4 h 58 minAudiobook9 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 4 h 58 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if you act against your own happiness just to prove you are free?
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, an unnamed retired official writes from his lonely corner of St Petersburg. He is forty, proud, bitter, and hungry for respect he cannot bear to ask for. He wants readers close enough to hear his confession—and far enough away to despise.
His argument challenges the belief that reason and self-interest can build a perfect society. Then he turns to his younger self: a poor clerk caught in an obsession over an officer’s slight and drawn toward Zverkov’s farewell dinner. Among people he dislikes, his longing for recognition meets his fierce need to resist.
What you’ll discover
- A voice without comfort Meet a narrator whose jeers and contradictions make his confession strange, funny, and painful.
- Freedom against good sense Follow an unsettling argument about why people choose what works against their own interests.
- Pride at the table Enter a farewell dinner where old school ties offer no promise of welcome.
- Liza’s plain honesty Encounter a young woman whose feeling for others contrasts with the narrator’s bitter isolation.
- Ideas put under pressure Watch abstract claims about human will take shape in a younger man’s painful encounters.
Who will love it
For readers who love a bold, uneasy voice, ideas argued through a character, and stories of pride, shame and isolation, or anyone seeking an introduction to Dostoyevsky.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- A spiteful man speaks from his hole
- Two times two is four is not freedom
- A slight from an officer starts an obsession
- The dinner for Zverkov goes wrong
- A young woman named Liza listens to him
- What the book is about and how it works
Who’s who
- The narratorAn unnamed retired civil servant of forty, sharp, proud and bitter, who writes from isolation and longs for respect he cannot bear to ask for.
- LizaA young woman in a brothel whom the narrator meets one winter night, plain and honest, with a feeling for others that he lacks.
- ZverkovA former schoolmate and officer, confident and well liked, whose farewell dinner becomes the setting for the narrator's humiliation.
- SimonovAn acquaintance of the narrator from school days, awkward and reluctant, who lets the narrator join the dinner against his better judgment.
- ApollonThe narrator's servant, calm and dignified in his scorn, who wages a silent war of wills with his master at home.
- The officerA tall stranger who moves the narrator aside in a tavern without a glance and becomes the target of his long dream of revenge.
Formats and delivery
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- Large-print eBook
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- Audiobook
- 4 h 58 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 9 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kellerloch
by Fjodor Dostojewski · 1864
Alone in St Petersburg, an unnamed man defends his freedom to choose even what harms him.
Medium level2–5 hours to read25 languages
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In short
Notes from the Underground is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, published in 1864 in St Petersburg. It is the confession of one man who never gives his name.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
A spiteful man speaks from his hole
The book opens with a confession in the narrator's own voice. He says he is a sick man, a spiteful man, and an unattractive man. He tells us he once worked as a minor civil servant in St Petersburg, and that he was rude to petitioners and took a small pleasure in it. Then an inheritance came to him, he left his post, and he withdrew into a shabby room.
He calls his place the underground. It is not a cellar so much as a state of mind, a place where he lives apart from everyone and watches the world with resentment. He writes as if answering an audience, and he keeps imagining what the gentlemen reading him will say. He answers their objections before they can make them, and he often contradicts himself in the next breath.
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What is Notes from the Underground about?
It is the confession of a bitter, unnamed former civil servant in St Petersburg. In the first part he argues about free will and reason. In the second he tells of humiliations in his youth that put those ideas to the test.
Who is the underground man?
He is the narrator, a man of forty who has withdrawn from society and lives in a small room. He has no name in the book. He is intelligent, proud and self-defeating, and he addresses imagined readers.
What does the underground mean in the book?
It is a state of mind as much as a place. The narrator lives apart from others, nurses his resentments and watches the world from a distance. The word stands for isolation, spite and hyper-awareness.
The author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1821–1881 · Russian novelist
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist born in Moscow in 1821. He lived in Saint Petersburg and spent years in Siberia after his arrest in 1849. He wrote Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868–1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880). He died in Saint Petersburg in 1881.
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