Notes from Underground

The hero of «Notes from Underground» is a lonely and embittered retired civil servant, who has recently inherited a fortune. He is now forty. He lives «in a corner» in a «filthy, terrible» room at the edge of Petersburg. In his reflections, he rejects rationalism and the utopian ideas of modernity, defending free will and the right to irrational actions, even if they cause suffering.

The novella is considered a precursor to existentialism and has influenced subsequent literature and philosophy.

The book also includes the journalistic essay «Winter Notes on Summer Impressions» — these are Dostoevsky's travel notes from his trip to Europe in 1862, where the writer criticizes Western values, bourgeois mentality, the cult of money, and spiritual emptiness, contrasting them with the ideal of the Russian soul.