Notes From Underground

This was my first reading of Dostoyevsky and having finished it, I cannot wait to read more of this brilliant author.

What I like most about this book is the shocking realism. The author hides nothing, and reveals the weaknesses of his main character shamelessly. The 'antihero' in this story is the most pathetic character I have ever encountered. I truly felt sorry for him. This story basically tells the tale of a man wholey consumed and overwhelmed by the basic decisions required in the most mundane of living situations. The needless self-degradation and obsessive questioning of motives leads to an endless cycle of disappointment.

I really enjoy the style of this book. Almost conversational in quality, almost mystical in it's take on the most ordinary of lives.

I recommend this book to anyone.

Upon reading this book you can instantly see how Dostoyevsky got the foundations for what would become his most celebrated works, notably Crime and Punishment. I am now currently in the middle of my third consecutive reading, and might I mention I only got the book a week ago?
It is a short and (at least for Dostoyevsky) an easy read and very gripping. I found it very difficult to put down. In terms of the first sentence only Albert Camus' The Stranger (Maman died today.) can rival its impact, and from that point until the end, I was utterly amazed. I had never read anything that was able to speak to me so truly, its effect was ineffable. I had read Dostoyevsky before (C&P and various short stories), but this produced a whole new side of him to me, that I instantly took to heart.
A lot of the same ideas and values present in C&P can be found in a diluted form here, and as the introduction states, this was the stepping stone to all his more famous works, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and of course Crime and Punishment.
Why did this novella have such a profound impact on me? The nameless narrator has this uncanningly human feel. It is so easy to connect with.
Anyone who gets sick and tired of the conformity, yet finds themselves conforming none the less. Anyone who has ever written something for themselves, yet wrote it in the manner such that others would be reading it. Anyone who has ever despised another member of the human race for some aisinine reason they don't even know. Anyone who has ever gone well out of their way for spite. Anyone who simply wishes to be able to go well out of their way for spite (i.e. they, like me, greatly admire George Costanza). Anyone who for whatever reason, has felt that they are inexplicably better than everyone else. Anyone who had something to prove to somebody, but was never able to do it.
If any of those are you, this book will change your life. If they do not apply to you, you will probably love this book amyway because it will give you insight into the human character.
The human character and the psyche are greatly examined here. In fact the narrator alludes to the pyschology of it all when he professes a desire to be thrown out of a window in a bar. Some of his desires reflect idiomatic actions of the time, such as the effect of sticking out one's tongue or delivering a slap. It is easy to understand their significance in 19th century Russia, because Dostoyevsky writes it so well here. You can really feel and relate to what the narrator is feeling and for this reason I believe Dostoyevsky to be one of the greatest story tellers of all time, and this one of his best works.

I bought the book at a bookstore and realized that Oxford has a slightly different version: "Notes from the Underground and the Gambler" (Oxford World's Classics).

The Oxford book is almost 300 pages long, or twice as big, and is divided into four parts and only cost about $1 more and has the extra short novel attached.

1. In the Oxford version there is a 13 page review or mini-biography of Dostoevsky and his life, along with an analysis of "Notes" and "The Gambler," plus a bibliography of references.

2. There is the basic "Notes" section part I.

3. Then there is the "Notes" section part II which is a story "Concerning The Wet Snow."

4. Finally, there is a short novel "The Gambler" written around the time of "Crime and Punishment."

I read the first few pages of Notes and the biography, but was immediately captured by "The Gambler" and read it almost non-stop start to finish. It is a very well written and compelling story about a young gambler - written in the narrative - that must reflect Dostoevsky's own passion for gambling in that period. This is the novel typed by Anna Grigorevna, a young 18 year old shorthand typist, who became his second wife. Together they produced "The Gambler" in just 25 days in October 1965. It is a wonderful story and one immediately understands the fame of Dostoevsky.

"Notes" is a source of inspiration for many modern writers. It fictional and is not a biographical or similar description of Dostoyevsky. It is broken into a series of 11 chapters or really two to four page essays followed by a short story. It is in the narrative form and describes the introverted life and thoughts of a young Russian. The first part is a bit choppy but obviously and excellent and interesting read. I have taken these points from another detailed analysis found elsewhere (from Paul Brians but not unique):
-1) it contains an all-out assault on Enlightenment rationalism,
-2) it is an outstanding example of Dostoyevsky's psychological skills,
-3) depicts his profound self-contempt combined with an exquisitely sensitive ego,
-4) the story contains one of the first characters whose childhood experiences have led him to fear love and intimacy even though he longs for them, and
-5) it portrays one of the first anti-heroes in fiction.
The latter figures were to dominate much serious fiction in the mid-twentieth century, notably Albert Camus' Meursault in The Stranger.

Highly recommend, but buy the Oxford version with "The Gambler."

With these opening lines, the ultimate outsider novel was born almost 140 years ago. Despite the number of years since its publication, it has lost none of its meaning, insight, or social value as a work of art. If anything, it has gained popularity and standing due to the many divergent and contentious worldviews of so many outsiders from all walks of life today. Few people realize that Ralph Ellison's classic 'Invisible Man' owes more than just passing gratitude for inspiration. Dostoevsky, similar to Goethe, was a true genius of his age that will continue to move and inspire generations of readers for centuries to come. While this is his shortest novel, many would argue that it is also his best. Read it and decide for yourself....

Notes From The Underground is Dostoevsky's grand look at the human condition from the perspective of a man living on the fringes of society. The short novel provides the key to much of the author's later and more fleshed out novels.
Presented in two parts the novel tells the story of the unnamed Undergound Man who is forced into a life of inaction by the reason driven society that he finds himself in.
Part I of the novel is a long monologue to an invisible audience which explains how the Underground Man came into existence. It is a masterpiece of Existentialist fiction and has been the cornerstone for many later writers including Freud and Camus. The ideas expressed in this part of the novel deal with the character's interactions with himself. This is also the mother of all anti-hero literature. Through the Underground Man's speech we identify him as an over sensitive man of great intellegence. We begin to identify with the character and understand him. While this part of the novel is idea laden it presents one of the great characters of modern fiction.
Part II of the novel is much more accessible to today's reader. This part of the novel deals with the Underground Man's interactions with the society around him. It is in this section that we see that he incapable of reacting in a normal way with the persons that he comes into contact with. He is not the rational man of Part I but a person driven to inaction by his own personal circumstances. He is spiteful, mean spirited and incapable of giving or receiving love to or from others.
On the whole this is a very important piece of world literature which deserves a very careful reading. The novel reads like an onion with each new chapter giving us deeper and deeper insight into the character. The modern reader may well grow tired of the writing style of the novel but if one has patience and reads carefully he will be rewarded.

First my confession: the first two encounters with this celebrated novella both ended with the book being rudely dismissed across the room near pg. 30. But ahh, the third reading felt positively as if a portable supernova had detonated between my two hands. My duty then as a reviewer is to tell you how you should approach this book and ultimately convince you to read it.
The most important thing you need to know about this book is that it is a POLEMICAL SATIRE. There is a great ideological distance between the narrator and Dostoevsky - in no way does he reflect the author's outlook. This fact is not obvious seeing that even his contemporaries were perplexed and generations of critics stymied. The opponent of Dostoevsky's polemic is the radical socialist Chernyshevsky, whose novel "What is to be Done?" (incidentally, Lenin's favorite novel) is parodied piecemeal throughout the novella. What the underground man represents is the logical extreme of a man who totally embraces Chernyshevsky's "rational egoism" and its socialist program. Chernyshevsky believed that once man is shown the truth through science and reason, the "new man" will inevitably renounce all irrational behavior. He also proposes that a new society be founded on socialist and materialistic principles, where the individual will is subjected for the betterment of humanity. In this book, Dostoyevsky seeks to undermine Chernyshevsky by showing that a strict adherence to this radical thought ends in a terrible cul de sac called the "man from underground". Where it diverges from being a mere satire is the fabulous and tortuous dialogue-monologue of this embittered man.
Although Chernyshevsky's overconfidence in science seems incredibly naïve to us now, this was certainly not the case in the 1860's. For example, the book mentions H.T. Buckle, an ambitious historian who attempted to "promote" history to an analytical science (for the refutation, consult Isaiah Berlin's "Proper Study of Mankind), as a living influence. The underground man, then, stands as nineteenth century's most heartfelt rebellion against this atmosphere of stifling rationality. But why should belief in science lead to rigor? Take the following reasoning offered by the narrator. Someone slaps him and he feels offended. But the "rational" part of him tells him that, according to "natural law" and scientific determinism, the slap is the result of environmental factors. Thus the offender is blameless because "the laws of nature cannot be forgiven" (pg.9). But then what is he to do with the resentment that he feels? This leads him a little later to the following wonderful outburst: "My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?" (pg.14). An entirely logical universe where human action is governed by something "like a table of logarithms" (pg. 24) leads to a false comfort in moral relativism. This still does not mean that the underground man prefers irrationality. He merely points out that what is offensive is precisely the fact that men who would send "all these logarithms to the devil" (pg.25) would attract followers. What this new rational universe lacks is man's freedom of will, and man will have it, the narrator warns, even by losing his reason, "so as to do without reason and still have his own way!" (pg.31).
From the very preface, a dismissive quotation ("Etc., etc., etc.") of Nekrasov's hyperromantic poem, there is a curious inversion of Romanticism that sets the tone for part II. We find, amazingly, that the underground man in his youth was a die-hard romantic! The narrator tells us how he brooded in his youth until he developed an overwhelming urge to "embrace the whole of mankind". Of course, what actually transpired - at the gathering around his schoolfellow Zverkov - is tragicomic: the underground man finds himself shamefully ignored and even insulted. Worse yet, the one truly romantic character, the sympathetic prostitute called Liza, is treated in a most harrowingly heartless manner. So the underground man is merely a romantic gone truly sour. This actually isn't too surprising if you think about it: cynics are romantics. You wouldn't be bitter about something unless you had an ideal in mind.
There's obviously a lot more to this little book. If you're looking for better explanations, what the excellent introduction by Richard Pevear leaves out, the relevant chapter in Joseph Frank's "The Stir of Liberation" will fill in the blanks. This along with Mochulsky's "Dostoevsky" is recommended for further reading.
I'll be blunt as possible: this book is a revolutionary masterpiece, as shocking as Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" and just as daring in composition. Overall, I feel that the book stands less as an advocate for irrationalism but more as a stark warning to romantic utopian fantasies that has a nasty habit of ending in cold murder. You REALLY ought to read this.

As he does in his other novels, here Dostoevsky, uses alienation, inner struggle, humiliation and suffering to underscore the ambiguities of the meaning of life and as a way of questioning the basic rules of humanity as well as the traditional rules and values of society.

The first half of book demonstrates how boredom, meaninglessness, self-doubt, and an overly active intellect conspire to mask man's fear and lack of courage to act in defense of his own right to be. This lack of courage, and the intellectual devices used to cover it up (rationalization, social excuses, etc.), ultimately immobilizes man, and estranges him from his inner self, thus, preventing him from being able to measure his true worth and calibrate his true degree of aliveness. In this sense, the psychological analysis of the Underground Man is a classic Freudian-Existential analysis, performed a half century before Freud was born.

The second half of the book carries a companion theme about how pain and suffering brought on by isolation and self-doubt can lay bare the true underlying meaning of the human condition. It reveals how, in an effort to muster the courage to act in the moment, that the essence of being alive is about the will to move beyond intellectualizations and rationalizations. Or said another way: only when he is broken down to the level of the most extreme degradation and embarrassment can man begin to accept himself and then be able to rebuild and prepare himself for a life of redemption, true love and understanding.

What Dostoevsky does so well in both The Underground Man and in Crime and Punishment is carry to the limit what man is unable to do - how we are utterly immobilized by our inner fears and incapacity to act. He shows what the consequences are (for our being and our humanity) when we mistake our cowardice for reasonableness, and use it as a substitute for acting.

A failure to live is precisely to be faced with the consequences of being alive, but instead of acting, we "sleep-walk through life," using psychological ruses to make ourselves feel better about dodging the consequences of "having a real life."

Left alone with our cowardice, Dostoevsky says, we become entangled and lost--we don't know what to join, what to keep up with; what to love, what to hate; what to respect, or what to despise. We become so out of touch with our "real being" that we long to turn ourselves into the hypothetical "average man." (p 203).

In the catatonia of this self-made mental prison, often crime or other modalities of rebelling and acting out against society are the only viable ways out. That is to say, rebelling against the rules of society is the only way to feel truly alive and in control of one's being.

In Crime and Punishment, for instance, it is Raskolnikov's murders that does this; in Notes From the Underground, it is the Underground Man's sexual seduction of a prostitute at a party that does so. In each novel, the criminal act serves as the cathartic way of restoring meaning and balance to lives immobilized by the fear of being unable to act.

Dostoevsky's most powerful and recurring theme ultimately is almost religious in its content and its subtext: that self-redemption and salvation are the ultimate liberator of the soul and can come only through humiliation and suffering. However, while Rakolnikov in Crime and Punishment surrenders to God and Christianity through the love of a prostitute. The underground man rejects love and overtures to turn his freedom over to those who consider themselves morally superior to him.

The Underground Man is the clearest, most succinct and most powerful statement of Dostoevsky's existentialist philosophy. It is a beautiful read. Ten stars.

This is a difficult novel. Although it's not nearly as long as other works of Dostoyevsky's, it doesn't make it any easier. For this reason, I'm especially glad that I chose the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation. Not only is the book translated well, there are tons of explanitory notes that help clarify what's going on in the story, pick up on cultural and period references, as well as help show for what purpose the book was written in the first place. Without these helps, I think I wouldn't have come away from this book with nearly as much of an understanding of it, and my rating probably would have been more in the neighbourhood of a three. However, because I understand a lot more about what was going on, I was able to appreciate what Dostoyevsky was trying to say with this book.

I enjoyed reading this book. Surprisingly, I found the first part more fascinating in some way. He wrote so beautifully, so sincere, it has such powerful text.

I had some hard time with the fact that he writes in second person address, like some kind of manifesto... It was quite disturbing at times.
Occasionally, he even turned his ramblings from monologue into a dialogue, which was pretty funny and interesting, but a bit daunting.
It's like thinking you read a letter written by a mentally ill person. But again, in my opinion, this is what makes it so fascinating. After all, what is more candid than a person who is mentally ill...?

The ending brings the whole meaning of the story into question! I raised my head from the pages and said, "uhh... - What just happened?"

Interesting and humorous.
This guy sits alone and decides to write down all his vents and vexations against every one and every thing under the sun. I actually laughed at his ramblings, and nodded in agreement as I found it ironic to be happening still today. I even became baffled at one point by what exactly his problem was. Still I was pretty enthralled. For being written in the 1860's, I was amazed at how drawn into the writing I was.
It may not be the most magical read I have ever read, but it was so far from what I usually read. Still, I am glad to have read it.

Many critics have observed that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, looking at 19th Century limitations, have seen the same decadence, but few have observed that these two geniuses attribute the problem to precisely opposite causes. To Nietzsche, it is Christianity which has created the 19th Century wimpy man; to Dostoevsky, it is the rejection of a profound Christianity which has produced the same result. Many postmodern readers see the "Notes" merely as a psychological text, valuable because anticipatory of Freud. What should be recognized as even more important is the allusive significance of the principal event in this text, the conversion of a prostitute. The Underground Man, a skilled rhetorician, talks a first-day prostitute out of pursuing her career. The next day she comes to his house, apparently having met her "savior." Brutally, he rejects her, as a trespasser on his freedom. He is Nietzsche's new man, though hardly a Superman, and certainly not superior to his Western Culture predecessor, the Christ who not only converts Mary Magdalene, but takes her into his new family.

There is one thing that must be understood when reading this novel: The first novel Dostoevsky wrote after being send to prison in Siberia for four years (and another four years to work there) was "House of the Dead", an autobiographical book about his time in prison. That book is still very remniscent of his early work, it is a "social" book, that still believes in the essential goodness of the human soul. This one is the book he wrote after "House of the Dead" and it is clear that Dostoevsky doesn't believe in anything he used to believe in anymore. This is the one work of Dostoevsky that is truly a testimony to the bitterness he felt after his harsh life in Siberia. It's a "revaluation of all values". This is the voice of Dostoevsky himself, in my opinion, the voice of someone who's seen everything he so believed in shattered into pieces. Read the first part, where he repeatedly dismisses utilitarianism. He has broken with his socialist past, with his leftie friends like Belinsky. This novel is an outburst of rage against the lies he used to believe in before life broke him. Here, he doesn't seem to care about humanity anymore, or tries not to care anymore, anyway.

I know many people would say one shouldn't confuse this work with an autobiography, but the sentiments expressed by the underground man seem to me to be those of Dostoevsky himself. I think that is the secret, and when I found out this "secret" it send a chill down my spine, because I always thought Dostoevsky was a good christian who wanted to live like Alyosha or Myshkin.

After this book, he started writing different books again, in which redemption and goodness was possible. In my opinion, "Notes from the Underground" is an essential read if you want to understand the true nature of those later works, like "Karamazov" and "Crime & Punishment". You will hear the voice of the underground man again, in Iwan, and Raskolnikow. You will hear the true message, and not the christianity and humanism of characters like Father Zosima and Alyosha.

The basis of his subsequent masterpieces, to call "Notes from the Underground" dark and disturbing is like calling King Kong "ape-like." It is often considered a cornerstone of existential thought, which is apt, because Dostoevsky was nearly as important to existentialism as Kierkegaard or Sartre. His characters, particularly the "anti-hero" character prevalent in his works, were perhaps the most original and unique to be created since the time of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Modern literature is almost unthinkable without Dostoevksy's contributions, most of which originated in this novella.

Yet again Dostoyevsky has written something that goes beyond words. As someone else has definately noted before, the antihero (ie the narrator) talks directly to the reader in the first part, and draws the reader quite forcibly into his feelings, which are quite disturbing, but if you look closely at it, we see that it is an exaggeration of human nature. This antihero that Dostoyevsky created IS humanity, and is exactly what Huxley's Mond, Orwell's O'Brien, and Zamyatin's guardians (I may be wrong with the antagonist here, it has been a while) would simply hate to deal with, both because this is a very unhappy person who doesn't mind sharing the mood, but also that he is does not mind suffering- he welcomes it! He is the man who would shatter the "crystal palace" that society so covets, but is that what people really want? More and more it seems that however unlikely his story, Huxley's world of abundance and happiness is the path our world is taking, making it quite the more necessary for the Underground Man to exist, and to live.

The man from the underground struggles with his inner demons and the consciousness of his own depravity and his unwillingness to make concessions due to reason. He believes one's own free will, or volition, must supercede reason, which should be relegated to the conformist proletariat masses.
Dostoyevsky leaves an indelible impression in such a short masterpiece. Read it in one sitting and come away impressed and pondering the validity of Dostoyevsky and his singular, dark theme of determinism.

A correction to "J. Thomas"'s comment below: Dostoevsky was not a Catholic, but an Orthodox Christian. Anyone who reads his larger works or his own personal writings knows very well how he felt about Catholicism, and why he thought Orthodoxy was the true faith, "the faith which has established the cosmos" (as we Orthodox declared yesterday on the Sunday of Orthodoxy.)

Besides for that, he is correct. Dostoevsky is a Christian author, an Orthodox author, and his entire work is permeated with the understanding that ideas can possess and kill, and only personal love, personal experience, personal suffering and sacrifice can save someone from the poison of ideology. His phronema (worldview) is uniquely Orthodox in his assertion that all ideas fall away into nothingness in view of the Incarnation-- which is to say the incarnation of God as man. The answer to bad ideas is not good ideas but the authoritative human image of Christ.

_Notes from the Underground_, especially in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, is fantastic. It is also very interesting to see how what he started in this book developed in books like _Crime in Punishment_ later on.

Although this review shall probably be posted on the Peavear/Volokhonsky translation, I must say that I have only read the Garnett translation of this one.

Notes from Underground shows an indellible influence which great novelists such as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and even perhaps Gogol had upon Dostoevsky. The intrusive narrator is probably the end of prose innovations and yet it has been with us even before "novel" as most critics call it even came to be.

The narrator is a disturbed man disilusioned with society who, in the first part engages in a philosophical discourse which probes his mind. I love how he lies to you and then admits it and has such a natural dramatic way of speaking to you. The narrator as the main character is the greatest way of novel writing.

In the second part, he tells why he is "underground." He tried to meet with a prostitute at his house and well, I tire of writing this review so I'll leave it at that.

The first words of this deeply disturbing, but powerful, novel are "I am a sick man....I am a spiteful man." and these may refer equally to the main character and to the author. Dostoevsky has written an amazing portrait of a loner, whose introverted, sick thoughts spill out on the pages in demented brilliance. The novel is a product of European cynicism, nihilism, and inertia, all of which reached a certain height in the paralyzed upper circles of 19th century Russia. Nobody could write such a book without some personal acquaintance with the mean moods of this anti-hero. The main character, who does nothing except hide from the world, is a total misfit, a loser in life at home, at work, and in love---a jerk, a dweeb, a dork, a geek in modern American parlance---yet through Dostoyevsky's clear prose, we see into his wounded soul. "Actually, I hold no brief for suffering, nor am I arguing for well-being." he writes, "I argue for...my own whim and the assurance of my right to it, if need be." He is apart from society, recognizes no social obligation. He argues that suffering is still better than mere consciousness, because it sharpens the awareness of your being, therefore suffering is in man's interest Someone who can argue that is not going to write an average novel. This is in fact not an average novel at all, but a book concerned with the play of ideas, ideas that flash around like comets and meteorites inside Dostoevsky's head. It can no more escape Dostoevsky's brain than a Woody Allen movie can escape Woody Allen.
The plot line of NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND is extremely slim. It concerns an underground man, a man like a rat or a bug, who lives outside, or more likely, underneath the world's gaze. It is a lonely, tortured life lived inside a single skull with almost no contacts with the rest of the world except for a vicious servant. The "action" of the book comes only when the protagonist worms his way into a dinner with former schoolmates. They don't want him, he despises all of them. So, as you can imagine, a good time is had by all. The underground man winds up in a brothel with an innocent, hapless prostitute named Liza. He wishes for some relationship, he immediately abhors the very thought of contact with another person. The result is worse than you can predict, though I will say that it involves "the beneficial nature of insults and hatred".
In the tradition of novels of introspective self-hatred, Dostoevsky's has to be one of the first. I wondered as I read how much Kafka owed him, for after all, the hero here is a cockroach too, only remaining in human form. I realized how much Dostoevsky had influenced the Japanese writers of the 20th century---Tanizaki, Mishima, Soseki, Kawabata, and others. The pages are brilliant, but full of vile stupidity, useless, arid intellectualism, hatred of one's best and love of one's worst qualities, withdrawal from life, and self-loathing. A less American novel would be hard to imagine. But, some of these characteristics are found in almost everyone at some point in their life, unpleasant as that realization may be. I have to give NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND five stars, though I can't say I enjoyed it. It is simply one of the most impressive novels ever written.

Dostoyevsky has written a macabre short novel. Throughout the book there permeates a dark sense of menace - the nameless characters mental unrest is captured with great prose style. The characters mental indecision is also expressed clearly, with rather confused and verbal lines.
There are two chapters in this novel. The first deals with the philosophical aspects of Dostoyevsky's own opinions, summed up generally as: A rather idiosyncratic kind of existentialism, and ultimate angst at a society laced with custom and stifled social stratification. While the second section deals with events in the characters life which have led to this philsophical stance. We are exposed to the pernicious, and obbsessive behaviour of the character, as he is driven into fits of rage and anxiety of the tritest of events.
Dostoyevsky has written a compelling book: sinister, unstable and in-depth. Each page casts a shadow. Each line is filled with sharp nihilism. Read this book with a light on!

The lonely and desolate protagonist has long been a target of authors. IN Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky births the landmark and premier loner novella. Dostoyevsky starts the literary franchise off with a bang. Often, an author will use a lack of a particular aspect of fiction to develop that same aspect. For instance, in Samuel Beckett's play, "Waiting for Godot," the characters literally sit around and wait for an enigmatic man named Godot. Godot never appears, but his coming paralyzes the play's plot but simultaneously drives it. In Notes from Underground, the same device is used in the character realm. The stark stratum of characters is dotted mainly by the narrator who goes unnamed and anonymous. Very little details are revealed to the audience, yet the inner-most ramblings and misanthropic threads are spilled all over the pages. The narrator sees people only as small insignificant ants and develops little to no discernable characters. This very idea fuels Dostoyevsky's existential philosophy and psychological point. He uses humor as a cruel device to lash out at the same world that has left him a withered old misanthrope. The novella is formed by its clear lack of development and simplistic view of life. Woody Allen once summarized in a joke: "Life is miserable, painful, irrational, tortuous and over much too quickly. Dostoyevsky's story served as a cultural magnet, inspiring such followers in both film and literature like Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Quick read? I finished Crime and Punishment and thought I'd zip through Notes like a snack before going on to the Brothers Karamozov, afterall, it's barely over 100 pages. Quick read? Think again.
Imagine being locked in a very small room with a verbose, insane, brilliant, jaded, before-his-times, clerk-come-philosopher....with a wicked sense of humor, and a toothache that's lasted a month. Pleasant company....are you searching for the door yet?
For the first hour, he's going to rant about his philosophy of revenge, the pointlessness of his life, his superiority, his failure, oh yeah, and his tooth. FOr the second half of the book, he's going to tell you a tale, with the title "Apropos of the Wet Snow". Because of course, there's wet snow outside on the ground.
I will leave you with this encouragement. If you can get through this book, you will appreciate Doestoevsky more, understand Crime and Punishment better, and probably enjoy a good laugh more than once.
Notes from the Underground is not light reading, but it is well worth the effort. And the translation by Pevear, including the translators notes at the back, is excellent.

Dostoyevsky begins this cornerstone work with the nameless antihero saying, "I", slowly, throughout the work, Dostoyevsky lures the reader into the mind of an antihero, till the last pages there is only talk of "we". After catching my breath after my first read, I found myself lured to rereading the last chaptern over . This book should be taken to heart by anyone interested in philosophy, politics, and psychology. Not only is this work a turning point in Dostoyevsky's life, but I feel it also leaves an seductive psychology abyss. An abyss that none one has dared to jump over, but only created cheap imitations.

Constance Garnett: bye!
Pevear and Volohonsky have done it again. The idiom is a little too updated in places, but as usual they capture the choppiness of the Russian in English. Dostoevsky for the modern reader! Outstanding!
This is the translation I recommend to my AP literature class.

This edition of "Notes from Underground" is lauded by various publications as masterful, definitve, and a great restoration, but I'm not sure I agree. I bought this edition because I'd lost a version I'd owned years earlier. Before I bought this one, I should have sought out the version I'd owned (which I think was a Penguin Classic edition).

In the first paragraph of the editon I'd owned, the "liver" sentence was translated as, "I think there is something wrong with my liver."

Here, it's translated as "I think my liver hurts."

It seems to me that the former translation of this sentence is superior, because it conveys a kind of mental illness (hypochondriasis) that I think Dostoevsky intended. The matter of whether there's something wrong with the protagonist's liver is left in the shadows.

Whereas, if the sentence is translated, "I think my liver hurts," it leaves the matter in doubt as to whether something really is wrong with his liver, doesn't it?

It's unfortunate that this translation occurs in the first paragraph. For me, the first paragraph of a novel is second in importance only to the first sentence.

I regret to say that I lost interest in reading this translation immediately after reading the "I think my liver hurts," sentence.

Talk about a Snore Fest, I have the audiobook and use it to fall asleep as the book literally says nothing. It just rambles on and on about minutia and useless detail about nothing. If you are looking for some type of expose and wisdom regarding human struggle, I suggest reading up on books about gulag survivors. I think that these so called classics are only read by phD's that seek to somehow impress their peers.

some of this VERY short novel, sizzles, but not much. I found this a chore to read for the most part. The anti-hero is so pathetic that you just want to end the misery as soon as possible, and the stuff with the prostitute is too melodramtic. Obviously this was a pre-curser to his genius work Crime and Punishment. After reading NOTES,I believe it has gotten far too much praise than it deserves.

Notes From UndergroundI approached this book eagerly having read ÈCrime and PunishmentÈ oh so long ago - and I am crazy for Russian novels. This is not a novel, first of all. It is maybe Èanti-novelÈ. The character is not a sympathetic one. It is difficult even to describe this often dreary person in a brief review. It is a tale that leaves an impression, however and I personally think it is best for anyone who would like to explore the strange world of the character to stumble upon it on her own. I do, also, recommend reading this book. I read it this summer on my porch.

Brilliant...

One of my favorite Dostoevsky books!

It's a short tale that explores the neurotic mind.

From the first line...
"I AM A SICK MAN...I am a wicked man."

This work is a painfully honest fictional exploration into the human heart.

MikeG

I've read Dostoevsky's Brothers and Crime and Punishment, and after reading Notes, I felt this was more of a psychological book than what I liked.I loved Brothers, but this was too much of a mind book for my liking. To tell the truth I listened to Notes from an audio book, and the narrative was too listless and introspective to allow for a flowing story. If you handle psychological books, then you might enjoy this book, but it takes a lot to get through it.

I could not find any redeeming reason to read this. I did not want to be near the book after trying. I tried as he was supposed to be a great author. My memory tells me that I threw this book into the trash. I did not want it on my book shelf.

A book not really interesting. The narrator himself admits it in the first pages. The author also admits it himself in the short preface.

The narrative is made by a sick individual who clumsily tries to justify his youthful errors. When he should have been more moderate and consensual, we find him stubborn and imbued with himself. If only his deplorable character was only limited to his friendships! We find this same character in all his shameful confusion ... with a prostitute!

Far from the great empty spaces of the existantialist literature of his successors, Dostoevsky gives the portrait of an antihero very close from the one of White Nights!

Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'Notes From Underground' (1864) is predominantly a childish, intellectually dishonest, and edgeless tirade against life, living, and mankind. As such, it is entirely ineffective, and pales in comparison to genuinely gripping nihilistic works like Lautreamont's 'Maldoror' (published only four years later in 1868), Louis-Ferdinand Celine's 'Journey To The End of The Night' (1932), or any of Jean Genet's five classic novels (the first, 'Our Lady of the Flowers,' was published in 1943).

Today's readers may recognize that 'Notes From Underground' might have more accurately been titled Victimology 101, since its anti-hero protagonist, who has willingly dropped out of society at the age of forty, seems to exist in a psychic state of what Carl Jung called "prehistoric kindergarten."

The narrator builds a series of small, circular, and repetitive arguments over the novel's 29 initial pages, then gleefully deconstructs one after the other while simultaneously mocking the reader for ostensibly following the narrator's previous lines of anti-reason. Dostoevsky may have been attempting to make a larger point about a particular kind of aggrieved personality, but if so, the author, in conjunction with his narrator, fails entirely to say anything illuminating. Is 'Notes From Underground' a satire, as some claim? Not officially, it isn't.

That Dostoevsky's "underground man" ("I'm no longer the hero I wanted to pass for earlier, but simply a nasty little man, a rogue") is bitter goes without saying; he is also cowardly, immature, self-destructive, unobjective, bullying, psychologically inflated, and almost wholly defined by his petty envy and "everlasting spite" for the rest of mankind.

The speaker continually states that he is "clever" and "cleverer" than everyone else, yet he repeatedly encourages whatever readership he has to laugh at him, since he assumes such a reaction will be automatic.

But there is nothing particularly clever, acute, abrasive, or piercing about his diatribes, and his tepid experiences, as outlined in Part II, "Apropos Of Wet Snow," fail to justify his philosophical platform or the outcast position he has elected for himself.

Unsurprisingly, what sinks 'Notes From Underground' is that its perceptions, debates, and critiques are collectively lacking teeth of any kind.

Is it accurate to summarize "civilization" as an engine that "merely promotes a wider range of sensations in man...and absolutely nothing else"?

There's a world of Marxists that would disagree, and have.

Are "all spontaneous men and men of action" active, successfully or otherwise, "precisely because they're so stupid and limited"? Do such men routinely "mistake immediate and secondary causes for primary ones"? Are brave men and intelligent men mutually exclusive groups?

It is a verifiable fact that "an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything" and that "only a fool can become something"? Western history, with its enormous catalog of highly accomplished "dead white males," clearly suggests otherwise.

Do "normal and fundamental laws" inevitably leave mankind "unable to do anything at all"? Is personal integrity merely a hollow charade trotted out for the benefit of others in all cases?

Blanket assumptions like these may leave readers believing that the narrator more than deserves his self-induced fate, and that any society, regardless of size and structure, would be better off without him.

Whether Dostoevsky's own opinions or merely those of the narrator, the overall impression the book leaves is that the "underground man" has erroneously extrapolated his own parochial experiences into verities which he believes apply universally to all men and societies.

Since he is so grossly mistaken, as well as enthusiastically committed to his mistake, it's no small surprise that he is a miserable human being.

Unfortunately, generations of lax, narcissistic personalities seeking validation for their own choices have embraced 'Notes From Underground' as a blueprint and sacred text. But authentic defiance necessitates exactly the sort of conviction, fortitude, insight, diligence, and sense of the relative that are squarely beyond the limitations of the book's narrator.

Irresponsible, short-sighted, sad-sack squabblers like Dostoevsky's narrator have always existed in all cultures, and probably always will. It's unfortunate that Dostoevsky expended the effort to create and give voice to such a character, but gave him so little of appreciable merit to say.

First of all, with a name like "Fyodor Dostoyevsky" how in the world can a guy get published? Perhaps he shouldn't be. That is my opinion. Maybe Crime and Punishment was good, but Notes from the Underground is absolutely awful. To be completely honest, I haven't even gotten to Part 2 yet, but the book is like Johnny Got His Gun and Walden on speed (quoted directly from my English teacher). The main character in this book, the Underground Man, is no more than a coward who has time to write books on how he is much too intelligent to act in life. The first seventeen pages leave the reader with a migraine, and after that, it all goes downhill. By the end of the book, I'm almost positive that one will be half insane and screaming, "Twice two is four, but twice two equals five is charming." Do not waste your time reading this so-called "classic."

An Amazing book, painfully truthful, Elegantly decietful, Ive trully never read anything of the sort, and don't have much words to explain to experience and for that I recommend you to read it as well.