Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground is widely recognized as the first work of existentialist fiction, a corrosive monologue in which a bitter, isolated narrator rebels against the rationalist utopianism of his age. Fyodor Dostoevsky created in the Underground Man a figure who insists on the irreducible freedom and irrationality of human consciousness, even at the cost of his own happiness and sanity. The novella laid the foundation for modernist fiction and existentialist philosophy alike.

Issued in 1864 as a direct attack on the rationalist optimism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, Notes from Underground established the template for a literary tradition that would include Kafka, Camus, and Sartre. Its portrayal of alienation, spite, and the perverse refusal to conform to rational self-interest remains startlingly contemporary and stands as a core text in the study of modern literature.