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Notes from the Underground (Dover Thrift Editions) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Unstated edition published by Dover Publications (1992) [Paperback]
Excellent Book
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Published January 1, 1972
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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November 12, 2025INTRODUCTION
Published in 1864, Notes from Underground was Dostoyevsky’s fifth novel and is widely regarded as an early work of existential literature. Given that the story was nearly titled “The Confessions”, there has been speculation that the book is autobiographical.
In his youth, Dostoyevsky was a member of a Western-influenced political circle espousing utopian socialism. Due to accusations of dissemination of seditious literature, he was sentenced to death by firing squad and reprieved minutes before execution. He was exiled to a Siberian prison camp; four years of hard labour were followed by five years of compulsory military service.
The book was written after this period, and during its writing, he endured the loss of his first wife and brother. He had already had the tragic loss of his mother to tuberculosis when he was fifteen, and his father was murdered a couple of years later.
He battled with epilepsy and addictions; gambling and soliciting sex workers were his prominent indulgences. He appeared to have renounced the latter in his later years, but gambling remained throughout his life. Retrospective psychiatric speculation includes diagnoses ranging from temporal lobe epilepsy to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Early descriptions portray him as an excitable and reclusive dreamer, socially awkward yet socially curious. He was described by one of his landlords as courteous but moody, and when dark, would lose self-awareness and forget good manners. An ADHD component is plausible, particularly given its heightened prevalence among those with epilepsy; also, the book narrator displays traits suggestive of impaired executive function, low motivation, excessive rumination, impulsivity, emotional volatility and sensitivity.
CHARACTER
The unnamed narrator is complex and can elicit various responses from the reader; at times, I felt respect, empathy, sympathy, and derision.
He is intelligent and spends an enormous amount of time reading, a vast capacity to think is coupled with a mental paralysis where he resides within a constant state of neurotic indecision. He finds that there are always multiple causes and actions and he constantly second-guess’s every thought and feeling he has as if trapped in recursive self-awareness, it is described as a hyperconsciousness.
He reassures and comforts himself with the idea that his paralysis is a mark of intelligence, yet admits he cannot begin or finish anything. He describes his continuous self-talk and analysis as babble, likening it to the intentional pouring of water through a sieve. Trapped within loops of self-doubt and introspection, coupled with little action, engenders chronic boredom, frustration and low self-esteem.
“Where are the primary causes upon which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them?”
He is looking for axiomatic beliefs from which to start, from which to provide a cause, a purpose, to give momentum for action. He needs something to believe in, have faith in, something that would justify and inspire forward motion. Although he achieves very little, one may think him lazy, but his overactive mind even prevents him from the respectability of choosing to be lazy; he is always excessively busy in the realm of thought, never free to relax.
He tends to live a secluded life where he consumes heroic romantic literature and imagines an honourable and noble version of himself, but he flounders when he reaches out to interact with the real world. When he does so, the result is impulsive behaviour that elicits feelings of shame; he is petty, jealous, arrogant, and indulges in what he sees as vice.
“And so, furtively, timidly, in solitude, at night, I indulged in filthy vice, with a feeling of shame which never deserted me.”
Whilst visiting a brothel, he once sees his reflection in a mirror and finds it extremely repulsive, it seems to reflect and affirm his view of himself. Dostoyevsky himself had disliked his appearance and sometimes referred to himself as Quasimodo.
There are sadistic and masochistic traits; he admits to taking pleasure in annoying and harming other human beings, being spiteful. He is intimidated by his class superiors and there is a kind of toxic compensation when he toys with his social inferiors to inflate his self-worth. He once described enjoying a toothache and times when he would have been happy to be slapped in the face. It is as if he is seeking a stimulus as reprieve from his chronic boredom and inner restlessness.
The tragedy is that he sees all of this with clarity and still cannot change; he admits to being a victim of his expectations and that reality came to its own conclusions. Aware of his tendency to spiral into endless monologues, he once says:
“We underground men should be kept in check, as they tend to talk on and on and on.”
One wonders if Dostoyevsky thought the same of himself when facing his mock execution.
CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE AND RATIONALITY
During the book's writing, European civilisation was undergoing an intellectual and scientific transformation, and Russia was emulating many of these developments. Faith in humankind’s rationality and its application through science were major drivers of change and new technological inventions were transforming the world and disrupting an old feudal order. Religious scripture as the primary source of knowledge on human affairs had lost its primacy; in its place, new social theories were being formulated.
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man acknowledges the utility of science, but he strongly resists the idea that human beings can be reduced to mere logical functions. He argues that humans have irrational impulses such as caprice and the passions. These are seen as fundamental to what it means to be human and defy systematisation; excess faith in logic is accused of stripping away our humanity.
“We will be reduced to a piano key or a stop of an organ, all human actions will then be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically like tables of logarithms”.
“Are we at risk of relying too heavily on this new technology and risking losing our humanity in the process?”
He warns that this mechanistic view of humanity divorces us from natural human beliefs such as a connection to the land, a people, and God. Today such values are often criticized for their exclusivity or prejudice; the historically laden and evocative term "blood and soil" comes to mind. Yet ironically, they remain powerful sources of meaning and identity for many minority indigenous communities and are promoted as such.
In place of these connections, he thought pleasure was becoming the foundation of our existence, and never to be satisfied, we would become bored and degraded. He envisions a future where, even amid material prosperity, people will rebel against this rational order in a desperate attempt to reclaim their freedom and foolishness.
“would not be surprised if all of a sudden in the middle of general prosperity a gentleman with a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and attempt to kick over the whole show and put rationalism to the winds simply to send these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will”
“Such a person would be sure to gain followers; such is the nature of man”
WARNINGS
By the mid-19th century, science had made extraordinary strides in unlocking hidden realms of understanding and enabling predictions and inventions previously unimaginable, and civilisation was riding a wave of self-confidence. This optimism extended into the social sciences and theories emerged to reshape society and cure or ameliorate many of its ills; it was an age of ideology.
This progress came at a cost, as rapid industrialisation created social upheaval; traditional family and social structures were impacted as rural peasants were uprooted from the countryside and migrated to urban centres to work in factories. While material advancements were undeniable and accompanied by opportunities, high-density living brought new challenges, such as overcrowding, crime, and disease.
Solutions were developed, including reforms in education, working conditions, housing, and sewerage management; there were also workhouses, hulk prison ships, compulsory military service, and the exportation of prisoners, soldiers and settlers to the colonies or Siberia.
Contemporary writers like Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy described many of these conditions with their associated suffering, while thinkers like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels offered rational analyses of their historical causes and potential solutions. Through their Communist Manifesto (1848), they were attempting to mobilise workers to revolt and bring about change.
Decades later, the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin would write a pamphlet called ‘What Is To Be Done (1902), echoing the title of a book written by one of Dostoyevsky’s contemporaries, the utopian socialist Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Some have argued that Notes from Underground was written in reaction to this rationalist vision of society.
The Underground Man stands as a prophetic warning against the uncritical embrace of reason. He argues that morality cannot be reduced to utilitarian calculus and that rational ideologies may not lead to peace but to more sophisticated forms of violence. History would vindicate his fears when, in the early 20th century, Russia dismantled many of its traditional institutions and replaced them with the atheistic rationalist ideology of communism. With its noble aims of constructing a fairer society, there were accompanying experiences of mass starvation, mass persecution and forced population displacement.
Meanwhile, across Europe, the most scientifically advanced nations on earth turned their technological prowess into smashing themselves against each other in the carnage of two world wars. The aptly named ‘machine gun’ was symbolic of World War 1. In World War 2, Germany, a nation at the forefront of science and rationality, gave rise to Adolf Hitler. Here was a man with a reactionary and ironical countenance; he did kick over the whole show, and he did get many followers.
PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES AND THE ENDURING RELEVANCE
The philosophical concerns raised in Notes from Underground echo those of earlier thinkers, notably the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Dostoevsky, Rousseau believed that scientific and intellectual progress had not led to moral improvement. He warned that over-intellectualism could come at the expense of our natural human qualities, such as emotions, instincts, and moral intuition.
This tension between reason and emotion had also been explored in other literature, such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) which dramatizes the conflict between heart and head.
In a broader context, it seems apparent that one must be wary of an overconfident sense lacking in sensibility; otherwise, the end can so easily justify the means, and one can almost justify anything. Genocide, compulsory euthanasia and slave labour, the possibilities are as endless as they are outrageous. Also, in the complex discipline of the social sciences, what has been apparently rational in one epoch can be proven as a falsehood in another. 19th and early-20th-century racial science is an example.
Decades later, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche challenged the idea that science, reason and happiness were the ultimate paths to truth and human flourishing. He too argued that there had been a decline of modern society; people had become content with comfort, distraction and short-term gratification. He also warned that power often determined what was to be accepted as truth.
Like Dostoyevsky, he valued the irrational aspects of our passions, instincts and creativity. Similarly, he believed that the new science was responsible for a decline in religion and with it came a corresponding association with a life lacking inherent meaning or value. Unlike Dostoyevsky, his solution was not a return to existing structures such as the church, but to have the courage to create our own moral purpose or foundation, we must assert our own values. He famously said of Dostoyevsky:
“He is the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn”.
Another half a century later, in the mid-twentieth century, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would describe Notes from Underground as the first existentialist novel. Like the underground man, Sartre saw that those who became aware of the terrible responsibility that accompanies every choice they make often struggle to act; he proclaimed that the conscious person must act, however little the idea appeals to them.
In more recent times, the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, in his book Equilibrium (2002), also warns us against excessive faith in human judgment and the systems we create; it needs to be balanced against other aspects of ourselves: morality, creativity, and common sense. In Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), without balance, he envisages a dictatorship of reason, a world dominated by technocratic elites, experts and bureaucrats who value logic and efficiency over human-centred values.
Civilisation does sometimes disconnect us from the natural world, both physically and psychologically. We are physically separated by the structures we build and our mental models can be mistaken for reality itself. These mental constructions have utility due to a correspondence; they are wonderful tools of explanation and prediction, but they are not reality; they are maps, not the terrain.
This idea is beautifully articulated in the 1960s by the philosopher Alan Watts. Drawing from Eastern philosophy, he warned that Western culture had confused symbols with reality, money with wealth, the menu with the meal. He described our attempt to understand reality as involving breaking the world into units, likening it to calculus, reducing curves to points; we have bitted the cosmos and created an information explosion. Talking to IBM students in the 1960s, he warns that with the development of computers, this information explosion is going to get exponentially worse. He foresees institutions being overwhelmed with data, thus causing them to spend more time collecting and analysing data than fulfilling their original purpose.
Conclusions
With the advent of artificial intelligence, society once again finds itself captivated by the allure of raw calculation, and algorithms promise to reorder our world with their unprecedented capacity to crunch through data.
There is little doubt that humankind has benefited tremendously from reasoned deduction and induction, and we have yet managed to avoid the comical situation of the hyper-rational speculators from Jonathan Swift's book Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Yet when we apply these same techniques to ourselves, they risk becoming a tool of oppression rather than liberation. History is replete with complex problems being reduced to rational formulae that are imposed upon society with unintended consequences.
There is already renewed vigour in debates surrounding the existence of freewill; there are deterministic models of human behaviour gaining traction that are challenging long-held beliefs about human autonomy and agency. Dostoevsky’s warning rings truer than ever:
“Soon we will be born from an idea (An abstraction).”
In nature, it appears that irrationality does have its place. Scientific studies of predator-prey dynamics reveal that some prey survive by behaving unpredictably, expressing random patterns of evasion that defy even the most evolved predatory strategies. Ironically, our capacity for irrational behaviour may not be a flaw but a final refuge, a defence against systems that seek to predict, control, and ultimately define us.
To technocratic arrogance, here lies a dire warning of rebellion from those who wish to reclaim their foolish will and humanity, a human trait, all too human. Notes from Underground stands as a reminder that human beings are not merely logical machines but complex creatures of passion and contradiction.
Published in 1864, Notes from Underground was Dostoyevsky’s fifth novel and is widely regarded as an early work of existential literature. Given that the story was nearly titled “The Confessions”, there has been speculation that the book is autobiographical.
In his youth, Dostoyevsky was a member of a Western-influenced political circle espousing utopian socialism. Due to accusations of dissemination of seditious literature, he was sentenced to death by firing squad and reprieved minutes before execution. He was exiled to a Siberian prison camp; four years of hard labour were followed by five years of compulsory military service.
The book was written after this period, and during its writing, he endured the loss of his first wife and brother. He had already had the tragic loss of his mother to tuberculosis when he was fifteen, and his father was murdered a couple of years later.
He battled with epilepsy and addictions; gambling and soliciting sex workers were his prominent indulgences. He appeared to have renounced the latter in his later years, but gambling remained throughout his life. Retrospective psychiatric speculation includes diagnoses ranging from temporal lobe epilepsy to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Early descriptions portray him as an excitable and reclusive dreamer, socially awkward yet socially curious. He was described by one of his landlords as courteous but moody, and when dark, would lose self-awareness and forget good manners. An ADHD component is plausible, particularly given its heightened prevalence among those with epilepsy; also, the book narrator displays traits suggestive of impaired executive function, low motivation, excessive rumination, impulsivity, emotional volatility and sensitivity.
CHARACTER
The unnamed narrator is complex and can elicit various responses from the reader; at times, I felt respect, empathy, sympathy, and derision.
He is intelligent and spends an enormous amount of time reading, a vast capacity to think is coupled with a mental paralysis where he resides within a constant state of neurotic indecision. He finds that there are always multiple causes and actions and he constantly second-guess’s every thought and feeling he has as if trapped in recursive self-awareness, it is described as a hyperconsciousness.
He reassures and comforts himself with the idea that his paralysis is a mark of intelligence, yet admits he cannot begin or finish anything. He describes his continuous self-talk and analysis as babble, likening it to the intentional pouring of water through a sieve. Trapped within loops of self-doubt and introspection, coupled with little action, engenders chronic boredom, frustration and low self-esteem.
“Where are the primary causes upon which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them?”
He is looking for axiomatic beliefs from which to start, from which to provide a cause, a purpose, to give momentum for action. He needs something to believe in, have faith in, something that would justify and inspire forward motion. Although he achieves very little, one may think him lazy, but his overactive mind even prevents him from the respectability of choosing to be lazy; he is always excessively busy in the realm of thought, never free to relax.
He tends to live a secluded life where he consumes heroic romantic literature and imagines an honourable and noble version of himself, but he flounders when he reaches out to interact with the real world. When he does so, the result is impulsive behaviour that elicits feelings of shame; he is petty, jealous, arrogant, and indulges in what he sees as vice.
“And so, furtively, timidly, in solitude, at night, I indulged in filthy vice, with a feeling of shame which never deserted me.”
Whilst visiting a brothel, he once sees his reflection in a mirror and finds it extremely repulsive, it seems to reflect and affirm his view of himself. Dostoyevsky himself had disliked his appearance and sometimes referred to himself as Quasimodo.
There are sadistic and masochistic traits; he admits to taking pleasure in annoying and harming other human beings, being spiteful. He is intimidated by his class superiors and there is a kind of toxic compensation when he toys with his social inferiors to inflate his self-worth. He once described enjoying a toothache and times when he would have been happy to be slapped in the face. It is as if he is seeking a stimulus as reprieve from his chronic boredom and inner restlessness.
The tragedy is that he sees all of this with clarity and still cannot change; he admits to being a victim of his expectations and that reality came to its own conclusions. Aware of his tendency to spiral into endless monologues, he once says:
“We underground men should be kept in check, as they tend to talk on and on and on.”
One wonders if Dostoyevsky thought the same of himself when facing his mock execution.
CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE AND RATIONALITY
During the book's writing, European civilisation was undergoing an intellectual and scientific transformation, and Russia was emulating many of these developments. Faith in humankind’s rationality and its application through science were major drivers of change and new technological inventions were transforming the world and disrupting an old feudal order. Religious scripture as the primary source of knowledge on human affairs had lost its primacy; in its place, new social theories were being formulated.
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man acknowledges the utility of science, but he strongly resists the idea that human beings can be reduced to mere logical functions. He argues that humans have irrational impulses such as caprice and the passions. These are seen as fundamental to what it means to be human and defy systematisation; excess faith in logic is accused of stripping away our humanity.
“We will be reduced to a piano key or a stop of an organ, all human actions will then be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically like tables of logarithms”.
“Are we at risk of relying too heavily on this new technology and risking losing our humanity in the process?”
He warns that this mechanistic view of humanity divorces us from natural human beliefs such as a connection to the land, a people, and God. Today such values are often criticized for their exclusivity or prejudice; the historically laden and evocative term "blood and soil" comes to mind. Yet ironically, they remain powerful sources of meaning and identity for many minority indigenous communities and are promoted as such.
In place of these connections, he thought pleasure was becoming the foundation of our existence, and never to be satisfied, we would become bored and degraded. He envisions a future where, even amid material prosperity, people will rebel against this rational order in a desperate attempt to reclaim their freedom and foolishness.
“would not be surprised if all of a sudden in the middle of general prosperity a gentleman with a reactionary and ironical countenance were to arise and attempt to kick over the whole show and put rationalism to the winds simply to send these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will”
“Such a person would be sure to gain followers; such is the nature of man”
WARNINGS
By the mid-19th century, science had made extraordinary strides in unlocking hidden realms of understanding and enabling predictions and inventions previously unimaginable, and civilisation was riding a wave of self-confidence. This optimism extended into the social sciences and theories emerged to reshape society and cure or ameliorate many of its ills; it was an age of ideology.
This progress came at a cost, as rapid industrialisation created social upheaval; traditional family and social structures were impacted as rural peasants were uprooted from the countryside and migrated to urban centres to work in factories. While material advancements were undeniable and accompanied by opportunities, high-density living brought new challenges, such as overcrowding, crime, and disease.
Solutions were developed, including reforms in education, working conditions, housing, and sewerage management; there were also workhouses, hulk prison ships, compulsory military service, and the exportation of prisoners, soldiers and settlers to the colonies or Siberia.
Contemporary writers like Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy described many of these conditions with their associated suffering, while thinkers like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels offered rational analyses of their historical causes and potential solutions. Through their Communist Manifesto (1848), they were attempting to mobilise workers to revolt and bring about change.
Decades later, the revolutionary Vladimir Lenin would write a pamphlet called ‘What Is To Be Done (1902), echoing the title of a book written by one of Dostoyevsky’s contemporaries, the utopian socialist Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Some have argued that Notes from Underground was written in reaction to this rationalist vision of society.
The Underground Man stands as a prophetic warning against the uncritical embrace of reason. He argues that morality cannot be reduced to utilitarian calculus and that rational ideologies may not lead to peace but to more sophisticated forms of violence. History would vindicate his fears when, in the early 20th century, Russia dismantled many of its traditional institutions and replaced them with the atheistic rationalist ideology of communism. With its noble aims of constructing a fairer society, there were accompanying experiences of mass starvation, mass persecution and forced population displacement.
Meanwhile, across Europe, the most scientifically advanced nations on earth turned their technological prowess into smashing themselves against each other in the carnage of two world wars. The aptly named ‘machine gun’ was symbolic of World War 1. In World War 2, Germany, a nation at the forefront of science and rationality, gave rise to Adolf Hitler. Here was a man with a reactionary and ironical countenance; he did kick over the whole show, and he did get many followers.
PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES AND THE ENDURING RELEVANCE
The philosophical concerns raised in Notes from Underground echo those of earlier thinkers, notably the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Dostoevsky, Rousseau believed that scientific and intellectual progress had not led to moral improvement. He warned that over-intellectualism could come at the expense of our natural human qualities, such as emotions, instincts, and moral intuition.
This tension between reason and emotion had also been explored in other literature, such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) which dramatizes the conflict between heart and head.
In a broader context, it seems apparent that one must be wary of an overconfident sense lacking in sensibility; otherwise, the end can so easily justify the means, and one can almost justify anything. Genocide, compulsory euthanasia and slave labour, the possibilities are as endless as they are outrageous. Also, in the complex discipline of the social sciences, what has been apparently rational in one epoch can be proven as a falsehood in another. 19th and early-20th-century racial science is an example.
Decades later, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche challenged the idea that science, reason and happiness were the ultimate paths to truth and human flourishing. He too argued that there had been a decline of modern society; people had become content with comfort, distraction and short-term gratification. He also warned that power often determined what was to be accepted as truth.
Like Dostoyevsky, he valued the irrational aspects of our passions, instincts and creativity. Similarly, he believed that the new science was responsible for a decline in religion and with it came a corresponding association with a life lacking inherent meaning or value. Unlike Dostoyevsky, his solution was not a return to existing structures such as the church, but to have the courage to create our own moral purpose or foundation, we must assert our own values. He famously said of Dostoyevsky:
“He is the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn”.
Another half a century later, in the mid-twentieth century, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would describe Notes from Underground as the first existentialist novel. Like the underground man, Sartre saw that those who became aware of the terrible responsibility that accompanies every choice they make often struggle to act; he proclaimed that the conscious person must act, however little the idea appeals to them.
In more recent times, the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, in his book Equilibrium (2002), also warns us against excessive faith in human judgment and the systems we create; it needs to be balanced against other aspects of ourselves: morality, creativity, and common sense. In Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), without balance, he envisages a dictatorship of reason, a world dominated by technocratic elites, experts and bureaucrats who value logic and efficiency over human-centred values.
Civilisation does sometimes disconnect us from the natural world, both physically and psychologically. We are physically separated by the structures we build and our mental models can be mistaken for reality itself. These mental constructions have utility due to a correspondence; they are wonderful tools of explanation and prediction, but they are not reality; they are maps, not the terrain.
This idea is beautifully articulated in the 1960s by the philosopher Alan Watts. Drawing from Eastern philosophy, he warned that Western culture had confused symbols with reality, money with wealth, the menu with the meal. He described our attempt to understand reality as involving breaking the world into units, likening it to calculus, reducing curves to points; we have bitted the cosmos and created an information explosion. Talking to IBM students in the 1960s, he warns that with the development of computers, this information explosion is going to get exponentially worse. He foresees institutions being overwhelmed with data, thus causing them to spend more time collecting and analysing data than fulfilling their original purpose.
Conclusions
With the advent of artificial intelligence, society once again finds itself captivated by the allure of raw calculation, and algorithms promise to reorder our world with their unprecedented capacity to crunch through data.
There is little doubt that humankind has benefited tremendously from reasoned deduction and induction, and we have yet managed to avoid the comical situation of the hyper-rational speculators from Jonathan Swift's book Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Yet when we apply these same techniques to ourselves, they risk becoming a tool of oppression rather than liberation. History is replete with complex problems being reduced to rational formulae that are imposed upon society with unintended consequences.
There is already renewed vigour in debates surrounding the existence of freewill; there are deterministic models of human behaviour gaining traction that are challenging long-held beliefs about human autonomy and agency. Dostoevsky’s warning rings truer than ever:
“Soon we will be born from an idea (An abstraction).”
In nature, it appears that irrationality does have its place. Scientific studies of predator-prey dynamics reveal that some prey survive by behaving unpredictably, expressing random patterns of evasion that defy even the most evolved predatory strategies. Ironically, our capacity for irrational behaviour may not be a flaw but a final refuge, a defence against systems that seek to predict, control, and ultimately define us.
To technocratic arrogance, here lies a dire warning of rebellion from those who wish to reclaim their foolish will and humanity, a human trait, all too human. Notes from Underground stands as a reminder that human beings are not merely logical machines but complex creatures of passion and contradiction.
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