Notes from the Underground

A nameless former civil servant, sick and spiteful, writes from his 'underground' corner of St Petersburg. In the first part he rails against the idea that people always act in their own rational interest: humans, he insists, will choose suffering and folly just to prove they are free. In the second part he recalls humiliating episodes from his youth, including a disastrous dinner with old schoolmates and his cruelty to a young woman named Liza.

Published in 1864, this short book is often called the first existentialist novel, and its narrator, intelligent and paralysed by his own consciousness, has haunted writers ever since. It opens the way to Dostoevsky's great novels, starting with Crime and Punishment. See Dostoevsky's life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to hard labour in Siberia, which he described in The House of the Dead.

His great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, turn questions of guilt, faith and freedom into stories; White Nights is a gentle place to start.