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Notes from the Underground, by Feodor Dostoevsky

J >> Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska. >> Notes from the Underground, by Feodor Dostoevsky



NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY




PART I

UNDERGROUND*

*The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course,
imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the
writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in
our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of
which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view
of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the
characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives
of a generation still living. In this fragment, entitled
"Underground," this person introduces himself and his views, and,
as it were, tries to explain the causes owing to which he has
made his appearance and was bound to make his appearance in our
midst. In the second fragment there are added the actual notes
of this person concerning certain events in his life. --AUTHOR'S
NOTE.


I

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!

I have been going on like that for a long time--twenty years.
Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am
no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took
pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was
bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I
will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very
witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show
off in a despicable way--I will not scratch it out on purpose!)
When petitioners used to come for information to the table at
which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense
enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost
did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people--of
course, they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was
one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would
not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I
carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword.
At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That
happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentlemen, what
was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the
real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the
moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame
that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered
man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing
myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to
play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I
should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though
probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie
awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.

I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official.
I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the
petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could
become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of many,
very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them
positively swarming in me, these opposite elements. I knew that
they had been swarming in me all my life and craving some outlet
from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely
would not let them come out. They tormented me till I was
ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and--sickened me, at last,
how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen,
that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking
your forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that
... However, I assure you I do not care if you are....

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know
how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a
rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I
am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the
spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot
become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes
anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally
ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of
character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.
That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now,
and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is
extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners,
is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that,
sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and
worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all
these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend
seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a
right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To
seventy! To eighty!... Stay, let me take breath ...

You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You
are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful
person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated
by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think
fit to ask me who I am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate
assessor. I was in the service that I might have something to
eat (and solely for that reason), and when last year a distant
relation left me six thousand roubles in his will I immediately
retired from the service and settled down in my corner. I used
to live in this corner before, but now I have settled down in it.
My room is a wretched, horrid one in the outskirts of the town.
My servant is an old country-woman, ill-natured from stupidity,
and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her. I am
told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my
small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know
all that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors
and monitors.... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going
away from Petersburg! I am not going away because ... ech!
Why, it is absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not
going away.

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?

Answer: Of himself.

Well, so I will talk about myself.


II

I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or
not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly,
that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not
equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious
is an illness--a real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday
needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human
consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which
falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth
century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit
Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the
whole terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and unintentional
towns.) It would have been quite enough, for instance, to have
the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men
of action live. I bet you think I am writing all this from
affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and
what is more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a
sword like my officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself
on his diseases and even swagger over them?

Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride
themselves on their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone.
We will not dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am
firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort
of consciousness, in fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let
us leave that, too, for a minute. Tell me this: why does it
happen that at the very, yes, at the very moments when I am most
capable of feeling every refinement of all that is "sublime and
beautiful," as they used to say at one time, it would, as though
of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do such ugly
things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all, perhaps,
commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the
very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be
committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that
was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire
and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief
point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me,
but as though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were
my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or
depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against
this depravity passed. It ended by my almost believing (perhaps
actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition.
But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that
struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people,
and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was
ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of
feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in
returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night,
acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome
action again, that what was done could never be undone, and
secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and
consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort
of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last--into positive real
enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon
that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a
fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I will explain;
the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of
one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had
reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could
not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you
never could become a different man; that even if time and faith
were still left you to change into something different you would
most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then
you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was
nothing for you to change into. And the worst of it was, and the
root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal
fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the
inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that
consequently one was not only unable to change but could do
absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute
consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as
though that were any consolation to the scoundrel once he has
come to realise that he actually is a scoundrel. But enough....
Ech, I have talked a lot of nonsense, but what have I explained?
How is enjoyment in this to be explained? But I will explain it.
I will get to the bottom of it! That is why I have taken up my
pen....

I, for instance, have a great deal of amour propre. I am as
suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf.
But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I had
happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been
positively glad of it. I say, in earnest, that I should probably
have been able to discover even in that a peculiar sort of
enjoyment--the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but in despair
there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is
very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.
And when one is slapped in the face--why then the consciousness
of being rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The
worst of it is, look at it which way one will, it still turns out
that I was always the most to blame in everything. And what is
most humiliating of all, to blame for no fault of my own but, so
to say, through the laws of nature. In the first place, to blame
because I am cleverer than any of the people surrounding me. (I
have always considered myself cleverer than any of the people
surrounding me, and sometimes, would you believe it, have been
positively ashamed of it. At any rate, I have all my life, as it
were, turned my eyes away and never could look people straight in
the face.) To blame, finally, because even if I had had
magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense
of its uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to
do anything from being magnanimous--neither to forgive, for my
assailant would perhaps have slapped me from the laws of nature,
and one cannot forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for
even if it were owing to the laws of nature, it is insulting all
the same. Finally, even if I had wanted to be anything but
magnanimous, had desired on the contrary to revenge myself on my
assailant, I could not have revenged myself on any one for
anything because I should certainly never have made up my mind to
do anything, even if I had been able to. Why should I not have
made up my mind? About that in particular I want to say a few
words.


III

With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up
for themselves in general, how is it done? Why, when they are
possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for
the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their
whole being. Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his
object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing
but a wall will stop him. (By the way: facing the wall, such
gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and men of action--are
genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an evasion, as for
us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not an
excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very
glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No,
they are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them
something tranquillising, morally soothing, final, maybe even
something mysterious ... but of the wall later.) Well, such a
direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender
mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him
into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in
the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps
the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is
very beautiful, in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that
suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take,
for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man
of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the
lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism,
gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is
sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that
with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of
himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely conscious
mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and
therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he
himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one
asks him to do so; and that is an important point.

Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose, for
instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does
feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too. There may even
be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in l'homme de la
nature et de la verite. The base and nasty desire to vent that
spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it
than in l'homme de la nature et de la verite. For through his
innate stupidity the latter looks upon his revenge as justice
pure and simple; while in consequence of his acute consciousness
the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last
to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the
one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating
around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and
questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions
that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a
stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the
contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand
solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till
their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it
is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile
of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe,
creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty,
stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed
mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above
all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will
remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious
details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more
ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its
own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings,
but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every
detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself,
pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive
nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it
were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove,
incognito, without believing either in its own right to
vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from
all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more
than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not
even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over
again, with interest accumulated over all the years and ... But
it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in
that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld
for forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly
doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of
unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations,
of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute
later--that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have
spoken lies. It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that
persons who are a little limited, or even simply persons of
strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it.
"Possibly," you will add on your own account with a grin, "people
will not understand it either who have never received a slap in
the face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I,
too, perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my
life, and so I speak as one who knows. I bet that you are
thinking that. But set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not
received a slap in the face, though it is absolutely a matter of
indifference to me what you may think about it. Possibly, I even
regret, myself, that I have given so few slaps in the face during
my life. But enough ... not another word on that subject of such
extreme interest to you.

I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who
do not understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in
certain circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like
bulls, though this, let us suppose, does them the greatest
credit, yet, as I have said already, confronted with the
impossible they subside at once. The impossible means the stone
wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the
deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they
prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey,
then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they
prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be
dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures,
and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called
virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you
have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is
a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.

"Upon my word," they will shout at you, "it is no use protesting:
it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your
permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether
you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as
she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see,
is a wall ... and so on, and so on." Merciful Heavens! but what
do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some
reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes
four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my
head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it
down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it
is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really
did contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as
true as twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! How
much better it is to understand it all, to recognise it all, all
the impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to
one of those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you
to be reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable,
logical combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on
the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are
yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you
are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth
in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on
the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive
against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an
object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of
juggling, a card- sharper's trick, that it is simply a mess, no
knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these
uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and
the more you do not know, the worse the ache.


IV

"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next,"
you cry, with a laugh.

"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had
toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case,
of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they
are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the
malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer
finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in
them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I
will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the
aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your
consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit
disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same
while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have
no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness
that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete
slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will
leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching
another three months; and that finally if you are still
contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own
gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your
fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well,
these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown,
end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest
degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes
to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century
suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the
attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the
first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just
as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and
European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and
the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans
become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days
and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing
himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than
anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and
others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom
he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him
with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and
inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply,
without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing
himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all
these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a
voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you,
I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house
awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I
have toothache. I am not a hero to you now, as I tried to seem
before, but simply a nasty person, an impostor. Well, so be it,
then! I am very glad that you see through me. It is nasty for
you to hear my despicable moans: well, let it be nasty; here I
will let you have a nastier flourish in a minute...." You do not
understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems our development
and our consciousness must go further to understand all the
intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My jests,
gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking
self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect
myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

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