Editing Notes from Underground (section)

{{Short description|1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky}}
{{Other uses}}
{{Infobox book
| name          = Notes from Underground
| author        = [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]]
| genre         = [[Philosophical fiction]]
| publisher     = [[Epoch (Russian magazine)|''Epoch'']]
| release_date  = January–April 1864
| title_orig    = Записки изъ подполья
| orig_lang_code = ru
| country      = [[Russian Empire]]
| set_in=[[St. Petersburg]], {{circa|1862–64}}<ref>Reference is made to "Napoleon—the Great and also the present one", setting the story in the reign of [[Napoleon III]] (1848–1870); and "the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived", setting the story after the death of [[Henry Thomas Buckle]] (1821–1862).</ref>
| language      = [[Russian language|Russian]]
| image         = Записки из подполья. Повесть Ф.М. Достоевского (1866) обложка.jpg
| caption       = Title page of Russian-language 1866 edition
| dewey         = 891.73/3 20
| congress      = PG3326 .Z4 1993
| oclc          = 31124008
| preceded_by   = [[The House of the Dead (novel)]]
| followed_by   = [[Crime and Punishment]]
| native_wikisource = Записки из подполья (Достоевский)
| wikisource        = White Nights and Other Stories/Notes from Underground
}}
'''''Notes from Underground''''' ([[Reforms of Russian orthography|<small>pre-reform</small> Russian]]: {{lang|ru|Записки изъ подполья}}; <small>[[Russian language|post-reform]]</small> [[Russian language|Russian]]: {{Langx|ru|Записки из подполья|translit=Zapíski iz podpólʹya|label=none}}; also translated as '''''Notes from the Underground''''' or '''''Letters from the Underworld'''''){{efn|[[Vladimir Nabokov]] considered the title more correctly translated as ''Memoirs from a Mousehole''.<ref>Alex Beam, ''The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship'', 2016, ch. 8 "We Are All Pushkinists Now", p. 114</ref>}} is a [[novella]] by [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]] first published in the journal [[Epoch (Russian magazine)|''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".<ref>{{cite book |last=Dostoevsky |first=Fyodor |date=2001 |others=Translated and edited by Michael R. Katz |title=Notes From Underground |publisher=W.W. Norton |edition=2nd |isbn=0393976122 |page=152 (''n 3'')}}</ref>

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 [[Dialogue (Bakhtin)#Double-voiced discourse|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.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bakhtin |first1=Mikhail |title=Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics |date=1984 |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |pages=227–28}}</ref>

The Underground Man attacks contemporary Russian philosophy, especially [[Nikolay Chernyshevsky]]'s ''[[What Is to Be Done? (novel)|What Is to Be Done?]]''<ref>{{cite book |last=Bird |first=Robert |chapter=Introduction: Dostoevsky's Wager |title=Notes from Underground |translator-last=Yakim |translator-first=B. |pages=vii–xxiv |location=Grand Rapids MI |publisher=[[William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company|William B. Eerdmans]]}} [https://books.google.com/books?id=thvj4Z9x-9UC&pg=PR10 Quote from p. x]:

"The views that brought Chernyshevsky to this vision were close to [[utilitarianism]], meaning that actions should be judged in terms of their expediency. Naturally, utilitarians assumed that we can know the standard against which expediency can be measured: usually it was economic well-being. In Chernyshevsky's [[Rational egoism|rational egotism]] [''[[sic]]''], utlitarianism as a method coincided with [[socialism]] as a goal: in essence, it is in everyone's individual self-interest that the whole of society flourish."</ref> More generally, the work can be viewed as an attack on and rebellion against [[determinism]]: the idea that everything, including the human personality and will, can be reduced to the laws of nature, science and mathematics.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Morson |first1=Gary Saul |title=Narrative and Freedom |date=1994 |publisher=Yale University Press |page=27}}</ref>