Motifs from F.M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in C.S. Lewis’s Works

Abstract

This article searches for motifs from F.M. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces. The main difficulty of this kind of research is that in Clive Lewis’s works the transformation of motifs from preceding texts can be quite fancy and not always obvious. We have no direct witness about Clive Lewis reading Notes from the Underground. However, his relationship with Nikolai Zernov could indirectly suggest it, together with certain motifs referring to Dostoevsky’s work, appearing not only in the novel Till We Have Faces but also in the fairy story The Silver Chair. Each of these motifs can be seen as a random element, but when taken together they form a system. The article analyzes the name of the land Underworld (“Podzem’e”) in The Silver Chair, and the “Creed” pronounced by one of its characters; the theme of the seen or unseen palace in Till We Have Faces, etc. In the end, the article underlines the main difference between the texts. While in Notes from the Underground there is no explicit word about the main character meeting Christ, the heroine’s meeting with God is the focus of the last episode in Till We Have Faces – a text close to Notes from the Underground both stylistically and thematically. This fact proves T.A. Kasatkina’s statement to be correct – “the need to believe in Christ that he [Dostoevsky] wanted to derive from the text has been already put in the text somehow” – and tells that, in spite of the impossibility of an accurate and intent reading of Notes from the Underground, C.S. Lewis understood the main idea of Dostoevsky’s work and brought it to the surface of his one.

Keywords

• dostoevsky
• lewis
• letters from underworld (notes from the underground)
• till we have faces
• underworld/underground
• reception