Notes from Underground
The first modern anti-hero, arguing with a reader who is not there.
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A resentful former official addresses an imagined audience and revisits humiliating encounters from his past. His contradictory reflections challenge easy explanations of reason, freedom, and human behavior.
F By Fyodor Dostoyevsky- Free delivery over Rs. 5,000
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A retired civil servant writes from a basement room in St Petersburg, addressing an audience he has invented so he can contradict it. The first half is argument; the second is a set of humiliating memories, including a dinner he was not invited to and an encounter with a young woman named Liza.
Short, bad-tempered and startlingly modern, it is usually read as the opening move of existentialist fiction and the source of a character type that has never left the novel since.
- Why the narrator insists that people will act against their own interests simply to prove they are free.
- How the book attacks the idea that reason and self-interest can fully explain human behaviour.
- What spite looks like as a philosophy rather than a mood.
- Why the second half undercuts the first, turning argument into evidence about the arguer.
- How the Liza episode exposes the gap between the narrator’s self-image and his conduct.
- Why this short book is treated as the starting point for the modern anti-hero.
Book details
- Author
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Publisher
- Lexicon Publishing
- Language
- English
- Format
- Paperback
Additional information
- SKU
- TL-HXJ5V86M
- Category
- Fiction
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