"I am a sick man...I am a wicked man. With this sentence Fyodor Dostoevsky began one of the most revolutionary novels ever written, a work that marks the frontier, not only between nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, but between two centuries visions of the self. For the unnamed narrator of Notes from Underground is a multiplicity of selves, each at war with the others--all at war with everything else.
Now Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohonsky, whose translations of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov have become the standard versions in English, give us a superb new edition of Dostoevsky's classic that conveys both the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original Russian.
About the Author
Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky’s life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821. A short first novel, Poor Folk (1846) brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. In prison he was given the “silent treatment” for eight months (guards even wore velvet soled boots) before he was led in front a firing squad. Dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited execution, when suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he returned to St. Petersburg only a full ten years after he had left in chains.
His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. But it was his fortuitous marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of utter destitution brought about by his compulsive gambling, that gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868-69), The Possessed (1871-72), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). When Dostoevsky died in 1881, he left a legacy of masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the Western world and immortalized him as a giant among writers of world literature.
