Notes from Underground Study Guide

One of eight children, Fyodor Dostoevsky was born to a family lineage of middle-class businessmen and petty nobles. His father Mikhail was a military doctor who later secured a government position and an acquired rank of nobility. A sickly but intelligent child, Dostoevsky was sent to a military engineering academy, which he hated. While he was there, it is believed his father was killed by serfs on his own plantation. His mother died of tuberculosis when Dostoevsky was a young man. Dostoevsky began a career as an engineer and, in his free time, wrote and translated. He also showed signs of epilepsy, greatly interrupting his professional and personal life. Accused of publishing materials critiquing the government, Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia for five years, beginning in 1849, and his experiences there informed his character Raskolnikov’s exile in his novel Crime and Punishment. After years of financial straits caused by a gambling problem, Dostoevsky began in 1866 the composition of novels—The Gambler, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov—on which his reputation now rests. His health declined until his death in 1881; he was increasingly recognized, in his later years, as an immense talent, and he is considered today one of the finest novelists of the nineteenth century.

Dostoevsky’s time in exile certainly affected the rather pessimistic outlook and opinion of humanity in Notes from Underground, a response to the unchecked optimism of Chernyshevsky. Notes from Underground takes place during a time of transformation and modernization for Russia, and to some degree explores what it means to be a modern man or an intellectual in the 19th century. In part one, the underground man uses recent historical events (such as the American Civil War) to demonstrate the violence and irrationality of human history.