Notes From Underground

A collection of powerful stories by one of the masters of Russian literature, illustrating Fyodor Dostoyevsky's thoughts on political philosophy, religion and above all, humanity.

From the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying a human life, to the anxious antihero of Notes From Underground—a man who both craves and despises affection—this volume and its often-tormented characters showcase Dostoyevsky’s evolving outlook on man’s fate. The compelling works presented here were written at distinct periods in the author’s life, at decisive moments in his groping for a political philosophy and a religious answer. Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky as “an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul”—and Notes From Underground as “an awe-and-terror-inspiring example of this sympathy.”
 
Translated and with an Afterword by Andrew R. MacAndrew
With an Introduction by Ben MarcusFyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) was educated in Moscow and at the School of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg, where he spent four years. In 1844 he resigned his Commission in the army to devote himself to literature. In 1846, he wrote his first novel, which won immediate critical and popular success. At the age of twenty-seven he was arrested for belonging to a socialist group and condemned to death, but at the last moment, his sentence was commuted to prison in Siberia. In 1859, he was granted full amnesty and allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In the fourteen years before his death on January 28, 1881, Dostoyevsky produced his greatest works including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed.
 
Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, a collection of stories, and the novel Notable American Women. Editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, he is on the faculty of Columbia University and has received a Whiting Award and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His essays have appeared in Time, Feed, Tin House, McSweeny’s, Bomb, Grand Street, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Conjunctions.
 
Andrew R. MacAndrew (1911-2001) was a professor at the University of Virginia and an acclaimed translator of Russian literature. In addition to fiction by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, and others, he translated A Precocious Autobiography by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.