The Classic 1864 Novella

Notes from the Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Parts 1 and 2

Complete Classics

Notes from Underground, also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel.[citation needed] It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done'. The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow", and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator.

It consists of an introduction, three main sections and a conclusion. (i) The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings will be further developed. Chapters two, three and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; chapters five and six with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious "inertia"-inaction;  chapters seven through nine with theories of reason and logic; (c) the last two chapters are a summary and a transition into Part 2.

War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history.