Notes from Underground
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First published in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground gives voice to one of literature’s most unsettling narrators: a bitter, isolated former civil servant living in St Petersburg, who turns his resentment against society into a relentless examination of his own consciousness. Divided between a series of philosophical reflections and a collection of humiliating personal recollections, the novella follows the Underground Man as he challenges the rational optimism of his age, insisting that human beings will sometimes choose suffering, contradiction and self-destruction simply to preserve their freedom. His encounters with former acquaintances and, most painfully, with a young woman named Liza expose the distance between his intellectual defiance and his desperate longing for human connection.
Written in the shadow of nineteenth-century debates about reason, progress and human nature, Notes from Underground is a foundational work of psychological fiction and a crucial precursor to existentialism. Dostoevsky dismantles the comforting belief that people can be understood as rational creatures whose desires are easily calculated, anticipating questions that would later shape the work of Nietzsche, Kafka and Sartre. Caustic, intimate and often darkly comic, the novella marks a turning point in Dostoevsky’s career, introducing the fractured consciousness and moral ambiguity that would reach their fullest expression in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
From the book
“I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
On Notes from Underground
“No other text by Dostoevsky has exerted more influence on twentieth-century thought or technique.”
— George Steiner, literary critic