Notes From the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I will not, of course, be able to explain to you precisely who is going to suffer in this case from my wickedness;

I'd gnash my teeth at them, and felt an inexhaustible delight when I managed to upset someone. I almost always managed.

The whole thing precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it.

I never managed to become even an insect. I'll tell you solemnly that I wanted many times to become an insect. But I was not deemed worthy even of that. I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

I'll bet you think I'm writing all this out of swagger, to be witty at the expense of active figures, and swagger of a bad tone besides, rattling my sabre like my officer. But, gentlemen, who can take pride in his sicknesses, and swagger about them besides?

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

The more conscious I was of the good and of all this “beautiful and lofty,” the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it.

I'll explain to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one's own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into.

will carry through to the end! That is why I took a pen in my hands .

the pleasure of despair, of course, but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And here, with this slap – you'll simply be crushed by the consciousness of what sort of slime you've been reduced to.

because even though it's the laws of nature, it's still offensive.

Once they are overcome, say, by vengeful feeling, then for the time there is simply nothing left in their whole being but this feeling.

I am the more convinced of this, so to speak, suspicion, seeing that if, for example, one takes the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of heightened consciousness, who came, of course, not from the bosom of nature but from a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect that, too), this retort man sometimes folds before his antithesis so far that he honestly regards himself, with all his heightened consciousness, as a mouse and not a man.

There, in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten-down, and derided mouse at once immerses itself in cold, venomous, and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years on end it will recall its offense to the last, most shameful details, each time adding even more shameful details of its own, spitefully taunting and chafing itself with its fantasies.

knowing beforehand that it will suffer a hundred times more from all its attempts at revenge than will the object of its vengeance, who will perhaps not even scratch at the bite. On its deathbed it will again recall everything, adding the interest accumulated over all that time, and . . . But it is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one's position,

Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well. And so a wall is indeed a wall . . . etc., etc.”

As if such a stone wall were truly soothing and truly contained in itself at least some word on the world, solely by being two times two is four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities!

the most revolting conclusions on the eternal theme that you yourself seem somehow to blame even for the stone wall, though once again it is obviously clear that you are in no way to blame;

it's all just slops – nobody knows what and nobody knows who, but in spite of all the uncertainties and stacked decks, it still hurts, and the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!

These moans express the pleasure of the one who is suffering;

and all the lawfulness of nature, on which, to be sure, you spit, but from which you suffer all the same, while it does not. There is expressed the consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, and yet there is pain; the consciousness that, despite all possible Wagenheims,[7] you are wholly the slave of your teeth;

Yet he himself knows that his moans will be of no use to him; he knows better than anyone that he is only straining and irritating himself and others in vain; he knows that even the public before whom he is exerting himself, and his whole family, are already listening to him with loathing, do not believe even a pennyworth of it, and understand in themselves that he could moan differently, more simply, without roulades and flourishes, and that it's just from spite and craftiness that he is playing around like that. Now, it is in all these consciousnesses and disgraces that the sensuality consists.”So

For you I'm no longer a hero, as I once wished to appear, but simply a vile little fellow, a chenapan.[9]

But that is simply because I don't respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?

It's perfectly clear to me now that it was I who, owing to my boundless vanity, and hence also my exactingness towards myself, very often looked upon myself with furious dissatisfaction, reaching the point of loathing, and therefore mentally attributed my view to everyone else.

Of course, I hated them all in our office, from first to last, and despised them all, but at the same time I was also as if afraid of them.

A developed and decent man cannot be vain without a boundless exactingness towards himself and without despising himself at moments to the point of hatred.

I was also afraid to the point of illness of being ridiculous, and therefore slavishly worshiped routine in everything to do with externals;

Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave.

It's not worth paying any attention to them, because they mean precisely nothing.

no one else was like me, and I was like no one else.”I am one, and they are all,” thought I, and – I'd fall to thinking. Which shows what a young pup I still was.

and here I am laughing at my own intolerance and fastidiousness, reproaching myself with romanticism. One moment I don't even want to speak with anyone, and the next I go so far that I'm not only chatting away, but am even deciding to become close with them.

they are what they are, they won't change even for the sake of decency, and they'll go on singing their translunary songs till their dying day, so to speak, because they're fools.

The properties of our romantic are to understand everything, to see everything, and to see often incomparably more clearly than our very most positive minds do; not to be reconciled with anyone or anything, but at the same time not to spurn anything; to get around everything, to yield to everything, to be politic with everyone; never to lose sight of the useful, practical goal (some nice little government apartment, a little pension, a little decoration or two) – to keep an eye on this goal through all enthusiasms and little volumes of lyrical verses, and at the same time also to preserve “the beautiful and lofty” inviolate in himself till his dying day, and incidentally to preserve himself quite successfully as well, somehow in cotton wool, like some little piece of jewelry, if only, shall we say, for the benefit of that same “beautiful and lofty.”