About the author:
Olga Yu. Panova, Doctor Hab. in Philology, Professor, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskie Gory, 1/51, GSP-1, 119991 Moscow, Russia; Leading Research Fellow, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2520-120X
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Abstract:
F. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) exerted a considerable influence on American literature since 1940s. In contrast with 1920s–30s when its reception and impact used to be somewhat blurred and undistinguishable from “Dostoevsky complex” in toto, in the postwar period it was read and interpreted against the existentialist background that actually defined the reception of Dostoevsky’s novella in the United States and stimulated writers’ and readers’ interest in this text that became classical and canonical for American writers in the second half of the XXth–XXIst centuries. “Underground man” as an important literary archetype found its way into postwar American culture. The works by outstanding authors beginning with Saul Bellow (Dangling Man, 1944), Richard Wright (The Man Who Lived Underground, 1945), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952), Jack Kerouac, Jerome Salinger and up to Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, 1991), Percy Walker, David Foster Wallace, show a persistent fascination of American writers with the novella and are based on re-reading and re-interpreting Dostoevsky’s ideas, motives and imagery.