Other editions of book Notes from Underground by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

A predecessor to such monumental works such 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 is Dostoyevsky at his best.

Notes from Underground (pre-reform Russian: Записки изъ подполья; post-reform Russian: Записки из подполья, tr. Zapíski iz podpólʹya), also translated as Notes from the Undergroundor Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow" and describes certain events that appear to be destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.

Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow", and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator and anti-hero.

Notes from the Underground is a short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is considered by many to be the world's first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow," and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying, and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, omniscient narrator.

Written in reaction to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s ideological novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), which offered a planned utopia based on “natural” laws of self-interest, Notes from the Underground attacks the scientism and rationalism at the heart of Chernyshevsky’s novel. The views and actions of Dostoyevsky’s underground man demonstrate that in asserting free will humans often act against self-interest. The underground man is profoundly alienated from life, entombed in his room. The hero’s views are outlined in Part I, and Part II describes the underground man’s conflicts. When he turns to reason for salvation, it fails him, and he concludes that not reason but caprice ultimately prevails in human nature.

One of the most profound and most unsettling works of modern literature, Notes from Underground remains a cultural and literary watershed. In these pages Dostoevsky unflinchingly examines the dark, mysterious depths of the human heart. The Underground Man so chillingly depicted here has become an archetypal figure — loathsome and prophetic — in contemporary culture.

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man," the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground, published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing: it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. And it remains to this day one of the most searingly honest and universal testaments to human despair ever penned. “The political cataclysms and cultural revolutions of our century…confirm the status of Notes from Underground as one of the most sheerly astonishing and subversive creations of European fiction.” –from the Introduction by Donald Fanger

Notes from Underground, also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man), who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? The second part of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow" and describes certain events that appear to be destroying and sometimes renewing the Underground Man, who acts as a first-person unreliable narrator and antihero.

Notes from the Underground by F. Dostoevsky. Worldwide literature classic, among top 100 literary novels of all time. A must read for everybody.In the 1980s, Italo Calvino (the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death) said in his essay "Why Read the Classics?" that "a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say", without any doubt this book can be considered a Classic This book is also a Bestseller because as Steinberg defined: "a bestseller as a book for which demand, within a short time of that book's initial publication, vastly exceeds what is then considered to be big sales".

'Notes From The Underground' is Doystoyevsky's allegory of the Russian State in the middle of the tumultuous 19th century. Just as its anonymous hero's life consists of appalling contradictions, so too, Russia at that time existed in a state of irreconcilable tension between Western intellectualism, and the 'practical' traditions of Old Russia. Dostoyevsky was a prominent promoter of 'westernisation' un'til his Siberian exile 1854,following which he became an ardent Slavophile. Notes From The Underground' repudiates many ideas of western rationalism, arguing that irrational desires are just as potent a spur to human behaviour, and leading Nietzsche to declare that Dostoyevsky was "the only writer that has ever taught me anything worth a damn about psychology"