Notes From Underground by F. Dostoyevsky

This story, first published in 1864, is considered by many - including Jean Paul Sartre - to be one of the first exemplars of existential thought in modern literature.

The story is told by an anonymous narrator, 40 years of age and living in St Petersburg, who initially says of himself: "I am a sick man ... I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man."  He also tells us that he is a thinker more concerned with "the highest and the best" sentiments than are his peers.

The narrator divides his story into two parts.  The first part occupies about a third of the whole.  In it the narrator ranges over a  number of philosophical and rhetorical questions, such as action and inaction, free will and determinism, and the nature of revenge.  In the second part, the narrator tells of a series of incidents that occurred over two days and nights when he was twenty years of age.  He reacquaints himself with some old school chums with whom he was never close and quarrels with them, then he disillusions a young woman about her prospects for a happy life.

By the end of the story, we find that the narrator, despite his knowledge of "the highest and the best", is unable to live up to his own high standards or live down to those of others - he is paralysed by inaction, which he fully recognises, and this leads him to be consumed with spiteful thoughts.

Shakespeare's Cassius was lean and hungry and thought too much, and "such men are dangerous".  Not always.  While Cassius was able to effect the assassination of Julius Caesar, the equally lean, hungry and pensive narrator can do no more than gnaw at his old wounds in a self-imposed exile from society - in his "underground".

This edition of Notes from Underground was translated by Jessie Coulson.  Coulson has managed to give us a text that is lively and contemporary in feel.  In a mercifully short 150 pages, Dostoyevsky has managed to give us a masterful insight into the psychology of a man who thinks too much and does too little.

Publishing details: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Penguin, London, 2010, pp.152