"Criticism from the Underground" is a collection of essays by the famous French philosopher, philologist and anthropologist Rene Girard, already known to domestic readers from the books "Violence and the Sacred" and "The Scapegoat". The heroes of these essays - Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus, Dante and Victor Hugo, Gilles Deleuze and Marcel Proust (as well as the characters of these authors) - allow Girard to formulate one of the central concepts of his “fundamental anthropology” - the concept of “mimetic desire”. This book is about the Other as our model, rival and double, in dramatic competition with which our desire arises, as well as our “I”. This is a book about what may be a more fundamental type of rivalry than the relationship Freud described through the Oedipus complex. CONTENTS: Introduction 5I. DOSTOEVSKY. FROM DOUBLE TO UNITY1. Descent into Hell 422. Underground Psychology 543. Underground Metaphysics 754. Resurrection 104II. TO A NEW TRIAL OVER “OUTSIDERS” 134III. FROM THE DIVINE COMEDY TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE NOVEL 171IV. MONSTERS AND DEMIGODS IN THE WORK OF HUGO 180V. SYSTEM OF DELUSION 191Notes 243