The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of F. Dostoevsky's novel Notes from the Underground to M.M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. We hope to understand not only the artistic devices highlighted in the novel but also the consequences to the conception of polyphony and the polyphonic novel genre, and to other important concepts whose resonance goes beyond the study of the literary discourse, reaching language studies in general. This is the case of the evasiveness in speech with which the underground man interacts while fighting against all the discourses which would have the last word on him.
Notes of Underground; Hidden polemic; Word with a loophole; Silence; Otherness word