Notes from the Underground

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man." So begins the confession of a retired civil servant living alone in a shabby room on the edge of St Petersburg, addressing an audience he insists is not listening. In the first half he argues — furiously, brilliantly, and against himself — that reason cannot govern a human being, that a man will act against his own interests simply to prove he is free, and that the rational utopias promised by the age would be a prison with good plumbing. In the second he tells the story that proves it: a humiliating dinner with former schoolfellows, and a night with a young prostitute named Liza in which he is offered one chance at ordinary human decency and destroys it.

Published in 1864, Notes from the Underground is the hinge of Dostoevsky's career — the book in which he stopped writing about suffering people and started writing from inside a suffering mind. Everything that follows, from Raskolnikov to Ivan Karamazov, begins here.

Its narrator is one of literature's most uncomfortable inventions: not a villain, not a victim, but a man whose self-knowledge is total and completely useless to him. He sees exactly what he is doing as he does it, and does it anyway. Readers have spent a century and a half recognising him against their will, which is precisely the effect Dostoevsky intended. This is an unabridged recording of a fresh modern translation.