Dostoevsky’s underground man is a combination of the psychologically tortured poor clerk and the frustrated dreamer of his early stories, but Notes from the Underground is a precursor of the great novels of ideas of Dostoevsky’s later career, with their ongoing central concern of the nature of free will. Initially musing on his ‘sickness’ and the detested notion of self-interest, the maladjusted and wilful Underground Man relates a series of incidents from years before, describing scenes of scandal and the chance arrival of love; love that, of course, by his very nature he cannot accept. With its assualt on Enlightenment and Romantic ideals and its tortured anti-hero, Notes from the Underground is one of the most influential pieces of fiction in Western literature.