Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground (1864) is the short, ferocious novella that opens Dostoyevsky's mature period and inaugurates one of the central figures of modern literature: the underground man, the spiteful, paralysingly self-conscious, articulate failure who narrates the book in the first person.

The book is in two parts. Underground is a sustained philosophical monologue against the rationalist optimism of the Russian radicals of the 1860s — the belief that human beings, properly enlightened, will choose their own rational self-interest. The underground man insists that they will, against any amount of evidence, choose their own free will over their rational interest, even to the point of self-destruction. Apropos of the Wet Snow illustrates the point through three episodes from the narrator's earlier life.

The book has been read for a century and a half as one of the founding documents of modern existentialism and the modern novel of consciousness. This edition reproduces Constance Garnett's classic English translation.