Notes from Underground: A Review of Dostoevsky’s Argument With Reason

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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The Underground Man declines to be liked before the first paragraph is over. “I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man,” he announces in the English text on Project Gutenberg (Part I, chapter I), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short novel does nothing afterward to take the sting out of the introduction.

Notes from Underground is a book people argue about more than they enjoy, and it has earned that. It is a monologue followed by a humiliation, in two halves that barely resemble each other. What follows covers where it came from, what it was written against, how critics have read it, and where it has surfaced since, from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to a Sundance premiere.

The Author and the Magazine

Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on November 11, 1821 (October 30 in the old Russian calendar) and died in St. Petersburg on February 9, 1881, according to Wikipedia’s biography. Notes from Underground sits between The House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment (1866), well ahead of the long novels that came later: The Idiot (1868–69), Demons (1871–72) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80).

The novella first appeared in Epoch, a St. Petersburg literary magazine Dostoevsky ran with his brother Mikhail. By Wikipedia’s account of the magazine, the first combined January–February 1864 issue came out in March, and the novella filled the magazine’s first four issues. Dostoevsky had announced it under a different title, “A Confession.” Epoch itself stopped publishing in February 1865 because of money trouble.

Both his first wife, Maria, and his brother Mikhail died in 1864, the same year the novella was published. Whether those losses shaped the book’s temper is a guess the record does not settle, and the sources checked for this review do not say when he wrote it.

Two Parts, Two Different Books

Part I, “Underground,” runs eleven short sections and opens with a footnote from Dostoevsky himself, telling readers that the “author” of these notes is invented and the pages are excerpts. What follows is a monologue by a retired civil servant, addressed to imagined listeners he keeps calling “gentlemen.” He talks about suffering, spite, boredom and inertia, and he argues that a life without pain would also be a life without freedom. The Wikipedia entry describes the address to the reader as heavily dialogized, which is accurate: the narrator argues with objections before anyone has raised them.

Part II, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” has ten sections and a different register entirely. It begins with an epigraph from the poet Nekrasov about a woman driven into prostitution by poverty, and its title echoes the critic Pavel Annenkov’s phrase about “damp showers and wet snow” in the Petersburg “natural school” of writers. Where the first half is an argument, the second is an event. A closing editorial note says the “author” kept writing but that the editors thought it best to stop.

What Chernyshevsky Had to Do With It

The Underground Man is arguing with a specific book: Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, a novel of rational self-interest and its crystal-palace utopia. His targets are “enlightened” self-interest as a basis for society, the idea that people will behave well once they understand their own advantage, and the determinism behind the phrase “two times two makes four.” Readers who skip the Chernyshevsky background still get the temperament of the book, but the jokes about palaces, arithmetic and “advantage” are aimed at somebody.

Gas-lit St. Petersburg street in wet snow with a lone man in an overcoat

“You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed.”

(Part I, chapter X, in the Project Gutenberg text)

Twice Two Makes Four

The first of the book’s two big ideas is that a person is more than a sum of interests. If human conduct could be tabulated and predicted, the narrator reasons, a rational society would have no use for will, and a will that can be calculated is not much of a will. His reply is that people do not always choose their own advantage, and that insisting on the freedom to choose badly is itself a proof of will.

“Twice two makes four without my will.”

(Part I, chapter VIII, from the Project Gutenberg text)

That is the line the whole first half pushes against. Arithmetic does not ask permission, and the narrator resents it for that. What makes the argument hard to dismiss is that he is partly right, and that being right gets him nowhere. He wins the point and loses the afternoon.

Too Conscious to Act

The second idea is paralysis. A man who sees every consequence, motive and counter-motive before he moves tends not to move. Dostoevsky made that the narrator’s condition and the book’s joke.

“…to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness.”

(Part I, chapter II, from the Project Gutenberg text)

The line is easy to quote and harder to live with, because the novella shows exactly what the illness costs. The Underground Man has an opinion about everything and a life containing almost nothing, a pairing that lets modern readers see themselves in him, usually with discomfort.

The Liza Chapters (Spoilers Ahead)

Part II takes the theory out into the street. The narrator fixates on an officer who once slighted him, buys an expensive overcoat to meet the man on equal terms, and bumps into him without being noticed at all. He then forces his way into a farewell dinner for a former schoolmate, Zverkov. The group leaves for a brothel, and he follows.

Victorian glass-and-iron exhibition hall glowing at dusk in the rain

There he meets Liza, a young prostitute. He lectures her on the life she is headed for, and for a moment it works: she is moved, and she embraces him after he weeps. Then he turns cruel, hands her five rubles and never sees her again. This is where Part I’s reasoning gets tested against another person, and he fails the test in the most ordinary way. It is also where the book stops being a debate and becomes a character study. Some readers who found the first half airless come around here, and some who loved it do not.

What Critics Have Said

The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the narrator’s confession contains “literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word”, meaning that every sentence is already answering an imagined listener. Vladimir Nabokov, in his lectures on Russian literature, treated the novella in terms of art as a kind of game, according to the same Wikipedia entry.

More recent readers tend to praise its psychology and wince at the man himself. Evgeny Popov, writing on his Substack in April 2024, calls it a foundational work of existential literature and calls the narrator “detestable and pitiable, insightful yet confused.” An unsigned Substack review reads it as a study of isolation and self-deception, a book that repels and pulls the reader in at once. Those two readings are the standard poles: the book is either a warning or a mirror.

The case against it deserves a hearing. Part I is dense, repetitive on purpose, and hard to sit through. The narrator’s cruelty can feel like Dostoevsky stacking the deck against his own character. And the book stops rather than ends, which some readers experience as a trick. As this review’s own judgment, those are fair complaints, and the novella survives them because the voice never lets go.

Who Read It Next

Friedrich Nietzsche read the novella in a French translation, per the Wikipedia entry, which also lists Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Eugene Thacker’s Infinite Resignation (2018) among the works that carry its influence. The same page notes that the protagonist of the 2018 HBO film of Fahrenheit 451 reads it, a small crossover covered in the Marcellino NY review of Bradbury’s novel.

On Screen and Online

Gary Walkow wrote and directed a film version that moves the story to contemporary America. It played in the Premiere section of the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, runs 88 minutes, and stars Henry Czerny as the unnamed narrator and Sheryl Lee. The Sundance page says it opens with the narrator confessing on video about an episode twelve years in the past. (Wikipedia dates the film to 1995; the Sundance archive lists the festival year as 1996.) A Turkish film, Yeraltı (2012), directed by Zeki Demirkubuz, is also listed among the adaptations.

For a quicker introduction, the web series Thug Notes, hosted by Greg Edwards as “Sparky Sweets, Ph.D.” and run on YouTube from 2013 to 2017, did an episode on the book that aired December 17, 2013.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Notes from Underground about?
A retired civil servant in St. Petersburg argues against rational self-interest and determinism in Part I, then shows in Part II what his own behavior looks like in practice. The central claim is that people will sometimes act against their own advantage just to prove they are free.

Cramped desk with a candle, a steel-nib pen and a revised handwritten sheet

Is it a novel or a novella?
It is short enough to be called a novella and is often called a novel. It runs in two parts, a monologue and a narrative.

When was it published?
In 1864, in the magazine Epoch, over its first four issues. Dostoevsky had announced it as “A Confession.”

Who is the Underground Man arguing with?
Mainly Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? and the rationalist utopia it describes, which the narrator calls a crystal palace.

Which English translation should a first-time reader pick?
Wikipedia lists more than a dozen, among them Constance Garnett (1918), David Magarshack (1955), Michael R. Katz (1989), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1993) and Kirsten Lodge (2014). No single edition has been verified as the best, so a sample page of two or three is the practical test.

Do I need to read Crime and Punishment first?
No. Notes from Underground comes before it in publication order, and it is a shorter way into Dostoevsky’s ideas.

Where to Read It

Notes from Underground (affiliate link). This is the edition linked from the buy button at the top of the page.

Further Reading

Evgeny Popov’s review (April 2024) reads the book as a foundational text of existential literature and as a warning about the isolation that excessive self-examination produces. An unsigned Substack review, which works from a 2006 Digireads edition, reads the narrator’s cruelty toward Liza as evidence of a craving for self-abasement.

Sources

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