Essay On Bobok

Bobok by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a witty anecdote that satirizes the extent in which human depravity exists and thus makes a social commentary on the futile and foolish nature of Russian Utopianism and assigns moral revival as the call for real change.
In the late 19th century, as writers like Chernyshevsky propagated novels detailing the idealistic and hopeful future in a utopic Russia, Dostoevsky wanted to make clear in his short story, Bobok, that a flaw existed in such ideal: that even in death, lies human depravity. The story starts as Ivan Ivanovitch, the protagonist, finds himself in a graveyard where he encounters the extraordinary, the talking dead. It is soon discovered that most of the conversation is directed toward gambling, theft, and fraud and that a foul stench permeates throughout the graveyard. Judging by how the dead complain despite having lost the sense of smell, it becomes clear that the stench is not only representative of the rotting physical bodies of the dead, but of a moral rotting of the soul as well. The stench is
In a sense, the graveyard is representative of the new and near future that everyone is soon to face and one that provides a different sort of freedom. The grave inhabitants talk of letting shame go and cries to “strip and become naked” (Dostoevsky 270), uniting the once scattered ramblings and divided people together in one voice. Here, death had become a whole new world as it granted them a new kind of freedom-one not of redemption but a sanction to indulge in their own impiousness. In a seemingly utopic fashion, no laws, obligations, or positions exist, but Bobok is what Dostoevsky sees as the result of such freedom. When given “absolute freedom”, human nature only permits people to fall in the same despicable habits, as it is not the environment that first need changing but the immortality of the