Notes from Underground

Based on Wikipedia: Notes from Underground

The First Modern Anti-Hero

Imagine a man who despises himself, despises you for reading about him, and despises himself even more for caring what you think. That's the Underground Man, and in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky unleashed him on the world in a slim novella that would reshape how we think about human psychology, free will, and the dark corners of consciousness.

Notes from Underground isn't just a book. It's an argument disguised as a confession, a philosophical grenade lobbed at the optimistic thinkers of nineteenth-century Russia who believed that science and reason could perfect humanity.

They were wrong, Dostoevsky insisted. And his proof was this bitter, brilliant, deeply unpleasant narrator.

A Voice Like No Other

The story first appeared in a Russian literary journal called Epoch in 1864. Dostoevsky originally planned to call it simply "A Confession," which tells you something about its intimate, almost unbearable directness.

The narrator is a retired civil servant living in Saint Petersburg. We never learn his name. Critics call him the Underground Man, though that phrase itself deserves unpacking. The Russian word podpolya literally means "under the floor"—not a basement or cellar, but something more cramped and disturbing. Think of the narrow crawl space beneath a house where rodents scurry and, according to Russian folklore, evil spirits lurk. This isn't a man who has retreated to a comfortable hiding place. He has wedged himself into the cracks of existence.

What makes his voice so revolutionary is its radical self-awareness. The literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers about narrative, observed that there isn't a single straightforward sentence in the entire confession. Every word the Underground Man speaks anticipates your objection. He argues with you before you can argue back. He insults himself before you can judge him, then resents you for the judgment he assumes you're making anyway.

It's exhausting. It's also hypnotic.

The Crystal Palace Must Fall

To understand what Dostoevsky was attacking, you need to know about Nikolay Chernyshevsky. He was a radical thinker who published a novel called What Is to Be Done? just a year before Notes from Underground appeared. Chernyshevsky's book was earnest, idealistic, and enormously popular among young Russian progressives. It imagined a utopian future where rational self-interest would guide all human behavior, where science would solve social problems, and where humanity would live in harmony inside something like the Crystal Palace—the famous iron-and-glass exhibition hall that had been built in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The Crystal Palace was a marvel of engineering, a symbol of progress, a temple to the belief that human ingenuity could create paradise on earth.

The Underground Man wants to spit on it.

Not because he's stupid. Not because he doesn't understand the appeal. He spits on it precisely because he does understand, and he knows something the utopians refuse to acknowledge: humans don't actually want what's good for them.

Two Plus Two Makes Five

Here's the philosophical heart of the novella. The Underground Man fixates on a simple mathematical truth: two plus two equals four. This is the kind of certainty that rationalists love. It's undeniable. It's the foundation of logic. It's the model for how we should organize society—find the correct answer and implement it.

But the Underground Man finds this certainty suffocating.

What if someone wants to say that two plus two equals five? Not because they're confused about arithmetic, but because they want the freedom to be wrong. Because being forced to accept the truth, even an obvious truth, feels like a kind of death.

This sounds irrational. That's the point.

Dostoevsky is arguing that human beings are not calculating machines. We don't simply want pleasure and comfort. We also want to assert our will, even when—especially when—it hurts us. We want to prove that we exist as individuals, not as variables in someone else's equation. A utopia that provides everything we "should" want would be a prison, because it would eliminate our capacity for meaningful choice.

The Underground Man calls the obstacles to human freedom "stone walls"—the laws of nature, the facts of mathematics, the logical constraints that supposedly determine what we can and cannot do. Most people, he says, accept these walls. They shrug and adapt. But he refuses. Even if he can't knock the wall down, he won't pretend to accept it.

The Structure of Spite

The novella divides into two parts, and they work very differently.

Part One is pure monologue—forty pages of the Underground Man spinning philosophical webs in his cramped room. He talks about suffering and why humans secretly enjoy it. He talks about inertia, that paralyzing inability to act that comes from thinking too much. He talks about consciousness as a disease, because the more aware you are of your own motivations, the less capable you become of simple, confident action.

Part Two tells an actual story. Or rather, it tells two stories that reveal the Underground Man in action—or rather, in agonizing failed action.

The first involves an officer who once shoved him aside in a tavern without even acknowledging his existence. The Underground Man becomes obsessed. He spends years plotting revenge. He borrows money to buy an expensive coat so he can bump into the officer on the street as an equal. When he finally does it, when he finally forces a collision, the officer doesn't notice.

Think about that. Years of obsession, culminating in a shoulder bump that means nothing to its target.

A Dinner Party in Hell

The second story is even more painful. The Underground Man invites himself to a farewell dinner for an old schoolmate named Zverkov, a man he has always envied and despised. The dinner is a disaster. He arrives at the wrong time because no one bothered to tell him the schedule changed. He gets drunk. He delivers a speech about how much he hates everyone present. His former classmates leave for a brothel without him.

And then—in a moment of pure spite-fueled lunacy—he follows them.

Not to join them. To confront them. To have some kind of final showdown, even if it means getting beaten.

By the time he arrives, Zverkov and the others have already disappeared into private rooms with prostitutes. The grand confrontation never happens. Instead, the Underground Man finds himself alone with a young woman named Liza.

The Cruelty of Eloquence

What happens next is the emotional core of the novella, and it's devastating.

The Underground Man, sitting in the dark with Liza, delivers a brilliant speech about her future. He describes in vivid detail how her life will unfold—how she'll age, how her value in the brothel will decline, how she'll be cast aside when she's no longer young enough to attract customers. He paints a picture of degradation and lonely death that reduces her to tears.

And here's the thing: he's not wrong. Everything he says about the brutal economics of prostitution is probably accurate. But he's not saying it to help her. He's saying it to feel powerful. He's using his intelligence as a weapon, enjoying the experience of finally being the one with authority.

Liza, against all odds, is moved. She sees through his cruelty to something vulnerable underneath. When he gives her his address—a gesture he immediately regrets—she actually comes to visit him.

The Visit

The scene in his apartment is almost unbearable to read. The Underground Man is caught in his real life—shabby rooms, a servant he argues with, poverty he usually hides behind his eloquence. He is humiliated. And because he is humiliated, he becomes vicious.

He takes back everything beautiful he said to her. He tells her he was mocking her. He tells her the truth about himself: that he wanted power over her, that he wanted to humiliate her, that he is not a savior but a petty, spiteful man.

And then he breaks down crying.

"They won't let me," he sobs. "I can't be good."

It's one of the most startling moments in nineteenth-century literature. The Underground Man, who has spent the entire novella insisting on his freedom to be irrational, suddenly reveals that he doesn't feel free at all. Something—society, his own psychology, the stone walls of his nature—prevents him from being the person he might want to be.

Liza, seeing his genuine anguish, embraces him tenderly.

And he responds by sleeping with her and then pressing money into her hand like payment to a prostitute.

The Note on the Table

Liza throws the money onto the table and leaves. The Underground Man runs after her, but she's gone. He never sees her again.

Years later, when he's writing his confession, he still rationalizes. Maybe it was better this way, he tells himself. Maybe the insult will purify her, give her strength, elevate her above the filth of her circumstances. It's a desperate attempt to make his cruelty mean something, to transform his worst moment into a secret kindness.

We don't believe him. We're not supposed to.

Russia in the 1860s

To fully appreciate what Dostoevsky was doing, you need some historical context.

In 1861, just three years before Notes from Underground appeared, Tsar Alexander II had emancipated the serfs—the peasants who had essentially been property of the landowning class for centuries. Russia was modernizing rapidly, absorbing Western European ideas about science, progress, and social organization.

But this modernization was chaotic. The country remained deeply traditional, largely agricultural, still medieval in many ways. Intellectuals were divided between Westernizers, who wanted Russia to import European reforms, and Slavophiles, who believed Russia had its own unique path to follow.

Meanwhile, a new generation of radicals was emerging—young people who believed that religion was superstition, that traditional morality was a tool of oppression, and that rational planning could create a perfect society. These were the nihilists, though they didn't use that term for themselves. They saw the old order as bankrupt and were ready to tear it down.

Dostoevsky had complicated feelings about all of this. He was no defender of the status quo—he had been arrested in his youth for participating in a radical discussion group and had been subjected to a mock execution before being sent to a Siberian prison camp. But he had also become increasingly skeptical of the rationalist schemes that promised to solve all human problems through planning and science.

Notes from Underground is his first major attack on these ideas, and it set the stage for his later masterpieces like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

The Birth of the Modern Dystopia

Literary historians often describe Notes from Underground as the most important source for the modern dystopian novel. When you read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's 1984 or Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, you're encountering descendants of the Underground Man's argument.

The formula is consistent: societies that try to engineer perfect happiness end up crushing the human spirit. People need struggle. They need the freedom to fail. They need irrationality.

But Dostoevsky wasn't simply against utopia. He was asking a harder question: What happens when we recognize our own irrationality and can't do anything about it? The Underground Man isn't a hero who breaks free. He's a man who sees his cage with perfect clarity and remains trapped anyway.

Nabokov's Objection

Not everyone has admired this novella. The great Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, famous for his precise, jewel-like prose, had serious reservations about Dostoevsky's work in general.

Nabokov believed that great art maintains a balance between the divine and the playful—between profound truth and the acknowledgment that fiction is, after all, make-believe. When Shakespeare's tragedies end in death, we feel both horror and delight, because we're responding to the author's mastery as much as to the characters' suffering.

Dostoevsky, in Nabokov's view, often tips into pure sensation. He called Notes from Underground by the dismissive title "Memoirs from a Mousehole"—a joke on that crawl-space meaning of "underground." He found its emotional intensity uncomfortable, more like reading a lurid newspaper account of a crime than experiencing genuine art.

This is a minority view, but it's worth considering. The Underground Man is designed to be unpleasant. Spending time in his head is claustrophobic, sometimes repulsive. Whether that repulsion serves a higher artistic purpose or merely makes the book an ordeal is a question each reader must answer.

The Confession That Never Ends

Dostoevsky himself added a curious editorial note at the end of Part Two. He says that the Underground Man kept writing after this point, but "it seems to us that we might as well stop here."

It's a strange gesture—pretending that the character exists independently and has produced more material than the "editor" chose to include. It reinforces the feeling that we're reading something raw and unfinished, that the Underground Man is still out there somewhere, still spinning his bitter monologues, still unable to stop explaining himself.

Maybe that's the final point. The Underground Man tells his readers directly: "I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway."

He's not special. He's just honest about what lurks under the floor of every conscious mind.

Why It Still Matters

More than a century and a half after its publication, Notes from Underground continues to unsettle readers because its central insight hasn't been resolved.

We still build systems—technological, political, economic—based on assumptions about what people want and how they behave. We still imagine that if we could just get the incentives right, everyone would act rationally and society would flourish.

And people still insist, against all evidence and their own self-interest, on asserting their freedom to be wrong, to suffer unnecessarily, to choose pain over comfort if it means proving they exist.

The Underground Man is not admirable. He's not even sympathetic. But he's recognizable. And that recognition—that shiver of seeing something of ourselves in his pathetic spite—is exactly what Dostoevsky intended.

Two plus two equals four. But somewhere, in the crawl space beneath your conscious mind, a voice is still whispering: What if it didn't have to?