Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Genre: Comedy
Setting:
Format of Original Source: Novella
Recommended Adaptation Length:

Candidate for Adaptation? Promising

EXCERPT:

I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well–let it get worse!

COMMENTS:

A monologue; might not dramatize. But the right approach (one man show? contemporizing it?) could be appealing. Will the existential nature of Dostoevsky’s psycho-drama translate to a modern audience?

VIEW SOURCE DOCUMENT

BACK TO LISTINGS