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Overview
"Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-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 One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.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.Written in 1864, this novel is the first and strangest of Dostoevsky's masterpieces--and the source of those that followed. Violating literary conventions in ways never before attempted, this classic tells of a mid-19th-century Russian official's breakaway from society and descent "underground."
Synopsis
This work marks the turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing. It touches on the moral, political, and social ideas he will explore in later works. This work tells of a mid-nineteenth century Russian official's breakaway from society and descent "underground" where, through a nameless narrator, there emerges a passionate confession of a suffering man. Published in 1864 and a perennial textbook selection since the 1960's.