NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man," the irascible voiceof a nameless narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emergethe passionate confessions of a suffering man; the brutalself-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn andiconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of thegreatest antiheroes in all literature. "Notes From Underground,"published in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky's writing: itannounces the moral political, and social ideas he will treat on amonumental scale in "Crime And Punishment," "The Idiot," and "TheBrothers Karamazov." And it remains to this day one of the mostsearingly honest and universal testaments to human despair everpenned. "The political cataclysms and cultural revolutions of ourcentury...confirm the status of "Notes from Underground" as one ofthe most sheerly astonishing and subversive creations of Europeanfiction."-from the Introduction by Donald Fanger