A letter to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, written in full knowledge that the post is bad.
Dear Fyodor Mikhailovich,
I have just finished your little book again. The third time in thirty years. The first time I was twenty-two and living in a rented room in Portland and I thought your underground man was me — the self-loathing, the paralysis, the sick pleasure in being too smart to participate in the world the other people were participating in. I was wrong. I was not him. I wanted to be him. He is cleverer than I was and more ruined than I was and I had not yet done the things that would earn me a seat at his table.
The second time I was thirty-eight, in Sefrou, sick with something that turned out to be giardia, reading by lamplight because the power had gone. I thought your underground man was a type — the nineteenth-century Russian civil servant whose humiliations happened to him in a particular grade of uniform, and whose grievances required a particular grade of samovar, and whose relevance to my own century was mostly ornamental. I was wrong about that too. I missed the argument.
This third time, I understand what you were doing. You were not writing a portrait. You were writing a refutation.
The underground man exists, in your pages, to answer Chernyshevsky. To answer the rational egoists. To answer the whole 1860s Russian intelligentsia who believed that if you only explained to a man what was in his rational self-interest, he would do it. You gave them a man who knew — precisely, cuttingly, with a professor’s accuracy — what his rational self-interest was, and who chose, out of spite, not to do it. You gave them a man who would rather suffer than be correct. You gave them a man who would rather ruin the evening with Liza than be saved by her. You gave them a man who pulled the lever that destroyed him because the lever was the only thing in the room he had been given to pull.
And you were right. A hundred and sixty years later, your underground man is the explanatory frame for almost everything I read in the news. For the vote against one’s interest. For the slow march into the algorithmic humiliation. For the man who burns his own house down because the alternative is admitting that the house was never going to be his. You saw the twentieth century. You saw the twenty-first. You saw us.
I want to tell you that I have also, in my life, pulled the lever that destroyed me because it was the only thing in the room I had been given to pull. I will not itemize. You would recognize the shape. You would not be kind about it.
One small thing. The Liza chapter. On my first reading, I thought you were cruel to her. On my second reading, I thought you were cruel to him. On this reading, I see that you were only cruel to the reader. You let her arrive at his filthy apartment with her gentleness and her willingness and then you made us watch him fail her. Not because he does not love her. Because he does love her, and loving her would require him to put down the weapon he has spent his life sharpening, and he cannot put it down, and so he turns the weapon on her and drives her out into the Petersburg snow. Nothing in twentieth-century American literature is crueler than that scene. I have thought about it for twenty years.
Fyodor Mikhailovich. You died in 1881. You are out of reach of my compliments and my complaints. I will only say that your little book is not little. It is the small end of the long telescope through which the rest of your novels were written, and the century that followed you, and maybe the one I am currently living in, which has not yet produced your equal.
With gratitude, and the specific unease you earned —
CD Damitio
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
Readers and fans of Notes from Underground will really enjoy The Ghosts of Intimacy — my experimental novella about a man returning home to face the women he has harmed. Not an underground man. A man trying, very late, to come aboveground. Written in fractured time and dream logic. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
