Notes from Underground

Dostoevsky’s best-known novel, Notes from Underground, marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing and the vision 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 One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator, is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.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 utopians and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky provide us with this brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy in its original Russian.