In 1864 Dostoevsky publishes Notes from Underground, whose spiteful narrator, retired to his corner, refuses the rational utopia of Chernyshevsky's crystal palace and asserts the right to want against reason itself. The Underground Man is literature's first existential anti-hero, and the book the tradition's second founding text.
Tagged: Existentialism
The Event
- Date
- 1864 (exact)
- Era
- The Nineteenth-Century Sources; Standard periodization of existentialist history
- Location
- St Petersburg; today St Petersburg, Russia
- Traditions
- Existentialism
- Streams
- Existentialism
- Key figures
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Key texts
- Notes from Underground
Primary Sources
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground. Epoch, 1864.
Secondary Sources
- Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.
- Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.
- Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2005.
Provenance: HIST-1422; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
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Jaspers's Philosophie
1932
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Kierkegaard's Either/Or
1843
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Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death
1849
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Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
1945
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Sartre's Being and Nothingness
1943
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Sartre's Nausea
1938
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Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life
1913
World View
Existentialism
Existentialism holds that life has no built-in meaning: each person, radically free, must create a self and accept responsibility for that creation.