Fedor Dostoevskij
Memorie dal Sottosuolo

Imagine going to the psychologist, or confessing to a friend or to yourself the most unconfessable secrets and memories of your consciousness, from the depths of your mind. Those kinds of things – experiences lived or imagined, fantasies realized or left unrealized, base actions also accomplished or imagined, anxieties and uncomfortable thoughts – that make each of us shudder inside at the mere thought or memory, diverting – with all the strength we have – our minds from them. That lived experience which is the most secret and hidden part of our existence.
Well, this is the sensation you feel – from the very first written words – when reading "Notes from Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The book by the Russian writer – published in 1865 – is a narrative written in the form of a monologue-confession in which the author brings to the surface a terrible and distressing universe, those “notes from underground” that try to eclipse themselves.
The novel-story inflicts a wound on the reader, a gash, within their own soul. It provokes – even without identifying with the episodes that happen to the protagonist of the book – an anguish and a sense of discomfort and frustration that often tempts one to interrupt the reading, which – despite this – continues, caught in a sort of unconscious catharsis.
Dostoevsky unravels his “confession” through the protagonist’s relationship with his work that he hates, with former schoolmates whom he hates and by whom he is hated, with a prostitute who represents – within the novel – the simulacrum of perdition and the unhappiness of the human soul. Work, former classmates, and prostitute are only a narrative “pretext,” as the absolute protagonist of the tale and of the narrator's homodiegetic events is “the surfacing from the underground.”
Emblematic are the words spoken by the protagonist, midway through the book, where he presents his “underground,” explaining the reasons why it remained on the “bottom” for so long and why now it is about to “surface”: in the memories of any man, there are things he does not reveal to everyone, but perhaps only to friends. There are also those that he does not reveal even to friends, but perhaps only to himself, and even then under the seal of secrecy. And finally, there are things that a man is afraid to reveal even to himself.
With "Notes from Underground," Dostoevsky puts on paper, verbalizes, the fears and anxieties of the individual at the end of the 19th century – which are then the same as those of the contemporary individual – in the face of secularization processes.
With his narrative, Dostoevsky also launches a harsh attack on Enlightenment philosophy and Positivist science, which – with the rationality and scientific-empirical accuracy of their doctrines – were unable to provide answers and explanations in the face of the unspeakable and the irrationality of the human psyche. But by then, one was already in the midst of modernity. Within thirty years, Freud with his theories on Psychoanalysis and Einstein with the Theory of Relativity would appear; Dostoevsky, with his literature, anticipated such scientific and philosophical revolutions.