Notes from the Underground

Notes from Underground, a 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former civil servant living in St. Petersburg who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that...