The Nexus Archive
Existential Literature · Novel
Notes from Underground
by Dostoevsky · The Underground Prophet · Russian Existentialism, 1821-1881
A short, corrosive monologue against rational systems and easy progress.
- Advanced
- 1864
- ~4 hr read
- 18 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the Part I · I — The Sick Man guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
The Voice That Turns on Itself
A retired civil servant sits alone in Petersburg, writing for readers he insists do not exist. He is forty, living on a small inheritance, and still occupied by insults and missed encounters from his twenties. His room gives him shelter from other people, but no relief from imagining what they think of him. This is the underground of Dostoevsky’s title: a life withdrawn from company and crowded with arguments.
Published in 1864, Notes from Underground begins with a warning from its author. The man and his notes are fictional, though Dostoevsky insists that such people must exist in contemporary society. The distinction matters because this wounded, brilliant, comic, cruel voice keeps turning against its own claims. Its objections to a perfectly reasonable society are inseparable from the speaker’s difficulty living with anyone at all.
The first part asks why knowing what would benefit us so often fails to govern what we do. The narrator defends the freedom to choose badly, even to suffer, against the prospect of becoming a predictable mechanism. But his own awareness gives him more reasons to hesitate, resent, and excuse himself. In the second part, an evening’s wet snow recalls events from when he was twenty-four. The imagined audience gives way to people with lives and wishes of their own. His longing to be recognised has to contend with the risk of being seen.
The opening pages
I — The Sick Man
Part I: Underground
I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!
I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)
When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people—of course, they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though.
But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.
Chapter guides · 18
Part I · I — The Sick Man
A Voice Built from Contradiction
A retired official introduces himself, retracts his claims, and quarrels with the audience he imagines.
Confession and resistance
The Underground Man calls himself sick and spiteful, then admits that even his spite is a performance. His self-knowledge does not steady him; it gives him more ways to attack himself. He also anticipates his listeners’ judgment and protests that he wants neither their amusement nor their forgiveness. He is forty, has retired on a small inheritance, and lives apart in Petersburg. His refusal to consult a doctor offers an early example of knowingly acting against his own interests.
Part I · II — Acute Consciousness
Consciousness Becomes an Illness
The speaker describes a pleasure in shame that makes both change and self-excuse difficult.
Knowing without changing
He argues that heightened consciousness can prevent action while making failure feel perversely enjoyable. Awareness of goodness accompanies the conduct that shames him; brooding over that conduct can then become a pleasure of its own. He tries to attribute his paralysis to natural laws, yet keeps returning to the conviction that he is to blame. His imagined response to a slap shows the same impasse: he could neither forgive it, forget it, nor settle on revenge.
Part I · III — The Wall and the Mouse
The Mouse Meets the Wall
An imagined injury grows through recollection, while the laws of nature offer the speaker no consolation.
Part I · IV — The Pleasure of Toothache
Pain Becomes Performance
The speaker turns a toothache into an example of helplessness made spiteful.
Part I · V — The Beautiful and Sublime
Feelings Invented Against Boredom
The Underground Man describes manufacturing remorse, grievances, and love when reflection leaves him unable to act.
Part I · VI — The Intelligent Man
Inertia Finds an Identity
Unable to become anything definite, he imagines a respectable career in laziness and admiration.
Part I · VII — Advantage and Free Will
The Argument Against Advantage
The Underground Man challenges the belief that understanding one’s interests must lead to reasonable conduct.
Part I · VIII — The Piano Key
The Piano Key Refuses
The speaker imagines a science that could predict every choice, then asks what would remain of individuality.
Part I · IX — Twice Two Makes Five
Twice Two Makes Five
The speaker asks whether human beings love pursuing an end more than possessing it.
Part I · X — The Crystal Palace
A Shelter Is Not Enough
His protest against the crystal palace turns into a demand for an ideal he could accept without pretending.
Part I · XI — Hurrah for Underground
An Audience of His Own Making
The speaker turns from disputing systems to testing whether he can tell himself the truth about his past.
Part II · II — Simonov's Room
A Hero in an Empty Room
A private triumph over an officer and dreams of universal admiration give way to the need for actual company.
Part II · IV — The Humiliation
The Dinner Becomes a Tribunal
The narrator demands recognition from the schoolfellows whose company he has insisted on joining.
Part II · VI — Liza
Liza Answers Back
After the failed pursuit of his schoolfellows, the narrator turns his need for power toward a young woman in a brothel.
Part II · VII — A Speech from a Book
The Letter He Did Not Expect
The narrator’s frightening speech reduces Liza to despair, but she has something of her own to show him.
Part II · VIII — Waiting for Liza
The Visit He Fears
The narrator restores his reputation on paper while fearing what Liza might see in his room.
Part II · IX — The Mask Falls
The Rescuer Needs Comfort
Liza meets his confession of cruelty with an embrace, and he struggles with the reversal.
Part II · X — The Five-Rouble Note
The Money Left Behind
Liza refuses his final insult, and the narrator returns to arguments that cannot undo it.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read Notes from Underground?
- About 4 hr in total.
- How difficult is Notes from Underground?
- Advanced. A mid-length novel; about 4 hours of reading.
- Which translation is this?
- The Constance Garnett translation from the Russian, first published in 1864. The text follows White Nights and Other Stories: Notes from Underground (1918).
- Can I read Notes from Underground for free?
- Notes from Underground is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 18 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky survived a staged execution, years in a Siberian prison camp, financial ruin, epilepsy, and political repression. His novels turned those experiences into intense examinations of freedom, guilt, faith, violence, and the divided human mind.
“What if human beings do not actually want what is good for them?”
Dostoevsky exposes the psychological and spiritual chaos beneath modern theories of progress.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. Notes from Underground is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.