Notes From Underground And The Double

Download or read book Notes from Underground and the Double written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-01-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm Bradbury Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter irony, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the 'anthill' and his gradual withdrawal from society. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who looks exactly like him - his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly tragi-comic study of human consciousness. Translated by Ronald Wilks with an Introduction by Robert Louis Jackson