Notes from Underground
Subtitle: The New Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1994
Place of publication: United States
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 136
ISBN-13: 9780679734529
Copyright date: 1993
First sentence: The ellipsis after the opening sentence of Notes from Underground is like a window affording us a first glimpse of one of the most remarkable characters in literature, one who has been placed among the bearers of modern consciousness alongside Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust.
Description: 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 One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.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.