Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground is a novella by the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 1864 in two parts, narrated by an unnamed, embittered former civil servant living in isolation in St. Petersburg who addresses the reader directly in a long, self-contradicting monologue attacking the rationalist, utopian philosophy of enlightened self-interest fashionable among Russian radical thinkers of the period. The novella's first part sets out the underground man's philosophical assault on the idea that human beings will always rationally act in their own best interest, insisting instead that people will choose suffering, spite and self-destruction simply to assert their free will against any system, however rational, that claims to determine their behavior. The second part narrates an earlier episode from the underground man's life, his disastrous attempt to reconnect with former schoolmates and his cruel treatment of a young prostitute, Liza, who offers him genuine connection that his own pride and self-loathing make him incapable of accepting. Widely regarded as a founding text of existentialist literature and a direct influence on later writers including Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre, Notes from Underground is considered one of the first true psychological novels for its unreliable, self-lacerating narrator.