Notes from Underground

Mentions per year

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• pron · Mar 17, 2013 · Recommends

  …for "religious arguments" about editors. Instead of belittling such sentiments, you might want to find out why they're so prevalent and whether they are indeed harmful. I suggest you read Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. These books have awarded me a lot of insight on the subject.

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• trutannus · Oct 25, 2021 · Recommends

  Another excellent book that injects you into an unstable protagonist is Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. Can be read in a day. Highly recommend. This was my first intro to Russian lit.

  on “Why did Dostoyevsky write Crime and Punishment?” ↗
• _hdki · Nov 29, 2024 · Recommends

  A few of this year's highlights for me and my notes on the books, where available. Fiction - Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/2ab29d16-0cb1-4ef8-8cde... Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - https://papertrail.biblish.com/books/65214629-29ac-45a6-b474... Bleak House…

  on “Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?” ↗
• kylecazar · Oct 22, 2026 · Recommends

  If you're looking for examples critical of humanity you have lots of options (mostly from the last two centuries). Notes from Underground and The Death of Ivan Ilyich fit the bill. I reread the former relatively recently (first time since college). It's dark, not for the easily affected.

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• westoncb · Oct 10, 2017 · Mentions

  I wonder how the 'psychological novel' which was supposed to be invented in James' The Portrait of a Lady (1880) (according to the article) is distinct from, e.g., Crime and Punishment (1866) (or Notes from Underground, though I guess that was a novella so it doesn't count). Is Portrait of a Lady more psychologically focused, or is the way it treats the psychological content somehow different?

  on “Novels were never the same after Henry James” ↗
• wjn0 · May 10, 2018 · Critical

  I found The Plague to be quite enjoyable, while I've struggled through Notes from Underground and The Idiot (the latter moreso because of its length). The Stranger and The Fall by Camus are also incredible, I hope to read all of them in their original French sometime soon.

  on ““The Idiot” Savant: On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot” ↗
• doc_gunthrop · Sep 5, 2020 · Mentions

  The first linked article (commentarymagazine.com) suggests that the Garnett/Matlaw translations of Dostoevsky’s "Notes from Underground" is a better translation than the P&V translation. As an example, it says the following: > ...His word for such acts of self-injury is, in English translations before P&V, “spite.” It is fair to say…

  on “How Chekhov invented the modern short story” ↗
• pron · Jul 18, 2015 · Mentions

  …whom? We certainly wouldn't be the same beings. > I think that we think more clearly and make better decisions at that level. You may be right, but so what? Who says that's better? Dostoyevsky wrote Notes from Underground about that (the protagonist is a man, a very neurotic man, who finds freedom -- or convinces himself so -- only in spite and self-harm). It is we who decide what's meaningful for us, and what we want…

  on “On the Value of Not Knowing Everything” ↗