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About the book:
Two works, one binding. Notes is the ur-text of modern alienation the spite-filled Underground Man addressing you directly, impossibly.
The Double is Gogolian nightmare.
Essential Dostoyevsky
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Some wear to cover and spine.
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About the author:
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 1881)
Born in Moscow, the son of a hospital doctor who worked among the destitute and was later murdered by his own serfs, Dostoevsky came to his understanding of suffering early and from close range. He studied military engineering in St. Petersburg, published his first novel Poor Folk to considerable acclaim at 24, and was arrested at 27 for involvement with a circle of utopian socialists who discussed banned texts. The sentence was death.
He was taken out with the others, blindfolded, and stood before a firing squad. At the last moment a rider arrived with the commutation: four years of hard labour in Siberia, followed by compulsory military service. One of the men beside him went permanently insane. Dostoevsky never forgot those minutes of absolute consciousness before the reprieve the acute aliveness of a man certain he is about to die. You can feel it in every page he subsequently wrote.
He returned from Siberia transformed: the idealist socialist had become deeply Russian Orthodox, politically conservative, philosophically obsessed with suffering, free will, and the existence of God. He also returned with epilepsy, crushing debt, and a gambling addiction he understood from the inside with the same unflinching clarity he brought to everything else.
The great novels came in this second life: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), finished months before he died. They are less novels in the conventional sense than dramatised philosophy sustained arguments about God, evil, consciousness, and human irrationality conducted through characters who argue, suffer, and contradict each other without resolution. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin called this the polyphonic novel: multiple voices of equal validity, no single authorial truth presiding. It's the right description.
His influences were Pushkin, whom he revered above everyone; Gogol, his early model; Dickens, whose social conscience and grotesque comedy he loved; Schiller's idealism; and the Russian Orthodox tradition at the root of everything. Nietzsche read him with excitement. Freud wrote an essay about him. Kafka, Camus, Faulkner, and Sartre all carry his fingerprints. The chapter in The Brothers Karamazov known as the Grand Inquisitor is among the most devastating arguments against institutional religion ever written and Dostoevsky was a believer putting it in the mouth of an atheist, which tells you most of what you need to know about how he worked.
