Nietzsche deeply admired the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81). “Here you have a psychologist with whom I am in agreement”, he wrote to Peter Gast in 1880. He refers in another letter (7 March 1887) to Dostoyevsky’s novella, Notes from the Underground (1864), a confession of astounding and frightful insights. The unnamed anti-hero of this story plumbs the depths of misery and paralysis which comes from the illness of self-consciousness: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased …”
DOSTOYEVKY SHOWS UP WHEREVER I GO.
