When shame becomes a disease: Katabasis in Dostoevskij’s rebels

Abstract

This paper proposes a re-interpretation of two of Dostoevskij’s great main characters based on “shame”. This is meant as a secondary emotion of self-awareness and self-evaluation. The analysis focusses on Jakov Petrovič Goljadkin, the unhappy hero of The Double, and the anonymous main character of Notes from Underground. The former, as an unsuccessful (by admission of the very same author) example of an attempt to give material shape to an emotion (shame is transformed into psychiatric disease), the latter, as an exaltation of the same emotion, is articulated in its deviations from anger and narcissism. The approach, which is of a hermeneutic type, based on Vjač. Ivanov’s studies (“Es ergo sum”, only if you are I am), permits the analysis of the I-other relationship in a strictly Slavic framework, and is also linked with a Bakhtinian interpretation of the text in its dialogic variant.