Notes from Underground, with its raving monologuist at war with himself and his society, inspires an entire line of later novels spanning the globe, all of which might share its title: Hunger, Nausea, The Stranger, Molloy, No Longer Human, Invisible Man, and various works by Philip Roth and Thomas Bernhard.
Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading. Against our wills, we are drawn in, whirred round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture.
They are composed purely of the stuff of the soul. The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. Indeed, it is the soul that is the chief character in Russian fiction. In her essay “The Russian Point of View,” Virginia Woolf wrote, Nietzsche famously called Dostoevsky “the only psychologist…from whom I have anything to learn.” Dostoevsky’s commitment to dramatizing the teeming inner life, often without moral constraint, anticipates modernist stream-of-consciousness narration. But the novella’s first sentence, “I am a sick man…I am a wicked man,” exposes us to 20th-century vertigo, the world of Freud and the modern novel, of unstably complex social orders, of fragmented and unknowable selves. The back cover of the Vintage edition, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, further claims that Notes from Underground is “one of the most revolutionary novels ever written” because it “marks the frontier, not only between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, but between the two centuries’ visions of the self.”Ī footnote from the author on the novella’s first page informs us that its narrator-protagonist, the nameless Underground Man, is “one representative of a generation that is still living out its life.” Here is the authoritative voice of 19th-century fiction and of 19th-century social thought-of Balzac or Tolstoy, of Hegel or Marx-the omniscient realist as social historian documenting with cool command the social panorama of the times. This 1864 novella is usually considered the prelude to Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, the first work that expresses both his mature philosophical concerns and perfects the tone of pathetic-grotesque hysterical frenzy that will characterize his most renowned books. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
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