> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_Underground
>
> Notes from Underground (1864) is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It
> is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It
> presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling 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.
>
> Plot summary
> The novel is divided into two rough parts.
>
>
> Part 1
> Part 1 falls into an introduction, three main sections and a conclusion.
> (i) The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings
> will be further developed. (1) Chapters two, three and four deal with
> suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; (2) chapters five and and six
> with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious
> "inertia"-inaction; (3) chapters seven through nine with theories of
> reason and advantage; (c) the last two chapters are a summary and a
> transition into Part 2.
>
> War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that
> everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things
> without purpose, and this is what determines human history.
>
> Secondly, the narrator's desire for pain and paranoia is exemplified by
> his liver pain and toothache. This parallels Raskolnikov's behavior in
> Dostoevsky's later novel,Crime and Punishment. He says that, due to the
> cruelty of society, human beings only moan about pain in order to spread
> their suffering to others. He builds up his own paranoia to the point he
> is incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye.
>
> The main issue for the Underground Man, is that he has reached a point
> of inactivity. Unlike most people, who typically act out of revenge
> because they believe justice is the end, he is conscious of this
> problem. Though he feels the desire for revenge, he does not find it
> virtuous; this incongruity leads to spite and spite towards the act
> itself with its concomitant circumstances. He feels that others like him
> exist, yet he continuously concentrates on his spitefulness instead of
> on action that avoids the problems he is so concerned with. He even
> admits at one point that he'd rather be inactive out of laziness.
>
> The first part also gives a harsh criticism of determinism and
> intellectual attempts at dictating human action, which the Underground
> Man mentions in terms of a simple math problem two times two makes four
> (see also necessitarianism). He states that despite humanity's attempt
> to create the "Crystal Palace," a reference to a famous symbol of
> utopianism in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, one cannot
> avoid the simple fact that anyone at any time can decide to act against
> what is considered good, and some will do so simply to validate their
> existence and/or to protest that they exist as individuals. This type of
> rebellion is critical to later works of Dostoevsky as this type of
> rebellion is used by adolescents to validate their own existence,
> uniqueness and independence (see Dostoevsky's The Adolescent) in the
> face of the disorder one inherits under the understanding of tradition
> and society.
>
> In other works Dostoevsky constructs a negative argument to validate
> free will against determinism in the character Kirillov's suicide in his
> novel the Demons (that sumbebekos is supernatural). Notes from
> Underground being the marked starting point of Dostoevsky moving from
> his psychological and sociological themed novels to novels based on
> existential and or human experience in crisis.
>
>
> Part 2
> The second part is the actual story proper and consists of three main
> segments that lead to a furthering of the Underground Man's
> super-consciousness.
>
> The first is his obsession with a policeman who moves him out of the way
> like a piece of furniture while breaking up a brawl at a bar. He sees
> the officer on the street and thinks of ways to take revenge, eventually
> deciding to bump into him, which he does, finding to his surprise that
> the officer does not seem to even notice it happened.
>
> The second segment is a dinner party with some old school friends to
> wish Zverkov, one of their number, goodbye as he leaves for the service.
> The underground man hated them when he was younger, but after a random
> visit to Simonov's he decides to meet them at the appointed location.
> They fail to tell him that the time has been changed to six instead of
> five, so he arrives early. He gets into an argument with the three after
> a short time, declaring all of his hatred of society and using them as
> the symbol of it. At the end they go off without him to a secret
> brothel, and in his rage later that evening the underground man goes
> there to confront Zverkov once and for all, regardless if he is beaten
> or not. He arrives to find Zverkov and company has left but it is there
> that he meets Liza, a young prostitute.
>
> After sitting in silence for a while, the underground man confronts
> Liza, who is unwavering at first, but eventually realizes the plight of
> her position and how she will slowly become useless and go lower and
> lower until she is no longer wanted by anyone. The thought of dying such
> a terribly disgraceful death brings her to realize her position, and she
> then finds herself enthralled by the underground man's seemingly
> poignant grasp of society's ills. He gives her his address and leaves.
> After this, he is overcome by the fear of her actually arriving at his
> dilapidated apartment, and in the middle of an argument with his
> servant, she arrives. He then curses her and takes back everything he
> said to her, saying he was in fact laughing at her and reiterates the
> truth of her miserable position. Near the end of his painful rage he
> wells up in tears after saying that he was only seeking to have power
> over her and a desire to humiliate her. He begins to criticize himself
> and states that he is in fact horrified by his own poverty and
> embarrassed by his situation. Liza realizes how pitiful he is and they
> embrace. The underground man cries out "They - they won't let me - I - I
> can't be good!" After this he still acts terribly towards her and before
> she leaves he stuffs something into her hand, which she throws onto the
> table. It was a five ruble note. He tries to catch her as she goes out
> onto the street but cannot find her and never hears from her again. He
> recalls this moment as making him unhappy whenever he thinks of it, yet
> again proving the fact from the first section that his spite for society
> and his inability to act like it makes him unable to act better than it.
>
>
> Literary significance and criticism
> The Underground Man became a common character type in many of the works
> that followed the novella. He is present in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
> in the milder form of the character Nikolai Levin, in Anton Chekhov's
> Ward No. 6, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and in Joseph Heller's
> Catch-22 as Yossarian the 28-year-old Army Air Corps Captain.
>
> Like many of Dostoevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular
> with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of socialist
> utopianism and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and
> uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied even
> through technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many
> existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel
> to be a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their
> own philosophies.
>
> The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was very impressed with Dostoevsky,
> claiming that "Dostoevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I
> have learned something," and that Notes from Underground "cried truth
> from the blood". A thorough investigation of the source of this
> statement may be found in a blog, Posts from Underground, in a post
> titled The Voice of Blood. Since Wikipedia doesn't allow the linking of
> blogs, it can be found through Google.
>
> The novel has also been cited by Paul Schrader as an influence when he
> wrote the screenplay for the film Taxi Driver, which has existential
> themes.
>
> Oleg Liptsin has adapted Notes from Underground for the stage. The world
> premiere was at the Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco on September 28th,
> 2007.
>
> The novel American Psycho quotes a passage from 'Notes from Underground'.
>
>
>