Notes From the Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky(1864)
Novelc. 100 pages
“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”
One great work, every day
by Fyodor Dostoevsky(1864)
“I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky(1864)
The first modern antihero speaks from his hole in Petersburg, raging against reason, against progress, against the Crystal Palace of utopian socialism, against everything that would reduce human beings to piano keys playing a predetermined tune. Dostoevsky's unnamed narrator is spiteful, contradictory, and impossible to like, yet his monologue anticipates existentialism, psychoanalysis, and a century of alienated literature. The prose bites. This is where the modern psychological novel truly begins, in a voice that refuses to be rationalized away.