Notes From Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Overview

“The political cataclysms and cultural revolutions of our century . . . confirm the status of Notes from Underground as one of the most sheerly astonishing and subversive creations of European fiction.”—from the Introduction by Donald Fanger

“I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man,” the irascible voice of a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground, published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing: it announces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. And it remains to this day one of the most searingly honest and universal testaments to human despair ever penned.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553211443
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/01/1983
Series:	Bantam Classics Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	4.14(w) x 6.84(h) x 0.38(d)
Age Range:	16 - 18 Years

About the Author

His life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a former army surgeon whose drunken brutality led his own serfs to murder him by pouring vodka down his throat until he strangled. A short first novel, Poor Folk (1846), brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against the Tsar in 1849. In prison he was given the "silent treatment" for eight months, before he was led in front of a firing squad. Dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited execution when an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he only returned to St. Petersburg a full ten years after he left in chains. His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a conservative and profoundly religious philosophy formes the basis for his great novels. But it was his fortuitous marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of utter destitution brought about by his compulsive gambling, that gave Dostoyevsky the emotional stability to complete Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. When he died in 1881, he left a legacy of masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the Western world.

Read an Excerpt

PART ONE

UNDERGROUND*

I

I AM a sick man. . . . I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I
think that my liver hurts. But actually, I don't know a damn thing about my illness. I am not even sure what it is that hurts. I am not in treatment and never have been, although I respect both medicine and doctors. Besides, I am superstitious in the extreme; well, at least to the extent of respecting medicine. (I am sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, sir, I refuse to see a doctor simply out of spite. Now, that is something that you probably will fail to understand. Well, I understand it. Naturally, I
will not be able to explain to you precisely whom I will injure in this instance by my spite. I know perfectly well that I am certainly not giving the doctors a "dirty deal" by not seeking treatment. I
know better than anyone that I will only harm myself by this, and no one else. And yet, if I don't seek a cure, it is out of spite. My liver hurts? Good, let it hurt still more!

I have been living like this for a long time-about twenty years. Now
I am forty. I used to be in the civil service; today I am not. I was a mean official. I was rude, and found pleasure in it. After all, I
took no bribes, and so I had to recompense myself at least by this.
(A poor joke, but I will not cross it out. I wrote it, thinking it would be extremely witty; but now I see that it was only a vile little attempt at showing off, and just for that I'll let it stand!)

When petitioners came to my desk seeking information, I gnashed my teeth at them, and gloated insatiably whenever I succeeded in distressing them. I almost always succeeded. Most of them were timid folk: naturally-petitioners. But there were also some fops, and among these I particularly detested a certain officer. He absolutely refused to submit and clattered revoltingly with his sword. I battled him over that sword for a year and a half. And finally I got the best of him. He stopped clattering. This, however, happened long ago, when
I was still a young man. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main thing about my spite? Why, the whole point, the vilest part of it, was that I was constantly and shamefully aware, even at moments of the most violent spleen, that I was not at all a spiteful, no, not even an embittered, man. That I was merely frightening sparrows to no purpose, diverting myself. I might be foaming at the mouth, but bring me a doll, give me some tea, with a bit of sugar, and I'd most likely calm down. Indeed, I would be deeply touched, my very heart would melt, though later I'd surely gnash my teeth at myself and suffer from insomnia for months. That's how it is with me.

I lied just now when I said that I had been a mean official. I lied out of sheer spite. I was merely fooling around, both with the petitioners and with the officer, but in reality I could never have become malicious. I was aware at every moment of many, many altogether contrary elements. I felt them swarming inside me, those contrary elements. I knew that they had swarmed inside me all my life, begging to be let out, but I never, never allowed them to come out, just for spite. They tormented me to the point of shame, they drove me to convulsions-I was so sick and tired of them in the end.
Sick and tired! But perhaps you think, dear sirs, that I am now repenting of something before you, asking your forgiveness for something? . . . Indeed, I am quite certain that you think so. But then, I assure you it doesn't make the slightest difference to me if you do. . . .

I could not become malicious. In fact, I could not become anything:
neither bad nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner,
taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent nineteenth-century man must be, is morally bound to be, an essentially characterless creature; and a man of character, a man of action-an essentially limited creature. This is my conviction at the age of forty. I am forty now, and forty years-why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral! Now answer me, sincerely, honestly, who lives past forty? I'll tell you who does: fools and scoundrels. I will say this right to the face of all those venerable old men, all those silver-haired, sweet-smelling old men! I have a right to say it, because I will live to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! . . . Wait, let me catch my breath. .
. .

You might be imagining, gentlemen, that I am trying to amuse you, to make you laugh? Wrong again. I am not at all the jolly character you think I am, or may perhaps think I am. But then, if, irritated by all this prattle (and I feel it already, I feel you are irritated),
you'll take it into your heads to ask me what I am, I'll answer you:
I am a certain collegiate assessor. I worked in order to eat (but solely for that reason), and when a distant relation left me six thousand rubles in his will last year, I immediately retired and settled down in my corner. I had lived here previously as well, but now I've settled down in this corner. My room is dismal, squalid, at the very edge of town. My servant is a peasant woman, old, stupid,
vicious out of stupidity, and she always has a foul smell about her besides.

I am told that the Petersburg climate is becoming bad for me, that with my niggling means it's too expensive to live in Petersburg. I
know all that, I know it better than all those wise, experienced counselors and head-shakers. But I stay on in Petersburg; I shall not leave Petersburg! I shall not leave because. . . . Ah, but what difference does it make whether I leave or don't leave.

To go on, however-what can a decent man talk about with the greatest pleasure?

Answer: about himself.

Well, then, I too shall talk about myself.

—

Table of Contents

Preface
The Text of Notes From Underground
Backgrounds and Sources
Selected Letters from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Mikhail Dostoevsky (1859-64)
Fyodor Dostoevsky · [Socialism and Christianity]
Fyodor Dostoevsky · From Winter Notes on Summer Impressions
N.G. Chernyshevsky · From What Is To Be Done?

Responses
PARODY
M.E. Salykov-Shchedrin · From "The Swallows"
Woody Allen · Notes from the Overfed
IMITATION/INSPIRATION
Robert Walser · The Child
Ralph Ellison · From The Invisible Man
John Lennon and Paul McCartney · "Nowhere Man"

Criticism
Nicolai Mikhailovsky · [Dostoevsky's Cruel Intent]
Vasily Rozanov · [Thought and Art in Notes From Underground]
Lev Shestov · [Dostoevsky and Nietzsche]
M.M. Bakhtin [Discourse in Dostoevsky]
Ralph E. Matlaw · Structure and Integration in Notes From Underground
Victor Erlich · Notes on the Uses of Monologue in Artistic Prose
Robert Louis Jackson · [Freedom in Notes From Underground]
Gary Saul Morson · [Anti-Utopianism in Notes From Undergound]
Richard H. Weisberg · The Formalistic Model: Notes From Underground
Joseph Frank · Notes From Underground

A Chronology of Dostoevsky's Life and Work
Selected Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

This revised Norton Critical Edition is based on Michael Katz's translation of the 1863 novel, which is introduced and annotated specifically for English-speaking readers. After the complete text of the novel, a section on background and sources offers selections from Dostoevsky's letters to his brother, some of his writings on socialism and Christianity and on his trip to the West, and excerpts from writings by Dostoevsky's contemporaries. A section on responses offers parodies and works of imitation by writers including Woody Allen, Ralph Ellison, and Jean-Paul Sartre. There are also critical interpretations by both Russian and Western critics from the 19th and 20th centuries. Includes a chronology. Katz teaches Russian at Middlebury College. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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