Notes from Underground (Paperback)

~ Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator) "I AM A SICK MAN...I am a wicked man..." (more)
Key Phrases: little debauch, crystal edifice, seven roubles, Anton Antonych, Hotel de Paris, Lake Como (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

You read every shimmering, tormented word, mesmerised. This is Dostoevsky in distillation, a prelude not just to his leading works, but to the entire 20th century... How is it possible to have a character who evokes aspects of Hitler and Pooter, who is hilarious yet disturbing, and both villain and victim? Because Dostoevsky was a genius, and the narrator of Notes From Underground his most protean character, with whom you never quite know how you stand Sunday Times Dostoevsky's is a genuinely disembodied voice, speaking for all sufferers and victims Guardian --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize

The Brothers Karamazov
“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” –New York Times Book Review

“It may well be that Dostoevsky’s [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now–and through the medium of [this] new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” –New York Review of Books

Crime and Punishment
“The best [translation] currently available…An especially faithful re-creation…with a coiled-spring kinetic energy… Don’t miss it.” –Washington Post Book World

“Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as is possible in English…The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured…The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard version.” –Chicago Tribune

Demons
“The merit in this edition of Demons resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators…They capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life.” –New York Times Book Review

“[Pevear and Volokhonsky] have managed to capture and differentiate the characters’ many voices…They come into their own when faced with Dostoevsky’s wonderfully quirky use of varied speech patterns…A capital job of restoration.” –Los Angeles Times

With an Introduction by Richard Pevear


From the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 30, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067973452X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679734529
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (141 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,430 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

123 of 135 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More with the Mad Genius........., August 13, 2001

By	Suzanne "Suzanne" (United States) - See all my reviews

Quick read? I finished Crime and Punishment and thought I'd zip through Notes like a snack before going on to the Brothers Karamozov, afterall, it's barely over 100 pages. Quick read? Think again.

Imagine being locked in a very small room with a verbose, insane, brilliant, jaded, before-his-times, clerk-come-philosopher....with a wicked sense of humor, and a toothache that's lasted a month. Pleasant company....are you searching for the door yet?

For the first hour, he's going to rant about his philosophy of revenge, the pointlessness of his life, his superiority, his failure, oh yeah, and his tooth. FOr the second half of the book, he's going to tell you a tale, with the title "Apropos of the Wet Snow". Because of course, there's wet snow outside on the ground.

I will leave you with this encouragement. If you can get through this book, you will appreciate Doestoevsky more, understand Crime and Punishment better, and probably enjoy a good laugh more than once.

Notes from the Underground is not light reading, but it is well worth the effort. And the translation by Pevear, including the translators notes at the back, is excellent.

73 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deep analysis of the human condition, April 27, 2001

By	Bryan A. Pfleeger (Metairie, Louisiana United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Notes From The Underground is Dostoevsky's grand look at the human condition from the perspective of a man living on the fringes of society. The short novel provides the key to much of the author's later and more fleshed out novels.

Presented in two parts the novel tells the story of the unnamed Undergound Man who is forced into a life of inaction by the reason driven society that he finds himself in.

Part I of the novel is a long monologue to an invisible audience which explains how the Underground Man came into existence. It is a masterpiece of Existentialist fiction and has been the cornerstone for many later writers including Freud and Camus. The ideas expressed in this part of the novel deal with the character's interactions with himself. This is also the mother of all anti-hero literature. Through the Underground Man's speech we identify him as an over sensitive man of great intellegence. We begin to identify with the character and understand him. While this part of the novel is idea laden it presents one of the great characters of modern fiction.

Part II of the novel is much more accessible to today's reader. This part of the novel deals with the Underground Man's interactions with the society around him. It is in this section that we see that he incapable of reacting in a normal way with the persons that he comes into contact with. He is not the rational man of Part I but a person driven to inaction by his own personal circumstances. He is spiteful, mean spirited and incapable of giving or receiving love to or from others.

On the whole this is a very important piece of world literature which deserves a very careful reading. The novel reads like an onion with each new chapter giving us deeper and deeper insight into the character. The modern reader may well grow tired of the writing style of the novel but if one has patience and reads carefully he will be rewarded.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant insights into psychology and philosophy, May 7, 2000

By	"mikeu3" (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Notes from Underground; White Nights; The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; and: White Nights Dream Ridiculous Man and selections from The House of the Dead (Signet classics) (Paperback)

I've read Notes from Underground twice--once when I was fairly new to Dostoevsky and Russian literature in general, and once after reading many of his other novels and learning a bit about the intellectual and literary climate of Russia in the 1860s from other sources as well. Both times I was deeply impressed, though for different reasons. On the first reading, Notes was simply a very moving, often disturbing psychological portrait of, as is revealed in the first two sentences, a sick and spiteful man. That Dostoevsky could produce this work over 35 years before Freud's heyday was, and still is, extremely impressive to me. What I did not realize on the first reading was the historical importance of the work. For some time, some Russian liberals had been dreaming of creating a utopian state, and more recently the increasing popularity of nihilism (and in particular the critic Chernyshevsky) had led to hopes that the exact laws of human action could be deduced and a rational utopia set up accordingly. Dostoevsky's underground man is a stinging condemnation of this idea, as his behavior shows that individuals do not naturally act according to the best interests of either society or themselves. Though the novel's merits certainly stand alone, it's worth reading a bit about the historical context in which it was written in order to get a better idea of its impact.

A few words about the other works in this edition: Dostoevsky wrote White Nights while in his 20s, before his Siberian exile and while he still held an interest in the Utopian ideas he would later condemn. It's a story of a young man and a young woman, both socially isolated, who happen to meet one night and, over the course of the next three nights, fall in love, with, unsurprisingly, a maudlin ending. The book dragged a bit at first, but I found the second half of it very touching and, though a fairly immature work, it was definitely worth my time.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man was the last short story Dostoevsky wrote, and contains a very clear version of his notion of the necessity of suffering for love and redemption, expressed through a man who dreams of travelling to another planet identical to earth in which suffering doesn't exist. It's not a really great work, but it's a quick and pleasant read.

The volume also contains three short excerpts from The House of the Dead (the book based on Dostoevsky's imprisonment)--two of them dealing with prisoners' tales of the murders that got them imprisoned, and one a discussion of corporal punishment. The excerpts are fairly interesting, but if this sort of thing fascinates you you're better off getting the whole work, which is published by Penguin Classics.