ABSTRACT
Dostoyevsky had perverted his great gifts, throwing away the chance of becoming a teacher and liberator of human beings in order to join up with their jailers. To present the post-exile Dostoyevsky as a broken and brainwashed man, victim of procedures that Pavlov would soon describe and elaborate, seems outrageously paradoxical. Dostoyevsky's own self-disgust, his egoism and guilt, his unhappy days at the Academy of Engineers are all deeply, authentically present within the text. Dostoyevsky intends Chernyshevsky to be equally dismayed when the egoism he advocates is incarnated in the Underground Man. Dostoyevsky is presenting the radicals with the logical embodiment of their theory and asking them how they like it. Dostoyevsky himself has to disengage from his character's potentially paralyzing embrace — to this extent, Mikhailovsky and Shestov are right: in a sense, Dostoyevsky is his character. Dostoyevsky denounces ideas and philosophies he doesn't like through a character whom he doesn't like either.
