GajimaruClassics.
Notes from UndergroundOn the coverEvening on Karl Johan, Edvard Munch, 1892
A bitter, brilliant, unnamed retired clerk addresses us from his cramped room beneath the city, confessing, contradicting, and daring us to look away. A short, savage monologue widely called the first existentialist novel.
Character notes and context for the chapter you’ve read.
A short, electrifying plunge into a mind at war with itself, spite, pride, and the terror of freedom laid bare. The seed of the modern novel and of a century of philosophy, in under two hundred pages.
St. Petersburg in the 1860s, abuzz with imported theories that reason and science would soon perfect humankind. The underground man is the howl those theories never accounted for.