Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Deborah A. Martinsen

Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.   Often considered a prologue to Dostoevsky’s brilliant novels, the story “Notes from Underground” introduces one of the great anti-heroes in literature: the underground man, who lives on the fringes of society. In an impassioned, manic monologue this character—plagued by shame, guilt, and alienation—argues that reason is merely a flimsy construction built upon humanity’s essentially irrational core. Internal conflict is also explored in “The Double,” a surreal tale of a government clerk who meets a more unpleasant version of himself and is changed as a result.

In addition to these two existential classics, this collection also includes the psychologically probing stories “The Meek One,” “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” and “White Nights.”

Deborah A. Martinsen is Assistant to the Director of the Core Curriculum at Columbia University and Adjunct Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature. She is the author of Surprised by Shame: Dostoevskys Liars and Narrative Exposure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432819

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian author and journalist. He spent four years in prison, endured forced military service and was nearly executed for the crime of reading works forbidden by the government. He battled a gambling addiction that once left him a beggar, and he suffered ill health, including epileptic seizures. Despite these challenges, Dostoevsky wrote fiction possessed of groundbreaking, even daring, social and psychological insight and power. Novels like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, have won the author acclaim from figures ranging from Franz Kafka to Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf.

Book preview

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THE DOUBLE

A Petersburg Poem

CHAPTER I

It was a little before eight o‘clock in the morning when Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a titular councillor,¹ woke up from a long sleep. He yawned, stretched, and at last opened his eyes completely. For two minutes, however, he lay in his bed without moving, as though he were not yet quite certain whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was going on around him were real and actual, or the continuation of his confused dreams. Very soon, however, Mr. Golyadkin’s senses began more clearly and more distinctly to receive their habitual and everyday impressions. The dirty green, smoke-begrimed, dusty walls of his little room, with the mahogany chest of drawers and chairs, the table painted red, the Turkish divan covered in reddish oil cloth with little green flowers on it, and the clothes taken off in haste overnight and flung in a crumpled heap on the sofa, looked at him familiarly. At last the damp autumn day, muggy and dirty, peeped into the room through the dingy window pane with such a hostile, sour grimace that Mr. Golyadkin could not possibly doubt that he was not in the land of Nod, but in the city of Petersburg, in his own flat on the fourth storey of a huge block of buildings in Shestilavochny Street. When he had made this important discovery Mr. Golyadkin nervously closed his eyes, as though regretting his dream and wanting to go back to it for a moment. But a minute later he leapt out of bed at one bound, probably all at once grasping the idea about which his scattered and wandering thoughts had been revolving. From his bed he ran straight to a little round looking-glass that stood on his chest of drawers. Though the sleepy, short-sighted countenance and rather bald head reflected in the looking-glass were of such an insignificant type that at first sight they would certainly not have attracted particular attention in any one, yet the owner of the countenance was satisfied with all that he saw in the looking-glass. What a thing it would be, said Mr. Golyadkin in an undertone, "what a thing it would be if I were not up to the mark to-day, if something were amiss, if some intrusive pimple had made its appearance, or anything else unpleasant had happened;² so far, however, there’s nothing wrong, so far everything’s all

Reviews for Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[reneepaule · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've not much to say about this book that hasn't been said before. Both stories are nice and deep.

'Notes from Underground' - a mind bender!

'The Double' - a mind bender in a very different way!

Though hard going at times - I think that was largely due to translations - I loved this book. I'd love to read it in Russian, but I don't speak Russian :)

[bodachliath · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book contains two short novels that have some thematic common ground, which helps to explain why Penguin housed them in a single volume. Notes from Underground:This is a very dark and surprisingly modern novella in which an unsympathetic narrator, a retired junior civil servant, describes his gradual alienation from society, initially in a description of his philosophy, but then through narrating some of the episodes that led to his downfall. This book prefigures some of the themes of Crime and Punishment.The Double:This is an earlier novella that is more of a comedy, though the core story is a dark vision. Once again the narrator is a St Petersburg civil servant. This one sees himself as an essentially honest person, but gradually falls from grace, then encounters his double, a lookalike answering to the same name, who gradually takes over the "hero's" life. A compelling vision of a broken man trapped in his own nightmare

[xuebi-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This volume combines two of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's iconic stories: Notes from Underground and The Double; both are thematically linked by their study of the human consciousness in a decidedly tragic-comedic fashion.

In the first novella, Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky recounts in an extended monologue the thoughts and feelings of the eponymous Underground Man who rambles and rages against the oppressive society "above ground" with bitter irony and how, because he does not want to take part in any aspect of that society, retreats underground to an isolated and tortured existence. He attacks Western philosophy and idealism, choosing instead "conscious inertia".
The second part of this novella delves deeper into the Underground Man's psyche by three events that happened, seemingly before his descent underground, and how they work together to destroy him, demonstrating the uncooperative and irrational actions of humans.

The second novella follows a civil servant as he encounters his doppelgänger one stormy night, and thereupon descends into a nightmarish world as his double demonstrates all the charm and social skills the original Golyadkin lacks to the latter's despair. Eventually, the original Golyadkin encounters more and more of his doubles and must be committed to an insane asylum, leaving the reader questioning how much of the narrator's story was fabricated in his own head.

Both novellas study the human condition and, particularly Notes from Underground, deal with the themes of alienation and existentialism; both are at the start of a long tradition of modern novels that are permeated with a sense of ennui and the meaningless of existence. Both novels in fact explore these themes at length and are an excellent introduction to the works of one of the greatest writers in Russia and indeed the world.

[wrk1-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I imagine Notes was just as difficult when it was published as it is now. The "story" is depressing and starts only in the second part of the novel. During the first part, I kept thinking, "How can the depressed extremes of this character ever be interesting? Is this book one long whine by a self-involved jerk?" As I read on, I started to understand that the man was relentless in following his motivations to their unsentimental beginnings. Uh-oh. This guy is doing something that very few of us do, and he's bragging about it. At that point, I knew I had better read on, no matter painful it gets. A cruel, self-centered, honest person.

[anneearney · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Double is still one of my favorites.