Frontiere ale subteranei la Vladimir Makanin

This article focuses on the underground as envisaged by the Russian postmodernist writer Vladimir Makanin in his novel Underground or A Hero of Our Time. Following the Dostoyevskian literary legacy, Makanin brings to the fore the 1990’s Moscovite underground, an image bearing the marks of the communist and perestroika erasand conveying social, political and spiritual connotations. The novel is set in Moscow, where the hero, Petrovich, a homeless antisocial non-writing writer, dwells at the bottom of society. He traces the origins of the political underground to Russia’s émigrés and dissidents who lived for decades in psychiatric wards, being submitted to depersonalization treatments. The spiritual underground is represented by artists (writers or painters) endowed with a great spiritual force, like Petrovich, who, by refusing to follow the predictable path of affirmation, chooses an original way of protecting his “ego”.