Notes from Underground

For other uses, see Notes from Underground (disambiguation).
Notes from Underground
Title page of Russian-language 1866 edition
AuthorFyodor Dostoevsky
Original titleЗаписки изъ подполья
LanguageRussian
GenrePhilosophical fiction
Set inSt. Petersburg, c. 1862–64[1]
PublisherEpoch
Publication date
January–April 1864
Publication placeRussian Empire
OCLC31124008
891.73/3 20
LC ClassPG3326 .Z4 1993
Original text
Записки изъ подполья at Russian Wikisource
TranslationNotes from Underground at Wikisource

Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья, Zapíski iz podpólʹya; also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld)[a] 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".[3]

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.[4]

The Underground Man attacks contemporary Russian philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?[5] More generally, the work can be viewed as an attack on and rebellion against determinism: the idea that everything, including the human personality and will, can be reduced to the laws of nature, science and mathematics.[6]

  1. ^ Reference is made to "Napoleon—the Great and also the present one", setting the story in the reign of Napoleon III (1848–1870); and "the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived", setting the story after the death of Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862).
  2. ^ Alex Beam, The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship, 2016, ch. 8 "We Are All Pushkinists Now", p. 114
  3. ^ Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2001). Notes From Underground. Translated and edited by Michael R. Katz (2nd ed.). W.W. Norton. p. 152 (n 3). ISBN 0393976122.
  4. ^ Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 227–28.
  5. ^ Bird, Robert. "Introduction: Dostoevsky's Wager". Notes from Underground. Translated by Yakim, B. Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans. pp. vii–xxiv. Quote from p. x: "The views that brought Chernyshevsky to this vision were close to utilitarianism, meaning that actions should be judged in terms of their expediency. Naturally, utilitarians assumed that we can know the standard against which expediency can be measured: usually it was economic well-being. In Chernyshevsky's rational egotism [sic], utlitarianism as a method coincided with socialism as a goal: in essence, it is in everyone's individual self-interest that the whole of society flourish."
  6. ^ Morson, Gary Saul (1994). Narrative and Freedom. Yale University Press. p. 27.


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