“I,” he declares, “Quite naturally want want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy just my reasoning capacity alone”.īut Dostoevsky is also railing against bigger things. While others go around dedicating themselves to “profit” and achievement, our underground man is cursed with the understanding that this is futile. “No one else was like me, and I was like no one else,” he says, committing the fallacy of unique experience. Our narrator is that loneliest of creatures, a smart man surrounded by idiots. “I was a coward and a slave,” he tells us. Superficially it is perhaps a satire of the evils of bureaucrats and professionals, too smart and bored for their own good, determined to inflict their unhappiness on others. It is a complicated novel, and can be read on any number of levels.

He imagines his audience heckling him, telling him to shut up, but on he goes. On and on he goes, waxing about romanticism, civilisation, suffering and wanting. The first is a frame, a diatribe for an imagined audience, explaining the state of our underground man’s mind. Notes From Underground is a novel in two parts. But what is this sickness that he speaks of? We have to read on to find out. By his account, he has been wicked for 20 years. His sickness and wickedness mean he now lives “underground”, a metaphorical and psychological state of separation from society.

He is also, significantly, an orphan, once sent to boarding school by “distant relatives”. “I am a sick man … I am a wicked man,” begins this taut little novel from 1864. Our narrator is an unnamed 40-year-old living in (St) Petersburg, retired from civil service after coming into a minor inheritance.

Dostoevsky notes from underground