Published in 1864, Notes from Underground is considered one of the first existentialist novels. The unnamed narrator, referred to by critics as the Underground Man, is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The book is presented as a collection of excerpts from the diary of this isolated, bitter man and is structured in two parts.  ”Underground”, the first part, is a monologue that attacks the idealism of emerging Western society symbolized by the utopian model of the “Crystal Palace” in Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?  The chapters of this section discuss the dilemmas posed by ennui and inertia and present the paradoxes of the perverse pleasure in and need for suffering and pain and the irrational impulse to act against one’s self-interest or benefit.  Apropos of the Wet Snow, the second part, relates three stories that reveal the strange contours of the Underground Man’s consciousness.  The first concerns his obsession with an officer who once slighted him and an attempt to get even. In the second he gets into an argument with some old school friends at a dinner for a colleague, after which they abandon him to visit a brothel.  The third involves his treatment of a prostitute he engages and then humiliates, rationalizing that his insults may well be a purification. The novel has influence can be seen in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and  Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. It features prominently in the 2018 movie Fahrenheit 451, based on the Ray Bradbury novel.

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