Roads Classics Dostoyevsky"s revolutionary work, was a major influence on James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Friedrich Nietzsche. 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. Dostoevsky"s most revolutionary work is comprised of the rambling memories of a bitter unnamed narrator who has withdrawn entirely from society into an underground existence.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 during the mid-19th century.