Notes from Underground

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Classic fiction (pre c 1945)

Published on 5 November 2026 by Penguin Books Ltd (Penguin Classics) in the United Kingdom as part of 'the Little Clothbound Classics' series

Hardback | 208 pages
167 x 117 x 21 | 220g

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' and his gradual withdrawal from society. A masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness, this Little Clothbound Classics edition has been translated by Ronald Wilks.

'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing – from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond – starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm Bradbury