Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Published 1864 · 162 pages · 44,105 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Philosophy, Short Fiction

How hard is Notes from Underground to read?

Notes from Underground scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Accessible vocabulary rendered clearly in translation. Philosophical terms emerge from context rather than technical jargon.
Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
The Underground Man's voice is parenthetical, self-interrupting, recursive. Sentences double back on themselves as he qualifies and contradicts.
Abstraction: 75 out of 100
Sustained philosophical argument about human nature, free will, and rationality. Part one is essentially a philosophical treatise.
Information density: 60 out of 100
Dense with ideas but the novella's short length makes it manageable. The narrative section provides relief from abstraction.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
First-person monologue with clear address to implied reader. The underground narrator is unreliable but his unreliability is the point.
Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
The crystal palace, the underground itself—symbols are present but the text is more discursive than symbolic.
Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
The narrator's self-awareness creates ironic tension. He knows he is contemptible yet cannot change.
Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
The narrator explicitly cuts off his notes. No redemption arc; he remains in his underground.
Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
Two-part structure: philosophical polemic followed by autobiographical narrative. Clear organization.

How Notes from Underground is regarded

Notes from Underground holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Notes from Underground sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (83 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Notes from Underground scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.
Symbol: Formal
I will not accept as the crown of my desires a block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand years, and perhaps with a sign-board of a dentist hanging out.
Mythos: Irony and Satire iv (irony iv)
I never met Liza again and I have heard nothing of her.
Genre: Confession + Anatomy
I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form.

Where the story of Notes from Underground takes place

  • Petersburg, 1860s frame, with the 1840s episode of the wet snow (1840 to 1864), the main setting

6 things that are true of Notes from Underground, with the passage for each

  1. The narrator says he is forty years old and has lived 'underground' for twenty years.

    I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty.

  2. The narrator says twice two makes four is a piece of insolence, while twice two makes five is sometimes charming.

    twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

  3. The narrator claims his own face would pass as intelligent only if he could make it so, and says his companions at work looked at him with loathing.

    At that time I was only twenty-four.

  4. The dinner for Zverkov is first set at seven roubles each, but is held an hour later than the narrator was told.

    the dinner had been ordered not for five, but for six o'clock.

  5. Liza is twenty and comes from Riga.

    "From Riga," she answered reluctantly.

  6. Liza throws the five-rouble note back onto the table after he thrusts it into her hand.

    I saw a crumpled blue five-rouble note, the one I had thrust into her hand a minute before.

Scenes in Notes from Underground that Frye would name

16 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Confession, untitled
I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth. This explicitly frames the work as introverted confessional autobiography and engages Rousseau and Heine.
Anatomy, untitled
Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In fact, those will be halcyon days. The text is an encyclopedic polemic against utopian rationalism, in the manner of Menippean satire.
Hamartia, untitled
I opened her hand and put the money in it ... from spite. This is the fatal misstep that destroys his chance of love.
Demonic imagery, untitled
that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years This shows a mouse-hole, hell and burial-alive world of unsatisfied desire.
Agon, untitled
I closed my eyes, and we ran full tilt, shoulder to shoulder, against one another! I did not budge an inch His absurdly prepared contest with the officer on the Nevsky is a mock-heroic agon.
Displacement, untitled
I should come out into the light of day, almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel. His daydreams show a romance hero pattern displaced into pathetic fantasy.

Books that share these scenes with Notes from Underground

About the author

Fyodor Dostoevsky