The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: Short Story

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In old days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous. Not seeming, but being. I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps, from the hour I was born.

I went to school, studied at the university, and, do you know, the more I learned, the more thoroughly I understood that I was ridiculous.

This pride grew in me with the years; and if it had happened that I allowed myself to confess to any one that I was ridiculous, I believe that I should have blown out my brains the same evening.

Perhaps it was owing to the terrible misery that was growing in my soul through something which was of more consequence than anything else about me: that something was the conviction that had come upon me that nothing in the world mattered.

whether the world existed or whether there had never been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was nothing existing.

I had almost given up thinking by that time; nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems!

I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

Rain had been falling all day, and it had been a cold, gloomy, almost menacing rain, with, I remember, an unmistakable spite against mankind.

Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star, and began watching it intently. That was because that star gave me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night. I had firmly determined to do so two months before, and poor as I was, I bought a splendid revolver that very day, and loaded it.

two months had passed and it was still lying in my drawer; I was so utterly indifferent that I wanted to seize a moment when I would not be so indifferent—why, I don’t know. And so for two months every night that I came home I thought I would shoot myself. I kept waiting for the right moment.