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    Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
    Unavailable
    Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
    Unavailable
    Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
    Ebook628 pages21 hours

    Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

    By Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Deborah A. Martinsen

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    About this ebook

    Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
    • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
    • Biographies of the authors
    • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
    • Footnotes and endnotes
    • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
    • Comments by other famous authors
    • Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
    • Bibliographies for further reading
    • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
    All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.  Often considered a prologue to Dostoevsky’s brilliant novels, the story “Notes from Underground” introduces one of the great anti-heroes in literature: the underground man, who lives on the fringes of society. In an impassioned, manic monologue this character—plagued by shame, guilt, and alienation—argues that reason is merely a flimsy construction built upon humanity’s essentially irrational core. Internal conflict is also explored in “The Double,” a surreal tale of a government clerk who meets a more unpleasant version of himself and is changed as a result.

    In addition to these two existential classics, this collection also includes the psychologically probing stories “The Meek One,” “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” and “White Nights.”

    Deborah A. Martinsen is Assistant to the Director of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky's Liars and Narrative Exposure.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarnes & Noble Classics
    Release dateJun 1, 2009
    ISBN9781411432819
    Unavailable
    Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
    Author

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. Between 1838 and 1843 he studied at the St Petersburg Engineering Academy. His first work of fiction was the epistolary novel Poor Folk (1846), which met with a generally favourable response. However, his immediately subsequent works were less enthusiastically received. In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the socialist Petrashevsky circle, and subjected to a mock execution. He suffered four years in a Siberian penal settlement and then another four years of enforced military service. He returned to writing in the late 1850s and travelled abroad in the 1860s. It was during the last twenty years of his life that he wrote the iconic works, such as Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which were to form the basis of his formidable reputation. He died in 1881.

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    Reviews for Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

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    • 4/5
      The Double is still one of my favorites.
    • 4/5
      I imagine Notes was just as difficult when it was published as it is now. The "story" is depressing and starts only in the second part of the novel. During the first part, I kept thinking, "How can the depressed extremes of this character ever be interesting? Is this book one long whine by a self-involved jerk?" As I read on, I started to understand that the man was relentless in following his motivations to their unsentimental beginnings. Uh-oh. This guy is doing something that very few of us do, and he's bragging about it. At that point, I knew I had better read on, no matter painful it gets. A cruel, self-centered, honest person.
    • 2/5
      Hey wait, are you a misanthrope? Do you feel betrayed and disappointed with life? Are you a bitter, bitter man? Why narrator, I never would have guessed! Why don't you spend the next hundred pages telling me about it? That sounds like loads of fun.
    • 5/5
      I've not much to say about this book that hasn't been said before. Both stories are nice and deep.

      'Notes from Underground' - a mind bender!

      'The Double' - a mind bender in a very different way!

      Though hard going at times - I think that was largely due to translations - I loved this book. I'd love to read it in Russian, but I don't speak Russian :)
    • 4/5
      This book contains two short novels that have some thematic common ground, which helps to explain why Penguin housed them in a single volume. Notes from Underground:This is a very dark and surprisingly modern novella in which an unsympathetic narrator, a retired junior civil servant, describes his gradual alienation from society, initially in a description of his philosophy, but then through narrating some of the episodes that led to his downfall. This book prefigures some of the themes of Crime and Punishment.The Double:This is an earlier novella that is more of a comedy, though the core story is a dark vision. Once again the narrator is a St Petersburg civil servant. This one sees himself as an essentially honest person, but gradually falls from grace, then encounters his double, a lookalike answering to the same name, who gradually takes over the "hero's" life. A compelling vision of a broken man trapped in his own nightmare
    • 3/5
      This volume combines two of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's iconic stories: Notes from Underground and The Double; both are thematically linked by their study of the human consciousness in a decidedly tragic-comedic fashion.

      In the first novella, Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky recounts in an extended monologue the thoughts and feelings of the eponymous Underground Man who rambles and rages against the oppressive society "above ground" with bitter irony and how, because he does not want to take part in any aspect of that society, retreats underground to an isolated and tortured existence. He attacks Western philosophy and idealism, choosing instead "conscious inertia".
      The second part of this novella delves deeper into the Underground Man's psyche by three events that happened, seemingly before his descent underground, and how they work together to destroy him, demonstrating the uncooperative and irrational actions of humans.

      The second novella follows a civil servant as he encounters his doppelgänger one stormy night, and thereupon descends into a nightmarish world as his double demonstrates all the charm and social skills the original Golyadkin lacks to the latter's despair. Eventually, the original Golyadkin encounters more and more of his doubles and must be committed to an insane asylum, leaving the reader questioning how much of the narrator's story was fabricated in his own head.

      Both novellas study the human condition and, particularly Notes from Underground, deal with the themes of alienation and existentialism; both are at the start of a long tradition of modern novels that are permeated with a sense of ennui and the meaningless of existence. Both novels in fact explore these themes at length and are an excellent introduction to the works of one of the greatest writers in Russia and indeed the world.