'It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!' alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of dostoyevsky's ground-breaking notes from underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'ant-hill' of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence 'underground'. the seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in the double when a government Clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality.