NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Notes from Underground also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld) 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.