Notes from Underground - Dostoevsky, Fyodor

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Résumé :
Notes from Underground is a fictional collection of memoirs written by a civil servant living alone in St. Petersburg. The man is never named and is generally referred to as the Underground Man. The underground in the book refers to the narrator's isolation, which he described in chapter 11 as listening through a crack under the floor. It is considered to be one of the first existentialist novels. With this book, Dostoevsky challenged the ideologies of his time, like nihilism and utopianism. The Underground Man shows how idealized rationality in utopias is inherently flawed, because it doesn't account for the irrational side of humanity. This novel has had a big impact on many different works of literature and philosophy. It has influenced writers like Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche. A similar character is also found in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. Notes from Underground was published in 1864 as the first four issues of Epoch, a Russian magazine by Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky. Presented here is Constance Garnett's translation from 1918.

Biographie:
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He is best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. His most acclaimed works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Russian dramatist of Ukrainian origin. His early works, such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore. Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913-1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). Other Authors are also prominent Authors.