Which novel by Dostoevsky begins with 'I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man'?

The novel that begins “I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man” is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.

First published in 1864, the novella is presented as the confession and memoir of an unnamed narrator commonly called the Underground Man. He is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg, consumed by resentment, self-consciousness, isolation, and an inability to act. The opening section is largely a philosophical monologue in which he attacks ideas of rational progress and the belief that people can be guided entirely by logic and self-interest.

The second part, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” dramatizes the narrator’s theories through humiliating encounters with former schoolmates and with Liza, a young woman from a brothel. The work predates Dostoevsky’s major novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, so those titles are common but incorrect alternatives. The English title also appears as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld.