Notes from the Underground: A Confession from a Petersburg Corner

A retired civil servant lives in a corner of Petersburg and spends forty pages telling the reader why every comfortable idea about reason and progress is a lie, before he consents to tell a story at all. The story, when it comes, is worse than the argument. The Gilded Library edition places paint...

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was sentenced to death at twenty-seven, reprieved on the scaffold, and sent to a Siberian camp for four years. He returned an epileptic and a compulsive gambler, and spent the next thirty years arguing that reason cannot account for what people actually do.