<p>Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella <i>Notes from the Underground </i> (1864) is considered one of the great masterpieces of world literature. The nameless narrator, a former civil servant in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, has withdrawn into an underground existence; here he inscribes his most ascetic ruminations of the alienating constraints of society and man's self-imposing irrationality. </p>
