Lineages
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Start from a classic and follow its line, one work at a time, across the map.
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Its heirs
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, AD 1866
The Underground Man rails against reason and utility; Crime and Punishment puts the argument to the test. Raskolnikov acts on a theory, that an extraordinary man may kill for the general good, and the novel follows what it does to him.
Source: Wikipedia, Crime and Punishment
“In the novel, Dostoevsky pinpointed the dangers of both utilitarianism and rationalism, the main ideas of which inspired the radicals, continuing a fierce criticism he had already started with his Notes from Underground.” Read it there
Yevgeny Zamyatin, AD 1924
Zamyatin's diarist, D-503, begins as a contented part of the One State's equation and rediscovers the irrational in himself. The Underground Man had said it first: two times two makes four is not life, and a man would rather suffer than be a piano key.
Source: Wikipedia, We (novel)
“Zamyatin, influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, made the novel a criticism of the excesses of a militantly atheistic society.” Read it there
Ralph Ellison, AD 1952
Ellison's narrator opens with 'I am an invisible man', a deliberate echo of 'I am a sick man', and like the Underground Man speaks to us from a hole: a cellar in Harlem lit by 1,369 stolen light bulbs.
Source: Wikipedia, Invisible Man
“The first line of Invisible Man ("I am an invisible man") for example, is a conscious echo of Notes from Underground ("I am a sick man").” Read it there