Notes from Underground

A short novel in two parts, often read as the first existentialist novel. Its narrator, an unnamed retired civil servant of about forty in St Petersburg, addresses imagined readers with spite, wit and self-contempt. In Part One, "Underground", he attacks the confident rationalism of his day, especially the idea, associated with Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?, that people act from enlightened self-interest and that science will one day calculate their choices like a table of logarithms. Against the image of the Crystal Palace, a perfectly rational society, he insists that human beings will act against their own advantage just to prove they are free, and that two times two makes four is not the whole of life. Part Two, "Apropos of the Wet Snow", recalls episodes from his twenties: a feud with an officer, a humiliating farewell dinner for a schoolfellow, and his cruelty to Liza, a young prostitute who reaches out to him. The novel asks whether heightened consciousness is a disease.

It is the founding text of the modern anti-hero and a sharp challenge to any theory that treats people as predictable, rational calculators.