Notes from Underground

A short, strange work in two parts, narrated by a bitter former civil servant living in St Petersburg. In the first part he speaks directly to the reader, arguing against rational self-interest and the idea that people always act sensibly. In the second he recalls episodes from his younger years, in which pride and loneliness lead to painful humiliations. The narrator is angry, funny and unreliable, and the book is often seen as a forerunner of modern existential writing.