A family bequest has allowed him to quit his job, which he hated, and he is now forty, living with a servant whom he despises in what he calls “a mousehole.” In an introductory note, Dostoevsky explains that both the character and his “notes” are fictional, but that he represents a certain Russian type the public needs to know about. The text itself purports to be the writings of a retired mid-level government bureaucrat. Petersburg life in this period was furtive and desperate. Dostoevsky himself had recently returned from exile, and his St. Petersburg-an atmosphere of careless improvidence, neglect, self-neglect, cruelty, even sordidness. What the two fictions share is a solitary, restless, irritable hero and a feeling for the feverish, crowded streets and dives of St. “Notes from Underground” feels like a warmup for the colossus that came next, “Crime and Punishment,” though, in certain key ways, it’s a more uncompromising book. I wondered if “Notes” would seem like a dim echo, whether it still had the shock value that I remember from long ago.ĭostoevsky worked on the text in 1863 and published it the following year in Epoch, the magazine edited by his brother Mikhail. MacAndrew’s translation for Signet Classics), I wondered if it had been overwhelmed by the books and movies that it has influenced. As I began reading “Notes” again recently (in Andrew R. A self-regarding, truculent, miserable, paralyzed man.

Petersburg, “that most abstract and pre-meditated city,” and a man unable to act and also unable to stop humiliating himself and embarrassing others. (Other candidates: Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew,” written in the seventeen-sixties but not widely read until the eighteen-twenties, and, of course, Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” from 1856.) Certainly, Nietzsche’s writings, Freud’s theory of neurosis, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Bellow’s “Herzog,” Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” perhaps Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and half of Woody Allen’s work wouldn’t have been the same without the existence of this ornery, unstable, unmanageable text-the fictional confession of a spiteful modern Hamlet, an inhabitant of St.

Many people would say that Dostoevsky’s short novel “Notes from Underground” marks the beginning of the modernist movement in literature.

Letters from the underground dostoevsky