Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1864 · Garnett translation, 1918

Notes from Underground

Name: Notes from Underground
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground (1864) is the confession of an unnamed, embittered ex-official who rails against reason, progress, and his own spite from a St. Petersburg basement. The Psychologist reading companion in IO reader tracks his self-contradictions line by line — useful, since the narrator is not to be trusted about himself.

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PART I · PARAGRAPH

I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!

I am a sick man....

I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)

When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people—of course, they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though.

Notes from Underground · Fyodor Dostoevsky · tr. Constance Garnett

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The facts

Length	about 44,100 words · 2,360 sentences
In sentence cards	about 157 minutes
Difficulty	steady
First line	I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man.
Themes	Part I: Underground · Part II: Apropos of the Wet Snow

Is Notes from Underground hard to read?

It is short but demanding — a bitter, contradictory narrator arguing with himself. In sentence cards it reads in about 157 minutes.

Which translation is this?

Constance Garnett's 1918 translation, in the public domain.

How long is Notes from Underground?

About 44,100 words in two parts; roughly 2,360 sentences.

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Colophon

Text: Garnett translation, 1918, from Project Gutenberg (pg:600). Cover: Standard Ebooks CC0 cover, fyodor-dostoevsky/notes-from-underground/constance-garnett. Reviewed 2026-09-04.