Notes from the Underground: The Original Unabridged and Complete Edition (Fyodor Dostoyevsky Classics)

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 "e;confession"e;: the work was originally announced by Dostoevsky in Epoch under the title "e;A Confession"e;. 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 "e;there is literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word"e;.

The Underground Man's every word anticipates the words of an other, with whom he enters into an obsessive internal polemic.