Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
Notes from Underground 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short novel Notes from Underground is considered the world’s first existentialist novel. Originally published in 1864 (this English translation was first published in 1918), it is presented as the memoirs of an unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living in St Petersburg, whose rambling stories and insights are a deep existentialist attack on emerging Western philosophies.