Assignment for Session 5: Literary Movements (Realism, Naturalism, and

Symbolism) in the 19th-Century West

Name: Phạm Thùy Trang

Student’s ID: 1622205

Baudelaire
1. What themes did Baudelaire usually present in his poetry that have made him get criticized
for
a long time?
He usually displayed in painfully vivid scenes his own spiritual and sensual torment. He lucidly
analyzed his own weaknesses as well as the hypocrisy and sins he found in society.
How are these themes presented in his quoted poems?
These themes are presented through lust, hatred, laziness, a disabling self-awareness that
ironized all emotions, a horror of death and decay, and finally an apathy that swallowed up all
other vices.

2. What ability does Baudelaire possess that makes him a representative of modern poetry?
It is the ability to present realistic detail inside larger symbolic horizons, his constant use of
imagery and suggestion, his consummate craftsmanship and the intense musicality of his verse.

3. What makes Baudelaire contrary with the Romantics?

Baudelaire is a city poet fascinated by the variety and excitement of modern urban life.

4. Who was Baudelaire’s favorite American author? Why?

He is Edgar Allan Poe. Because Baudelaire was struck by the similarity of their ideas: by Poe’s
dedication to beauty, his fascination with bizarre images and death, and above all his emphasis
on craftsmanship and perfectly controlled art.
Dostoevsky
1. What are the main themes in Dostoevsky’s works?
The main themes are some of the central predicaments of our time: the choice between God and
atheism, good and evil, freedom and tyranny; the recognition of the limits and even of the fall of
humanity against the belief in progress, revolution, and utopia. They are unforgettably the
enormous contradictions of which our common human nature is capable and by which it is tor.

2. What event made him get exiled to Siberia?

Dostoevsky became involved in the Petrashevsky circle, a secret society of antigovernment and
socialist tendencies. He was arrested on April 23, 1849, and condemned to be shot. On
December 22 he was led to public execution, but he was reprieved at the last moment and sent to
penal servitude in Siberia.

3. Who was the philosopher whose ideas Dostoevsky ever admired when he was young and then
loathed afterward?
He is Charles Fourier, a French socialist.

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

4. How old is the narrator at the time he narrates his story? What city does he live in?
He is forty and he lives in Petersburg.

5. In what sentence does the narrator talk about his symptom of sadism?
The sentence is: “I was a nasty official. I was rude and took pleasure in it… When petitioners
used to approach my desk for information, I’d gash my teeth and feel unending pleasure if I
succeeded in causing someone distress.”
How does this detail conflict with what he narrates later?
He feels gloating when others are suffering, but then this rudeness and malice is very easily
extinguished. He is shamefully aware at every moment, even at the moment of his greatest
bitterness, that not only is he not a spiteful man, he is not even an embittered one, and that he is
merely scaring sparrows to no effect and consoling himself by doing so. He is foaming at the
mouth-but just bring him some trinket to play with, just serve him a nice cup of tea with sugar,
and he’d probably have calmed down. His heart might even have been touched.
How does this conflict afflict him?
He would probably have gashed his teeth out of shame and then suffered from insomnia for
several months afterward.

6. According to the narrator, what status of a man’s mental life could be a kind of disease?
It is being overly conscious.
What is his revision of this idea afterward?
He remains firmly convinced that not only is being overly conscious a disease, but so is being
conscious at all.

7. In what moments (write particular sentences and pages) does the narrator talk about his
symptom of masochism?
On page 1310: “If someone had slapped my face, I might even have been grateful for it. I’m
being serious. I probably would have been able to derive a peculiar sort of pleasure from it-the
pleasure of despair, naturally, but the most intense pleasures occur in despair, especially when
you’re very acutely aware of the hopelessness of your own predicament. As for a slap in the
face-why, here the consciousness of being beaten to pulp would overwhelm you.”

8. How does the narrator compare a man with a mouse?

“I’m green with envy at such a man. He's stupid, I won't argue with you about that; but perhaps a
normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it’s even very beautiful. And I'm
all the more convinced of the suspicion, so to speak, that is, for example, one were to take the
antithesis of a normal man-that is, a man of overly acute consciousness, who emerged, of course,
not from the bosom of nature, but from a laboratory test tube (this is almost mysticism,
gentlemen, but I suspect that it’s the case), then this test tube man sometimes gives up so
completely in the face of his antithesis that he himself not as a person, but a mouse. It may be an
acutely conscious mouse, but a mouse nonetheless, while the other one is a person and
consequently… and so on and so forth. But the main thing is that he, he himself, considers
himself to be a mouse; nobody asks him to do so, and that's the important point.”

Chekhov
1. What makes Chekhov differ from his two Russian predecessors, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky?
The work of Chekhov is a smaller scope than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. He is thus much more in
the stream of Western realism than either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, and the delicate, precise
realism of his short stories has served as a model for later writers in Europe, China and the
United States.

2. What are the main topics in Chekhov’s stories?

There is implied in his stories of philosophy of kindness and humanity, a love a beauty, a sense
of the unexplainable mystery of life, a sense, especially, of the individual’s utter loneliness in
this universe and among other people. The Russia depicted in Chekhov’s stories seems to be
nearing its end; there is a sense of decadence and frustration that heralds the approach of
catastrophe. The aristocracy still keeps up a beautiful front but is losing its fight without much
resistance, resignedly. Officialdom is stupid and venal. The Church is backward and narrow-
minded. The intelligentsia are hopelessly ineffectual, futile, lost in the provinces or absorbed in
their egos. The peasants live subject to the lowest degradation of poverty and drink, apparently
rather aggravated than improved since the much-heralded emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”

3. What is the color of the lady’s dog?
The color is white.

4. How does Gurov’s wife think of herself?

She thinks of herself as a “thinker”.
How is this differ from his thinking of her?
He secretly considered her shallow, narrow-minded, and dowdy, he stood in awe of her, and
disliked being at home.

5. What is Gurov’s plan to the “lady with the dog”?

He wants to have a brisk transitory, an affair with her.
How does he proceed with that plan?
He gets the lady’s attention through her dog. “He snapped his fingers at the Pomeranian, and
when it trotted up to him, shook his forefinger at it. The Pomeranian growled. Gurov shook his
finger again. The lady glanced at him and instantly lowered her eyes.” And that is how they get
to know each other.
6. In what city the story takes place?
Yalta.
Where is the lady from?
She is from the town of S in Petersburg.
What is her name?
Her name is Anna Sergeyevna.
What is the color of her eyes?
The color is grey.
What is the name of the lady’s husband?
His name is Von Diederitz.
Where is Gurov from?
He is from Moscow.

7. Why does the lady have to leave the city where she meets and have an affair with Gurov?
Because her husband sent a letter told that he was having trouble with his eyes and import her to
come home as soon as possible.

8. What are Gurov’s feelings when he comes back to live in Moscow?

At first, he becomes gradually immersed in Moscow life with a belief that Anna Sergeyevna will
be nothing but a vague memory, and that hereafter, with her wistful smile, she will only
occasionally appear to him in dreams, like others before her. However, then he realizes that his
recollections grow ever more insistent, he always thinks about Anna in his daily life: “She
accompanied him everywhere, like his shadow, following him everywhere he went”, and in the
streets he follows women with his eyes, to see if there are any like her.
What does he decide to do afterward?
When the Christmas holidays come, he decides to meet Anna Sergeyevna. He packs his things,
telling lie his wife he has to go to Petersburg in the interests of a certain young man, and set off
for the town of S.

9. In what situation does Gurov meet up again with the lady?

Gurov remembers that Anna might go to the first night of the performance at the local theatre of
The Geisha, he decides to go to the theatre, and he sees Anna come with her husband. When her
husband goes out to smoke in the first interval, and she is left alone in her seat. Gurov, who has
taken a seat in the stalls, goes up to her.
How does she respond to him?
She glances up at him and turns pale, then looks at him again in alarm, unable to believe her
eyes, squeezing her fan and lorgnette in one hand, evidently struggling to overwhelm a feeling of
faintness. After a silence, at last she gets up and moves rapidly towards one of the exits. She
stops on a dark narrow staircase to talk to him.
What will they do after that meeting?
Gurov will go away that night, and then Anna will come to him in Moscow.

Writing
References
1. Beardsley, Monroe C. (1942), “Dostoevsky’s metaphor of the “Underground”, Journal of the
History of Ideas, Vol. 3, No. 3, p. 265-290.
2. Hannon, Michael (2006), "An Analysis of Freedom and Rational Egoism in Notes From
Underground," Episteme, Vol. 17, Article 5, p. 63-72.
3. Tanism, Sumaiya (2021), “Epistemological ideologies of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from
Underground", American Research Journal of English and Literature, Vol. 7, Issue No. 1, p. 1-8.

Summary
“Notes from Underground” are autobiographical lines that show the inner life of the narrator
with many contradictions and darkness. In which, the image of the "Underground" where the
narrator lives also carries many meanings, which was discussed by Beardsley in his article
named “Dostoevsky’s metaphor of the “Underground”. Furthermore, Dostoevsky also shows his
idea about the freedom that in “An analysis of freedom and rational egoism in Notes from
Underground”, Hannon contrasts the views of freedom in “Notes from Underground” to outline
the Dostoevsky's critique of Chernyshevsky's rational egoism. The author begins by emphasizing
the main elements of Chernyshevsky's book and the concept of freedom in “Notes from
underground”, and uses that as the basis for refuting Chernyshevsky's point of view. From there,
the author considers the kind of world in which Dostoevsky's freedom conception might occur,
and questions the demands of that world. In addition, a macroscopic and inconspicuous aspect is
also included throughout “Note from Underground”, they are epistemological ideologies that in
“Epistemological ideologies of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground”, Tanism
examines the ideologies in which the protagonist experiences his existential crisis. The thoughts
offered by the narrator, which depict him as a grotesque, selfish man are also seriously tried to
illustrate and understand in that article.