Notes from the Underground

Rating:
Summary: This is one of my favorites
Review: This novel spoke greatly to me. Dostoevsky uses a great structure for writing and makes a great complex charector( and no his not so empty that you wonder if his alive or dead). The story is in two parts( One part Solitude and the other the past when the charector was living in the real world). I don't want to tell any of the story because I didn't read anything about this book before I read it and was happy I did. So I'll just say this is one the best book I've read in awhile and this is a russian literature classic.

Rating:
Summary: Dark and moody, but intelligent and rewarding
Review: It is somewhat ironic that usually the people who pick up thislittle book are going through a personal crisis. This is probably thelast thing they need. This is not a cheer-up book, although they may find some commiseration in the narrator's life.

Who is this narrator? Like the protagonist of Dostoyevksy's -The Idiot-, he is someone who believes himself to be superior to "the great mass," but who is so superior that he must live "underground" (much like living as an "idiot"). He is something of a voluntary outcast, who nevertheless manages little personal moments of stickin' it to the man... perhaps the funniest subplot is how he plays "chicken" with important people who are walking down the sidewalk...

A Russian literary critic is rumored to have said "Dostoyevsky is the nastiest Christian I've ever met." And indeed, you would be mistaken if you expected something overly life-affirming, even in an existentialist way, in this book. It is life-affirming only in a fatalistic Russian sense, of "No matter how bad it gets, we can always laugh about it." Even the one scene that is set up as a messianic, optimistic scene, turns into something ugly and spiteful.

Still, this novel is interesting and brilliant, and a great introduction to Dostoyevsky's psychological studies and his anti-rationalist, anti-Enlightenment crusade. If nothing else, it shows Dostoyevsky before he wrote he had written his major novels, and before he had been sent to Siberia (an experience that made him significantly temper his anti-establishment views).

Rating:
Summary: una mezcla de literatura y filosofia
Review: ....aunque cada obra literaria seria esta fundamentada en principios filosoficos y cada filosofia es una historia de nuestras luchas, esta obra es una mezcla perfecta de ideas entre los pensamientos del literato y del filosofo. anuncio de sus mas grandes y extensas obras, como son crimen y castigo y los hermanos karamazov. este antiheroe es una voz muy liberal para su tiempo y a veces fue incomprendido, pero todo aquel que desee leer a dostoievski y quiera adentrarse en sus obras deberia leer esta en primer lugar como una introduccion y ya tendra la mitad del trabajo hecho, la otra mitad consiste en lidiar con los nombres rusos que dan un poco de trabajo.. LUIS MENDEZ [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: The Anti-Hero Who Knows He Is
Review: This stunning account of a young man in Russia who daily - even hourly - celebrates his misanthropy is a tour de force in our literature. We don't meet a slime-bag this putrid till we meet the hero of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" many years later. We get used to watching this anti-hero sink ever lower: Just when we think he has hit rock-bottom in manners and charity, he performs a deed or says a word that can only sink him lower in our estimation. As he comments on his story, we understand he is attempting to fight hypocrisy, but he perverts every attempt by filling it with self-loathing so that the fight against hypocrisy gets swallowed up in his self-destruction. Fun stuff? Hardly. But it is breathtaking to behold.

Rating:
Summary: a summary of the book in one sentence...
Review: "rest assured- I have an explanation for everything." In fact, this may be the summary of all Dostoevsky's works, as he truly seems to have an explanation for everything. However, are they compatable with the 21st century- perhaps. The book is wonderfully amusing (but then again, I find "The Brothers Karamozov" terribly funny as well), and displays the epitome of existentialism. We are all "obscene fl[ies]-ceaselessly giving way to everyone, humiliated by everyone, insulted by everyone." The anonymous narrator in "Notes" reminds me of the main character in "A Confederacy Of Dunces", who is so extremely pretentious and vain that he can never establish a relationship with anyone, being far too superior to them.

"Notes" is a wonderful book, and the more you read of it, the more enjoyable it becomes. So don't allow the first 40-odd pages to overwhelm you, even though it's disastrously boring, because the rest of the book is fantastic. (translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Profound, Moving...but not for everyone
Review: I don't know where to begin or what exactly to say, except that I somehow want to convey how powerful this book is. It is about a raving and ranting hypersensitive man who has lived in relative isolation his whole life without being loved, and then it relays some minor events in his life that impact him greatly. throughout, we see the way he analyzes every situation before he gets into it, then we see how he instinctively reacts during the situation, and finally, the impact after he has left the situation. It is very dark, as one would expect from a Dostoevski book, but its also got some serious stuff for you brain to chew on...

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant insights into psychology and philosophy
Review: 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. The book dragged a bit at first, but I found the second half of it very touching and, though a fairly immature work, it was definitely worth my time.

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man was the last short story Dostoevsky wrote, and contains a very clear version of his notion of the necessity of suffering for love and redemption, expressed through a man who dreams of travelling to another planet identical to earth in which suffering doesn't exist. It's not a really great work, but it's a quick and pleasant read.

The volume also contains three short excerpts from The House of the Dead (the book based on Dostoevsky's imprisonment)--two of them dealing with prisoners' tales of the murders that got them imprisoned, and one a discussion of corporal punishment. The excerpts are fairly interesting, but if this sort of thing fascinates you you're better off getting the whole work, which is published by Penguin Classics.

Rating:
Summary: A worthy work
Review: This a very interesting look at the psychological make up of "the Underground Man". It is a wonderful story and is a really good introduction to Dostoyevsky. This book is a great lead into some of Dostoyevsky's other novels, particularly Crime and Punishment.

Rating:
Summary: The Seed of Dostoevsky's Major Works
Review: This work is stunning in both its presentation and the ideas that it brings up for our inspection. However, these ideas themselves first become available to us through the character of the narrator from underground.

To understand this work in-depth is to understand what it means to be human in Dostoevsky's world. It is this fundamental perspective that informs the masterworks that followed. To truly grasp even the opening line of this work: "I am a sick man....a spiteful man. An unattractive man..." to understand what, exactly, consitutes his sickness, his spite, his unattractiveness, is to better understand the major works that followed from the Russian master. In fact, he surreptitiously introduces Raskolnikov in one of this book's last lines.

This book is a wonderful key to unlock Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Besides which, it is by far the best short novel I have had the honor of being introduced to.

Rating:
Summary: This is What a Novel Should Do¿Express!
Review: An amazing work! Beautifully written in a confessional style. Dostoyevsky's masterpiece about a man that no one likes, lives in the dregs of society, and his psyche as it goes through different situations and attempts to explain life. It is a novel that expresses perhaps more than any other. The character rambles on, shows his pain and suffering, and even meets a girl after his friends left him in a cafe. Highly recommended!