Notes from Underground - Paperback

Thomas R. Beyer Jr was born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York where he attended Xaverian HS. He is a graduate of Georgetown University (1969) and the University of Kansas (1974). For the past 42 years he has been a Professor of Russian at Middlebury College in Vermont. He is the author of over a dozen books to learn Russian, and several translations of the Russian writer Andrei Bely. Considered an expert on Russian writers in emigration in Germany and the United States, Professor Beyer has lectured extensively in Russia, Germany and the United States. For the past few years he has offered seminars on the works of Dan Brown designed to permit students and readers separate fact from fiction. He has published revised and abridged versions of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) was educated in Moscow and at the School of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg, where he spent four years. In 1846, he wrote his first novel, Poor Folk; it was an immediate critical and popular success. This was followed by short stories and the novel The Double. While at work on Netochka Nezvanova, the twenty-seven-year-old author was arrested for belonging to a young socialist group. He was tried and condemned to death, but at the last moment his sentence was commuted to prison in Siberia. He spent four years in the penal settlement as Omsk. In 1859, he was granted full amnesty and allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In the fourteen years before his death, Dostoyevsky produced his greatest works, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. The last was published a year before his death.