And he is a striking protagonist, even if not necessarily a likeable one.

The weather in this very cold city is bad for his health, and the cost of living stretches his meager resources, adding in some very real-world problems. The Underground Man might not have a name (appropriate, given that he himself feels that he barely has any characteristics), but his life in a squalid room on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg seems tangibly real. Meanwhile, the book is marked as a novel that touches on realism partly because it is set in the identifiable real-world city of Petersburg (aka Saint Petersburg), described by the narrator-protagonist as “the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.” However, these episodes never really go anywhere and always amount to nothing. It has virtually no plot, though it does include a number of narrative episodes, especially in the second part of the book. Notes from Underground is a highly unconventional novel, but it is still a novel. Indeed, the modern Western ideas that the text seems designed to criticize seem to have infected, not just the protagonist, but also the text itself. However, Dostoevsky’s text (as the important theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has noted) actually includes a number of energies that make it far more complex than it would at first appear to be. He rails against those ideas, which he somehow seems to blame for his miseries, but he seems able to do little about his situation other than to complain endlessly.

Dostoevsky’s text is seemingly composed of the misanthropic ramblings of a miserable and embittered narrator/protagonist whose mind has been poisoned by exposure to modern bourgeois ideas from the West. As a result, the bourgeois ideology that was already a conservative force in the France of Madame Bovary was still a radical one in the Russia of Notes from Underground. Notes from Underground was published seven years after Madame Bovary, but it is set in a society that is, in many ways, hundreds of years behind that of Flaubert’s France in terms of historical development.

The underground man book dostoevsky