“I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.” With those words a nameless narrator begins to speak to us from a cellar in Petersburg, and modern literature is never quite the same again. He is a retired minor official of forty, poor, embittered, and superbly intelligent, who has withdrawn from the world into a burrow of resentment and now addresses an imagined audience he fully expects to despise him. What he offers is not a story but a confession, and the confession is an assault, upon his readers, upon his age, and above all upon himself.

Written in 1864, Notes from Underground is a short and difficult book that has come to be called the first existentialist novel, and the claim is just. Decades before the word existed, Dostoevsky put into the mouth of his wretched narrator a revolt the twentieth century would spend itself elaborating: the refusal to be a rational machine, the insistence on freedom even at the price of ruin, the conviction that a human being would sooner suffer than be made happy on another’s terms. It is among the most uncomfortable books ever written, and among the most necessary.

What Is Notes from Underground About? The Short Answer

Notes from Underground (1864) is Dostoevsky’s short novel narrated by an unnamed, embittered retired civil servant known only as the Underground Man, and it divides into two unequal parts. The first is a long philosophical monologue, a rant against reason, progress, and the notion that human beings can be organized into happiness. The second, set some years earlier, tells the squalid story of a few days in which the narrator humiliates himself and wounds the one person who offers him tenderness.

There is almost no plot in the ordinary sense. The drama is entirely the exposure of a single mind, and the book’s method is to let that mind incriminate itself, sentence by sentence, until the reader can no longer hold it comfortably at arm’s length. Part One builds the argument; Part Two produces the evidence, the ruined life that argument was fashioned to defend.

The Underground Man: A Portrait of Spite and Hyperconsciousness

The Underground Man is the true subject of the book, and his defining affliction is consciousness itself, raised to a pitch that cripples him. He sees through everything, including his own motives, and the seeing leaves him unable to act, for every impulse is met at once by its own mocking commentary. Where an ordinary man of action moves through the world untroubled by doubt, the Underground Man can only watch himself and sneer, and because he cannot act, he takes his revenge in spite, relishing even his own degradation because it is at least his own and belongs to no one else. “The world may go to pot,” he tells us, “so long as I always get my tea.”

He is petty, vain, and cruel, and Dostoevsky’s genius is to make us recognize him regardless. This is not a monster crawling up from below but the modern self-consciousness itself turned into a sickness, and the unsettling implication of the whole performance is that the patient might be the reader. The more the narrator debases himself, the more clearly we see that his disease is only an extreme case of our own inwardness, and that is the first of the book’s many discomforts.

Against the Crystal Palace: Free Will Versus Reason

Beneath the spite lies a serious argument, and it is the reason the book still matters. Dostoevsky is answering the confident rationalists and utopian socialists of his day, who held that once people were shown their true interests they would naturally set about building a perfect society, a gleaming “Crystal Palace” of reason and universal plenty. The Underground Man will have none of it. A human being, he insists, is not an equation to be solved. He will act against his own advantage for the sheer joy of proving that he can, will choose pain and disorder and even self-destruction rather than be reduced to a predictable mechanism, “a piano key or an organ stop.”

Reason tells us that twice two makes four, and here the narrator plants his flag on the most unpromising ground imaginable. “Twice two makes four is the beginning of death,” he declares, and adds that “twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” The point is not that arithmetic is false but that a person who is nothing more than a solver of equations has already ceased, in some essential way, to be a person. What the Underground Man defends, against the whole apparatus of enlightened progress, is the freedom to be irrational, the last thing about a human being that no system can administer or improve away. That defense is the seed from which existentialism grew.

“Apropos of the Wet Snow”: The Story of a Failure

If Part One is the argument, Part Two is the proof, and it is devastating. Turning back to his younger years, the narrator recounts a sequence of self-inflicted humiliations, each performed as though to demonstrate that his philosophy is not a boast but a life sentence. He nurses a years-long obsession with an army officer who once moved him aside on the street without even noticing him, and plots an absurd revenge that might force the man to acknowledge his existence. He invites himself to a farewell dinner with former schoolmates who despise him, and converts the evening into an agony of wounded vanity.

And then there is Liza. She is a young prostitute to whom, in a sudden fit of eloquence, the narrator preaches a moving vision of a better and more loving life. When she believes him, and later comes to him in trust, seeking the way out he seemed to offer, he meets her hope with deliberate cruelty, because his poverty and shame cannot endure being witnessed by someone who has seen him at his best. The one chance at human connection, at tenderness, at redemption, he destroys with his own hands. In that ruin the philosophy of freedom shows its other face: it is also the self-justification of a man who has made himself unfit to live, and who would rather wound love than be pitied by it.

Notes from Underground and the Birth of Existentialism

Dostoevsky predates the existentialist movement by half a century, and yet he is routinely called its greatest forerunner, and this small book is the clearest reason why. The Underground Man’s revolt against a rational order that would dissolve the self, his insistence on freedom over happiness, his lucid and agonized inwardness, all of it runs straight into the century that came after. Nietzsche revered Dostoevsky; the condemned freedom and estranged consciousness of Sartre’s Nausea are his direct descendants; and Camus wrestled with him for a lifetime, so that the Underground Man’s shadow falls across the whole philosophy of absurdism. The tradition mapped in our guide to the existentialist books to read after Camus circles back, again and again, to this cellar.

His reach does not stop at existentialism. Dostoevsky’s own earlier tale of a clerk unmade by the appearance of his double stands among the ancestors of the kafkaesque tradition as well, so that this one restless imagination feeds two of the darkest currents in modern fiction at once. His single great discovery, made before anyone else had the nerve to make it, is that the free individual and the rational system are at war, and that literature would have to take the individual’s side.

The Voice That Will Not Be Silenced

Return, at the end, to the voice from the cellar. What makes Notes from Underground endure is not its argument alone but the merciless honesty of the man who makes it, who accuses himself more savagely than any reader ever could, and who then turns and dares us to feel superior to him. “I have only carried to an extreme in my life,” he tells us in the closing pages, “what you have not dared to carry even halfway.” It is an accusation disguised as a confession, and it is precisely why the book refuses to stay safely in the nineteenth century where we might like to leave it.

The novel is short and dense and can be finished in an afternoon, which makes it the sharpest possible introduction to Dostoevsky before the vast later novels, but it is not an easy afternoon, because its final move is to implicate the reader in everything it has shown. We close the book uneasy, having met a man we wanted to disown and could not, and that unease is exactly what Dostoevsky meant us to carry up out of the underground and into our own lives.