Novella: Notes from Underground

Overview
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella unfolds as the confession of an unnamed, impoverished former civil servant in St. Petersburg, often called the Underground Man. Bitter, hyperconscious, and isolated, he writes from his cramped “underground” to expose the contradictions of his personality and to rail against the fashionable rationalism and utopian confidence of his age. His voice alternates between grand pronouncements and self-lacerating admissions, pulling readers into a mind that both craves and sabotages human connection.

Structure and Voice
The book divides into two parts. The first is a philosophical monologue in which the narrator expounds his worldview, spiteful, paradoxical, and resistant to systematization. The second is a sequence of memories, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” in which those ideas play out in petty confrontations and cruel misadventures. Throughout, he contradicts himself, flaunts his unreliability, and delights in exposing the ugliness of his motives, insisting that consciousness is a disease and that freedom consists in the capacity to act against one’s own interests.

Part I: Underground
Seated in his shabby room, the narrator savages the belief that people are rational calculators who will choose what is advantageous if only they know what it is. He insists that human beings will sometimes choose the harmful simply to assert their freedom against the tyranny of reason, “two times two is four” becomes a symbol of suffocating inevitability. He prefers pain to contentment if the latter is mechanical, and he nurses a perverse pleasure in humiliations, toothaches, and shame because suffering guarantees his individuality. He derides schemes to perfect society, mocks the crystalline palaces of progress, and proposes caprice, desire, and spite as ineradicable elements of human nature. He also confesses his cowardice, inertia, and vanity, displaying the very moral chaos he describes.

Part II: Apropos of the Wet Snow
Rewinding to his younger years as a minor official, the narrator recounts a series of encounters that expose his isolation and thwarted pride. An officer once moved him aside on the street without acknowledging him; consumed by resentment, he plots a symbolic revenge. He buys a better coat, practices walking with dignity, and, after weeks of obsessing, manages to bump the man shoulder-to-shoulder on Nevsky Prospect, a triumph so petty it deepens his self-contempt.

Hungry for recognition, he invites himself to a farewell dinner for a school acquaintance, Zverkov, organized by his former classmate Simonov. He arrives late, underdressed, and immediately offends the group with moralizing speeches and awkward provocations. When they head to a brothel, he follows, trying to force a confrontation and instead becoming invisible to them. There, alone in a room after the others have gone, he meets Liza, a young prostitute. He delivers a fervent monologue about dignity and degradation, conjuring the bleak future that awaits her if she stays where she is, and urges her to seek a different life, even giving her his address.

Days later, Liza visits his squalid flat. Amid the chaos, his insolent servant Apollon demanding overdue wages, his own shame at the poverty of his surroundings, the Underground Man veers from tenderness to cruelty. When Liza responds with quiet compassion, he panics and tries to reassert control by humiliating her, pressing money into her hand as payment. She leaves the banknote on his table and walks out. Too mortified to follow, he collapses into tears and self-disgust, recognizing that his appeal to her better self was tangled with vanity and the urge to dominate.

Ending and Emphasis
An editorial note closes the book by suggesting the narrator continued writing, yet the text breaks off. What remains is a portrait of a man who understands himself painfully well but cannot live differently: a mind at war with societal ideals, with others, and above all with itself, thrashing in the damp, oppressive atmosphere of St. Petersburg’s “wet snow.”