I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man, the irascible voice of a nameless
narrator cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions
of a suffering man; the brutal self-examination of a tormented soul; the
bristling scorn and iconoclasm of alienated individual who has become one of
the greatest antiheroes in all literature. Notes From Underground, published
in 1864, marks a tuming point in Dostoevsky´s writing: it announces the moral
political, and social ideas he will treat on a monumental scale in Crime And
Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, And it remains to this
day one of the most searingly honest and universal testaments to human despair
ever penned. The political cataclysms and cultural revolutions of our
century…confirm the status of Notes from Underground as one of the most
sheerly astonishing and subversive creations of European fiction. -from the
Introduction by Donald Fanger
