About the author:
Ekaterina А. Markova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia; Teaching Assistant, The Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Miklukho-Maklaya 6, 117198 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5954-1440
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Abstract:
The article is devoted to the issue of the critical reception of F.M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in the XXth century. Some letters, as well as books on philosophy and literary criticism by such writers as D.H. Lawrence, J.M. Murry, C. Wilson and I. Murdoch are analysed. The reviews by the given authors correspond to two waves of interest in Dostoevsky — the first one took place at the turn of the XXth century followed by the second one in the middle of the century. The writers name the key characteristics of the Underground Man: vanity, egoism, self-division, desire for suffering and inability to act. Some critics of Dostoevsky’s Notes see the Underground Man as а recurrent image and note his relevance to the ideas of existentialism, especially the one about inability to apprehend truth in a rational way.
