Notes From Underground & Other Stories (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840225777 ISBN 13: 9781840225778

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 2015

Synopsis

With an Introduction and Notes by David Rampton, Department of English, University of Ottowa. Notes from Underground and Other Stories is a comprehensive collection of Dostoevsky’s short fiction. Many of these stories, like his great novels, reveal his special sympathy for the solitary and dispossessed, explore the same complex psychological issues and subtly combine rich characterization and philosophical meditations on the (often) dark areas of the human psyche, all conveyed in an idiosyncratic blend of deadly seriousness and wild humour. In Notes from Underground, the Underground Man casually dismantles utilitarianism and celebrates in its stead a perverse but vibrant masochism. A Christmas Tree and a Wedding recounts the successful pursuit of a young girl by a lecherous old man. In Bobok, one Ivan Ivanovitch listens in on corpses gossiping in a cemetery and ends up deploring their depravity. In A Gentle Spirit, the narrator describes his dawning recognition that he is responsible for his wife’s suicide. In short, as a commentator on spiritual stagnation, Dostoevsky has no equal.

About this title

Review:

'...a rant against natural laws and a scream of defiance form the man who lives underground. This book, superbly presented as always by Hesperus, is essential reading for the twenty-first century. Warning: not for the faint-hearted!' --The Use of English

'a canny work of literature... "Notes" is still a work of modern literature; it still can kick' --The New Yorker

From the Publisher:

A new translation of the most important of Dostoevsky’s shorter works.

Dostoevsky's Underground Man is a combination of the psychologically tortured poor clerk and the frustrated dreamer of his early stories, but his Notes from the Underground is a precursor of the great novels of ideas of his later career, with their ongoing central concern of the nature of free will.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1840225777
• ISBN 13: 9781840225778
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 720