In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels--Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov--Fyodor Dostoyevsky penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Hailed by Walter Kaufmann as the "best overture for existentialism ever written," the novel's nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis lies a search for objective morality in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Notes from the Underground introduces the moral, political, and social themes that would drive Dostoevsky's later works, offering a view into the penetrating intellect of one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century.