Top Highlights

• seemed, in the end, that all this world, with all its inhabitants, both the strong and the weak, with all their habitations, whether beggars’ shelters or gilded palaces, at this hour of twilight resembled a fantastic, enchanted vision, a dream which in its turn would instantly vanish and waste away as vapor into the dark blue heaven. Suddenly a cer...
• Notes from Underground gives voice to the double-mindedness, at once guilty and defiant, of the conscious transgressor.
• The murderer, as he wrote to Katkov, would be “an intellectually developed young man who even has good inclinations” and who kills “under the influence of some of those strange, ‘incomplete’ ideas which go floating about in the air …” In other words, the tale was to be a further exploration of the consequences of Russian radical ideology, particula...
• “Hm … yes … man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice … That is an axiom … I wonder, what are people most afraid of? A new step, their own new word, that’s what they’re most afraid of