Notes From Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Overview

A predecessor to such monumental works such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From Underground represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing towards the more political side. In this work we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives withdraws from that society into the underground. A dark and politically charged novel, "Notes From Underground" shows Dostoyevsky at his best.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781420926897
Publisher:	Digireads.com
Publication date:	01/01/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 5.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) was educated in Moscow and at the School of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg, where he spent four years. In 1844 he resigned his Commission in the army to devote himself to literature. In 1846, he wrote his first novel, which won immediate critical and popular success. At the age of twenty-seven he was arrested for belonging to a socialist group and condemned to death, but at the last moment, his sentence was commuted to prison in Siberia. In 1859, he was granted full amnesty and allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In the fourteen years before his death on January 28, 1881, Dostoyevsky produced his greatest works including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed.
 
Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, a collection of stories, and the novel Notable American Women. Editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, he is on the faculty of Columbia University and has received a Whiting Award and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His essays have appeared in Time, Feed, Tin House, McSweeny’s, Bomb, Grand Street, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Conjunctions.
 
Andrew R. MacAndrew (1911-2001) was a professor at the University of Virginia and an acclaimed translator of Russian literature. In addition to fiction by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and others, he translated A Precocious Autobiography by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Editorial Reviews

An author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul . . . [Notes From Underground is] an awe- and terror-inspiring example of this sympathy

THOMAS MANN

This excellent Canongate Canons edition has an enlightening and entertaining introduction by DBC Pierre . . . Dostoevsky chips away at complex human motivation with persuasive stylistic tools, succeeding in being hilarious and heart-rending in a single sentence (after all, "mankind is a comical construction"), captured in this beautiful translation by Natasha Randall. It's through elegantly excavating the particularities of his era that Dostoevsky strikes upon timeless truths, and with perspicacious analysis of behaviour, tunnels through to hidden depths

Guardian

Notes From Underground established Dostoevsky's reputation as the most innovative and challenging writer of fiction in his generation in Russia

Guardian - Rowan Williams

One of the most revolutionary and original works of world literature

WALTER KAUFMAN

Dostoyevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something

NIETZSCHE F

Notes From Underground transcends art and literature, and its place is among the great mystical revelations of mankind . . . It cannot be recommended to those who are not either sufficiently strong to overcome it or sufficiently innocent to remain unpoisoned. It is a strong poison, which is most safely left untouched

D.S. Mirsky in HISTORY OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

The most unflinching study of self-loathing in the literary canon

Irish Times

Notes from Underground is still a modern book; it still can kick

New Yorker

Dostoyevsky's Underground Man . . . is perhaps the greatest reliably unreliable narrator in world fiction

New York Times

Notes From Underground, with its mood of intellectual irony and alienation, can be seen as the first modern novel . . . That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work

MALCOLM BRADBURY

Notes From Underground, with its mood of intellectual irony and alienation, can be seen as the first modern novel . . . That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work

Malcolm Bradbury

One of the most revolutionary and original works of world literature

Walter Kaufman

Dostoyevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something

Nietzsche

An author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul . . . [Notes From Underground is] an awe- and terror-inspiring example of this sympathy

Thomas Mann