Notes from Underground

“I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”

So begins the most famous opening in Russian literature, and the beginning of existentialism itself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella is a howl from the basement of the human soul, a confession by a man who has retired from the world, who hates everyone including himself, and who cannot stop telling us why.

The Underground Man is a former civil servant in St. Petersburg, aged forty, who has withdrawn into a squalid apartment. He is bitter, intelligent, and utterly paralyzed by his own self-awareness. He knows that he is spiteful, but he cannot stop being spiteful. He knows that he is ridiculous, but he cannot stop performing his ridiculousness. In the first part of the novella, he attacks every ideology of progress, reason, and human goodness. In the second part, he narrates a series of humiliations: a dinner with old schoolmates who despise him, a visit to a brothel, a failed attempt at love. He ends exactly where he began—alone, in the underground, still talking.

This is Dostoevsky at his most brilliant and uncomfortable: a novel about the irrationality of the human heart, the failure of utopian thinking, and the perverse pleasure of saying "no" to everything. Notes from Underground is the ground zero of modern literature—and it has never stopped shocking.

• Published in 1864, widely considered the first existentialist novel

• A direct attack on Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, a utopian socialist novel that argued for rational self-interest

• Influenced Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, and nearly every major writer of the twentieth century

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

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A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears—or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the most honest people are the ones who admit they are lying.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world literature. Born in Moscow, the second of seven children, he was the son of a military doctor who was murdered by his own serfs. Dostoevsky studied engineering but turned to writing. In 1849, he was arrested for his involvement in a progressive literary circle, sentenced to death, and subjected to a mock execution—the trauma of which shaped his entire worldview. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by exile. Notes from Underground was written immediately after his return to St. Petersburg, and it marks the turning point from his earlier, more conventional fiction to the great novels of his mature period. The novella is a direct polemic against the rational egoism of the 1860s radicals. Dostoevsky's Underground Man is the anti-hero of modernity: hyperconscious, impotent, and defiantly irrational. His other major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). He died of a pulmonary hemorrhage in 1881 and is buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery in St. Petersburg.