Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
List: $17.99 | Sale: $12.59
Club: $8.99

Notes from Underground

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrator: Alan Turton

Unabridged: 5 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/23/2026


Synopsis

Pevear and Volokhonsky may be the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era. (The New Yorker)Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between 19th- and 20th-century fiction and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original. This audio edition of Notes from Underground is the only recording of Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation of Dostoevsky’s classic work.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of Notes from Underground is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.This audiobook is skillfully read by Alan Turton, with audio engineering by Raconteurs Audio. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.Copyright (c) 1993 Translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Recorded by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. (P) 2025 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

About Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), born in Moscow, lived much of his childhood distanced from his frail mother and officious father. During these formative years, he formed a close bond with his elder brother Mikhail. When they were teenagers, however, Fyodor and Mikhail were enrolled in separate boarding schools, Fyodor matriculating at an engineering school in St. Petersburg. Even as he was studying the trade of government, Dostoevsky was honing his skills as a writer, inking drafts of what would become his first novel-Poor Folk. In 1846, it was published to warm critical response. Something of a literary figure at the age of twenty-five, Dostoevsky began attending the discussion group that would result in his imprisonment. His sentence was commuted to four years in prison and four years of army service. His prison experiences, as well as his life after prison among the urban poor of Russia, provided a vivid backdrop for much of his later work. Released from his imprisonment and service by 1858, he began a fourteen-year period of furious writing, in which he published many significant texts, including The House of the Dead, Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Devils. During this period, Dostoevsky's life was in upheaval, as he lost both his first wife and his brother. On February 15, 1867, he married his stenographer Anna Grigorevna Snitkina, who managed his affairs until his death. Two months before he died, Dostoevsky completed the epilogue to The Brothers Karamazov, which was published in serial form in the Russian Messenger.


Reviews

Goodreads review by karen

oh, dear. this is not a character that it is healthy to relate to, is it?? he is a scootch more pathetic than me, and more articulate, but his pettinesses are mine; his misanthropy is mine, his contradictions and weaknesses... i have to go hide now, i feel dirty and exposed... come to my blog!......more