A stunning book instilled with thought-provoking ideas, jarring unexpected statements, and elegant sentences, Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a novella that follows the story of an unnamed narrator, who is a cynical and isolated figure living in St. Petersburg, Russia in the mid-19th century. The narrator is a former civil servant who has rejected society and its conventions and has become a dispossessed intellectual, critical of the values of the government and society around him.