Literary Significance and Criticism
Like many of Dostoyevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of utopian socialism and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied, even through technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own philosophies.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was very impressed with Dostoyevsky and claimed that he was "one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something", and that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood".
Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, which has themes of existential anguish in the black American experience, uses a protagonist-narrator inspired by Dostoyevsky's underground man.
Read more about this topic: Notes From Underground
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“The want of an international Copy-Right Law, by rendering it nearly impossible to obtain anything from the booksellers in the way of remuneration for literary labor, has had the effect of forcing many of our very best writers into the service of the Magazines and Reviews.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)