Notes from the Underground (1864) is the fierce, paradoxical monologue of an unnamed retired civil servant who retreats into his St. Petersburg apartment and rails against reason, progress, and human nature itself. Often cited as the first existentialist novel, it introduced the concept of the “underground man” — the spiteful, hyper-conscious individual alienated from society.
Short but extraordinarily influential, this novella shaped Nietzsche, Kafka, and countless writers after them. Download the free EPUB and read the work that Dostoyevsky himself considered the gateway to his mature fiction.