Notes From The Underground: Dostoevsky’s Radical Challenge To The Byronic Tradition In Russian Literature

While Fyodor Dostoevsky’s debt to writers such as Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol has been well studied, his complex attitude toward Mikhail Lermontov has received much less attention. For much of his life, Dostoevsky viewed Lermontov with a certain degree of mistrustful appreciation. He admired the writer’s talents (particularly in poetry), but he was put off by what he saw as a streak of nastiness he instilled in his character Grigory Pechorin from A Hero of Our Time (1841), as well as the fawning imitation this figure inspired in Russian society after publication of the novel. Although one can find scattered references to Lermontov in Dostoevsky’s work, it is in his Notes from the Underground (1864) that Dostoevsky created his most fascinating engagement with the Pechorin prototype, albeit in a subtle, almost hidden fashion. Once we become aware of the Pechorin subtext, however, we may be surprised by the extent to which it suffuses the entire portrait of Dostoevsky’s famous narrator-protagonist. Over the course of the novel, and particularly in its second half, Dostoevsky showed how his tortured protagonist of the 1860s would emulate (consciously or unconsciously), and then fail at the very activities in which his 1840s predecessor had such memorable (if lamentable) success. These episodes range from the character’s self-conscious relationships with a single friend and multiple adversaries to his conflicted and cruel treatment of a trusting woman. Through his use of the pervasive Pechorin echoes, Dostoevsky strove to debunk the previous generation’s intense (and misguided, in Dostoevsky’s view) fascination with Romantic hero archetype popularized by Lord Byron and embodied in the figure of Grigory Pechorin. In this fashion Dostoevsky remade one of the most distinctive heroes in Russian literature into a scandalous anti-hero.