'I am a sick man... I am a wicked man. With this sentence Fyodor Dostoevsky began one of the most revolutionary novels ever written, a work that marks the frontier, not only between nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, but between two centuries visions of the self. For the unnamed narrator of Notes from Underground is a multiplicity of selves, each at war with the others--all at war with everything else. Now Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohonsky, whose translations of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov have become the standard versions in English, give us a superb new edition of Dostoevsky's classic that conveys both the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original Russian.
