Read more
"Backgrounds and Sources" includes relevant writings by Dostoevsky, among them "
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions," the author's account of a formative trip to the West. New to the Second Edition are excerpts from V. F. Odoevksy's "
Russian Nights" and I. S. Turgenev's "
Hamlet of Shchigrovsk District." In "Responses", Michael Katz links this seminal novel to the theme of the underground man in six famous works, two of them new to the Second Edition: an excerpt from M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's
The Swallows, Woody Allen's
Notes from the Overfed, Robert Walser's
The Child, an excerpt from Ralph Ellison's
The Invisible Man, an excerpt from Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, and an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's
Erostratus. "Criticism" brings together eleven interpretations by both Russian and Western critics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two of them new to the Second Edition. Included are essays by Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky, Vasily Rozanov, Lev Shestov, M. M. Bakhtin, Ralph E. Matlaw, Victor Erlich, Robert Louis Jackson, Gary Saul Morson, Richard H. Weisberg, Joseph Frank, and Tzvetan Todorov. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
About the author
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and many other novels.Michael R. Katz is C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has published translations of more than fifteen Russian novels, including Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground. He lives in Cornwall, Vermont.
Summary
The text for this edition of Notes from Underground is Michael Katz’s acclaimed translation of the 1863 novel, which is introduced and annotated specifically for English-speaking readers.
