Notes From Underground (Canons) - Softcover

Dostoyevsky is one of the few psychologists from whom I have learned something * * Nietzsche * * An author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul . . . [Notes From Underground is] an awe- and terror-inspiring example of this sympathy -- Thomas Mann Notes From Underground, with its mood of intellectual irony and alienation, can be seen as the first modern novel . . . That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work -- Malcolm Bradbury Notes From Underground established Dostoevsky's reputation as the most innovative and challenging writer of fiction in his generation in Russia -- Rowan Williams * * Guardian * * Notes From Underground transcends art and literature, and its place is among the great mystical revelations of mankind . . . It cannot be recommended to those who are not either sufficiently strong to overcome it or sufficiently innocent to remain unpoisoned. It is a strong poison, which is most safely left untouched -- D.S. Mirsky in HISTORY OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE One of the most revolutionary and original works of world literature * * Walter Kaufman * *

'I am a sick person. I am a spiteful person. An unattractive person, too . . .' In the depths of a cellar in St. Petersburg, a civil servant spews forth a passionate and furious note on the ills of society. The underground man's manifesto reveals his erratic, self-contradictory and even sadistic nature. Yet in Dostoyevsky's most radical and disturbing character, there is the uncomfortable flicker of recognition of the human condition. When the narrator ventures above ground, he attends a dinner with a group of old school friends. It is here, paralysed by his own social awkwardness, that he carries out extraordinary acts and cements his status as a true and original outsider.