Rebel Writers: Marlowe vs Dostoevsky

Tamburlaine (1587) Paradise Lost (1667-1674) Notes from Underground (1864)

This arose out of wanting to write about how great I think Christopher Marlowe was. In particular his plays Tamburlaine Parts 1 and 2, which I only first read in December 2025. It's now my favourite play I’ve ever read. Since December, I read parts from it almost daily, and continue to be affected by lines as if newly read. Since it's religiously ambiguous, I contrasted Tamburlaine with Milton’s Paradise Lost, whose work is religiously unambiguous and devoutly Protestant. Then, last week, I happened to pick up Notes from Underground and felt the same impetus of character yet directed entirely elsewhere. So compared it to the spirit of Notes from Underground as an inverse of Tamburlaine – and thereby arrived at this very strange post.

Three Extremes of Freedom

Tamburlaine and Notes from Underground have felt so personally affecting to me. In each, it was as if having a conversation with my own soul. I think they represent my own animosity and my audacity. It’s not the intellectual ideas, it’s just the feeling, a resonance of being understood.  The mentality of books emanate from within them. You absorb the spirit of what you read. Reading is an ontological ritual practice of performing the nature of that book. The words are musical notes, the instrument is ourselves, and we read to play the music. There are plenty of books I do not want to read because I do not want to perform them in my soul. I think the most mentally healthy books I ever read are Ancient, Renaissance, and early Baroque. It’s shocking how differently you see the world when you immerse yourself in that.

Prior to the Modern era the world was understand as a map that could be understood. Whether that's the seas, the stars, or the social world. Since the Modern period, that map became the human psyche. Psychology became a labyrinth to endlessly explore. Whereas the pre-modern map of the social world was timeless and the same for all, the modern psychology was supposedly individualistically unique to each person. The effect of this is phenomenal. If every human mind is unique then nothing can be anticipated, and no human interactions are predictable. Prudence would not be possible. In the pre-modern world, Prudence was possible because the map of the world was understood. Psychology is conceptually seductive, but can be an implosion of insight, leading to a kind of paralysis. Whereas, if the map is timeless and fixed, no matter all the changes that the world undergoes, then it becomes more enticing to take action. In the early Baroque (the turn of the 17th century), as Europe left the Renaissance and entered the Modern era, there is a culturally unique moment of the mind simultaneously inhabiting both prudence and psychology. In all other times, it leans too much to one or the other. Either the restrained by a providential world, or the lost in a psychological labyrinth.

Each of these three writers utilised the pre-eminent literary genre of their respective eras—the Elizabethan stage (late 16th century), the Baroque epic (late 17th century), and the Modernist psychological novel (mid-19th century)—to map the shifting boundaries of human agency. The play is a vocal, physical and active genre, whereas the novel is a still, silent, contemplative genre. This also matters to the psychology of their content.

Though I compare three texts, I compare them for their characters. None which are biographical of their author, yet all undeniably invest something of themselves into the work. Their characters are in all cases a projection of the ego. In Dostoevsky’s, the ego’s ability to denounce others, in Milton's the ego’s ability to denounce hierarchical power, and in Marlowe's the ego’s ability to aggrandise itself. Yet they're operating on different landscapes. Dostoevsky is social theory turned subjective character drama, Milton is political theory turned metaphysical cosmology, whilst Marlowe’s is history turned into poetic myth. Despite the historical source of Tamburlaine, (The Turkish-Mongolian Timur) Marlowe conceives it and represents it as a testament to human will — a myth of the will. All works are a study or an exploration of free will, and freedom itself, an anomalous ungovernable free will at its most extreme. Each dramatises what happens when the character‘s will refuses reduction. They are not comparable because they stage extreme responses to the same metaphysical pressure: what does a being do when confronted with limit? The texts are a spectacle of a character confronting of wall of limitation. They all respond with audacity, fuelled by animosity, yet each expressed differently.

Though separated by centuries, Tamburlaine, Paradise Lost, and Notes from Underground form a genealogy of rebellion — an audacity fuelled by animosity. Marlowe, Milton, and Dostoevsky area genealogy the shrinking arena of rebellion. In Tamburlaine, he rebels against limitations of ambition, and his audacity remakes the world; in Paradise Lost, his animosity fuels him to rebel against the divine hierarchy; in Notes from Underground, he rebels against reason itself.; revealing not differing expressions of free will, but also its progressive interiorisation, until rebellion survives only as self-sabotage. In each case, the spirit of rebellion is not exposed in what they do but in what they are. The great literary accomplishment in each of them is the character they have created rather than the story they are telling.

Tamburlaine does not resent the world; he overpowers it. His rebellion is against limitation itself — against inherited hierarchy, against the fixity of rank, against the idea that one must remain what one was born. His audacity is insubordination. He does not argue against the order of things; he challenges it delightfully at the working of his own free will as if within his sword he has the power to rearrange the order of the solar system. The animosity is externalised into conquest, into spectacle, into the reconfiguration of political geography. It is rebellion as inspired architecture.

In Milton, rebellion becomes metaphysical and inward. Satan’s animosity is not directed at material limitation but at hierarchy — at the structure of divine order itself. Yet the drama unfolds almost entirely within rhetoric and consciousness. Rebellion is interior sovereignty. Satan’s audacity is not territorial but interpretative. He does not conquer heaven; he reframes defeat. It is rebellion as reinterpretation.

Then in Dostoevsky, rebellion collapses even further inward. In Notes from Underground the Underground Man rebels against rational determinism. I explored in my essay on Zamyatin’s WE that WE took up what was already laid out in Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky  will act against his own interest simply to prove that he is not reducible to arithmetic. His animosity apophatic; he negates; he asserts freedom through self-sabotage. It is rebellion as nihilism.

Animosity is the raw fire, and audacity is what that fire is directed to. In this sense, we can see a gradual migration of rebellion from external force, to metaphysical rhetoric, to psychological interiority. All three refuse submission. All three insist on freedom. But the arena contracts. The movement from Marlowe to Milton to Dostoevsky is not contradiction but contraction — the arena of rebellion shrinking from cosmos to conscience to cellar.

Marlowe’s TAMBURLAINE

Tamburlaine Part I was written around 1587, possibly 1586. Part 2 was written soon after Part I, probably 1587–1588. Almost certainly produced because Part I was an explosive hit. First performed by the Admiral’s Men likely in 1587 at the Rose Theatre. Parts 1 and 2 published together in 1590, when they were already a major theatrical success. Two five act plays becomes a single ten act tragedy in two parts.

I think Tamburlaine is the best play of the English Renaissance. It reaches a higher ontological register than any literary character I know. Tamburlaine is an avatar of pure energy. I could give up all of Shakespeare’s play for these two plays. My mind would be better for it. What is an indecisive Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a mammasita of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, or a guilty conscience Shakespeare’s Macbeth compared to the force of nature that is Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.

The contrast can be framed historically as well as psychologically. Tamburlaine represents Renaissance anthropocentrism at full voltage. The Renaissance hero still trusts ambition. The modern anti-hero distrusts everything, including himself.

Part I embodies expansion, conquest, velocity, and rhetorical force. The meteoric rise to rise ending in triumph Part II introduces mortality, vulnerability, children, illness, and inward reckoning—without moral repentance.

Marlowe is very clever with the motivation for building this play. It unusually ends with Tamburlaine having achieved everything, punished all his enemies, and suffered nothing for this excess of ambition. Regardless of what happens in Part 2, Part 1 was written without an assumption of a Part 2 being wanted. So if we take Part 1 independently, we see that Marlowe had been telling a different story beneath Tamburlaine, and Tamburlaine alludes to it many times. The Titanomachy. The Greek mythological narrative of the Zeus usurpation of the throne of Olympus from his father (as the gods before the Olympians were called the Titans, even though they are the same genealogical lineage). Tamburlaine is Zeus usurping the throne from Cronos. Tamburlaine even mentions this in the play as his motivation for betraying Cosroe after he helped him usurp the throne from his own brother. Like the Titanomachy, Tamburlaine gives crowns to his favourite soldier generals, like Zeus gave rule of the sea to Poseidon and the underworld to Hades. Likewise, Tamburlaine often compares himself, and others do too, to the god of war, implying Ares. Tamburlaine also mentions triumphs which undoubtedly in Marlowe’s mind are Roman triumphs. Furthermore, Zenocrate is Tamburlaine’s chosen wife, a spoil of war but who he genuinely adores with all his spirit, is similar to how Hades abducted Persephone. While adducted is bad, Hades treats Persephone better than any of the other deities treat their wives. Marlowe mixes all these into his narrative and how even how characters see themselves.  Never would it be known that Tamburlaine, who is based on the real-life figure of Timur, was a Muslim, a Turkish-Mongolian. The plays even burn the Qur’an. The religious world of Christianity functions architecturally, not psychologically. There are polytheistic Greco-Roman deities penetrating almost every high-minded thought and action through the whole play. But none so important as Jove (Jupiter/Zeus). Marlowe writes the whole thing with such delight.

When reading him, my soul as a character is manifest; not my soul perhaps but my vitality. My "Yes!" to life, my enthusiasm to live, my kataphatic vitality, is manifest in Tamburlaine. My relentless "Yes" to the mystery of the future, undaunted by creative energy, my audacity to the defy circumstances, and to assert myself unto the world.

Tamburlaine is not a tragic hero who falls from grace; he rises by will and is undone by will, making the play structurally distinct from medieval morality drama or the Wheel of Fortune tragedy tradition. Tamburlaine’s force consumes itself rather than being judged from above. Tamburlaine’s death is best understood not as divine punishment but as natural consequence (likely illness/pneumonia in line with historical sources on Timur), reinforcing the play’s non-soteriological worldview.

At the time, I was reading Machiavelli and they felt like two complimentary texts. Even the description of Tamburlaine seems to echoes the description of eponymous hero in Machiavalli's The Life of Castruccio Cavalcanti. Even in their deaths, both Tamburlaine and Cesare Borgia die by illness of a fever, rather than slain by another's hand. Only by his own body was he defeated. Machiavelli was widely read at the time (his works were not translated into English until the late 17th century but they were already circulating England in Italian and Latin in the mid 16th century). Although Tamburlaine would be considered imprudent in Machiavelli's political terms, Tamburlaine is no paragon of Machiavelli’s prudent Prince, nevertheless he is a paragon of the spirit of Machiavellian virtù.

“Men rise from obscurity to greatness by their own virtù.”

-        Machiavelli, Discourses, I.10

The same which Machiavelli admires about Cesare Borgia and Ferdinand of Aragon in The Prince: bold, resolute, manly, impetuous. Marlowe must have been amongst with youthful enthusiasm of young men who may have admired Cesare Borgia in the way that young men enjoy action stars in the movies.

Tamburlaine repeatedly emphasises that he creates his own destiny. Marlowe practically mythologised his own will into mythic landscape of the theatre. Rather than writing an historic drama of political ideas. A theatre of the will: a mythic staging of force, ambition, and capacity rather than a moral or historical argument.

It might be tempting to think of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine as a Nietzschean figure of will to power. But Tamburlaine is not Nietzschean. Nietzsche’s hero is solitary and interior. A superiority by outward disdain and inward ego. The ultimate result would be a superfluous existential figure who finds its impossible to integrate with society. Tamburlaine is social, theatrical, and external—defined by presence, speech, and action.

The only existentialism of Marlowe is the hyper-individualism that may have been arising from Protestant's insistence of the self. Yet there remains a scaffolding of a Catholic and pagan architecture to keep it from imploding into existential interiority. But what we find in al Marlowe's plays is both a delight and a caution upon self-interestedness. Each character pursues his own desires. With a rejection of social norms or expectations, yet to an imploding degree. They are truly insubordinate characters. Rebels against the social, religious, political, economic world they are within. But ultimately finds it destructive if it is asserted without prudence. Nevertheless, Tamburlaine and Faustus end by an inevitable loss of body rather than an antagonist's victory over them.

It is existential in that sense. The power of individual agency in reshaping the world around us. But doesn't fall into any existential feelings, in such a way that Shakespeare's comparative plays like Macbeth or Coriolanus do. His drama resists interiorisation, conscience-based morality, and sincerity. Tamburlaine reflects a Counter-Reformation Baroque disposition slightly before the Baroque; meaning is externalised into spectacle, rhetoric, force, excess, scale, velocity, and theatricality. Marlowe is anti-Protestant in effect, even when not explicitly; a resistance to the Protestant thinning of the world. The "Dissolved World" as I call the Protestant psychology.

Marlowe should not be read as a “modern” writer but as a threshold figure: positioned between the late Renaissance and the emerging Protestant-modern worldview, yet not fully belonging to either. Ultimately, Marlowe represents a lost trajectory in European culture.

Milton’s PARADISE LOST

The genre of literature that was most esteemed at the end of the Renaissance in England was epic verse. Shakespeare and Marlowe most likely would have moved into that genre in their later and more mature phase after they'd confirmed their popular success on the stage as younger men.

Marlowe's final poetic works were an original poem of Hero & Leander and a translation of Book 1 of Lucan's Civil War otherwise known was Pharsalia, where he may have been trying to practice his epic style to accomplish his own epic poem. In both he is turning directly to the ancient, in both mythology and history.

If we do consider Marlowe as having underwritten the Titanomachy through Tamburlaine Part 1, then we can directly compare it with Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost of his rebel angel Satan. If Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is a Titanomachy where the rebel succeeds, Paradise Lost is a Titanomachy where the rebel fails.

Milton was a poet of lyrical and epic poems, and playwright of Masques. By contrast to Marlowe, Milton internalises the entire cosmos. Paradise Lost is not a theatre of force but a theology of conscience. Satan’s rebellion unfolds almost entirely as an inward drama of pride, resentment, and self-justification. Hell is not primarily a place; it is a mental condition.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”

― John Milton, Paradise Lost 

This single line marks the decisive shift from Marlowe to Milton. Where Marlowe stages metaphysics externally—through action, rhetoric, and presence—Milton relocates metaphysics inside the self. The world thins. Psychology thickens.

This difference becomes clearest in how each writer treats rebellion. Especially in another play of Marlowe’s, Doctor Faustus, who rebels against limits to act in the world: to see, to command, to perform. Milton’s Satan rebels against hierarchy to preserve an inward sense of sovereignty. This is an absolutely ontological statement of Protestantism. Satan’s grandeur is rhetorical and introspective; Tamburlaine’s or Faustus’s is kinetic and theatrical. In the Marlovian world, to exist is to expand; if the expansion ceases, the character effectively dies. In the Miltonic world, to exist is to endure; greatness is found in the mind that reinterprets the world.

In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus we see a similar spirit for power and self-advancement but in the form of knowledge. Faustus makes a deal with the devil.  The great difference is that Faustus is more an existential contract with the metaphysical world. Whereas Tamburlaine is practically the architect of that structure. The religious contrast is equally decisive. Marlowe, though writing within a Christian culture, retains a polytheistic intelligence. Classical figures, demons, angels, and allegorical forces coexist without being morally flattened. Good and evil are not psychological states but operative agencies. Mixing a complex web of deities, Persian, Christian, Greek without consistency to be any one religion but with coherent to Tamburlaine’s creative aspirations of Worldly power that he believes all the gods work for his needs. Tamburlaine bends and blurs the metaphysical out of shape slipping from one religion to another. Faustus lives inside the Catholic metaphysical world (despite Marlowe living within a Protestant one at the time). Truthfully, it is not even the pact with the devil that condemns Faustus to Hell but his aspiring to become God through the arts the Devil gives him, and seeking repentance. In Doctor Faustus, damnation is not interior guilt but the arrival of forces that have always been present. Christianity in Marlowe remains architectural and symbolic, not inwardly and tyrannically examining.

Milton, however, writes as a fully formed Protestant. Salvation, damnation, freedom, and obedience are all matters of inner alignment. The external world exists largely to illustrate inward truths. Milton’s verse, though also grand, is syntactically recursive and meditative, designed for reading rather than staging. Marlowe’s language acts; Milton’s language reflects.

Most importantly, Marlowe and Milton differ in what they think art is for. Marlowe treats drama as external metaphysics: a way of staging force so that human beings can recognise what they are up against. Milton treats poetry as internal correction: a way of disciplining perception so that the soul aligns properly with divine order. One builds an arena; the other builds a conscience.

Milton transitions into the modern, existential framework that Marlowe resists. Where Marlowe’s characters are undone by fate, force, and misjudgment, Milton’s characters are undone—or redeemed—by their own inward stance.

So the difference between Tamburlaine, and Doctor Faustus, compared to Paradise Lost is not simply Catholic versus Protestant, or Late Renaissance versus Early Modern. It is the difference between a world that must be faced and a world that must be interpreted.

THE SECOND BRIDGE

Since I have Marlowe's 16th Century play, Milton's 17th Century epic poem, there is another genre that links this genealogy to Dostoevsky's 19th Century novel. Voltaire's 18th Century genre of the Philosophical Tale. The Enlightenment overturned the Baroque, with its simultaneity of the map of prudence and labyrinth of the psyche, in favour of the optimism of Reason. It's this prevailing Utopian optimism which Dostoevsky attempts to dismantle through his Underground Man. In the Philosophical Tale, the rebel is against the irrational, believing suffering would simply be relieved, and the world can be corrected, through rationality and logic.

Dostoevsky’s NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

The two parts of Notes from Underground were first published in 1864, in the January and April issues of Epoch, a magazine edited by Dostoevsky’s brother Mikhail. Epoch was the successor to their earlier magazine Time, which had been suppressed by the censors.

Dostoevsky did not write Notes from Underground as a confession, nor simply as fiction. It was a deliberate philosophical intervention. Notes from Underground is diagnostic, not confessional, which is why I dislike when people quote Dostoevsky blankly without citing the character or even the novel. What he wrote down is not the words of his own constitution. To understand his motivation, we have to situate it in Russia in the 1860s, in direct dialogue with the intellectual climate of his time. The most widely accepted view among scholars is that Notes was written as a refutation of the rising ideology of rational egoism in Russia.

Scholars such as Joseph Frank (in Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt) argue that the book is explicitly designed to dismantle the belief that If you educate man correctly, he will choose the good. Chernyshevsky argued that human beings always act in their rational self-interest. If society is structured logically and scientifically, people will behave well. Utopia can be engineered Dostoevsky considered this view spiritually catastrophic. The Underground Man’s famous rebellion against “2+2=4” is an attack on the idea that human beings can be reduced to predictable machines. In Orthodox theology the self cannot save itself through reason alone.

Dostoevsky’s response was that Man will deliberately choose against his own interest — just to prove he is free. Other writers have agreed with Dostoevsky.

“Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.”

―  Machiavelli, Discourses

“In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.”

 ― Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War 

Notes from Underground dramatises what happens when consciousness is severed from transcendence through mechanics.

The unnamed character of Notes from Underground, who we'll call the Underground Man, has been placed among the highest literary characters who are bearers of modern consciousness alongside Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust.

The unifying idea of Notes from Underground, embodied in the person of its narrator, is dramatised in the very process of its writing. The controlling art of Dostoevsky remains at a second remove. This is the Underground Man’s book, not Dostoevsky’s—though the two coincide. Notes from Underground has often been called a prelude to the great novels of Dostoevsky’s final period, and this is true in part because it is here that Dostoevsky first perfected the method of tonal distancing. This method enabled him to present characters—and even himself—simultaneously from different points of view, countering empathy with intellect. Laughter creates the distance that allows recognition.

The notes Dostoevsky added to the first part of Notes from Underground insist on the social and typical, as opposed to the purely personal or psychological, nature of the Underground Man:

“Such persons—such persons as the writer of these notes—not only may but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.” Dostoevsky, author's note at the beginning of Notes from Underground.

Dostoevsky’s view of those circumstances would have been familiar to readers of his articles in Time over the preceding years, particularly Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, an account of his first trip to Europe in 1862, published in the February and March issues of Time in 1863. There he discusses Russia’s captivation with the West:

“Why everything—almost everything—that we have of development, science, art, civic-mindedness, humanity—everything, everything—comes from there, from that same land of holy wonders. Why our entire life, even from earliest childhood, has been set up along European lines.”

The 1860s in Russia saw the rise of a generation of nihilism leaning towards Western European materialism and anti-religious attitudes. Russian society, in Dostoevsky’s view, had been formed by decades of imported development and Enlightenment—words that acquire a sharply ironic inflection in his later work. It is the attempt to live by these imported ideals that drives the Underground Man into his subterranean existence. In the social displacement produced by an imported culture, Dostoevsky perceived a more profound human displacement: a spiritual void filled with foreign content. The two time periods of the novel represent two stages in the evolution of the Russian intelligentsia—the sentimental literary culture of the 1840s and the rational, utilitarian culture of the 1860s: the time of the liberals and the time of the nihilists.

One of Dostoevsky’s constant preoccupations in his later work was the responsibility of the liberal generation for the emergence of nihilism, an idea he embodied most explicitly in Demons (1871), in the figures of the dreamy individualist Stepan Verkhovensky and his deadly utilitarian son Pyotr. In Notes from Underground, the same historical evolution is reflected within the mind of a single man. The polemicist of the first part grows out of the defeated dreamer of the second, and the inverted time sequence of the two parts seems designed to lead us toward this recognition.

The “gentlemen” whom the Underground Man addresses throughout his notes—when they are not the more indeterminate “you”—are the typical intellectuals of the 1860s. More specifically, they are presumed to be followers of the writer Chernyshevsky, the chief spokesman and ideologist of the young radicals.

Chernyshevsky was the author of several influential critical works, most notably The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (1860), in which he formulated the doctrine of rational egoism, adapting the enlightened self‑interest of English utilitarianism. His programmatic utopian novel What Is to Be Done?, written in prison after his arrest in 1862 for revolutionary activities and published in 1863, immediately became a manual for social activists. Though Chernyshevsky is never mentioned by name in Notes from Underground, his theories, and particularly his novel, are among the most immediate targets of both the Underground Man’s diatribes and Dostoevsky’s subtler, more penetrating parody. The Underground Man’s ego maintains superiority through resentment, asserts freedom through negation, and survives by refusing integration. It is ego as resistance which implodes into paralysis.

Dostoevsky’s reply to Chernyshevsky is thus both ideological and artistic. The implication is that the two are inseparable—and further, that the indispensable unity of artistic form reflects a more primordial unity: that of the living person, irreducible to rational calculation. The Underground Man is driven by implosive animosity; it is resentment without anywhere to place it.  It is nihilistic as Dostoevsky viewed those of the European rational ego emerging in Russia.

Conversely, to anchor these thoughts, Tamburlaine is animosity in its ecstatic form. Animosity as the energy towards accomplishing great things. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man’s animosity is anti-creative. It negates structure without building an alternative cosmos. Dostoevsky is not celebrating him. He is diagnosing a spiritual impasse of modernity: what happens when rational self-awareness detaches from faith, community, and grace. Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground to attack rationalist utopianism and defend the irreducible, self-contradictory freedom of the human soul.

It is fascinating to see how the prose reflects this. Dostoevsky’s sentences are often circular, self-correcting, and stuttering—the sound of a man tripping over his own shadow. The Marlovian poetry is linear and architectural; it climbs. Each sentence is a stone laid upon another to build a monument to the self. Underground Man can only define himself through negation—by what he is not, by what he refuses, and by the void he inhabits. Conversely, Tamburlaine is kataphatic or ecstatic; he is a presence that overflows, defining himself through the excess of his being and the fullness of his conquests.

Marlowe’s blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) is expansive and architectural. It is characterized by moving towards an ever ascending horizon. It evokes vertigo. You feel the scale of the world expanding until the human figure becomes a giant. The iambic pentameter acts as a heartbeat that refuses to cease like a stream that continues to flow. Naturally, as befits the Renaissance, its music is Italian. It creates a sense of inevitability—the listener is carried away by the sheer sonic force of the verse.

Dostoevsky’s prose, loops and self-interrupts. It mimics recursive thought. It is psychologically modern. Though Dostoevsky was inspired much by Cervantes, Gogol, and other Russian writers, he practically invents his prose, since its more than style but permits him the ability to stand removed as the author from his character. His works are polyphonic. There is Dostoevsky, and there is the narrator, and yet the narrator is also unreliable, and continuously challenging and refuting himself. The narrator's "apophatic" style is his primary tool for maintaining freedom. His being is defined not by what he is, but by his refusal to be anything at all. By saying what he is not, he ensures he can never be fully captured or explained by the reader.

The Underground Man’s world is closed, while Tamburlaine’s is open. This creates a fundamental existential divide between a Being of Negation and a Being of Presence. Dostoevsky anticipates modern neurosis. Marlowe represents pre-modern audacity. Tamburlaine declares rather than introspects. The Underground Man disintegrates under consciousness.

While both characters are defined by a refusal to submit to the natural order, their motivations and the eventual destination of their energy exist at opposite ends of the human spectrum. Ultimately, Dostoevsky’s work creates an ontology of isolation, while Marlowe’s creates an ontology of abundance. This comparison reveals a profound psychological pivot: the transition from ecstatic animosity to implosive animosity.

In both relationships, a woman enters the protagonist's sphere of influence as a potential catalyst for change, but the results are diametrically opposed based on the polarity of the man's animosity.

In Notes from Underground, the encounter with the prostitute Liza is the narrator's one true chance at human connection. However, because his animosity is implosive, he cannot accept her genuine pity. To him, her soul is a mirror that reflects his own wretchedness. Conversely, Tamburlaine, instead of crushing her to feel powerful, Tamburlaine elevates her to prove his own divinity. He does not seek to break her; he seeks to crown her in the highest honours of poetry and politics. Where the Underground Man sees Liza’s empathy as a threat to his autonomy, Tamburlaine sees Zenocrate’s beauty as the only mirror worthy of his glory. She magnifies him and he sees their pairing as Zeus and Hera. Her presence doesn't expose his weakness; it fuels his ungovernable passion.

He achieves her affections not through strength, but through a devastating, cynical monologue designed to crush her spirit. When she eventually responds with love and a desire to save him, he is humiliated by her moral superiority. He reacts with a spiteful, petty cruelty—offering her money as if to re-establish her status and his dominance—precisely because he cannot bear the light she brings into his basement. His relationship with Liza is the ultimate expression of resentment: he destroys the thing he needs most because its beauty exposes his own deformity. A slight digression: Taxi Driver was very much inspired by Notes from Underground. People often call it a film about loneliness. I’ve never agreed with that. I would say both Notes and Taxi are about an implosive resentment. In both, their protagonist is full of spite and disdain towards the world. It overwhelms these characters to the point of acid of resentment making them unable to manage the relationships and circumstances of their life. Yet they refuse the systems they find themselves in because of this internal superiority that creates external disdain.

These three texts represent the decisive shift for the human spirit when it encounters the friction of existence. A spectrum of one end, the Pathology of the Ego (Dostoevsky), and on the other, the Apotheosis of the Will (Marlowe), with Milton and Voltaire in the middle. Renaissance Humanism: Man believes expansion solves displacement. Modern Existentialism: Man feels displaced by systems and turns inward. By viewing these as polar opposites, we can see how the same raw experience of existence—suffering and animosity—can either be a stimulant or stagnation.

All three driven by, exalted by, and sabotaged by pride. Between them lies not contradiction but polarity—two extreme articulations of freedom under pressure. A genealogy of the will from Renaissance theatre to modern psychological fracture.

CLOSING

The history of the literary rebel is not merely a chronicle of shifting aesthetic tastes, but a profound ontological record of the human spirit’s contraction under the pressure of existence. By tracing a genealogy from Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587) through John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), we witness a progressive interiorisation of freedom. This movement represents a transition from the "Apotheosis of the Will" to the "Pathology of the Ego," as the arena of rebellion shrinks from the expansive cosmos to the meditative conscience, and finally, to the claustrophobic cellar.

In Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, we encounter the Renaissance hero at "full voltage". Tamburlaine is an "avatar of pure energy" who views the world not as a fixed moral hierarchy, but as a "theatre of the will" to be rearranged by the force of his own virtù. Drawing upon the "Titanomachy"—the Greek myth of Zeus usurping the throne of Saturn—Marlowe presents a world where the rebel succeeds The decisive shift toward modernity occurs in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Where Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is a Titanomachy won, Milton’s epic is a Titanomachy where the rebel fails. Consequently, the drama of rebellion is forced to migrate inward. Milton relocates metaphysics inside the self; Hell is no longer primarily a place of physical fire, but a mental condition. When Satan declares that "the mind is its own place," he marks the birth of "interior sovereignty". The world thins, psychology thickens, and the arena of struggle contracts from the battlefield to the conscience. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the trajectory of rebellion reaches its most "implosive" extreme against the rational determinism of "2+2=4". His animosity is just as anti-creative as the rational utopian world he disdains. He asserts his freedom through "self-sabotage," acting against his own rational self-interest simply to prove he is not a "predictable machine". While Tamburlaine’s soul is a "general" conquering the world, the Underground Man’s soul is a "prisoner" of its own consciousness. Underground Man is intoxicating because he feels intellectually superior in his suffering. Tamburlaine lets intensity erupt into action.

All three characters are fuelled by a similar animosity and audacity in the face of constraint, yet they represent polar opposite responses. The movement from Marlowe to Milton to Dostoevsky reveals a progressive interiorisation of the human spirit. Tamburlaine is the architect of his own apotheosis, while the Underground Man is the victim of his own consciousness. we see the decisive shift of the modern soul: the transition from a world that must be faced to a world that must be interpreted—or simply refuted.

The degree of freedom experienced, the nature of the rebel, was in both cases due to the relationship towards suffering. The suffering was caused by the presentation of constraint within their circumstances. Whilst both characters are full of the same animosity, sense of superiority, and audacity, these books are two completely opposing responses to that, in Marlowe’s, suffering is a stimulant to action, in Dostoevsky’s suffering is a stimulant to resentment. Both characters defied circumstance, but Marlowe’s was the freer. Tamburlaine could create circumstance at every moment he was obstructed by it. Dostoevsky’s man implodes by that resistance.  One resists determinism through assertion; another resists determinism through interpretation; and the other through negation. By placing the Underground Man and Tamburlaine side-by-side, see we the polarities of human suffering: one where the self is a general and one where the self is a prisoner. The kataphatic vs the apophatic; the ecstatic vs the existential.

Tamburlaine moves through the world with the clarity of one who reads human nature as a fixed terrain rather than a winding labyrinth. He rebels against limitation. His confidence arises from a perception of reality as timeless, patterned, and navigable—a world where ambition, fear, pride, and desire follow rhythms able to be intelligibly anticipated. From this clarity emerges a Renaissance Prudence: the mastery of sees the structures and systems of the world as mere stagecraft. To the Marlovian will, structure is decoration, not destiny. He is the General who triumphs over confusion by being the only one with the clarity to see that the throne is vacant for whoever has the audacity to take it. This Marlovian vision produces a myth of the will grounded in a structuralist and realist's intelligence: a social and political structure that can be anticipated, entered, and reshaped through virtù. Tamburlaine’s victories flow from perception before they become action; he prevails because he refuses to accept the structures of his moment as an absolute constraint. His will expands outward because his sight has already demystified and anticipated the obstacles in its path.

This is inversed through Milton. Milton's rebel cannot defeat the structure he lives in, so he moves the rebellion into a reversal of values. ​Since he cannot reshape the external terrain, he reshapes the meaning of his defeat. As civilisation grows more intricate, the same animosity and audacity migrate inward, following a fundamental collapse of this confidence. Structures accumulate density and systems are perceived as immovable because they can be rationally explained, until the human mind begins to mistake the temporary arrangements of society for the inescapable laws of nature. The 'Stone Wall' of 18th-century rationalism and 19th-century determinism presents itself as a totality that cannot be dismantled, only endured. Consequently, psychology thickens, interpretation multiplies, and the will—once the architect of empires—becomes the prisoner of its own complexity. The will continues to seek expansion, but it now encounters its objects through reflection rather than movement. It no longer seeks to shatter the system; it seeks to prove its existence despite the system. From this transformation emerges a new, desperate form of rebellion—one that works through rumination and interior resistance, mistaking a labyrinthine mind for a liberated one.

​From this inward turn arises the modern condition: a freedom that lives through consciousness, a rebellion that expresses itself through the '2+2=5' of the spiteful intellect. The will does not vanish, but it becomes pathologised. Its field of action contracts into the structures of thought, memory, and selfhood, where identity becomes its only available material. If Paradise Lost is an inversed Titanomachy, then the Underground Man is a failed Tamburlaine. He asserts his freedom through negation. He proves he is free only by acting against his own self-interest. This genealogy traces a continuous metamorphosis of agency freedom, through redirected animosity and audacity. Across this movement, the will remains constant in its fire, but its form evolves from the General who commands reality to the Prisoner who can only refute it. [POSTSCRIPT]

The contemporary diagnosis becomes clear as the genealogy enters the twenty-first century. If the transition from Marlowe to Dostoevsky traced a history of progressive interiorisation, the present era marks the systematic capture of that interiority. We now live within the logic of the Algorithm—the ultimate Structure—an intelligence that anticipates, influences, and steers the inner life from within itself. Thought, desire, identity, and attention are no longer merely formed inwardly; they are shaped through continuous external modulation. Consciousness becomes a managed environment, and interiority becomes a governed space.

In this landscape, the walls are constructed from data, convenience, optimisation, and curated identity. Animosity and audacity are performed within digital architectures that simulate rebellion while leaving the real terrain of power untouched. Expression replaces transformation. Performance replaces movement. Self-making replaces world-making. The human will continues to generate intensity, but its energy circulates inside closed systems designed to absorb, translate, and redirect it. The physical, political, and social landscape becomes background, while identity becomes the primary site of action on a landscape of Algorithmic Systems.

The only true rebellion remaining is to stop being Psychological or Providential and return to a Baroque integration of both simultaneously. To not be fooled by the simulated intertextual digital culture of the screen, and a return to the structural clarity that looks at the modern systems seeing only a thin curtain of stagecraft, with the audacity to step through outside it, beyond it, into the creative Prudence of virtù.