About the author:
Anna L. Gumerova, PhD in Philology, Senior Researcher, A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Povarskaya 25 a, 121069 Moscow, Russia.
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9795-0974
E-mail:
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. We have no direct witness about Clive Lewis reading Notes from 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 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.