund Freud,
to compose not only the story of neurosis
but also the story of the transformation
of the neurosis into a novel.
In his Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky
uses the light of reason in an unusual way,
alternating sadism with regard to the
bourgeoisie and masochism with regard
to the protagonist, who is afflicted with,
according to Moravia, an ineradicable sense of
guilt, which is nourished by the complete lack
of light. Dostoevsky precedes by over a century
the existentialist novels of Kafka and Sartre,
in which social relation is but a projection of
one’s inner life. Dostoevsky uses his indecorous
soul to describe his own darkness, this sense
of guilt that will characterise, in different
forms, the characters that were excluded from
the bourgeois salons and those with sensitivity
to social injustice, the protagonists of many
novels of the 20th Century.
10 – To be continued. For “Epiphanies of light”,
to date, the following short stories by Empio
Malara have been published in LUCE:
“Alessandro Manzoni, a creator of light” (n.317,
September 2016); “Herman Melville. Light that
invites us on a journey” (n.321, September 2017);
“Light and dark in the portrait of James Joyce
as a young man” (n.322, December 2017);
“Flashes and lights in Hemingway’s A Farewell
to Arms” (n.323, March 2018); “The artificial sun
in the novel The magic mountain by Thomas
Mann” (n.324, June 2018); “The irreverent and
irrational light in some texts by Carlo Emilio
Gadda” (n.325, September 2018). “Philip Roth’s
revealing lights in American Pastoral” (n.326,
December 2018); “Marcel Proust’s lighted
windows in the novel Swann’s Way” (n.327,
March 2019); In the Light of Leonardo da Vinci
(n.328, June 2019)
EPIPHANIES OF LIGHT / LUCE 329
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