Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground

Item

Title

Creator

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC)

Spatial Coverage

Online

Athens See all items with this value Athens->Searchculture.gr

Relation

Faces of the hero

Subject - keywords

Novel

Date

17 January 2021

Date Issued

2021

Abstract

Only a few years before the publication of his major novels, Dostoevsky releases one of his strangest and most ground-breaking works, under the title “Notes from Underground”. Written in the style of a delirious confession, Notes from Underground features a distinctive structure, being, in essence, comprised of two autonomous works: a philosophical essay in the form of a dialogue with the reader, and a novella entitled “Apropos of the wet snow”. The hero or, more accurately, the anti-hero of both works is an anonymous middle-aged civil servant, sick and resentful, steeped in bitterness and rage, who lives in isolation “underground”, in his basement. Having set himself apart from the rest of humankind, he violently attacks the social ideals of “happiness” and “success” and dares to speak of the forces that act deep within us and which we mostly refuse to acknowledge. Even the few youthful attempts of this marginalized man to come out of his “hole” and seek contact and acceptance always lead him to humiliation and, once again, into withdrawal and “self-flagellation”. With Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky turns his attention to the contemporary lonely hero. The individual, having renounced everyone and everything, even the value of the act itself, claims the right to be passive, lazy and, potentially, useless. The Dostoevskian hero rebels against the heroic ideal itself.
Aris Servetalis and Flomaria Papadaki interpret an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, Notes from Underground, directed by Ektoras Lygizos.

(Edited description from organiser’s website)