Notes from Underground: with White Nights, The Dreams of a Ridiculous Man, and selections from The House of the Dead

In this Signet Classic volume can be seen Dostoevsky’s evolving outlook on man’s fate. The works presented here were written at distinct periods in the author’s life, at decisive philosophy and a religious answer. The characters are representative of the human hearts he probed with such surprising insight. They include a whole range of tormented people–from the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying a human life to the irritating, anxious antihero of Notes from Underground, a man who both craves and despises affection. Thomas Mann described Dostoevsky as “an author whose Christian sympathy is ordinarily devoted to human misery, sin, vice, the depths of lust and crime, rather than to nobility of body and soul” and Notes from Underground as “an awe–and terror–inspiring example of this sympathy.”