Book Bearings
Notes from the Underground
- 132 pages · about 2 hours
- First published 1864
- 837 editions
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1 About this book
Notes from Underground is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1864. Its narrator, a bitter and isolated retired civil servant living in Saint Petersburg, never gives his name. The first part is his monologue, addressed to imagined listeners with whom he argues constantly, attacking the fashionable belief that human beings are rational and that their behavior can be reduced to laws of nature and calculation. In the second part he recalls episodes from his younger days, in which his pride and spite lead him into one humiliation after another.
- Political
- Classics
- Political fiction
- Philosophy
- Officials and employees
- Employees
- Russia (federation)
- Slavic philology
2 What to expect
A short, abrasive novel in two parts: first a retired clerk's monologue against reason, progress and himself, then his memories of humiliations he largely brought on himself. The narrator is spiteful, clever, self-aware and unreliable, and the book is as much philosophy as story, often called a forerunner of existentialism. The first half is dense argument and the second painful comedy, and it is uncomfortable by design.
Good for readers who want: Russian literature, a philosophical antihero, and a short, provocative read.
3 About Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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