The novella appears to be an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a disgruntled, solitary, unidentified narrator (dubbed the Underground Man by critics) who is a retired civil worker residing in St. Petersburg. The Underground Man's diary is used to tell the first section of the novel, which criticises modern Russian philosophy, particularly Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? [2] The "Apropos of the Wet Snow" section of the novel covers circumstances that appear to be destroying and sometimes reviving the underground guy, who acts as a first-person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.