Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author), Boris Jakim (Translator)

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $19.70

  A bold new translation of a literary classic One of the most profound and most unsettling works of modern literature, Notes from Underground (first published in 1864) 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. This vivid new rendering by Boris Jakim is more faithful to Dostoevsky's original Russian than any previous translation; it maintains the coarse, vivid language underscoring the visceral experimentalism that made both the book and its protagonist groundbreaking and iconic.

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $11.40

  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'.

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $24.40

  Backgrounds and Sources includes relevant writings by Dostoevsky, among them Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, the author's account of a formative trip to the West. New to the Second Edition are excerpts from V. F. Odoevksy's Russian Nights and I. S. Turgenev's Hamlet of Shchigrovsk District. In Responses , Michael Katz links this seminal novel to the theme of the underground man in six famous works, two of them new to the Second Edition: an excerpt from M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's The Swallows, Woody Allen's Notes from the Overfed, Robert Walser's The Child, an excerpt from Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, an excerpt from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, and an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's Erostratus. Criticism brings together eleven interpretations by both Russian and Western critics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two of them new to the Second Edition. Included are essays by Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky, Vasily Rozanov, Lev Shestov, M. M. Bakhtin, Ralph E. Matlaw, Victor Erlich, Robert Louis Jackson, Gary Saul Morson, Richard H. Weisberg, Joseph Frank, and Tzvetan Todorov. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

• New

  Hardcover
  2004

  $17.90

  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