There is no doubt that both The Communist Manifesto and The Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky are truly remarkable works. They are sure to be discussed and argued in a decade, maybe even in a century or even in several centuries. If to take The Communist Manifesto only, it can be claimed to be an eternal work which has put its reflection not only on some of the societies in the world but somehow affected everyone living on this planet. One might agree or disagree with the ideas implied and depicted in work written by Marx and Engels, but the issues either stated or implied there are still being argued and widely discussed. One of the questioned issues stated in The Manifesto is human nature. In the book “Notes from Underground” written by the author living under a socialistic regime, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in its turn, presents a problem from another angle, that is, from the side of its life practice. It seems that the author made up his hateful character with the purpose of making fun of some of the issues from the imaginary ideal society. However, it’s not a secret that both great and not very good life experiences that history gives us are set for people’s edification. Utopian communistic countries still remember how hard they tried to achieve the ideas and the radiant tomorrow promised to them by authorities. It is still can not be defined if these ideas were deceitful for both the authorities and people or if they were society-deceitfully oriented, but the fact remains that Cuba, the Soviet Union, China, and the Eastern part of Europe were governed by the communist rule, believe it or not. Many other people in the world, mostly in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern European countries such as Italy, Portugal, Greece, and France, embraced communism in the face of the struggles and revolutions at that time. The authorities believed that human nature is changeable and dynamic. Rather biased than an objective assumption, that human nature is adjustable, stated in The Communist Manifesto, makes people, who blindly believe it, find themselves in ridiculous, not acceptable, and sometimes even self-harming state.
In the first place, the point stated in the Manifesto is that human nature might, can, and even should subdue a regime of power in a country. Whatever the regime is, people can accept it and adjust to it. Finally, any of them begin to act according to what is better for them. They saw slavery or feudalism as an example of that. The same is the thought of Dostoyevsky’s character. He willingly accepts the theory and continues to develop it. As he considers himself to be a great theorist, he is meditating in his underground. The theorist made up by the author simply forgets that he is a part of the society, which is driven not by the same ideas as he is. Consequently, the character finds opposition of people who reject his type of behavior as unacceptable in society. He is trying to prove his theories, practicing them in his life, but he always comes to one and the same conclusion that he is not worthy and miserable. His theory breaks every time like a soap bubble as he tries to live it out. The same fate is in store for Marx’s theory in spite of the belief of making people subdue the brand new regime, new laws, and differently-oriented logic. No doubt that it is a regime to be transformed, not human nature.
In the second place, The Manifesto implies that any person can subdue nature and its laws. Giving an example of birds, which are occupied making their nests, or insects, which are involved in meeting today’s physical needs, authors of the Manifesto sought to build a society where everyone works, works for himself to meet his physical needs. So does the character of “Notes from Underground,” he is trying as hard as he can to live the life of an insect but fails to do that as he testifies in the book “I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that.” (Dostoyevsky, 15) People can not simply become like insects, birds, or animals, if the character had understood that, he wouldn’t have done many things, humiliating himself. He came to the masochistic point to enjoy toothache, any kind of ache, instead of going to the doctor. He mentions that several times “Next, you will be finding pleasure in a toothache! You will exclaim, laughing. “And why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache,” I will answer.” (Dostoyevsky, 20) For centuries people have been striving for the progress of society and were not pleased with the achieved results. So the next generations will do. It is extremely important to know that people would not stop at some particular stage of the progress.
In the third place, The Manifesto fails to take into account the complexity of human nature. Going by historical experience, Karl Marx analyzed the previous epochs in the life of humanity and seemed to see ahead to the future, taking some extra factors into account. Dostoyevsky, with the help of his character, ridicules the idea that people’s actions can be calculated or forecast somehow. The character is thinking of the matter in terms of mathematics, thinking that two times two makes four. There exists a certain term for that; it is called determinism, which implies that everything up to cognition and behavior, actions, and decisions of people can be determined by an unbroken chain of certain events. But no matter what the events are, one can’t say anything for another man; human nature is too complex for divining somebody’s intentions as they’re sometimes beyond understanding.
Making conclusion, it might be reckoned that being blinded by an idea expressed by a man, a person may meet unpredictable consequences. Adjusting human nature to some assumption of a doctrine is simply impossible as it is a stable, complex, and individual component of each and every human. Firstly, human nature does not boil down to always acting out of self-interest under Then; it can not be changed anyhow, can not be given the same status as animals and insects have. Finally, it is so complex that the things which drive people can not be made up or forecast, and the actions of people can not be determined.
Works Cited
Dostoyevsky, Dostoevsky Fyodor. Notes From Underground. Moscow: Plain Label Books, 1965
Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, Samuel Moore, and Gareth Stedman Jones. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002