Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground is widely considered the forerunner of modernist literature and one of Dostoevsky’s greatest literary achievements. The novel recounts the thoughts and encounters of a civil servant known only as The Underground Man who has quit his job and lives in a basement flat on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, surviving on a small inheritance. His humiliation turns to an inward-turning aggression that further reinforces his alienation from mainstream society.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian short story writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature. His works are broadly thought to have anticipated Russian symbolism, existentialism, expressionism, and psychoanalysis. He also influenced later writers and philosophers including Anton Chekov, Hermann Hesse, Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre. His books have been translated into more than one hundred and seventy languages.

Patrick Maxwell is an English writer and journalist. He writes on literature for The Big Issue and The London Magazine, and is a regular commentator for TheArticle magazine and Classical Music Daily. He lives near Oxford.

“The only psychologist from whom I had something to learn…[Dostoevsky] ranks amongst the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

“He is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch.” 
—James Joyce