NotesfromUnderground

Table of Contents INTRODUCTION SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY PART ONE: UNDERGROUND PART TWO: APROPOS OF THE WET SNOW Notes from Underground FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky with an Introduction by Richard Pevear Copyright © 1993 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 1400041910 INTRODUCTION The ellipsis after the opening sentence of Notes from Underground is like a window affording us a first glimpse of one of the most remarkable characters in literature, one who has been placed among the bearers of modern consciousness alongside Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust. What we see is a man glancing at us out of the corner of his eye, very much aware of us as he speaks, very much concerned with the impression his words are making. In fact, we do not really see him, we only hear him, and not through anything so respectable as a window, but through a crack in the floorboards. He addresses the world from that crack; he has also spent a lifetime listening at it. Everything that can be said about him, and more particularly against him, he already knows; he has, as he says in a typical paradox, o......