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 narrators form of address to his reader is acutely dialogized. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, in the Underground Mans confession "there is literally not a single monologically firm, undissociated word". The Underground Mans every word anticipates the words of an other, with whom he enters into an obsessive internal polemic.