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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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| Title: |
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Notes from Underground; White Nights; The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; and: White Nights Dream Ridiculous Man and selections from The House of the Dead (Signet Classics) |
| Moochable copies: |
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No copies available |
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| Topics: |
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| Published in: |
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English |
| Binding: |
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Mass Market Paperback |
| Pages: |
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240 |
| Date: |
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1961-10-01 |
| ISBN: |
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0451523768 |
| Publisher: |
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Signet Classics |
| Weight: |
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0.27 pounds |
| Size: |
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0.53 x 4.26 x 6.9 inches |
| Edition: |
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Rev&Updtd |
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| Description: |
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Product Description
Notes from Underground, by Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
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| Reviews: |
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chris (Japan) (2015/07/14):
I've read Notes from Underground twice--once when I was fairly new to Dostoevsky and Russian literature in general, and once after reading many of his other novels and learning a bit about the intellectual and literary climate of Russia in the 1860s from other sources as well. Both times I was deeply impressed, though for different reasons. On the first reading, Notes was simply a very moving, often disturbing psychological portrait of, as is revealed in the first two sentences, a sick and spiteful man. That Dostoevsky could produce this work over 35 years before Freud's heyday was, and still is, extremely impressive to me. What I did not realize on the first reading was the historical importance of the work. For some time, some Russian liberals had been dreaming of creating a utopian state, and more recently the increasing popularity of nihilism (and in particular the critic Chernyshevsky) had led to hopes that the exact laws of human action could be deduced and a rational utopia set up accordingly. Dostoevsky's underground man is a stinging condemnation of this idea, as his behavior shows that individuals do not naturally act according to the best interests of either society or themselves. Though the novel's merits certainly stand alone, it's worth reading a bit about the historical context in which it was written in order to get a better idea of its impact.
A few words about the other works in this edition: Dostoevsky wrote White Nights while in his 20s, before his Siberian exile and while he still held an interest in the Utopian ideas he would later condemn. It's a story of a young man and a young woman, both socially isolated, who happen to meet one night and, over the course of the next three nights, fall in love, with, unsurprisingly, a maudlin ending.
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| URL: |
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http://bookmooch.com/0451523768 |
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