Reviews

Notes from Underground was absolutely incredible, I flew through it and I annotated so much I truly felt like my mind had been scraped out and rearranged into words on the page!

jekutree's review against another edition

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5.0

Incredible read. Notes From Underground is perhaps the most scared I’ve ever been to relate to a character. The Underground Man represents everything vile and nasty hidden within all of us. He leans into the misanthropic thoughts we all share about each other and the world we live in. Lots of observations within this book still reign true today which is incredible considering it’s almost 200 years old.

jada's review against another edition

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3.0

the first half was borderline incomprehensible stream of consciousness ramblings, but the second half was a lot more interesting. mr underground man seems to be the world's most introspective man—he said it himself: "to be too conscious is an illness"—but despite all this introspection, he still seems to make the worst possible decisions. he's just a dilemma: thinks things through so much yet still chooses the objectively worse choice, and is simultaneously self-aggrandising and self-deprecating. all of dostoevsky's novels are just grey (I refuse to believe any of his protagonists have seen a sunny day before) and this was no exception.

the double
this was definitely the worse of the two books (but I'm also gonna reread this next year to see if I'll appreciate it more). I'm not sure if it’s the translation or whatever, but the characters just inexplicably devolved into yoda-speak at times, and repeated the name of the person they were speaking to like 10 times a sentence, and I'm really not sure what to make of it. I just didn't really like it.

reading both of these back to back makes me realise how similar his protagonists are, and having not read any other russian lit thing, I'm not sure if it's a him thing or a genre convention.