In Archetypes from Underground, Lonny Harrison has proposed to pursue answers to what he regards as the ultimate question: “What is the Dostoevskian self?” (4). Any casual but thoughtful reader of Dostoevskii will have noticed the large number of characters who embody conflicts and splits, from the hero of The Double, to Raskolnikov, to Ivan Karamazov. There is no doubt that if there is a Dostoevskian self, it is complicated. Many of Dostoevskii's characters represent “social-cultural types,” but what his readers and critics have failed to see until now is that Dostoevskii's world is a world of not just types but archetypes too.

What is an archetype? Harrison draws on three members of the archetype pantheon: Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Richard Tarnas. The basic notion is, in Jung's words, “primordial patterns of ideas” or, in Harrison's, “the language of stories and myth—the images that make up the great narratives of our time even as they stand in relation to more remote cultures and civilizations” (10). When it comes to Dostoevskii, “archetypes are aspects of personality that carry meaning by virtue of being invested with ideas of self, nation, God, tradition, and primordial truth” (11).

Thus, we get a set of themes and character types. There is, for example, “the divided self.” If we examine divided-self characters through the lens of archetype theory, we come to see not only that Dostoevskii was drawing on a classic archetype, namely that of the double, but also that his use of the archetype places him squarely in the history of “the emergent modern self” (62). There is the underground, as represented by reptiles, tarantulas, insects, spiders, and blood (Chapter 3). There are feminine types, as represented by mothers, Mother Russia characters, Madonna-like characters, and femmes fatales (Chapter 3). There are (from Robert Belknap's 1967 study of The Brothers Karamazov) the devil, the buffoon, nadryv (translated variously as “crisis” or “laceration”), and divine grace (Chapter 4). There are myths of death and renewal, resurrection themes, and hero myths (Chapter 5).

The question arises: why not refer to all these examples simply as themes, while adding that Dostoevskii drew on a variety of traditions, myths, and cultural symbols? Why call them archetypes? The answer appears to come from Jung: archetypes arise from the collective unconscious. “In Jung,” Harrison explains, “an archetype is an explanatory paraphrase of Platonic eidos—archaic, primordial types, universal images from remotest times, an essentially unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived” (13). So the point must be that archetypes connect us with our fellow human beings, because everyone carries them around in an unconscious realm. In Harrison's account, this is important because Dostoevskii's conception of the self is built upon recognition of an unconscious in which an “archetypal self” resides (19). It is from this thought that the logic of the book's organization follows. Chapters 1 and 2, “Foundations of the Dostoevskian Self” and “The Divided Self,” explore the structure of the modern self that we find in Dostoevskii, while the remaining chapters (minus the conclusion) classify and present the various archetypes. That would lead us to expect, by way of conclusion, the assertion that these archetypes spring from a modern self that includes an unconscious realm.

But Harrison doesn't quite make that connection, which leads the reader to ask: “Why archetypes, and how are they really connected to the self?” Why is it not simply the case that Dostoevskii, through his characters, presented a divided self and at the same time drew on a number of themes on which others before him had also drawn? When we get to the conclusion, it suddenly emerges that, in Dostoevskii, “the true self is revealed by the oral and aesthetic vision emanating from, and at one with, a transcendent order of being” (149), that “one of Dostoevsky's chief artistic concerns was to revitalize the pre-modern vision of a transcendent, authentic, personal self, a self that achieves oneness with the divine presence” (150–51). Unless I missed something earlier in the book, I saw the self connected with a collective unconscious and primordial types but not with the religious notion of “divine presence”—leading me to think that this is a book about a set of cultural themes that are associated with Dostoevskii's concept of the self.