About the work
Stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novella „Notes from Underground" („Zapiski iz podpolya"), published in 1864. The inner monologue of a nameless, embittered former St Petersburg civil servant is regarded as one of the founding texts of existentialism and the earliest figure of the modern anti-hero. Numerous theatre directors have adapted the text for the stage.
Plot
The „Underground Man", a cynical former St Petersburg official of about forty, speaks out of his underground existence. In the first part he unfolds a bitter philosophical reckoning with the belief in progress and the rationalist optimism of his age: against the idea that man always acts to his own advantage he sets the defiant freedom to act even against his own reason and to his own harm; he mocks the „Crystal Palace" of rational society. In the second part he recounts episodes from his life: the humiliating obsession with an officer who ignores him; a dinner with former schoolmates who despise him; and finally the encounter with the young prostitute Liza, whose heart he first opens with a vision of a better life, only to humiliate her cruelly, out of shame and self-hatred, when she actually comes to him.
Cultural significance
„Notes from Underground" is a key text of literary modernism and anticipates central motifs of existentialism — freedom, self-consciousness as sickness, the revolt against reason. Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus invoke the text. As a stage monologue it is a demanding solo piece, performed internationally many times.