Notes From Underground: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

by Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

• New

  Paperback
  1993

  $12.08

  This title comes from the award-winning translators of Crime and Punishment , Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The apology and confession of a minor mid-19th-century Russian official, Notes from Underground is a half-desperate, half-mocking political critique and a powerful, at times absurdly comical, account of man's breakaway from society and descent 'underground'.

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $8.12

  How far would you go to escape the real world? The underground man had always felt like an outsider. He doesn't want to be like other people, working in the ant-hill' of society. So he decides to withdraw from the world, scrawling a series of darkly sarcastic notes about the torment he is suffering. Angry and alienated, his only comfort is the humiliation of others. Is he going mad? Or is it the world around him that's insane?

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $7.40

• New

  Hardcover
  2004

  $16.17

  Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is the only translation that counts. They are the only translators who succeed in making Dostoevsky accessible to a 21st century audience, thanks to their ruthless attention to detail at the expense of alterations which can dilute Dostoevsky's unique and flowing style of writing. The great appeal this book retains even today is in part due to Pevear and Volokhonsky, as well as to Dostoevsky himself. Furthermore, Richard Pevear's substantial introduction is essential reading. It explains the purpose of the book and the historical significance of its ideas. Dostoevsky was writing at a time when Russia had reason to be optimistic, but the warning signs in his fiction perhaps leave us clues as to why Russia still has social problems today - and why, less than 40 years after Dostoevsky's death, Russia embraced Communism and destroyed the society in which Dostoevsky had lived