A former official has withdrawn from society. He is sick, spiteful and alone. His confession becomes a classic of psychological and philosophical fiction.
FROM THE AWARD-WINNING TRANSLATORS RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
Dostoevsky's genius is on display in this powerful existential novel.
Notes from Underground is the confession of an unnamed former civil servant in mid-nineteenth-century St Petersburg: sick, spiteful, isolated and intensely self-conscious. Speaking from his chosen separation from society, he attacks reason, progress, human perfectibility and himself.
The novella moves from bitter philosophical monologue to remembered episodes of humiliation, failed social contact and cruelty. In the Underground Man, Dostoevsky creates one of fiction's most unsettling voices: an antihero who understands his own degradation but cannot free himself from it.
What makes Notes from Underground so disturbing is not simply the narrator's anger, but his clarity. He sees through reason, society, sentiment and himself, turning this classic Russian novella into one of literature's sharpest studies of alienation and self-sabotage.
Industry Reviews
"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"
