The Underground Hero and the Problem of Self-Identity in Modern Culture
The article analyzes the text of Notes From the Underground in the aspect of the cultural problem of self-identity. The authors show that the appearance of the Underground Hero, whose philosophy and attitude to reality are caused by the specific cultural and historical factors of the modern era understood as modernity in an expanded sense. Such factors are Descartes's ideas about the thinking subject and the process of individualization of society, the influence of which, according to the authors, is due to the enhanced consciousness of the hero. In this enhanced consciousness, the authors see the main source of problems with self-identity in the hero of the Notes. Due to the excess of thinking, the Underground Hero understands the conditionality and limitations of socio-cultural roles. The rejection of the absurdity of social relations turns into an inability of participation for him. The endless stream of intertwining thoughts and experiences turns into a burden for their bearer and makes such a person unfit for action and unable to objectify oneself in any socio-cultural forms. Further, the authors show that similar features are found in other iconic literary characters of modernity - Hamlet by William Shakespeare and Roquentin by Jean-Paul Sartre. In the authors' opinion, the tragedy of the Underground Man is that he is not able to feel as integrity. The ontological incompleteness is compensated for by his attempts to find grounds for integrity in his own self, which is expressed in baseless claims to totality and, ultimately, is resolved in emphatic exaltation. Such an experience is achieved in the ultimate existential tension, in which the “I” is put in a borderline state of transition when one's sense of reality reaches ultimate tension. In this sense, it is directed against the monotonous routine of the rationalized everyday life of modern culture, in which a person is assigned the role of a function, a “pin”, a “piano key”, etc. In the case of the Underground Hero, the sense of the real is stretched to the limit in suffering. Suffering, thereby, becomes an essential feature of a person. On the one hand, a person who claims complete freedom of self-determination rejects any attempts to define it from the outside. The reverse side of such a pose of denying authority is a painful doubt about the legitimacy of such self-justification since forming one's image one understands that one relies on nothing other than one's own thinking. By constructing one's personality on one's own, a person exposes oneself to selfcriticism. However, it is this emphatic exaltation that makes the Underground Man invulnerable to any form of cultural totality. This apparently is the logic of the formation of the free individual's selfidentity. In the end, the authors come to the conclusion that a thoughtful reading of the text convinces of the futility of any attempts to fit the individual essence of a modern person into any of the group identity frameworks. No amount of participation will return the much-desired sense of ontological completeness to this person.