Notes From Underground - Hardcover

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067942315X ISBN 13: 9780679423157

Publisher: Knopf, 1993

Synopsis

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man," the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground, published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing: it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. And it remains to this day one of the most searingly honest and universal testaments to human despair ever penned.

“The political cataclysms and cultural revolutions of our century...confirm the status of Notes from Underground as one of the most sheerly astonishing and subversive creations of European fiction.”
–from the Introduction by Donald Fanger
From the Paperback edition.

About 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.

Book Description:

Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between 19th- and 20th- 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 067942315X
• ISBN 13: 9780679423157
• Binding: Hardcover