Notes from the Underground is celebrated as the first existentialist novel; it is the starting point for the sense of meaninglessness that runs through much of twentieth-century writing, including that of Kafka and Beckett. Dostoyevsky"s most revolutionary work is comprised of the rambling memories of a bitter unnamed narrator who has withdrawn entirely from society into an underground existence. It is a probing and speculative analysis of the political and philosophical questions that were pertinent in Russia and Europe at the time.