Introduction

'I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.' A former minor civil servant of forty, having inherited a small sum and resigned, hides in a squalid 'underground' room in St Petersburg and pours out his confession to imagined readers. He attacks the fashionable rationalism and utilitarianism of the day: people think that man always acts in his own interest, and that once science calculates what is good for him a perfect 'Crystal Palace' can be built; but man insists on proving that he is a man and not a piano key, and will act against his own interest for the sake of free caprice; 'two times two makes four' is the beginning of death. The second part tells of humiliating episodes from his youth, above all his cruelty to Liza, a good-hearted prostitute. This short novel is seen as the prelude to all Dostoevsky's great novels and a forerunner of existentialist literature.