The nameless narrator of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), often known as Underground Man, opens his rambling memoirs with a declaration: “I am a sick man … I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man.” Forty years old, he sits and stews in his tiny St Petersburg apartment, refusing treatment for his ailing liver, having left the civil service after receiving an inheritance.

What makes Underground Man seem like a rogue, or an antihero, is that he has reached a point of ennui that leads him to act primarily out of spite. Throughout his life, he has accumulated nastiness, anger and depression because he is unable to avenge to his satisfaction wrongs done to him. Further assailed by questions and doubts, he keeps himself in this position by imagining slights, and internalising the anger they inspire.

As well as referring to Notes from Underground as the first existential novel, some critics, including Leonid Grossman, have ascribed Underground Man’s opinions to Dostoevsky. Certainly, the author identified strongly with his protagonist, calling him the “real man of the Russian majority”. Dostoevsky rejected the idea that people act in accordance to reason or their best interests and asserted the need for them to be able to behave as they choose, without fitting into Enlightenment ideas of “progress”. In particular, he wrote in reaction against Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done? (1863), which argued for the means of production to be reorganised according to co-operative ideals.

Dostoevsky’s central character, however, will not work readily with anyone. In chapter 1, The Underground, he directly addresses the readers, trying to win them over to his viewpoint. He knows “the highest and the best”, but he accepts that he’s not one of them and that the standards they set are unattainable, even though he was the only civil servant he knew not to be taking bribes. In response, he would rather be thought of as malevolent, hurting people’s feelings at will, but he says the truth is that: “I couldn’t make myself anything … neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect”.

Perhaps, as WB Yeats wrote, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Both are true of Underground Man: he fulminates against the values of 19th-century Russia before declaring that he doesn’t believe a single word of his (incredibly persuasive) opening monologue. He labels himself an “ineffective, irritating windbag”, but he would prefer to be this than a man of deeds: these people may set the terms for “good” and “bad” character, but they are stupid and limited, “taking immediate, but secondary, causes for primary ones, and thus they are more quickly and easily convinced than other people that they have found indisputable grounds for their action”.

Underground Man states that he was “ashamed” of the second, main chapter of the book, subtitled A Story of the Falling Sleet. This is where he demonstrates the spite and inertia that he has discussed, writing about his 24-year-old self, who felt that “Every decent man in this age is, and must be, a coward and a slave”. The first anecdote is the funniest, showing just how much effort he must make to carry out the smallest act of rebellion in a world in which the most “civilised” shed the most blood.

He decides to fight whoever is in the tavern, but then stands around, unable to do anything

Entering a tavern, he decides to fight whoever is there, but then stands around, unable to do anything. An officer silently grabs his shoulders and moves him out of the way. Furious at this minor humiliation, Underground Man starts to stalk the military man, who, it transpires, often walks around Petersburg’s crowded Nevsky Prospect, pushing anyone he considers inferior out of his path. Underground Man becomes obsessed with setting up a confrontation, in which he will not yield. After much deliberation, he eventually squares up to the officer. Their shoulders clash: the officer walks on. His subsequent attempts to convince himself that his gesture has made any impact are tragicomic: “He did not even glance round, and pretended he had not noticed; but he was only pretending, I am certain.”

His next encounter is more sustained, with some old classmates whom he thoroughly despises for their “triviality” and “stupidity”. He especially hates Zverkov: “I disliked him even in the lower forms, precisely because he was good-looking and lively. He did uniformly badly in lessons … but succeeded in passing his final examinations because he had influential friends”. When he bumps into the group and learns that Zverkov is leaving Petersburg, Underground Man contributes to a present and goes to the dinner, despite their attempts to dissuade him.

Underground Man never asks for sympathy, but often looks for empathy. With the officer, one can easily share his resentment towards such an imperious symbol of authority; at the meal, things are far less clear, our judgment clouded by our immersion in his rage. He refuses to toast Zverkov and then makes a passive-aggressive speech about how he loathes people who use empty phrases or tell dirty stories, and how he values ”truth, sincerity and honesty”.

But does he? In the final scenes, he talks to 20-year-old “prostitute” Liza, trying to “harrow her soul and crush her heart”, lecturing her about the shamefulness of her profession, purely to have power over someone. She tells him that his hectoring monologue “sounds just like a book”, and his effort to cast himself as the hero who will “rescue” her collapses. By the end, Underground Man has to admit that he doesn’t know where “real life” is lived, but he seems sure, at least, that in opting out of a society that rewards the officer, or Zverkov, he’s not the villain. At this point, an editorial voice comes in to tell us that the Notes continue – almost certainly going nowhere – but that this seems a good place to stop.