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Literary significance and criticism

The Underground Man became a common character type in many of the works that followed the novella. He is present in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the milder form of the character Nikolai Levin, in Anton Chekhov's Ward No. 6, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 as Yossarian the 28-year-old Army Air Corps Captain, and in Richard Wright's short story The Man Who Lived Underground.

Like many of Dostoevsky's novels, Notes from Underground was unpopular with Soviet literary critics due to its explicit rejection of socialist utopianism^[3] and its portrait of humans as irrational, uncontrollable, and uncooperative. His claim that human needs can never be satisfied even through technological progress, also goes against Marxist beliefs. Many existentialist critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre, considered the novel to be a forerunner of existentialist thought and an inspiration to their own philosophies.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was very impressed with Dostoevsky, claiming that "Dostoevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something," and that Notes from Underground "cried truth from the blood."^{[citation needed]}

The novel has also been cited by Paul Schrader as an influence when he wrote the screenplay for the film Taxi Driver, which has existential themes.

Oleg Liptsin has adapted Notes from Underground for the stage. The world premiere was at the Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco on September 28, 2007.

The novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis quotes a passage from the introduction of Notes from Underground as one of its epigraphs, as a means of comparing the use of the Underground Man as a symbol of his generation and environment to the novel's protagonist Patrick Bateman as a similar contemporary symbol.