Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A collection of powerful stories by one of the masters of Russian literature, illustrating the author's thoughts on political philosophy, religion and above all, humanity: Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the DeadNotes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead (150th Anniversary Edition)

The compelling works presented in this volume were written at distinct periods in Dostoyevsky's life, at decisive moments in his groping for a political philosophy and a religious answer. From the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying life to the anxious antihero of Notes from UndergroundNotes from Underground—who both craves and despises affection—the writer's often-tormented characters showcase his evolving outlook on our fate.

Thomas Mann described Dostoyevsky 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 UndergroundNotes from Underground as "an awe- and terror- inspiring example of this sympathy."

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Mass Market Paperback, 233 pages

Published November 2nd 2004 by Signet (first published 1864)

tags: novels, cultural, short stories, classics, literature, classic literature, 19th century, philosophy, russia, russian literature, fiction

Book Quotes

“Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Man, after all, is stupid, phenomenally stupid.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Ero talmente abituato a pensare e immaginare tutto secondo i libri e a rappresentarmi ogni cosa al mondo così come io stesso l’avevo inventata prima nei miei sogni, che lì per lì non capii neppure quella strana circostanza. Ma ecco quel che accadde: Liza, offesa e schiacciata da me, aveva capito molto più di quanto immaginassi. Aveva capito, di tutto, ciò che una donna capisce sempre prima di ogni altra cosa, se ama veramente, e cioè che ero infelice.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Born, Dead, Idea

“Sevginin bulunmadığı yerde aklı da arama.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Sevgi

“It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself—as though that were so necessary—that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“...naša su htijenja pretežno pogrešna, zbog pogrešnog pogleda na naše koristi. Ponekad poželimo čistu glupost upravo zato što u toj gluposti vidimo, uslijed svoje gluposti, najlakši put za postizanje neke unaprijed pretpostavljene koristi.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one’s position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repent- ed of again a minute later—that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Я клоп и признаю со всем принижением, что ничего не могу понять, для чего все так устроено. Люди сами, значит, виноваты: им дан был рай, они захотели свободы и похитили огонь с небеси, сами зная, что станут несчастны, значит нечего их жалеть. О, по моему, по жалкому, земному эвклидовскому уму моему, я знаю лишь то, что страдание есть, что виновных нет, что все одно из другого выходит прямо и просто, что все течет и уравновешивается, - но ведь это лишь эвклидовская дичь, ведь я знаю же это, ведь жить по ней я не могу же согласиться! Что мне в том, что виновных нет и что все прямо и просто одно из другого выходит, и что я это знаю - мне надо возмездие, иначе ведь я истреблю себя. И возмездие не в бесконечности где-нибудь и когда-нибудь, а здесь уже на земле, и чтоб я его сам увидал. Я веровал, я хочу сам и видеть, а если к тому часу буду уже мертв, то пусть воскресят меня, ибо если все без меня произойдет, то будет слишком обидно. Не для того же я страдал, чтобы собой, злодействами и страданиями моими унавозить кому-то будущую гармонию. Я хочу видеть своими глазами, как лань ляжет подле льва и как зарезанный встанет и обнимется с убившим его. Я хочу быть тут, когда все вдруг узнают, для чего все так было.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that a peculiar sort of enjoyment--the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And when one is slapped in the face--why then the consciousness of being rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“You believe in the crystal palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you can never stick out your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture, even with your fist hidden away. Well, perhaps I’m so afraid of this building precisely because it’s made of crystal and it’s eternally indestructible, and because it won’t be possible to stick one’s tongue out even furtively.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Tongue

“Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the way: facing the wall, such gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and men of action--are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them something tranquillising, morally soothing, final--maybe even something mysterious ... but of the wall later.)”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me, and I was unlike any one else. "I am aline and they are every one," I thought--and pondered. For that it was evident that I was still a youngster.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me, and I was unlike any one else. "I am alone and they are every one," I thought--and pondered. For that it was evident that I was still a youngster.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Dünya kurulalı beri insanların yalnızca kişisel çıkarlarına göre davrandıkları görülmüş müdür? İnsanların bile bile, yani gerçek çıkarlarını iyice anladıkları halde, bunları ikinci plana itip kimsenin zorlamadığı başka yollara, bir sürü karışık, tehlikeli işlere atıldıklarını gösteren milyonlarca örneğe ne demeli? Evet, insanlar kendilerine gösterilen yolun tam tersine, canlarının istediği yöne yürümüşler; akıl almaz, çetin, neredeyse karanlık yollarda yürümek için direnmişlerdir. Dik kafalılık, direnmek onlara çıkarlarından daha tatlı geliyor, anlaşılan...”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Insanlar

“İki kere iki dört çekilmez bir şey. İki kere iki dört, bana sorarsanız, bir küstahlıktır. İki kere iki dört, ellerini böğrüne dayayarak yolumuzu kesen, sağa sola tükürük atan bir külhanbeyinin ta kendisidir. İki kere iki dördün yetkinliğine inanırım ama en çok övülmeye değer bir şey varsa, o da iki kere ikinin beş etmesidir.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Dostoyevsky, Yeraltından Notlar

“Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: İNterest

“I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The dreamer can have no desires, for he has everything ; he is above desire, he is surfeited, he is himself the artist creating his life at every hour, guided only by his own inspiration.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Surreal

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."

His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
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