『우리 시대의 영웅』과 『지하로부터의 수기』 간의 상호텍스트성 연구 : 페초린의 패러디로서 지하인

Abstract

This paper analyzes “Notes From Underground” as a parody of “A Hero of Our Time”. First, “Notes From Underground” parodies “A Hero of Our Time” in that the author states in footnote to “Notes From Underground” that the work is fiction and that its purpose is to propose a protagonist of our time and the underground man mentions Rousseau’s “Confession” in order to impress the sincerity of the protagonists’ confessions upon the readers. The Underground man shows Pechorin characteristics through the codes of ‘evil person’ and ‘superstitions’, romanticist feelings of superiority and alienation, motifs of negation and skepticism, the succession of romanticist conflicts, an understanding of love and friendship as a dominating and dominated relationship, theatric words in order to gain a woman’s heart, and the wail that erupts when the theatric act has reached its limits. However, the underground man does not have the romanticist aura that Pechorin has. This is because he is also the successor of Poprishchin, Akaky Akakievich, and Devushkin, the weak that have been oppressed by society. If Pechorin was an executioner that judged other people’s lives, then the underground man has to endure the contempt of his servant Apollon who acts as his executioner by exposing his true life. The underground man undergoes skepticism, doubt, negation, and feelings of superiority and alienation as he mimics the romanticistic world and protagonists that he has made his own in his twenties, takes these feelings into his underground world, and reinforces his will to fight with an evil intent. He first rejects and ridicules the world around him from a perspective of all things beautiful and ideal and acts upon his fluctuating will. Then he is drawn into doing hideous acts and begins to feel pleasure from doing so. By looking at his actions that result from his purposeless, nonideal desire, he states that humans are not beings that can be enlightened by instruction, rational thought, and understanding of scientific laws, but ungrateful beings that choose to live according to foolish whims and an arbritrary free will. The underground man derives his argument against the concept of rational egoism that came to th fore in the 1860s from his own mimicked actions of romanticism, in particular Lermontov’s demonic romanticism. The underground man criticizes that whether it is romanticism or the new trend of thought, rational enlightenment, all such things are detached from life because they are all from books and they try to live by mimicking such books. Dostoevsky identifies the problems that Lermontov discovered in the aristocratic intellectuals of the same time, ‘loneliness, alienation, boredom, self-centered desire to only receive love, the wish to dominate others, pleasure derived from destroying, endless doubt and uncertainty, a self-ridiculing self-reflection, theatric tendencies to act as though in a protagonist in a literary work in order to overcome the boredom as the same problems found in modern men living in the artificial modern city of Petersburg and by bestowing upon the modern man the environment of the socially disadvantaged, examines the consciousness and self-consciousness of anti-hero. The Pechorinisitic romantic protagonist is changed in many ways by Dostoevsky. Characters that struggle between good and evil, Raskolnikov, Stavrogina, Rogozhin, and Dmitri Karamazov can be seen as the later versions. These are as the underground man was ‘evil men’ that needed to meet Christ. Not only this, but the underground man is also the predecessor of characters of ideology that propound ‘the extraordinary man’s way of thought’ and live according to such an ideology, Raskolnikov, Peter, Verkhovensky, Ivan Karamazov, Kirillov. This is because the underground man is a man of ideology that is buried in his romanticist world view and experiments on it.