Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья; also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in the journal Epoch in 1864. It is a first-person narrative in the form of a "confession": the work was originally announced by Dostoevsky in Epoch under the title "A Confession". The novella presents itself as an excerpt from the 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. Although the first part of the novella has the form of a monologue, the narrator's form of address to his reader is acutely dialogized. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, in the Underground Man's confession "there is literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word". The Underground Man's every word anticipates the words of an other, with whom he enters into an obsessive internal polemic. The Underground Man attacks contemporary Russian philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? More generally, the work can be viewed as an attack on and rebellion against determinism: the idea that everything, including the human personality and will, can be reduced to the laws of nature, science and mathematics. The novella is divided into two parts. The title of the first part—"Underground"—is itself given a footnoted introduction by Dostoevsky in which the character of the 'author' of the Notes and the nature of the 'excerpts' are discussed. The first part of Notes from Underground has eleven sections: Section I propounds a number of riddles whose meanings are further developed as the narration continues. Sections 2, 3, & 4 deal with suffering and the irrational pleasure of suffering. Sections 5 & 6 discuss the moral and intellectual fluctuation that the narrator feels along with his conscious insecurities regarding "inertia"—inaction.

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Related concepts (3)

Russian nihilist movement

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