Memorias del subsuelo

"In a novel there has to be a hero, and here all the traits of the anti-hero have been deliberately brought together," says the nameless narrator of Memories from Underground, which Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky published in 1864 in his brother Mikhail's new magazine Época. , to whom he had confessed his concern about the "harsh and savage tone" of the text. In its first part, a forty-year-old mid-level civil servant, already retired, addresses a public imagination as an orator: between mockery, paradoxes and violent interpellations, he confesses his proud isolation from society, his constant attacks against "everything that beautiful and the sublime" and his firm conviction that civilization will not be able to save the human being, condemned by free will to defy reason and savor evil. In the second part, based on the memory of a youthful anecdote, the novel begins to be filled with characters -conceited lieutenants, fawning friends, haughty servants, young prostitutes- who have just outlined, with their revelry and snubs, the characteristic universe dostoevskyan. The "underground" from where the protagonist writes is a symbolic space for "the lack of contact with life" and the "presumptuous resentment" that it generates, but also a refuge where a false sensation of "tranquility" reigns. It is the place where insects, spiders and mice live, and also the superfluous man, "unable to love", that great prototype of Russian literature.