The North American Dostoevsky Society stands with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here.
Today, Anna Tropnikova sat down with the creators of The Scoundrel and the Choreographer – Suna Erdim, Mea Johnson, Tianhui Lai, and Ezra Rudensky – to discuss their process, the Underground Man, George Balanchine, and reading Dostoevsky today.
The short film was born of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program at Oberlin College and submitted as an entry to the Second International Dostoevsky Society Video Competition.
AT: Tell us a little bit about your background. What first drew you to the passage about the crystal palace in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground?
SE: Prior to starting work on the film, we had all read (or reread) Notes from Underground for a class we shared together last spring, and this particular passage was a major reason we went on discussing the novella amongst ourselves for many months to follow. We saw the Underground Man’s rejection of the crystal palace as an articulation of the instinct to act contrarily to one’s own best interest and, by the same token, a rebellion against perfection. While these large-scale projects of late nineteenth-century industrial development declared themselves premier symbols of humanism and progress, for the Underground Man they embody the opposite: an imposing sense of finality and, by extension, death and decay. Acting against oneself thereby becomes a way of preserving oneself against this finality. This feeling was not too hard for us to identify with—after all, is it not common and extraordinarily human to experience a kind of disdain, almost a resentment, for so-called “perfect” things?
MJ: The symbol of the crystal palace is interesting as an examination of the concept of a final, “perfect,” immutable state of existence. I disagree, though, with the mischaracterization of rationality and the desire for improvement as a dangerous belief in some impossible end goal of perfection; rather, a continual process of improvement is the solution to avoiding despondency and inaction. I would be interested in seeing a response to this work focusing on the “finality” aspect, reinterpreting the crystal palace as representative of the stagnation and apathy caused by lack of engagement in this process of change.
TL: The comparison between perfection/completion and death was deeply intriguing to me when I first read the work. And the idea of making decisions that are not the logically better ones, the idea of rejecting the rationally better choices just to prove one’s own will, interests me for how it may relate to our self-destructive tendencies. To the Underground Man, mathematical certainty is a stone wall that robs humans of their freedom. As he is stuck in this paradox of inaction, he is neither perfect nor dead, nor is he free, and free will is his most essential need.
AT: How did you first hear of the International Dostoevsky Society video essay contest? Did you have specific adaptations of Dostoevsky in mind, or is the world of adaptation a new terrain?
MJ: I was introduced to this contest (and Dostoevsky generally) by Suna. I think we all considered it a fantastical idea at first, and a film contest certainly wasn’t something I would have independently thought of participating in. I have an amateur interest in cinematic techniques and video editing, but have never been part of a serious project. In hindsight, we would change a lot, but it was lovely to have had the opportunity to shape the atmosphere and visual style of an actual short film.
TL: Like Mea, I was introduced to this contest by Suna. I had at one point an idea to do the confession scene between Rodion and Sonya, but I think the Underground Man ended up being a way better idea; the script is simply too inspired. This was also my first time acting, but the character is so well written, I could feel a connection in this embodiment the first time we did a dramatic reading of the script. I enjoyed playing as the Scoundrel, and soon found that the act of acting feels like playing with boundaries of identity. We’re all amateurs on the entire terrain, and the creative process took a lot of passion, mutual trust, and consistency.
SE: I stumbled across Bloggers Karamazov a couple of years ago and started keeping its announcements of video and essay contests on my radar ever since. When I saw the call for submissions to the Second IDS Video Competition, I wanted to see if we could come up with something to send in. It was a creative experiment to get us through some of the colder and slower months of the semester—we certainly weren’t concerned with perfection, and weren’t even sure we were going to have a final product, since we are all very new to filmmaking. Content-wise, we tested out a couple of ideas, but the Underground Man proved to be a figure we couldn’t escape. He never stopped weaving his way into our post-Russian class café discussions: we were always tying his inner monologues to our own daily experiences, so we wanted to try a hand at adapting his character for the camera.
AT: Now let’s talk specifics. You did a marvelous job finding an edifice behind you that (especially in black and white) seemed to visually evoke a palace, so that as we get introduced to the relevant quote from Notes from Underground we simultaneously start thinking of many other great palaces that are the imposing edifices of modernity: besides the Crystal Palace itself in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, which Dostoevsky is clearly alluding to, I am also thinking of the Palace of Fine Arts in the other Hyde Park for the Chicago World’s Fair. Walk us through how you conceived this piece around this quote. How does the idea of “rational man” refract, so to speak, in the materials you’ve used for this piece—in Dostoevsky’s novel, in the setting of Manhattan, in Balanchine’s alluded to choreography of Le Palais de Crystal?
SE: I certainly wanted to evoke parallels between Scoundrel’s descriptions of stylistic elements in the Choreographer’s performance and the looming backdrop of the city itself. I took inspiration from the qualities of symmetry and virtuosity that Balanchine’s works are known for. He aimed to strip dancing of all abstractions and figurative elements, through the minimalism with which he approached backdrops, costumes, titles, and librettos. Such choices may have challenged the structures and qualities of a classical ballet, but they also isolated his clear-cut conception of beauty—long-limbed silhouettes with stark, exaggerated lines—and situated it as the bare crux of the performance. What emerges is an intriguing metaphor for a non-malleable, crystal palace kind of beauty, also reflected by the cities that were home to these ‘palaces’ of performing arts, be it Petersburg and its Mariinsky or Manhattan and its Metropolitan. Notes from Underground is itself a critical discourse on the emergence of the metropolis as an embodiment of human rationality, achievement, and productivity, an effort to organize, categorize, and ‘choreograph’ bodies in its own right.
AT: Another interesting part that makes this performance have an air of realism – I am sure you are aware of Balanchine’s chilly reception when his troupe first toured in Berlin and Paris in 1924. Did you have a particular critic in mind, or was the Scoundrel entirely the Underground Man personified in the form of a neurotic (ex-?)Soviet critic?
SE: Yes, there is definitely overlap here! As is the case with many groundbreaking creative figures, Balanchine faced criticism from both artistically liberal and conservative standpoints. There were those who denounced him out of nostalgia for a more traditional style, finding his minimalism too subversively and oppressively modern; others complained his choreography was too mechanical, stripped down, and wound up in itself, not free or open enough. The Scoundrel’s ideological attacks on the Balanchinian choreographer, interestingly, could have intersected with either side of these real-life critiques.
Due to the stylistic elements he embraces, the Choreographer also epitomizes the Man of Action (recall the well-known Balanchine slogan, “don’t think, dear, do!”)—an individual through whom the Underground Man, in his visions of confrontation, obtains a short-lived sense of catharsis and giddiness. The fade to black at the end of their conversation, after which the start of the same scene repeats itself again and the Scoundrel does not approach the Choreographer at all, is meant to articulate that it was an imagined interaction all along. The Man of Action remains unchallenged in reality, and not even in his own fantasy can his turbulent counterpart, the Man of Acute Consciousness, manage to overcome him.
AT: Let’s talk about the agile camera during this performance. How did you conceive of your camerawork as you narrated this story?
ER: The movement of the camera reflects the flow of conversation and the movement of vocal energy between the characters. This gives agency, activity, and potential volatility to the ideas each character puts forth. We hope this has reflected a Dostoevskiian polyphonic; ideas become agents, able to dynamically engage in the “real” world.
MJ: The editing choices were intended to emulate design elements in films contemporary with our setting. The typeface and overall design of the intro title card, the intertitle with the quote, and the credits took inspiration from classic American film noir, as did the minimal visual background of the scene and the harsh contrast created by our stark lighting and black and white color grading. In addition to its congruence with the time period and setting, the genre is also associated with atypical narrative structures, post-war alienation and societal anxiety, cynical, morally ambiguous characters, and the arbitrary cruelty of fate—all of which resonate with our film’s themes.
Anna Tropnikova is a Slavic Languages and Literatures and Film and Media Studies PhD Candidate at Yale University. Her historiographical dissertation targets Russo-Japanese correspondence in film and its implications for Slavic cinema. She has published in The Russian Review, in Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in several edited volumes on contemporary cinema, most recently in Digital Combat: Re/Framing Eastern European and Ukrainian Cinema (2026), edited by Yuri Leving.
Suna Erdim is an incoming junior Comparative Literature student at Oberlin College with prospective minors in Russian and French. She works as a Writing Associate and as Co-Editor-in-Chief of The Plum Creek Review, Oberlin’s oldest literary magazine. Additionally, she is pursuing a number of creative projects which place Russian literature in dialogue with the performing arts, including a novel-length fiction manuscript and a play. She can also be found playing tennis, figure skating, dancing, practicing the violin, or making illustrations of literary characters as well as her own.
Mea Johnson is a newly initiated Russian literature fan and an incoming junior at Oberlin College with a prospective double major in Sociology and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She works as a sociology research assistant. She independently studies Russian (and hopefully soon, Italian) in her limited free time, and informally helps others with creative projects and revising their writing.
Tianhui Lai is an incoming PhD student in Cognitive Psychology at University of Pittsburgh and an Oberlin alumna. She has lived a decent amount of past lives as a research assistant, language teacher, union organizer, restaurant worker, and scientific editor in China where she’s from. She spent the past year in Oberlin pursuing meaning in existentialist literature and knowledge in Russian language in an attempt to escape from life’s little jest. She finds embodiment and aliveness in singing, and since this project, acting.
Ezra Rudensky is an incoming junior at Oberlin College, where they major in Politics with prospective minors in Russian and Art History. They serve as the Media and Design Coordinator of Oberlin’s Youth Democratic Socialists, columnist at the Oberlin Review, and head cook in the student cooperative system. They are currently interning for a union and have been halfway through Brothers Karamazov for almost 11 months.