Notes From Underground

Description

'I am a sick person. I am a spiteful person. An unattractive person, too...' In the depths of a cellar in St. Petersburg, a retired civil servant spews forth a passionate and furious note on the ills of society. The underground man's manifesto reveals his erratic, self-contradictory and even sadistic nature. Yet Dostoyevsky's disturbing character causes an uncomfortable flicker of recognition, and we see in him our own human condition.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He has written many works of fiction including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. He died in St. Petersburg on 9th February 1881. Natasha Randall is a writer and literary translator. Her translations include We by Yevgeny Zamyatin and A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. Her writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, New York Times, Los Angeles Book Review and more.

This excellent Canongate Canons edition has an enlightening and entertaining introduction by DBC Pierre . . . Dostoevsky chips away at complex human motivation with persuasive stylistic tools, succeeding in being hilarious and heart-rending in a single sentence (after all, "mankind is a comical construction"), captured in this beautiful translation by Natasha Randall. It's through elegantly excavating the particularities of his era that Dostoevsky strikes upon timeless truths, and with perspicacious analysis of behaviour, tunnels through to hidden depths * * Guardian * * Dostoyevsky's Underground Man . . . is perhaps the greatest reliably unreliable narrator in world fiction * * New York Times * * The most unflinching study of self-loathing in the literary canon * * Irish Times * * Notes From Underground established Dostoevsky's reputation as the most innovative and challenging writer of fiction in his generation in Russia -- Rowan Williams * * Guardian * * Notes from Underground is still a modern book; it still can kick * * New Yorker * * Dostoyevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something -- NIETZSCHE Notes From Underground, with its mood of intellectual irony and alienation, can be seen as the first modern novel . . . That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work -- MALCOLM BRADBURY An author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul . . . [Notes From Underground is] an awe- and terror-inspiring example of this sympathy -- THOMAS MANN Notes From Underground transcends art and literature, and its place is among the great mystical revelations of mankind . . . It cannot be recommended to those who are not either sufficiently strong to overcome it or sufficiently innocent to remain unpoisoned. It is a strong poison, which is most safely left untouched -- D.S. Mirsky in HISTORY OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE One of the most revolutionary and original works of world literature -- WALTER KAUFMAN