Notes from Underground

by Constance Garnett (Translator), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $11.42

  An introduction that places the underground man in the historical context of nineteenth-century modernity's movement toward secularism, examines his psychological dynamics, and identifies the developments in Russian intellectual life that the work parodies and criticises.

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $27.39

  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

  $17.55

  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