The "Backgrounds and Sources" includes relevant texts by Dostoevsky, among which are "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions," the author's account of a defining journey to the West. The Second Edition includes excerpts from V. F. Odoevsky's "Russian Nights" and from I. S. Turgenev's "Hamlet of the Province of Shchigrovsk." In "Responses," Michael Katz connects this foundational novel with the theme of the underground man in six famous works, two of which are new in the Second Edition: an excerpt from M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin's "The Struthious," Woody Allen's "Notes from the Overfed," Robert Walser's "The Child," an excerpt from Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man," an excerpt from Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," and an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Erostratus." "Criticism" gathers eleven interpretations from both Russian and Western critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two of which are new in the Second Edition. The collection includes essays by Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky, Vasily Rozanov, Lev Shestov, M. M. Bakhtin, Ralph E. Matlaw, Victor Erlich, Robert Louis Jackson, Gary Saul Morson, Richard H. Weisberg, Joseph Frank, and Tzvetan Todorov. A Timeline and selected Bibliography are also included.

Pages: 272, Year of Publication: 0108, Dimensions: 13.2x13.2cm