Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in the journal Epoch in 1864. It is a first-person narrative in the form of a 'confession': the work was originally announced by Dostoevsky in Epoch under the title 'A Confession'. The novella presents itself as an excerpt from the memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. Although the first part of the novella has the form of a monologue, the narrator's form of address to his reader is acutely dialogized. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, in the Underground Man's confession 'there is literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word'. The Underground Man's every word anticipates the words of an other, with whom he enters into an obsessive internal polemic.