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    Notes from the Underground
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    Notes from the Underground
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    Notes from the Underground
    Ebook159 pages3 hours

    Notes from the Underground

    By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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    About this ebook

    In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes — moral, religious, political and social — that dominated Dostoyevsky's later works. Notes from the Underground, then, aside from its own compelling qualities, offers readers an ideal introduction to the creative imagination, profundity and uncanny psychological penetration of one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century. Constance Garnett's authoritative translation is reprinted here, with a new introduction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMar 5, 2012
    ISBN9780486114996
    Author

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist and philosopher whose works examined the human psyche of the nineteenth century. Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest writers in world literature, with titles such as Crime and Punishment; Notes from Underground, one of the first existential novellas ever written; and Poor Folk, Russia’s first “social novel.”

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    Reviews for Notes from the Underground

    4/5

    2,443 ratings62 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Amazing how he can twist and turn a thought from nowhere and make it grow into a full blown psychological drama.
    • 4/5
      Short and enjoyable. I can't get enough. Feels like a slice from the mind of one of Dostoevsky's more expanded characters, in a good way. It's all been distilled into 130 pages and it really made me think. How is he so darn good at writing melodramatic and insane people? I probably relate a little too much to this guy.

      And in there, also a nugget of truth re: philosophy of science "Man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready intentionally to distort the truth, to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, only so as to justify his logic.".
    • 3/5
      Shooting from my hip, I'd guess that Notes From The Underground emerged via the tradition of epistolary novels and the recent triumph of Gogol's Diary of a Madman. There is little need here to measure the impact and influence of Dostoevsky's tract. Nearly all of noir fiction is indebted. The monologue as a novella continues to thrive, finding its zenith, perhaps, in the work of Thomas Bernhard.

      Notes is a work for the young. Its transgressions can't begin to shock anymore. Its creative instability has to be appreciated for its technical merit. This hardly works on old sods like me. Somehow in this tale of honor lost and self deception I kept thinking of the Arab Spring. Dangerous potentials are unearthed when you cleave away traditions and don't offer realized possibilities.
    • 5/5
      All of Dostoyevsky's novels are works of genius, but, as far as I am concerned, this is the best one of them all.
    • 4/5
      My first Dostoyevsky reading, and I really enjoyed it. Soon I'll begin reading his longer works, this was a good introduction.
    • 4/5
      Notes from the Underground. Fyodor Dostoevsky. 1993. I tried to like this book, but, alas, I didn’t. I know it is a classic and that people far smarter than I am think it is a great novel. It was just an ordeal to get through. If you want to read Dostoevsky, try Crime and Punishment first.
    • 4/5
      For such a short work I was finding this hard going until I realised the problem was with my mindset and over reverent reading of Russian literature. When I realised it was a comedy and worked out something of the Russian sense of humour it all clicked - it's viciously funny enough to anticipate the satire boom of the mid 20th century. Still have problems with the sort of existentialist viewpoint presented here, but at least Dostoyevsky's wit makes it enjoyably palatable.
    • 5/5
      painful articulation of the internal side of a self marginalized person
    • 5/5
      You can't help getting drawn into Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" as you follow the rantings of a spiteful, bitter person. Dostoyevsky has created a character whose every action leads to his own self-destruction, pain and alienation from others.
    • 3/5
      This rating is provisional - I'm going to need some time for this novel to stew before coming to a final decision. I read this as part of a challenge to read cult classics which seemed a good opportunity to read a famous Russian author whose work I have been avoiding since attempting Crime and Punishment as a teenager.

      If you, like myself, are coming to this book knowing little about it, a word of advice - don't let the first part make you quit! I disliked it and found it boringly pretentious; at this point I was sure I was going to hate the book and was tempted to stop. The second part I found much more interesting; although the neurotic narrator was just as pretentious, the overall style was more accessible.
    • 5/5
      Who would have imagined that the thoughts of such a loathsome and miserable person could make for such entertaining reading? In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic Notes from Underground, we meet Underground Man, a menial Russian bureaucrat living a squalid existence in St. Petersburg “that most abstract and pre-meditated city.” The novel is divided into two sections. The first part comprises Underground Man’s philosophical musings—sometimes thoughtful, sometimes wildly contradictory—arguing that people are neither enlightened nor rational, and only too willing to deny the simple fact that “twice two is four” merely for the perversity of doing so. The second part of the book then details three specific episodes from his past in which he was either offended by someone else’s actions or behaved very badly—almost hysterically foolish, in fact—to a variety of his acquaintances and colleagues.Some critics have labeled Notes from Underground as the first Modernist novel while others have called it the first Existentialist novel. Whatever the truth of those lofty claims, it is easy to see the influence that this book has had on the development of literature over the subsequent 150 years, including the work of Kafka, Camus, and Sartre right up through that of Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, and Faulkner. In Underground Man, the author has created one of the most compelling and frustrating characters I have ever come across; he is at once intelligent and hopelessly naïve, arrogant and frightened, lucid and self-delusional, as well as someone who desperately craves love but is incredibly cruel to a decent young woman who might provide it. He is someone who, through his actions and words, has much to teach us about ourselves, although that is likely the last thing he would ever want to do. Nevertheless, Underground Man is not a person you would want to have as a friend or even be forced to sit next to at a dinner party.
    • 3/5
      Vrijmoedige monoloog van een eigenzinnig, arrogant en wispelturig man. Het eerste deel is absoluut een sleutel tot het hele oeuvre van Dostojevski, het tweede deel doet erg gogoliaans aan. Onderliggende boodschap: de verscheurde moderne mens als gevolg van het wetenschappelijk positivisme.Eerste lectuur toen ik 17 jaar was, onmiddellijk herkend als sleutelroman
    • 5/5
      Wow, talk about your unreliable narrators. The underground man presages later existential heroes (which probably by definition means antiheroes), but he's not just arguing a case like Meursault, or trying to drown out his own nobler impulses like Yossarian, or clacking his horrible mandibles together and going "LLLOOOOVVVVVEEEEEE SSSSAAAAAMMMMMMSSSSSSSAAAAAAAA" like Gregor Samsa (and, as I've read Nabokov used his lepidopterist skills to establish, never realizing that he had turned into a bug that had wings under its shell and could just buzz off into the sky and let his bug flag fly. But Nabokov also thought Dostoevsky was boring and derivative, so who cares what he thinks?). The underground man is doing all these things, and there's a bushel of straight nihilism in his Notes to boot, but mostly what he's doing is fucking us around. Not leading us down the garden path to cause us to come to the same conclusions about human worthlessness and venality that he has; leading us down the garden path to make us think that's what he's doing, when really he just wants to dick us around. "You despise me, vividly and at length?" he cries? "Well, I gave you that me that you despise. I told you about him. He is a straw man and I gave you the words you used to despise him, to boot, ass."

      He's Ambrose Bierce without the relish, and the only thing that can rescue a narrative from that much self-loathing is a healthy dose of clinical honesty. Which is a big problem for the first half of this book, the "essay". Because one true thing about the UM is that he needs us to know how smart he is (that's part of what ultimately salvages the book from the brink of failure); so he makes sure we know right from the start that he is capable of saying savagely perceptive things in a surgically precise way. But then he wastes that talent--hacking down 19th-century positivism, utopian socialism, enlightened self-interest, other ideas which I'm not going to suggest don't deserve hacking down, or which to portions of Dostoevsky's 1860s audience it might not even have been revelatory to see hacked down, but which to a book as many lightyears ahead of its time as this one is it's a waste of time to even bother with. It's like Gilles Deleuze (who ever would have thought, Deleuzie, when I gave your What is Philosophy two stars in a LibraryThing review in 2007 that you would come to be my go-to example of a forwardthinker for this review less than four years later?) spending time dismantling Descartes instead of nurturing rhizomes; or to take a real example instead of a hypothetical one, it's the was psychology as a profession is so fixated on the ghost of Freud and the shadow he casts over them that every textbook spends time attacking him and thus validating his continued relevance as a pole of debate via the good ol' Oedipus complex (kill your fathers!) instead of letting him be and going about their fMRIs.

      Phew! What I'm saying here is that hacking on the absurdity of the safe little herd beliefs of the herd is boring, and people have always believed stupid shit and who gives a shit, and if it's the beginning of, like, a sociological investigation into the negative effects of said beliefs, or a psychological sketch of how the personality that attacks them with so much rage and yet such palpable self-loathing also comes to be, then fine, but here it's not--or the first half's not. It's just venom, and every time the UM gives us a premise or principle or alludes to a fictional event that might serve for orientation, he then moves the goalposts on us, reminds us that he's fucking us around, and so what good is he then? We're willing to believe for the moment that life is hell, but then he refuses to help us derive meaning from that, even nihilistic meaning/lessness; we want Virgil in Hell and we get the Joker in Arkham.

      The intro to my edition of Notes from Underground states that each section makes the other magnificent. Certainly that's not true of the first. As discussed, I find it on its own to be practically worthless, although exquisitely done; but the melting-snowflake sadness that suffuses the second half, the "story", is nowhere present in the "essay". The "story" makes the essay make sense--the pointless seething spittard that we see in the first half is revealed as someone very lonely and sad, who finally wants to be loved and esteemed but is far too clever and aware of his defense mechanisms to ever be able to dismantle them. You see how Dostoevsky was on his way to religion of a very true and hardheaded sort--on his way to the conviction that the fundamental crisis of human life isn't human corruption or venality or selfishness, but human pain. A totally unlovable man is obsessed with the officer who once moved him dismissively out of the way. He plots his revenge in a way too pathetic to be disguised by all his cleverness (but of course he is still feeding us our material, and the fact that only by presenting his ugliest self can he get us to feel sorry enough for him to love him may well be his last trick on us and himself). It gives him a reason to live, this revenge, for a couple of weeks at least, and he prepares for it like his wedding day. Even as your lip curls in scorn you wince at how he hits the tender places--the piece of each of us that feels fundamentally unloveable and yet like we have to trick someone into loving us as is because we're the only us we've got. The beaver collar was the most devastating detail for me.

      And when he makes his big move it's meaningless, of course, but he pretends it isn't--diffidently, desultorily--as an excuse to keep going. To keep sneering after love. The party scene is excruciating (although it does bring up a sliver of doubt I have about this messy thesis as well, the way it reminds me of a thirteen-year-old nerd's birthday party. Are any adults like this? No, and the UM's got that covered, right at the end when he reminds us that he has presented us with the deliberate collection of all the traits necessary for an antihero. But still--you could argue that he is a psychological representation of all the ugly cravings and tantrums that grown-ups hide away, but I think what grown-ups do is actually much healthier for the most part--they learn to garner love by being loveable, to the degree they can--funny, reliable, affectionate, whatever it is. Anyone gonna argue that fifty-year-olds on average are more selfish than fifteen-year-olds? More spiteful, maybe, with heads fuller of bad memories, but I truly think that we overcome demons, as an aggregate species, faster than new ones are spawned. Moral arithmetic).

      And all the cruelty and pathos of the UM's encounter with Liza at the end, the way he toys with her and drives her away and blames literature for his problems and then himself and then us--it's heartbreaking but also so predictable, down to the big tease-reveal that it was five rubles he pressed into her hand, making her back into a prostitute (called it). The second half of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow", and I'm maybe trying to cut a Petersburg knot by making "the need for love" my keyword for this text in toto (in which case consider this meandering review to represent also my prior attempts to untie it), but what else makes the icy malice and slushy yearning and grey despair so touching instead of repugnant? The first half of Notes without the second half would be pointlessly unpleasant, a slapup of laughable, spiteful, adolescent nonsense; the perfect, tragic-in-the-most-exact-sense second half would, okay, exert somewhat less fascination without the extensive preparation of the first. Fine, Dosty knew what he was doing.

    • 5/5
      My favourite Dostoyevsky and have read several times.
    • 5/5
      With the opening sentences: "Dostoevsky introduces the unifying idea of his tale: the instability, the perpetual 'dialectic' of isolated consciousness". - Richard Pevear in the introduction.

      I've read two other translations. This one is excellent. It was like seeing an old friend with new clothes, ones that fit better and were complementary.
    • 4/5
      I think this may be the shortest work by a Russian novelist I have ever read. That being said, I don't know that this book is truly a novel so much as it is an extended short story told from the perspective of a Russian man who tends to rabble and who once drove away a woman who might have been able to love him. Overall, I liked the book, although the first part was certainly difficult to get through, the second (which actually relates a story instead of just philosophizing) more than made up for it.
    • 5/5
      This is a fantastic book that addresses the question of "what is the self?". The underground man can only represent us who find ourselves lost and unsure yet despised by our own ineptitude. For those who have not yet to begin exploring "what a self is" or "what and why makes the self?" I highly suggest you start here.
    • 3/5
      This guy is batcrap crazy. I don't think I'd ever want him as a friend (though I guarantee I would be his friend, because I seem to attract crazy), but he's certainly amusing to watch/listen to.
    • 2/5
      What a horrible person -- sad, sick, poisonous. If this guy is supposed to be a metaphor for modern man, what's the point of going on?
    • 3/5
      Torment and pain on the road to existentialism. As only a Russian could write it. One gets bogged down in the dismal slush of it all and hankers for some ray of hope in this eternal uphill struggle. Great literature, perhaps, but a slog nevertheless.
    • 5/5
      In this book dostoevsky historicly draws the line between nihalism and existentialism.The 1st part is almost pure philosophical:the author/hero write his thoughts about the confused,and over-knowledged modern man, that results a negative modern human being.Kafka and Musil took that example and developed it,the existentialists tried to solve the problem aroused.The 2nd part is the prose story and it's magnificent.Dostoevsky is not the best user of words in fiction, but he is genius regardless - describing human nature,both psychologiclly and philosophiclly.
    • 4/5
      An entertaining at times critique of philosophy such as rationalism among others, overall not my cup of tea.
    • 1/5
      I have virtually no idea why this book is considered a classic. More of a "personal manifesto" than an actual story, this is a disjointed reasoning of why the narrator feels and acts so outlandishly. Though I can sympathize with some of his emotions on my very worst days, 'Notes' as a whole left me feeling exhausted and a little dull. The second part of the book does try to assume some semblance of a story, yet the other characters are hardly developed, the plot is weak, and the climax is wholly anticlimactic. The only saving grace is the scene with the prostitute, yet even that promise is not only not fulfilled, it is swept with disgust under the carpet.
    • 3/5
      I can see what it is that literary critics like about this book but I found that it required a bit more concentration than I was willing to give it.
    • 5/5
      Dostoevsky's novella is part narrative and part manifesto, all awash in anguish. The book is the indelible cornerstone of existential literature, being a violent confrontation with the human condition and the nature of life. There are a number of quotable passages here, and the writing is smooth and digestible in contrast to the narrator. He is not likable, though he is interesting in much the same way as a car crash or the aftermath of disaster, and it is probable that most readers can relate to his bitterness, though maybe not at such extreme levels.
    • 4/5
      This book is broken into two parts.The first part is the journal to the underground man - it completely blew me away... At times I would laugh at out loud at the madness of his logic, while other times I would be dumbfounded by his incredible line of thinking and view on the world/life.Very few books make me question the way I think/rationalize like this book succeeded in doing.The second part is a story of the underground man, showcasing his thoughts/actions from his journal in story form. I found this part to be a tad boring and drawn out, but interesting as it still held the same logic from the first part.Overall, its verbiage is tough to read depending on the translation you get, and you have to pay extremely close attention - I had to re-read things multiple times to 'get it.' But this is not a book that you just want to finish, you really do want to 'get it.' So take the time to read it slowly, and find a quiet coffee house with minimal distractions, cause it will be worth it.
    • 5/5
      I kind of dreaded reading this book, as if I needed to read it to get into Dostoevsky's work. But this book is still quite funny and a very interesting read, especially for its take on human nature and idealism.
    • 4/5
      The story of a man that goes through his life and no one seems to notice him. On the few occasions that they do he feels compelled to drive them away with his self loathing.. I think many people do live lives similar to the protagonist here that become reclusive and spiteful and don't realize that many of their problems that bring on themselves. As always with Dostoevsky the writing is beautiful as well as painful to read. An existential nowhere man living a life of terrible insignificance.
    • 5/5
      I've met the underground man before. After years of pastoring, I've seen traces of him in all sorts of people—even myself. I've witnessed the painfully thorough introspection that causes otherwise rational people's thoughts to cycle through an internal feedback loop. I've been privy to the inflated sense of pride that imagines absurd revenge scenarios in response to the slightest unintentional personal infraction. There's plenty of underground man in our world today.It's uncanny how a nineteenth century Russian man is reflected so clearly in our capitalistic western culture. Perhaps the rejection of any sort of utopian vision is the common thread. The idea that the world isn't getting better and better draws strange people together.This was my first foray into Dostoyevsky (I'm ashamed to say). He's created a compelling character that elicits empathy while simultaneously thoroughly frustrating the reader. This sort of tortured complexity will keep me coming back to Dostoyevsky for a long time.
    • 3/5
      Possibly the first existential novel (novella). The unnamed writer, 40 years old, tells us he is writing to no one but argues that man must choose (free will) and will choose not to live by logic and in fact will choose against logic. The second part, gives us the background of the writer and how he ended up underground. Then the very end, we learn that even this has been edited and we the reader do not know what is the truth. Rating 3.43.