Notes from Underground

The underground man argues with an imagined audience, changes position and then seems annoyed that anyone might have believed him. His spite becomes a comic and uncomfortable performance of thinking aloud. A short book, it still asks you to stay with deliberate contradiction and humiliation. The English wording is a translator's work too: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky provide one readily identifiable version, worth sampling against another before choosing your copy.