Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoyevski

Notes from Underground 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 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 The Underground Man attacks contemporary Russian philosophy especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky s What Is to Be Done 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

Notes from Underground 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 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 The Underground Man attacks contemporary Russian philosophy especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky s What Is to Be Done 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

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends but only to himself and that in secret But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind The more decent he is the greater the number of such things in his mind Anyway I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures Till now I have always avoided them even with a certain uneasiness Now when I am not only recalling them but have actually decided to write an account of them I want to try the experiment whether one can even with oneself be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth I will observe in parenthesis that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility and that man is bound to lie about himself Notes from the Underground is a novel published by Dostoevsky in 1864 It remains as one of the most important works of existentialist literatüre and Russian nihilist idea In this work Dostoevsky attempts to justify the existence of individual freedom as a necessary part of humankind

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends but only to himself and that in secret But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind The more decent he is the greater the number of such things in his mind Anyway I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures Till now I have always avoided them even with a certain uneasiness Now when I am not only recalling them but have actually decided to write an account of them I want to try the experiment whether one can even with oneself be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth I will observe in parenthesis that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility and that man is bound to lie about himself Notes from the Underground is a novel published by Dostoevsky in 1864 It remains as one of the most important works of existentialist literatüre and Russian nihilist idea In this work Dostoevsky attempts to justify the existence of individual freedom as a necessary part of humankind

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone but only to his friends He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends but only to himself and that in secret But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind The more decent he is the greater the number of such things in his mind Anyway I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures Till now I have always avoided them even with a certain uneasiness Now when I am not only recalling them but have actually decided to write an account of them I want to try the experiment whether one can even with oneself be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth I will observe in parenthesis that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility and that man is bound to lie about himself Notes from the Underground is a novel published by Dostoevsky in 1864 It remains as one of the most important works of existentialist literatüre and Russian nihilist idea In this work Dostoevsky attempts to justify the existence of individual freedom as a necessary part of humankind