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Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics) Paperback – August 30, 1994

by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

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Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

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Editorial Reviews

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.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian

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Product details

Series: Vintage Classics
Paperback: 136 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (August 30, 1994)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 067973452X
ISBN-13: 978-0679734529
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.4 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 504 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Russian
- #91 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Classics
- #183 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary

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Pepa

THE EBOOK IS NOT THE PEVEAR TRANSLATION! This is ...

May 1, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

THE EBOOK IS NOT THE PEVEAR TRANSLATION! This is flagrant product misrepresentation by Amazon. They listed an e-book version of the PEVEAR translation and when I downloaded it and opened it on my device it is NOT the same translation as you can see in the peak inside of the printed version. You can find free online versions of this translation that Amazon is falsely selling as the PEVEAR translation in lots of places online. Amazon cheated!

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VA Duck

From a Crawl Space

November 17, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

As usual with Dostoevsky, the read is complex, even in this instance with the simplest of storylines - an old man ranting. The complexity comes from Dostoevsky's amazing ability to articulate the waves of thought behind human emotion - the flood and ebb of reasoning, the articulation of the irrational. But complexity extends well beyond style. Dostoevsky counters and buttresses contemporaneous philosophical thought using the rantings of his protagonist, "the underground man", the narrator. For those not familiar with Søren Kierkegaard and Nikolay Chernyshevsky (and here I admit my own ignorance) even a quick read of the short, but well done Wikipedia article on this title will be a very useful primer. Interestingly, the reviewer mentions that 'underground' is a flawed translation of the Russian and that 'crawl space' (my alternative) or something like it, might be more apt, implying; underneath the structure and within the loathsomeness of darkness, rats, snakes, spiders, and evil spirits.

Part I "underground" overwhelms, tediously with rant, still, the reader comes away with a sense of the underground man's misery, frustration, and disgust at life. It is a pure rant with minimal structure. In part II "Apropos the wet snow" we are taken on a - years earlier - 'social encounter' of the underground man. It does not go well - in fact, the reader will now feel, compellingly, albeit without sympathy, the narrator's hatefulness.

Dostoevsky's novels so overwhelm with depth and seriousness that other authors on the list of '100 greatest books' (which I am reading through) can seem well behind. In order NOT to be that reviewer who ‘gushes’ 5-stars at everything picked-up - and because this isn’t my favorite Dostoyevski novel I’ll give it 4-stars (but if my arm were twisted - even a little - 5! ;-).

(translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Publisher: Aegitas April 20, 2017)

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Andy

It’s definitely Dostoevsky

March 3, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The first part of the book is phenomenal and timeless. It speaks about how resentment is a part of human nature or maybe how humans will never be satisfied, that it is perhaps ontologically necessary that we cannot experience satiety or fulfillment. I’m not quite sure how to word it, but if you read it for yourself that would be cool, and then you could tell me what it is that I read.

I thought the first part was an absolutely brilliant nsight into human nature

The second part is about an angry Russian guy being an angry (and especially miserable) Russian guy. It feels uniquely Russian. I found the second part hard to relate to—probably because I’m not a Russian from the 19th century. But the texture was vivid: I could feel like the spite and the cold wind. Dostoevsky does an amazing job of carefully invoking a vivid image (of something Russian.)

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Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

Depressingly uplifting

April 16, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

_Notes_ is long on thought and character, and short on incident.

In the first (and shorter) part, there are literally _no_ incidents; it consists of a great deal of existential-ish philosophizing and critiquing of society (and of the personality of the narrator, who is never named). Even more, the narrator critiques contemporary scientific utopianism, insisting that, even if human nature were reduced to mathematics, it would still be human nature and perversely inconsiderate of its own best interests; that Man is not a rational animal at all but an emotional animal who demands, above all else, freedom (or its illusion). Man, he says, feels oppressed even by simple mathematics; he wants to be free to declare, when he chooses, that twice two is five.

Determinism, he observes, relieves Man of the burden of guilt; Man, he implies, cannot live without it. Implied but never stated (though apparently it was stated in the original text and removed by Russian censors) is that only through faith in Christ can this paradox be overcome.

The second part consists, basically, of two sequences of events.

In the first, the narrator decides to insult an officer by bumping into him on the street, and eventually does, to no effect.

In the second, he invites himself to a party of farewell for a man he doesn't like, gets drunk and behaves badly, berates a prostitute, and makes an ass of himself in front of his servant.

Really, at the level of plot, that's about it. It doesn't so much end as is cut off, first by the narrator's claim that he will write no more, then by a fictitious editor's claim that he did, indeed, write more, but that there's no point in continuing.

Fortunately, there's a great deal that _isn't_ at the level of plot: deep and detailed analysis of Russian society of the nineteenth century ... which turns out, really, to be analysis not of society, but of the narrator himself, whom we quickly realize is not a reliable or objective speaker. In fact, _Notes_ is a portrait, a portrait of a thoroughly unpleasant and despicable human being; who is, nonetheless, a human being and not some kind of metaphorical cockroach. Even as the narrator demands our despite, Dostoevsky invites us to love him as a perversely damaged image of Christ.

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