Notes from Underground and the Double. This item is unavailable.Notes from Underground and the Double

A predecessor to such monumental works as "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov", "Notes From Underground" represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing towards the more political side. In this work we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives withdraws from that society into the underground. A dark and politically charged novel, "Notes From Underground" shows Dostoyevsky at his best. In Dostoyevsky's "The Double" we see an intense psychological study of its main character Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a government clerk who becomes obsessed with the idea that a fellow clerk has taken over his identity. "Notes From Underground" and "The Double" are two of Dostoyevsky's more popular shorter works, which exhibit the author's uncanny ability to portray the darker side of the human psyche.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His debut, the epistolary novella Poor Folk(1846), made his name. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with the politically subversive 'Petrashevsky circle' and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Omsk, Siberia. From this experience came The House of the Dead (1860-2). In 1860 he began the journal Vremya (Time). Already married, he fell in love with one of his contributors, Appollinaria Suslova, eighteen years his junior, and developed a ruinous passion for roulette. After the death of his first wife, Maria, in 1864, Dostoyevsky completed Notes from Underground and began work towards Crime and Punishment (1866). The major novels of his late period are The Idiot (1868), Demons(1871-2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). He died in 1881.