A retired civil servant of forty lives on a small inheritance in a rented room in Petersburg. He is not going anywhere and he is not going to be forgiven, and he sits down to explain himself to readers he insists do not exist. The first sentence he writes is that he is a sick man, a spiteful man, an unattractive man. He spends the rest of the book proving it and daring you to look away.
The first part is the argument. That a man is not a piano key. That he will choose his own harm over another man's arithmetic of his happiness, and will choose it precisely because the arithmetic is correct. That being fully conscious is a disease, and that the people who act in the world are the ones who never thought about it long enough to stop.
The second part is the evidence, and it is worse, because now he is twenty-four and out among people. An officer moves him out of a doorway without noticing he is there. Schoolfellows who did not invite him to their farewell dinner cannot get rid of him once he arrives. And then there is Liza, to whom he talks beautifully about a better life, who believes him, who comes to find him, and who sees the room he actually lives in.
Written in 1864, before Crime and Punishment and everything after it, this is where Dostoevsky found the voice the rest of his novels are built on, and where the next century found its first modern narrator: self aware, self disgusted, and unable to stop talking. You will sometimes see it called Notes from Underground. It is the same book. The title on this edition is the one the source text carries.
Constance Garnett's translation, the one that carried Dostoevsky into English, complete and unabridged in two parts, with Dostoevsky's own footnote on the first leaf explaining that the diary and its writer are imaginary.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 128 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. It is a short book and it is priced as an object. Dostoevsky wrote it as a novella and nothing has been cut, so the volume is thin on the shelf beside our Crime and Punishment and our Karamazov. Every word of it is here.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
