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Notes from UndergroundFyodor Dostoevsky

On the coverEvening on Karl Johan, Edvard Munch, 1892

Notes from Underground

1864 · Russia · Novella · ~140 pages

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.

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Why read it

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.

Themes
SettingSt. Petersburg, 1860s

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.

About the author

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) wrote after prison and exile had broken and remade him. This brief, furious book opened the late great phase that would produce Crime and Punishment and the novels beyond it.