Notes from Underground is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel consisting of excerpts from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told from the man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy. The second part describes events that are destroying and sometimes renewing the man. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer and philosopher whose literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia.