Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

A bitter, isolated former civil servant withdraws from society to brood over his failures and resentments in a monologue that moves between philosophical argument and intensely personal memory, including his obsessive desire for revenge against an officer who slighted him and a painful encounter with a young woman he both pities and humiliates. Often regarded as the first existentialist novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, translated by Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes for Alma Classics, is a mordant study of pride, self-contempt and the limits of reason.