Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND is a rambling memoir of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The narrator attacks many aspects of contemporary Russian society, as well as emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? In later parts of the work the narrator, who becomes increasingly erratic and unreliable, seems to be in both decline and in a state of renewal as he seeks revenge against several people who have slighted him.