“I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man,” a nameless voice cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the painful self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn of a lonely individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature.

In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov—Fyodor Dostoevsky penned the darkly fascinating Notes from Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes—moral, religious, political, and social—that dominated Dostoevsky’s later works.

Those who are familiar with his works will immediately recognize the novel’s richly complex philosophical, political, and psychological themes; those who are not will find the best introduction to Dostoevsky’s grander masterpieces.