Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel Notes from the Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society he scrawls a passionate obsessive self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man's essentially irrational nature.
