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    Notes from the Underground
    Notes from the Underground
    Notes from the Underground
    Audiobook5 hours

    Notes from the Underground

    Written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Narrated by Norman Dietz

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    A predecessor to such monumental works as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground represents a turning point in Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing toward the more political side. In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives, withdraws from that society into the underground. This "Underground Man" is one of the first genuine antiheroes in European literature.

    The first part of this unusual work is often treated as a philosophical text in its own right; the second part illustrates the theory of the first by means of its own fictional practice. A dark and politically charged novel, Notes from the Underground shows Dostoevsky at his best.

    This version of Notes from the Underground is the translation by Constance Garnett.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 20, 2010
    ISBN9781400188062
    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 the Underground

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I read this for #1001Books, and did not care too much for this one by Dostoevsky -- Underground Man (unnamed protagonist) does ramble on and on! Perhaps I would have appreciated this more with a different translation. Not long after, I read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and loved it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Notes from the Underground. Fyodor Dostoevsky. 1993. I tried to like this book, but, alas, I didn’t. I know it is a classic and that people far smarter than I am think it is a great novel. It was just an ordeal to get through. If you want to read Dostoevsky, try Crime and Punishment first.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It made me think about things differently but I hated the beginning but loved the middle and ending
    • 5/5
      You might see yourself in this book. I sure as hell did. It’s not a novel but a self reflection. What an experience!
    • 4/5
      My first Dostoyevsky reading, and I really enjoyed it. Soon I'll begin reading his longer works, this was a good introduction.
    • 5/5
      My favourite Dostoyevsky and have read several times.
    • 2/5
      Seems to be pretty standard for Fyodor's protagonists to confuse agonizing and obsessing over things with being intelligent and cultured.
    • 4/5
      I think this may be the shortest work by a Russian novelist I have ever read. That being said, I don't know that this book is truly a novel so much as it is an extended short story told from the perspective of a Russian man who tends to rabble and who once drove away a woman who might have been able to love him. Overall, I liked the book, although the first part was certainly difficult to get through, the second (which actually relates a story instead of just philosophizing) more than made up for it.
    • 5/5
      This is a fantastic book that addresses the question of "what is the self?". The underground man can only represent us who find ourselves lost and unsure yet despised by our own ineptitude. For those who have not yet to begin exploring "what a self is" or "what and why makes the self?" I highly suggest you start here.
    • 4/5
      This small yet deeply written book is a haphazard rant of nonsense, unless you are familiar with philosophy, Russia, and Dostoevsky himself. A friend had once recommended this to me, but he warned me that I should read up on the content before I actually got around to the book. And so began a brief, yet enlightening, exploration of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and some brushing up on basic philosophy, sociology, and Russian politics in 1860's. I have to say, all of this background work was indeed very helpful. Perhaps not everyone will be willing to put that much effort into reading one book, but I have to say, you will get a much more rich, comprehensive understanding of this unusual book if you do.The book is narrated by an unnamed character, who calls himself the "Underground Man." It doesn't take the reader long to see that our anti-hero is pathetic, contradictory, and extremely irritating. He is insufferably arrogant, believing the world to revolve around himself. He laments all of the woe that has befallen him, but we very quickly see that he gets a certain pleasure out of his suffering, or rather, out of people noticing his suffering. His comments on the moans of a man with a tooth-ache, growing louder and louder and increasingly pitiful so that no one could possibly escape noticing his condition, is a perfect example. The narrator actually believes that everyone has nothing better to do than notice and anguish over his every misfortune. In the second part of the story, the Underground Man is more the focus, instead of his views. He tells us a few stories from his life, which even further bring to life his pathetic, self-centered character. There is a officer who, every day, walks past our main character. Every day, the narrator steps aside to let the officer pass. This is such a very small instance that no one would remember it, or even make any note of it. However, in the narrator's pride, he builds up an entire, involved story about how the officer is slighting him, pretending not to recognize him every day, and thinks day and night about not letting him pass one day. It is built up and built up, until one day, finally, the narrator fails to step aside. The two men bump shoulders, and that is that. Of course, WE know that the officer never even noticed, but the narrator says "But I knew that he was pretending!"Other similar things are when the narrator forces some former friends to invite him to a dinner (where he insults all of them and ruins their night), and where he becomes involved with a woman, whom he falls in love with. We see him destroy any shred of kinship still felt between him and his friends, and we see him destroy all love that the girl may have had for him.This book is a sputtering, mad, crazy rant of anger and misguided thinking, and yet it is also remarkably well structured. In all of its crazy veering off subject, the random allegories, and the contradictions that the narrator voices over and over, Dostoevsky obviously has a purpose and a vision to this work. Although it never left me breathlessly racing through pages, this book did occupy my thoughts for awhile after I read it, and the narrator was interesting in how utterly unlikable he was.If approached with research (or knowledge) and a readiness to look deeper into this book than what is immediately apparent, "Notes from Underground" is worth the read.
    • 4/5
      The story of a man that goes through his life and no one seems to notice him. On the few occasions that they do he feels compelled to drive them away with his self loathing.. I think many people do live lives similar to the protagonist here that become reclusive and spiteful and don't realize that many of their problems that bring on themselves. As always with Dostoevsky the writing is beautiful as well as painful to read. An existential nowhere man living a life of terrible insignificance.
    • 4/5
      What a strange little book. It's as funny as it is extremely uncomfortable to read. The protagonist is clearly on the way to becoming mad if he isn't already quite mad. He's also extremely intelligent with the ego to match, but also relatively stupid in some of the things he does in order to illustrate his brightness. I felt myself going back and forth between liking and disliking this character over and over and yet, on some levels I related (not on the brainz, but certainly on the maudlin self-absorption/introspection that leads to despising yourself as well as other people). Yeah... interesting read.
    • 1/5
      I have virtually no idea why this book is considered a classic. More of a "personal manifesto" than an actual story, this is a disjointed reasoning of why the narrator feels and acts so outlandishly. Though I can sympathize with some of his emotions on my very worst days, 'Notes' as a whole left me feeling exhausted and a little dull. The second part of the book does try to assume some semblance of a story, yet the other characters are hardly developed, the plot is weak, and the climax is wholly anticlimactic. The only saving grace is the scene with the prostitute, yet even that promise is not only not fulfilled, it is swept with disgust under the carpet.
    • 2/5
      I'd been really looking forward to reading some of Dostoevsky's works, and I still am to some extent. It's just a shame that my first experience with his work is such a disappointment. Notes from the Underground starts off well, with its rather enthralling first Part, where the bitter, miserable Underground Man rails against certain types of rationalist thinking. He says a lot of rather insightful things; a lot of it wasn't that eye-opening to me, but it was a very good expression of familiar ideas. It's just a shame that in the second half the book becomes such annoying rubbish. Part Two consists of a story in which the Underground Man does nothing except exhibit the sort of stupid misanthropic behaviour and thinking I was guilty of when I was about 14 (though he does many more extreme things). It's not entertaining or even remotely interesting, it's just boring and irritating. I understand Dostoevsky is making a point and doesn't agree with what this guy says, but that doesn't make it an engaging read. I skimmed through the last few chapters because I'd got so angry at this guy and his general uselessness. However, I've heard a few Dostoevsky fans express similar thoughts about this book, so I've not been too discouraged. Might take a while for me to pick up another one of his books though, because this one has left a seriously bad taste.
    • 5/5
      Wow, talk about your unreliable narrators. The underground man presages later existential heroes (which probably by definition means antiheroes), but he's not just arguing a case like Meursault, or trying to drown out his own nobler impulses like Yossarian, or clacking his horrible mandibles together and going "LLLOOOOVVVVVEEEEEE SSSSAAAAAMMMMMMSSSSSSSAAAAAAAA" like Gregor Samsa (and, as I've read Nabokov used his lepidopterist skills to establish, never realizing that he had turned into a bug that had wings under its shell and could just buzz off into the sky and let his bug flag fly. But Nabokov also thought Dostoevsky was boring and derivative, so who cares what he thinks?). The underground man is doing all these things, and there's a bushel of straight nihilism in his Notes to boot, but mostly what he's doing is fucking us around. Not leading us down the garden path to cause us to come to the same conclusions about human worthlessness and venality that he has; leading us down the garden path to make us think that's what he's doing, when really he just wants to dick us around. "You despise me, vividly and at length?" he cries? "Well, I gave you that me that you despise. I told you about him. He is a straw man and I gave you the words you used to despise him, to boot, ass."

      He's Ambrose Bierce without the relish, and the only thing that can rescue a narrative from that much self-loathing is a healthy dose of clinical honesty. Which is a big problem for the first half of this book, the "essay". Because one true thing about the UM is that he needs us to know how smart he is (that's part of what ultimately salvages the book from the brink of failure); so he makes sure we know right from the start that he is capable of saying savagely perceptive things in a surgically precise way. But then he wastes that talent--hacking down 19th-century positivism, utopian socialism, enlightened self-interest, other ideas which I'm not going to suggest don't deserve hacking down, or which to portions of Dostoevsky's 1860s audience it might not even have been revelatory to see hacked down, but which to a book as many lightyears ahead of its time as this one is it's a waste of time to even bother with. It's like Gilles Deleuze (who ever would have thought, Deleuzie, when I gave your What is Philosophy two stars in a LibraryThing review in 2007 that you would come to be my go-to example of a forwardthinker for this review less than four years later?) spending time dismantling Descartes instead of nurturing rhizomes; or to take a real example instead of a hypothetical one, it's the was psychology as a profession is so fixated on the ghost of Freud and the shadow he casts over them that every textbook spends time attacking him and thus validating his continued relevance as a pole of debate via the good ol' Oedipus complex (kill your fathers!) instead of letting him be and going about their fMRIs.

      Phew! What I'm saying here is that hacking on the absurdity of the safe little herd beliefs of the herd is boring, and people have always believed stupid shit and who gives a shit, and if it's the beginning of, like, a sociological investigation into the negative effects of said beliefs, or a psychological sketch of how the personality that attacks them with so much rage and yet such palpable self-loathing also comes to be, then fine, but here it's not--or the first half's not. It's just venom, and every time the UM gives us a premise or principle or alludes to a fictional event that might serve for orientation, he then moves the goalposts on us, reminds us that he's fucking us around, and so what good is he then? We're willing to believe for the moment that life is hell, but then he refuses to help us derive meaning from that, even nihilistic meaning/lessness; we want Virgil in Hell and we get the Joker in Arkham.

      The intro to my edition of Notes from Underground states that each section makes the other magnificent. Certainly that's not true of the first. As discussed, I find it on its own to be practically worthless, although exquisitely done; but the melting-snowflake sadness that suffuses the second half, the "story", is nowhere present in the "essay". The "story" makes the essay make sense--the pointless seething spittard that we see in the first half is revealed as someone very lonely and sad, who finally wants to be loved and esteemed but is far too clever and aware of his defense mechanisms to ever be able to dismantle them. You see how Dostoevsky was on his way to religion of a very true and hardheaded sort--on his way to the conviction that the fundamental crisis of human life isn't human corruption or venality or selfishness, but human pain. A totally unlovable man is obsessed with the officer who once moved him dismissively out of the way. He plots his revenge in a way too pathetic to be disguised by all his cleverness (but of course he is still feeding us our material, and the fact that only by presenting his ugliest self can he get us to feel sorry enough for him to love him may well be his last trick on us and himself). It gives him a reason to live, this revenge, for a couple of weeks at least, and he prepares for it like his wedding day. Even as your lip curls in scorn you wince at how he hits the tender places--the piece of each of us that feels fundamentally unloveable and yet like we have to trick someone into loving us as is because we're the only us we've got. The beaver collar was the most devastating detail for me.

      And when he makes his big move it's meaningless, of course, but he pretends it isn't--diffidently, desultorily--as an excuse to keep going. To keep sneering after love. The party scene is excruciating (although it does bring up a sliver of doubt I have about this messy thesis as well, the way it reminds me of a thirteen-year-old nerd's birthday party. Are any adults like this? No, and the UM's got that covered, right at the end when he reminds us that he has presented us with the deliberate collection of all the traits necessary for an antihero. But still--you could argue that he is a psychological representation of all the ugly cravings and tantrums that grown-ups hide away, but I think what grown-ups do is actually much healthier for the most part--they learn to garner love by being loveable, to the degree they can--funny, reliable, affectionate, whatever it is. Anyone gonna argue that fifty-year-olds on average are more selfish than fifteen-year-olds? More spiteful, maybe, with heads fuller of bad memories, but I truly think that we overcome demons, as an aggregate species, faster than new ones are spawned. Moral arithmetic).

      And all the cruelty and pathos of the UM's encounter with Liza at the end, the way he toys with her and drives her away and blames literature for his problems and then himself and then us--it's heartbreaking but also so predictable, down to the big tease-reveal that it was five rubles he pressed into her hand, making her back into a prostitute (called it). The second half of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow", and I'm maybe trying to cut a Petersburg knot by making "the need for love" my keyword for this text in toto (in which case consider this meandering review to represent also my prior attempts to untie it), but what else makes the icy malice and slushy yearning and grey despair so touching instead of repugnant? The first half of Notes without the second half would be pointlessly unpleasant, a slapup of laughable, spiteful, adolescent nonsense; the perfect, tragic-in-the-most-exact-sense second half would, okay, exert somewhat less fascination without the extensive preparation of the first. Fine, Dosty knew what he was doing.

    • 5/5
      You can't help getting drawn into Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" as you follow the rantings of a spiteful, bitter person. Dostoyevsky has created a character whose every action leads to his own self-destruction, pain and alienation from others.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book, especially the first part. the writer, the underground man see that the old ideas and values no longer offer the lessons we need to live life in a honest and full way. However the undergrond man also sees that the "new age" approach is no better. He hopes of a soluntion but is afraid there is no solution
    • 5/5
      A forty year old man introduces himself: "I AM A SICK MAN . . . I am a wicked (nasty) man." This comes from a man who immediately demonstrates his unsureness and his unreliability, as he touts his superstitiousness and refusal to be treated for his (imagined?) sickness. With a few lines of prose Dostoevsky has introduced the reader to a new type of man, one that we will see traces of in characters like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and others in subsequent novels. What do we make of this narrator and his story?It is a story that is bifurcated into two parts that are very different from each other but intimately connected. The narrator is talking to someone. Perhaps it is the reader or perhaps it is himself, but he is passionate as he speaks out from his "corner" bemoaning the fact that he is not even able to become an insect, much as he would like to. The narration, upon first reading, is strange, but it changes when he draws in the reader by observing that he is not the only one who takes pride in his "sickness". Everyone takes pride in their own sickness. Suddenly we have come upon, become part of, the modern condition. This is the world that Nietzsche and others would later describe and that we live in.The first part is entitled "Underground" and it is a world where the certainties of "2+2=4" and the philosophies of rationalism and utilitarianism are not welcome. The narrator, in his hole, cannot act and is overcome with inertia -- being constantly offended by "the laws of nature". What is a man without wants or desires who is living a life that is determined? Reason is not the answer, so he speculates that "two times two is five is sometimes also a most charming little thing". (p 34) He is bored and so he begins to write as the falling snow reminds him of an anecdote that occurred when he was twenty-four years old.Thus the narration changes as the second part, "Apropos of the Wet Snow" begins. The nature of his pathology and his paranoia becomes clear as he reacts with coworkers and meets a young girl. The bifurcation of the story begins to appear in the narrator who, shortly after meeting the girl, starts to have doubts, thoughts like this:"A sullen thought was born in my brain and passed through my whole body like some vile sensation, similar to what one feels on entering an underground cellar, damp and musty. It was somehow unnatural . . . " (p 88) He begins to doubt himself (maybe he always has). The girl tries to reach out to him but he cannot reciprocate. Ultimately he concludes that life lived in books is better than his real life. He does little, is disappointed, and begins to write.This novel is a tragicomedy of ideas, powerful in the sense that it identifies the direction that much of modern thought will pursue. The dramatic expressiveness of the prose betrays a narrator who is bereft of the will to engage in life. It is a form of nihilism that eats away at the narrator. Dostoevsky's answer, not given in this short novel but found in The Brothers Karamazov and elsewhere, is a faith that is absent here. That does not mean that this is not a rich text, filled with ideas and deep with meaning. It is a book that challenges the reader in ways that resonate forward more than a century later.
    • 3/5
      Vrijmoedige monoloog van een eigenzinnig, arrogant en wispelturig man. Het eerste deel is absoluut een sleutel tot het hele oeuvre van Dostojevski, het tweede deel doet erg gogoliaans aan. Onderliggende boodschap: de verscheurde moderne mens als gevolg van het wetenschappelijk positivisme.Eerste lectuur toen ik 17 jaar was, onmiddellijk herkend als sleutelroman
    • 3/5
      Possibly the first existential novel (novella). The unnamed writer, 40 years old, tells us he is writing to no one but argues that man must choose (free will) and will choose not to live by logic and in fact will choose against logic. The second part, gives us the background of the writer and how he ended up underground. Then the very end, we learn that even this has been edited and we the reader do not know what is the truth. Rating 3.43.
    • 5/5
      I do not know enough Russian to fully appreciate it, but I know enough. I can feel 'the space under the floor' of the translation. I can see the absence of something there, that I know the Russian would fully explain.

      My first Dostoyevsky and I am pleased it was this one. The nauseating, twisting anxiety and self loathing. The violent and unrepentant revulsion, bitterness, cruelty and nastiness, and the thrilling, shuddering language of it all. In it I can hear echoes of everything I love now -- Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury! -- And I see the angels and auroachs and the power of my perversion.

      Staggering. Helpful to read certain phrases out loud. Despite being "Notes", it is obviously a piece written to be spoken.
    • 4/5
      I found it very difficult to get through part one. If you’re struggling to read it, I would suggest listening to at least the first half. Personally, I only listened to part one and went back to reading once I got to part two. The second part of the book is much easier to read because it is less like a rant, and more of a narration. Like when I read Of Mice and Men, I spent quite a bit of this book wondering why so many people have suggested this book to me and it wasn’t until the end that I finally understood. All of the pieces fall into place and you can finally see what Dostoevsky wanted to say. I’ve been told that Dostoevsky is someone you either love or hate because he has such a dreary outlook on human nature. I believe I fall in with those who love him. I can see how he could be perceived as being a pessimist, but personally I feel that he more of a realist.While some people might see the Underground Man as depicting the scummiest side of humans, I don’t feel that he should be seen in such a negative light. His feelings and even his reactions are not uncommon and, while not the ideal way to feel or react, it shouldn’t be depicted as horrible. Being jealous and angry are human emotions, they aren’t something that we can all pretend we don’t feel. Also, most people in society might not actually act the way he does, but I’ll bet that we’ve all had similar scenarios play out in our heads. Humans are not always happy and nice people, we go through good streaks and bad streaks. And each one of us is capable of horrendous things.
    • 3/5
      This particular copy of mine has a handful of short stories within it. There are a few pieces that were quite depressing and very fitting as Dostoyevsky works. This was a book that I had to teach to my sophomores when I was teaching 10th grade English and I can't say it had the kids very riveted unfortunately.
    • 5/5
      I haven't had the energy to attempt Dostoyevsky's more well known works, however this book contained some of the finest writing I've ever read. Admittedly, existentialism has little appeal for me, yet his dry wit and humor were a pleasant surprise, particularly as contained in the second part of the work. I found his encounters with a local police officer and dinner party with old schoolmates some of the funniest, best written material I have ever read. An unusual, but very compelling book, highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      There are some truly brilliant moments in the book that took me completely by surprise, and I was always excited when I had the chance to pick it back up to read after having to put it down.
    • 4/5
      My first Dostoyevsky reading, and I really enjoyed it. Soon I'll begin reading his longer works, this was a good introduction.
    • 5/5
      painful articulation of the internal side of a self marginalized person
    • 5/5
      This novella is split into two parts. The first part is an essay where the author goes into a discussion about intellectual people versus normal people. In the second part the author a forty years old government servant, narrates in first person his struggle as a intellectual to fit in the society and the social conventions.Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a master of in your own mind kind of narrative. His characters carry on a conversation with themselves and the reader while in a scene. There is no one else who does the "screwed mind babble " better than Dostoyevsky. A great read for someone who likes that kind of stuff. A 4.5/5 read for me.
    • 3/5
      This rating is provisional - I'm going to need some time for this novel to stew before coming to a final decision. I read this as part of a challenge to read cult classics which seemed a good opportunity to read a famous Russian author whose work I have been avoiding since attempting Crime and Punishment as a teenager.

      If you, like myself, are coming to this book knowing little about it, a word of advice - don't let the first part make you quit! I disliked it and found it boringly pretentious; at this point I was sure I was going to hate the book and was tempted to stop. The second part I found much more interesting; although the neurotic narrator was just as pretentious, the overall style was more accessible.
    • 5/5
      All of Dostoyevsky's novels are works of genius, but, as far as I am concerned, this is the best one of them all.