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Product Description
Review
Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize
"The Brothers Karamazov
"One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky's original." -"New York Times Book Review
"It may well be that Dostoevsky's [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now-and through the medium of [this] new translation-beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader." -"New York Review of Books
"Crime and Punishment
"The best [translation] currently available...An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it." -"Washington Post Book World
"Reaches as close to Dostoevsky's Russian as is possible in English...The original's force and frightening immediacy is captured...The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard version." -"Chicago Tribune
"Demons
"The merit in this edition of "Demons resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators...They capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life." -"New York Times Book Review
"[Pevear and Volokhonsky] have managed to capture and differentiate the characters' many voices...They come into their own when faced with Dostoevsky's wonderfully quirky use of varied speech patterns...A capital job of restoration." -"Los Angeles Times
With an Introduction by Richard Pevear --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
"The Brothers Karamazov
"One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky's original." -"New York Times Book Review
"It may well be that Dostoevsky's [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now-and through the medium of [this] new translation-beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader." -"New York Review of Books
"Crime and Punishment
"The best [translation] currently available...An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it." -"Washington Post Book World
"Reaches as close to Dostoevsky's Russian as is possible in English...The original's force and frightening immediacy is captured...The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard version." -"Chicago Tribune
"Demons
"The merit in this edition of "Demons resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators...They capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life." -"New York Times Book Review
"[Pevear and Volokhonsky] have managed to capture and differentiate the characters' many voices...They come into their own when faced with Dostoevsky's wonderfully quirky use of varied speech patterns...A capital job of restoration." -"Los Angeles Times
With an Introduction by Richard Pevear --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Book Description
Darkly fascinating short novel depicts the struggles of a doubting, supremely alienated protagonist in a world of relative values. Seminal work introduced moral, religious, political and social themes that dominated Dostoyevsky's later masterworks. Constance Garnett's authoritative translation is reprinted here, with a new introduction.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Thoroughly Modern Book,
By
This review is from: Notes from Underground (Paperback)
Dostoevsky's "underground man" is a hermit with an axe to grind, if he can figure out how. This man without a name lives a solitary life in his "corner", glaring out at the world, and after forty years of life has nothing to show for it but bitterness and a malicious attitude. He sees life through his sense of perceived wrongs by others and by a sense of his own weakness and indecision. Yet he states that he prefers his own space as it allows him to exercise his free will. He is intelligent, insightful, self-contradictory and possibly insane.Dostoevsky wrote this short novel in part to reply to the utopian socialist writings of people such as Chernyshevsky who believed that Man's behaviour could be determined by universal laws and that the application of these laws would lead to a society of equals. In 1863, Chernyshevsky wrote a novel called "What Is To Be Done?" in which he gave form to his utopian ideas; forty or so years later Lenin was to write a political pamphlet with the same title, no coincidence! Chernyshevsky was an inspiration to Lenin and a whole host of Russian revolutionaries in the last half of the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky's "underground man" argued against this rationalization of Man, he believed that people are capricious by nature and often even act against their own best interests. Free will was the factor missing in the socialists' equation for human happiness; that Man can act in an impulsive, seemingly illogical yet inherently satisfying manner is crucial to understanding "Notes From Underground" and most of Dostoevsky's novels. Two plus two does not always equal four when free will is part of the equation. We make our own decisions and we live with them. Russian literature doesn't appeal to everyone, but "Notes From Underground" is well worth the read if for no other reason than because it is atypical of Russian literature. Dostoevsky may have been a Slavophile and mistrustful of Western influences in his country, but he wrote a novel that appeals very strongly to the Western sense of individuality and personal freedom. Unfortunately, in 1917, Lenin answered his own question - what is to be done? The "underground man" would not have lasted long in the new dictatorship of workers and peasants, he would have preferred the existentialist world of Sartre to the brutal, collectivist realities of Soviet Russia.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
so great,
By
This review is from: Notes From Underground: 150th Anniversary Edition (Mass Market Paperback)
this is one of the best books i've read to date. its about a man and his failure to connect with the world around him. the novel is spilt up into two parts. chronologically the first part happened after the second part so is essentially the underground man reflecting on his past, by a theoretical means. the first part of the book is a philosophy on life and people, and the second part is the manifestation of what he was talking about in the first part.the underground man is an interesting character because throughout the novel he liberally depreciates himself and celebrates his own misery. he says that he is doomed to be miserable because of his intelligence, because he has the capacity to critically observe the world, and yet because of this very fact he says that he can never be an insect. this reminds me of a quote from Nietzsche 'even a man who despises himself respects himself as one who despises'. but overall, this over critical approach to living hinders the underground man so that he is quite passive throughout the novel, despite his words, which i suppose could be considered an action of sorts. and it's because of this passivity that he fails at connecting with others, isolating himself with his thoughts. now it could be argued that his refusal to act is an expression of his utilizing his freedoms. he acts in a way that is not accepted by society, which is why he is so isolated, but by isolating himself, he is demonstrating that he has the capacity to exercise free thought and action, to not blindly follow the status quo. his outcast status is the ultimate freedom, and yet he's so miserable, which would tie into the intelligence bit. and all of this would leave him going in circles in his thoughts, making them all sound paradoxical because if he does or doesn't he's screwed kind of thing, so he's passive. but it's good. i liked the theory a bit more than the story manifesting the theory, partially because it gets rid of the trappings and gets right down to the concepts, so less digging on my part, though the digging can be fun i'll admit. i'm in something of a dystopian phase right now and revel in all like material, so this book came to me at a great time. i recommend it to everyone. its a great read and gives you something to think about.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A study of human consciousness,
By
This review is from: Notes from Underground (Paperback)
"So long live the underground. I already carried the underground in my soul." This best epitomizes Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground.The book is not easy to read let alone to digest. Dostoyevsky again placed some of his favorite arguments in the moth of a character (the 40-year-old underground man) he despised. The underground man self-proclaims to be angry and sick at the very beginning and goes out of his way to offend his readers. The book reads like a delirious man's babbling, in his own shy, wounded, and exorbitant pride. While a novel usually needs a hero, but here Dostoyevsky had purposely collected all the features of an anti-hero: self-contempt, wounded vanity, conceit, and sensitive ego. Even though the underground man might be extremely egotistical and has no respect for others, Dostoyevsky never meant for him to have any surface appeal. The recurring themes of the narrative revolve around the underground man's alienation from society, which he despises, his bitter sarcasm, and the heightened awareness of self-consciousness. He larks to revenge himself for his humiliation by humiliating others. I don't think Dostoyevsky meant for the underground man to be liked and pitied by the readers. In fact, our anti-hero is inevitably targeted for Dostoyevsky's harsh satire. The first part of the book (titled The Underground) introduces the anonymous underground man and his outlook on life. The second part (titled A Story of the Falling Sleet) sees how the man with heightened senses of ego and awareness submerges voluptuously into his underground, motivated by many contradictory impulses. Dostoyevsky paints not only a complex portrait of an anonymous personage who lacks surface appeal, but also a society in which people are so unaccustomed to living and the manners of which that they feel a loathing for real life. Notes from Underground is an egocentric man's monologue that is abound with fascinating nuance which reveals itself only upon close reading. 2004 (5)
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