Notes From The Underground - Softcover

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

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9781907832475: Notes From The Underground

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1907832475 ISBN 13: 9781907832475

Publisher: Sovereign, 2012

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Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel following life of a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. The unnamed narrator turns to a series of incidents from his earlier life and examines them obsessively through a lens of self-contradictory beliefs. A vivid example of essentially irrational nature of human kind presented here with realism and conviction of Dostoyevsky's prose. From the Notes "When . . . in the course of all these thousands of years has man ever acted in accordance with his own interests?" "For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?" "Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind." "It's a burden for us even to be men- men with real, our own bodies and blood; we're ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We're stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We're acquiring a taste for it. Soon we'll contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write any more 'from Underground'

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About the Author

Born in Moscow in 1821, Foydor Dostoyevsky is considered to be one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. Dostoyevsky was incarcerated in 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. He also suffered from an acute gambling compulsion. Crime and Punishment was completed in a mad hurry because he was in urgent need of an advance from his publisher. Motivated by the dual wish to escape his creditors at home and to visit the casinos abroad, Dostoyevsky travelled to Western Europe in 1862. He visited France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and England. In London he attended the 1862 World's Fair and had a first-hand look at the Crystal Palace, the architectural wonder of the age. The image of the Crystal Palace, which for progressive critics symbolized the dawning of a new age of reason and harmony, was to loom large in Dostoevsky's works to come, especially Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment.