Reading Order
Notes from Underground Reading Order
Notes from Underground (1864) by Fyodor Dostoevsky is the short work that ushered in his great mature period and that later critics identified as the founding text of literary existentialism — a bitter, self-lacerating monologue from an unnamed civil servant in St. Petersburg who has retired from public life and broods obsessively on his own inadequacy, the nature of free will, and his contempt for the rational optimism of the progressive thought of his time. The novella is in two parts: the first, 'Underground,' is a sustained philosophical argument against the utilitarian and rationalist ideas of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's influential novel What Is to Be Done? — Dostoevsky's Underground Man insists that human beings will deliberately act against their own interest simply to prove their freedom from rational calculation. The second part, 'Apropos of the Wet Snow,' dramatizes that argument through the Underground Man's humiliations with officers, schoolfellows, and the prostitute Liza.
Where to start
Notes from Underground (1864) — the complete novella; no prequel required. Available in multiple translations: Pevear and Volokhonsky is the most widely recommended; the Michael Katz translation is excellent. A single volume (under 100 pages) and the ideal introduction to Dostoevsky before tackling the major novels
Complete Notes from Underground Book List
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Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky·1864
Notes from Underground — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Notes from Underground about?
Notes from Underground is a short novella (under 100 pages) structured as a first-person monologue from an unnamed 'Underground Man' — a retired civil servant in St. Petersburg who has retreated from public life and who delivers a sustained, bitter, self-aware meditation on his own inadequacy, his paradoxical will, and his hatred of the progressive rationalism of his time. The first part is philosophical: the Underground Man argues that human beings will deliberately act against rational self-interest just to prove that they are free from the 'laws of nature' and rational calculation — that the ability to act irrationally is itself the proof of human freedom. The second part narrates specific humiliations: his obsessive response to a slight from an officer, his disastrous attempt to join a dinner party, and his complex, damaging encounter with a young prostitute named Liza, who genuinely tries to connect with him and whom he drives away.
Why is Notes from Underground considered the first existentialist novel?
Notes from Underground is often identified as the founding text of literary existentialism because of its Underground Man's insistence on individual freedom and his resistance to the deterministic and rationalist frameworks of his time. The Underground Man predates Sartre and Camus by nearly a century but anticipates their central arguments: that human freedom is irreducible to rational calculation, that consciousness is a curse as well as a gift ('too much consciousness is a disease'), and that the attempt to reduce human beings to calculating machines produces only rebellion and suffering. Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground as an explicit refutation of Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (1863), which argued that human beings, properly educated, will naturally pursue their rational self-interest. The Underground Man's entire first section is directed against this argument. Sartre and Camus both acknowledged Dostoevsky as a precursor; Kafka's work is unthinkable without Notes from Underground.
How does Notes from Underground relate to Dostoevsky's major novels?
Notes from Underground is the work in which Dostoevsky found his mature voice and his central subject — the paradoxical consciousness that knows its own irrationality and cannot escape it. The Underground Man is the psychological predecessor to all of Dostoevsky's subsequent great characters: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment takes the Underground Man's theory of the exceptional individual and attempts to act on it; Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov takes the Underground Man's atheism and gives it its fullest philosophical formulation; Myshkin in The Idiot is a kind of anti-Underground Man — a consciousness so purified of bitterness that it is destroyed by the world. Notes from Underground is by far the shortest introduction to the Dostoevskian worldview and the ideal starting point before the major novels.
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