Notes from Underground

Yet another book of Dostoyevsky where the main character is a young man who is a little bit out of balance mentally. The difference to the “Idiot” and the “Double” is that the underground man knows that his thinking patterns should be different but at the same time he loathes the conventional. And by doing so he appears to make himself unstable. It is hard to be the one who swims against the stream. In it extremes you have it as a new “normal”, poisoning everything. I would advice reading the second chapter first and first chapter second. In this particular vintage classics edition the foreword of Pevear offer further insight.