Author(s): F. M. Dostoevsky

Classics

'I am a sick man...I am a wicked man.' With this sentence Dostoevsky began a work which marks the frontier not only between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, but between two centuries' visions of the self. For the unnamed narrator of Notes From Underground is a multiplicity of selves, each at war with the others - all at war with everything else. A former official who has retreated from society into an underground existence, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive and self-contradictory narrative which serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man's essentially irrational nature. Richard and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard versions, give us a remarkably faithful edition of Dostoevsky's classic which conveys both the tragedy and the tormented comedy of the original Russian.