Notes from the Underground
April 13, 2026 — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Table of Contents
Review
Bought this a while back because I felt compelled to investigate some of the Classics, but didn’t want to dive right into The Brothers Karamazov. I have no idea if this is reflective of Dostoevsky’s broader writing style, but I found this almost physically painful to read. Our narrator is so repellent that I couldn’t make myself read it on the metro with a dead phone. After 60 pages, I pulled up the audiobook on YouTube and sped it up to 2.65x speed to get it over with.
At one point I mistakenly flipped to The Double and read several paragraphs before realizing and found it much better, so perhaps I should read that at some point and consider it a better barometer for Fyodor.