Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. As anyone who’s read it can confirm, Notes (1864) is a powerful but extremely weird little novel, and both these qualities have to do with the fact that the book is at once universal and particular. Its protagonist’s self-diagnosed “disease”—a blend of grandiosity and self-contempt, of rage and cowardice, of ideological fervor and a self-conscious inability to act on his convictions: his whole paradoxical and self-negating character—makes him a universal figure in whom we can all see parts of ourselves, the same kind of ageless literary
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