
The Stranger
A clerk in Algiers kills a man, then faces a court more interested in his behavior at his mother’s funeral.
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An isolated narrator argues with society, reason, himself, and every explanation he has just offered.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella gives the floor to an anonymous former civil servant whose intelligence, bitterness, pride, and contradictions keep him apart from other people.
Dostoevsky’s narrator explains, revises, and attacks his own ideas while refusing the comforting stories other people accept.

A clerk in Algiers kills a man, then faces a court more interested in his behavior at his mother’s funeral.
Read our takeExplore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

English novelist, essayist and journalist, born Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was an imperial policeman in Burma, a plongeur in Paris kitchens off the rue Mouffetard, and a militiaman shot through the neck in Spain before any of it.
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Prague novelist who worked fourteen years as an accident-insurance official, left three novels unfinished, told his friend Max Brod to burn everything, and was disobeyed. His Paris is a holiday, not an exile: he came twice as a tourist with Brod between 1909 and 1912, and never lived there.
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The doctor of the Paris slums who wrote the century's blackest, funniest novel — and changed the sound of French prose.
View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Notes from Underground, its publication, and its place in literary history.

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The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.