Notes from the Underground

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Isolated from society in a tenement basement in St. Petersburg, a malicious former civil servant vents his resentments. In the rambling notes that follow, we are exposed to the inner turmoil of the Underground Man, who represents the voice of his generation. An emotional, paranoid knot of contradictions, the spiteful narrator is also desperate to join a society he loathes, if only to prove his superiority to it.

One of the most revolutionary of Dostoyevsky’s novels, Notes from Underground was first published in 1864. Considered as one of the earliest existentialist novels, it explores the life of an unnamed narrator, an ex-official, who has retreated underground as a protest against the social utopia. Through one of the most celebrated characters in literature, the unnamed narrator, Dostoevsky brings forth the nuanced existence of the society’s moral expectations. In a complete fall out from the society, the novel’s anti-hero, or otherwise known as the underground man, writes a passionate, subversive and self-opposing account that examines the moral and intellectual fluctuations of the narrator and celebrates man’s inherently illogical nature.