Notes from Underground

A bitter, retired civil servant addresses his imaginary readers from his corner in St Petersburg. In the first part he attacks the confident belief that people act in their own rational interest, insisting that a man will choose even suffering to prove he is free, and that two times two makes four is not life but the beginning of death. In the second he tells, with painful honesty, of a humiliating dinner with old schoolfellows and of his cruelty to a young woman who offered him kindness.

Dostoevsky published the short novel in 1864, and its spiteful, self-mocking narrator is often called the first antihero of modern literature. This is Constance Garnett's translation, read by six LibriVox volunteers in about five hours.