Notes from Underground tells the story of a nameless former civil servant, forty years old, who writes from a room in St. Petersburg: in Part One he argues against reason and the calculation of interest, and in Part Two he recounts what he did at twenty-four, up to the night he cruelly treated a young woman who wanted to help him.
In Part One, in eleven chapters, the underground man presents himself as sick, wicked, and graceless, and soon denies that he is wicked. He says that too much consciousness is a disease, that the intelligent man of his time cannot become anything, and that man does not always act out of calculable self-interest. Against the Crystal Palace of utopia, he defends the right to want even the foolish, and ends up withdrawing almost everything: he admits he does not believe a single word of what he wrote, and decides to recount a memory apropos of wet snow.
Part Two contains three episodes. The officer who pushes him aside at a billiard table and the revenge for a staged collision on Nevsky Prospect. The farewell dinner for his colleague Zverkov, to which he invites himself and where he is treated condescendingly and then ignored. And the house where he meets Liza, to whom he gives a sermon about the end that awaits her. Four days later she goes to his home, sees his quarrel with the servant Apollon and, when he shouts out his shame, embraces him. He answers with money, she leaves the note on the table and goes out: "Never again did I meet Liza, nor did I hear anything about her." The memoirs end with an accusation against the reader.