A faithful translation of the classic written at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century follows the narrator's withdrawal from his life as an official to the underground, where he makes passionate and obsessive observations on social utopianism and the irrational nature of humankind.

Selected Letters from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Mikhail Dostoevsky (1859-64) --[Socialism and Christianity] / Fyodor Dostoevsky -- from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions / Fyodor Dostoevsky -- from Russian Nights / V.F. Odoevsky -- from "Hamlet of Shchigrovsk District" / I.S. Turgenev -- from What Is to Be Done? / N.G. Chernyshevsky -- Parody -- from "The Swallows" / M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin -- Notes from the Overfed / Woody Allen -- Imitation/Inspiration -- The Child / Robert Walser -- from The Invisible Man / Ralph Ellison -- from We / Yevgeny Zamyatin -- from "Erostratus" / Jean-Paul Sartre -- [Dostoevsky's Cruel Talent] / Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky -- [Thought and Art in Notes from Underground] / Vasily Rozanov -- [Dostoevsky and Nietzsche] / Lev Shestov -- [Discourse in Dostoevsky] / M.M. Bakhtin -- Structure and Integration in Notes from the Underground / Ralph E. Matlaw -- Notes on the Uses of Monologue in Artistic Prose / Victor Erlich -- [Freedom in Notes from Underground] / Robert Louis Jackson -- [The Pun of Creativity; Double Determination] / Gary Saul Morson -- The Formalistic Model: Notes from Underground / Richard H. Weisberg -- Notes from Underground / Joseph Frank -- [The Symbolic Game] / Tzvetan Todorov.