How does Notes from the Underground challenge determinism and utopian ideas?

In Notes from the Underground (1864), Fyodor Dostoyevsky mounts a fierce critique of the rationalism and determinism championed by the radical intelligentsia of his time, specifically targeting Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel What Is to Be Done?.12

Dostoyevsky challenges the deterministic belief that human behavior is governed by predictable laws of nature or self-interest. Through his narrator, the "underground man," he argues that humans possess an inherent need for free will—or "caprice"—which often leads them to act against their own best interests simply to assert their autonomy.12

The novella rejects the possibility of a perfectly engineered utopian society, suggesting that even if such a system were constructed based on rational principles, individuals would inevitably rebel against it because it would define them as predictable objects rather than free agents. Ultimately, the work portrays the underground man’s irrationality as a direct, albeit equally flawed, response to the rigid, scientific systems proposed by rationalists, highlighting the complexity of human nature that such theories fail to capture.21