Notes from the Underground (AmazonClassics Edition) - Softcover

Isolated from society in a tenement basement in St. Petersburg, a malicious former civil servant vents his resentments. In the rambling notes that follow, we are exposed to the inner turmoil of the Underground Man, who represents the voice of his generation. An emotional, paranoid knot of contradictions, the spiteful narrator is also desperate to join a society he loathes, if only to prove his superiority to it.

Exploring themes of free will versus determinism, Dostoyevsky’s existential exploration was written to challenge increasingly popular Western egoist philosophies. In the Underground Man, he found the embodiment of the antihero, whose behavior—like all human behavior—defies rationalization.

AmazonClassics brings you timeless works from the masters of storytelling. Ideal for anyone who wants to read a great work for the first time or rediscover an old favorite, these new editions open the door to literature’s most unforgettable characters and beloved worlds.

Revised edition: Previously published as Notes from the Underground, this edition of Notes from the Underground (AmazonClassics Edition) includes editorial revisions.

Born in Moscow, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, short-story writer, translator, essayist, journalist, and philosopher, regarded today as one of the most significant writers of the Golden Age of Russian Literature.

Raised with an appreciation for books, Dostoyevsky developed a desire to write at an early age. His first novel, Poor Folk, gained him entry into literary circles, but his interest in the banned books of tsarist Russia landed the young author in a Siberian prison camp for four years. It helped to instill in Dostoyevsky themes of desperation, suicide, poverty, manipulation, crime, and morality that would inform his novels.

One of the first translators of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Garnett (1861–1948) was born in Brighton, England, educated in Latin and Greek at Newnham College, Cambridge, and tutored in Russian by the exiled Feliks Volkhovsky. Credited with helping to introduce nineteenth-century Russian literature to the English-speaking world, Garnett went on to translate more than seventy Russian literary works, including those of Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Ostrovsky, Alexander Herzen, and Anton Chekhov.