Notes from Underground
Translated by Constance Garnett
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This novel is a foundational existentialist text that brutally dissects the human psyche, exposing the irrational, self-destructive impulses that lie beneath the surface of reason and civilization.
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Book Summary
A bitter, hyperconscious former civil servant living in St. Petersburg delivers a rambling, spiteful monologue attacking rationalism, utopianism, and human nature itself. Through his paradoxical embrace of suffering and caprice, he reveals the dark, irrational core of human freedom that defies all systems of logic and morality.
The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the Underground Man, a forty-year-old retired official, introduces himself as spiteful, ill, and unattractive. He argues that hyperconsciousness leads to paralysis and inaction, contrasting himself with the 'direct man of action.' He attacks the rationalist and utilitarian belief that humans act only in their own self-interest, insisting instead that the most advantageous advantage is the exercise of free, capricious will—even if it leads to chaos and suffering. He rejects the utopian 'Crystal Palace' as a prison that would destroy human individuality. In Part II, he recounts specific events from his youth: his obsessive humiliation at a farewell dinner for a despised former classmate, Zverkov; his subsequent visit to a brothel, where he delivers a bookish, moralizing speech to a prostitute named Liza; and her unexpected visit to his squalid apartment, where he cruelly humiliates her out of spite and self-loathing. The novel ends with his reflection on this cruelty and his permanent retreat into the underground.
Reading guide
Go deeper in Notes from Underground
Character guides, themes, chapter companions — plus Character Web, narrative arc, and theme heatmap teasers that unlock fully beside the text in BetterReads.
Narrative arc
Story tension across the book.
- Setup
- Escalation
- Breaking point
The Underground Man
He opens his notes by addressing an imagined audience of "gentlemen" he both despises and craves, insisting he is sick, spiteful, and unattractive, yet refusing to be cured. His defining tension is that he is hyper-conscious of every base motive he acts on, and takes a perverse voluptuous pleasure in his own degradation rather than renouncing it. This voice — confessional, combative, philosophically unmoored — sets the terms for everything that follows, daring the reader to keep listening.
Liza
She meets the narrator in a house of prostitution and becomes, in his imagination, a project: a "pure soul" he might rescue and thereby prove his own nobility. But his fantasy curdles into rage — he imagines crushing her, spitting at her, striking her — even as he obsessively replays the moment he struck a match and saw her tortured, distorted smile. Her possible arrival at his apartment becomes the axis of his dread, and her silence or presence will test whether his grand speeches were ever anything but vanity.
Apollon
Apollon works part-time as a tailor but serves the narrator with an insolence so complete it becomes a kind of art, his mouth compressed into a V, his head oiled with sunflower oil, in love with every button on his own coat. He is the one person in the narrator's life who refuses to be impressed, wounded, or moved by him, and their years of squabbling have become a fixture of mutual torment. When Liza arrives at the apartment, it is Apollon's silent, judgmental presence that makes the scene unbearable, exposing the narrator's poverty and posturing at the worst possible moment.
Zverkov
At school Zverkov got the better of the narrator with casual, good-natured jests, and after they parted he rose through the service, cut the narrator in the street, and now commands a farewell dinner in his honor. He is not cruel so much as effortlessly superior, twisting and twirling in a theatre box to ingratiate himself with a general's daughters, and the narrator both worships and hates him. The dinner becomes the stage on which the narrator's need for recognition collides with his inability to behave, and Zverkov's indifference is the wound that will not close.
Simonov
Simonov is the practical one, the man who collects seven roubles apiece and books the Hotel de Paris, tolerating the narrator without warmth and without cruelty. After the disastrous dinner, the narrator writes him a letter full of aristocratic playfulness and lies, begging him to explain everything away, and Simonov's silence or response will determine whether the narrator can pretend the evening never happened. He matters because he is the ordinary, functioning social world against which the narrator measures his own paralysis — and finds himself wanting.
The Officer
A burly officer who physically moves the Underground Man aside in a billiard hall.
Hyperconsciousness and Inaction
The narrator argues that excessive self-awareness and intellectual analysis lead to paralysis and an inability to act, contrasting the 'man of action' with the tortured, inactive intellectual who is trapped in his own thoughts.
Free Will vs. Rational Self-Interest
The book rejects the utilitarian idea that humans always act in their own rational best interest, instead championing the primacy of caprice, irrational desire, and the need to assert one's will even against one's own advantage.
Alienation and Isolation
The narrator's 'underground' existence is a physical and psychological retreat from society, driven by a profound sense of being different, despised, and unable to connect with others, leading to bitter solitude.
Spite and Self-Destruction
The narrator's actions are frequently motivated by spite, which he knowingly directs against himself as well as others, finding a perverse pleasure in his own degradation and suffering.