Literary Significance and Criticism
Like many of Dostoyevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of utopian socialism and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied, even through technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own philosophies.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was very impressed with Dostoyevsky and claimed that he was "one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something", and that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood".
Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, which has themes of existential anguish in the black American experience, uses a protagonist-narrator inspired by Dostoyevsky's underground man.
Read more about this topic: Notes From Underground
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