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Why it matters

Notes from Underground appeared in the journal Epoch in 1864 as a first-person “confession”; Dostoevsky had announced it under the title “A Confession”. Its speaker is a bitter, isolated, unnamed former civil servant in St. Petersburg who addresses a reader he keeps arguing with, contradicting himself as he goes. The book is still read because that voice is so unsettlingly alive: he defends the right to act against his own interest, and he cannot stop noticing how he comes across. Wikipedia’s entry on Dostoevsky calls the novella one of the first works of existentialist literature, and its unease about reason, comfort and freedom has not gone out of date.

Part 1 is aimed at the determinism and rational egoism of the 1860s, above all Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, whose Crystal Palace stands for a planned, harmonious society. The narrator’s reply is that people may choose what harms them simply to prove they are free; “two times two makes four” is his emblem of the stone wall of natural law. Wikipedia reports that Nietzsche read the book in a French translation and lists Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man among works it has influenced. It also quotes Bakhtin, for whom every word of the confession anticipates an answer from someone else.

Notice how the book changes gear. Part 2, “Apropos of the Wet Snow”, turns the arguments into anecdote: a humiliating farewell dinner for a former schoolmate, then the narrator’s night with a young prostitute, Liza, whom he first lectures and then treats cruelly. The theory of Part 1 is tested against a living person, and he does not come out well. Wikipedia adds that “underground” may be a loose rendering of a word nearer to a crawl space beneath the floor. Content note: contempt, humiliation, cruelty toward a woman, self-destructive impulses; nothing graphic. The Vietnamese text on this site is the site’s own translation made directly from the Russian.

Introduction written for LitMundi with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.