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