Записки изъ подполья
1864
- fiction
- history
- general
- officials and employees
- employees
- fiction, historical
- russia (federation), fiction
- fiction, historical, general
- fiction, political
- slavic philology
The story
Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes — moral, religious, political and social — that dominated Dostoyevsky's later works.
What it’s like
Feverish, sardonic monologue in a single cramped voice, like overhearing a man argue with himself at two in the morning in a damp St Petersburg room with the lamp turned low. The prose is dense and digressive, full of sudden turns, mocking asides and rhetorical traps, so the reading rhythm is restless: long bitter paragraphs that double back and then snap into short, jabbing sentences. The world on the page is sensory in a grim, close way: cold rooms, shabby furniture, the smell of tobacco and wet coats, the sound of carriages on cobbles beyond a shut window. The mood is cynical, self-lacerating and darkly funny, closer to cold sweat than to melancholy comfort. The intensity is low in action but high in feeling: there is no gore, and violence is almost entirely absent, but there is a painful humiliation scene at a dinner party, a brothel episode that is squalid and unsettling, and sustained despair and self-contempt that some readers will find heavy. It suits a long, quiet night alone, or a reader who enjoys philosophical argument carried by character rather than plot. It is for people who want a difficult, talky interior and do not mind sitting with an unreliable, bleakly witty mind for a short, intense stretch.
More books like Записки изъ подполья
Closest in mood, pacing and theme. Tell us why you loved Записки изъ подпольяand we’ll explain which ones fit you.
