Dostoevsky, the Law, and the Underground Man

Abstract

Throughout the history of World literature no other writer has devoted more passionately to the issue of law in literature than Dostoevsky. The theme of law and justice is intertwined in the plot of his fiction and journalism from the earliest writings, reaching maturity with Crime and Punishment, his best-known novel among lawyers, to his last and greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov, a true legal novel. He acquired a good knowledge of the criminal proceedings of the tsarist regime and made remarkable literary use of the research he undertook to depict impressive social and psychological panel of his time. This paper focus primarily on the short novel Notes from Underground (1864), which opens the mature phase of the writer whose complex personality of its anonymous narrator and protagonist is latent in two other major characters - Raskolnikov and Ivan - that will appear in the best known works to be created some years later. “Notes” is a rich source for a multitude of interdisciplinary studies, especially psychoanalytic approaches trying to unravel the secrets of the odd behavior of the main character. The bellicosity, obsessive self-awareness, and verbosity of this self-entitled underground man is studied from a legal point of view following the readings of Bakhtin (dialogism) and Richard Weisberg (ressentiment). The legal themes of insult and revenge and human law and justice will be the axis of an analytical support whose goal is to understand the fascinating solitary existence struggling to enjoy the freedom to live.