Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky; transl. Constance Garnett, Dover Publications, New York, 1992

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…No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite…My liver is bad, well—let it get worse! 1

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. 2

…when last year a distant relation left me six thousand rubles in his will I immediately retired form the service and 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. 3

I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. 5

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. 7

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. 8

“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. 9

…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. 10

…to take offence simply on purpose, for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at nothing’ that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last to the point of being really offended. 11

They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls’ breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. 16

Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. 21

I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering—that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead…the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. 22

But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too. 23

And so hurrah for underground! Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him.) 25

You may, perhaps, have really suffered, but you have no respect for your own suffering. 26

“My face may be ugly,” I thought, “but let it be lofty, expressive, and, above all, extremely intelligent.” But I was positively and painfully certain that it was impossible for my countenance ever to expressive those qualities. 30

I had a sickly dread, too, of being ridiculous, and so had a slavish passion for the conventional in everything external. I loved to fall into the common rut, and had a whole-hearted terror of any kind of eccentricity in myself. But how could I live up to it? I was morbidly sensitive as a man of our age should be. They were all stupid, and as like one another as so many sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who fancied that I was a coward and a slave, and I fancied it just because I was more highly developed. 30

We, in Russia, have no fools; that is well known. That is what distinguishes us from foreign lands. 31

I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. 33

I went out of the tavern straight home, confused and troubled, and the next night I went out again with the same lewd intentions, still more furtively, abjectly and miserably than before, as it were, with tears in my eyes—but still I did go out again. 34

Dreams were particularly sweet and vivid after a spell of dissipation; they came with the remorse and with tears, with curses and transports. There were moments of such positive intoxication, of such happiness, that there was not the faintest trace of irony within me, on my honour. 39

I had a number of schoolfellows, indeed, in Petersburg, but I did not associate with them and had even given up nodding to them in the street. I believe I had transferred into the department I was in simply to avoid their company and to cut off all connection with my hateful childhood. Curses on that school and all those terrible years of penal servitude. 41

“Am I keeping you?” I asked, after two minutes of silence. / “Oh!” he said, starting, “that is—to be truthful—yes. I have to go and see someone…not far from here,” he added in an apologetic voice, somewhat abashed. / “My goodness, why didn’t you say so?” I cried, seizing my cap, with an astonishing free-and-easy air, which was the last thing I should have expected of myself. 45

Once, indeed, I did have a friend. But I was already a tyrant by heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him; I tried to instill into him a contempt for his surroundings; I required of him a disdainful and complete break with those surroundings. I frightened him with my passionate affection; I reduced him to tears, to hysterics. He was a simple and devoted soul. 47

In the next room two gloomy, angry-looking persons were eating their dinners in silence at two different tables. There was a great deal of noise, even shouting, in a room further away; one could hear the laughter of a crowd of people, and nasty little shrieks in French: there were ladies at the dinner. 49

Somewhere behind a screen a clock began wheezing, as though oppressed by something, as though someone were strangling it. After an unnaturally prolonged wheezing there followed a shrill, nasty, and as it were unexpectedly rapid, chime—as though someone were suddenly jumping forward. It struck two. I woke up, though I had indeed not been asleep but lying half-conscious. 60

“I saw them carrying a coffin out yesterday and they nearly dropped it,” I suddenly said aloud, not that I desired to open the conversation, but as it were by accident. / “A coffin?” / “Yes, in the Haymarket; they were bringing it up out of a cellar.”… Silence. / “A nasty day to be buried,” I began, simply to avoid being silent. / “Nasty, in what way?” / “The snow, the wet.” (I yawned.) /
“It makes no difference,” she said suddenly, after a brief silence. / “No, it’s horrid.” (I yawned again). “The gravediggers must have sworn at getting drenched by the snow. And there must have been water in the grave.” 62

“H’m…yes. Perhaps. Another thing, Liza, man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it. 66

…don’t rely upon your youth—all that flies by express train here, you know. You will be kicked out. And not simply kicked out; long before that she’ll begin nagging at you, scolding you, abusing you, as though you had not sacrificed your heath for her, had not thrown away your youth and your soul for your benefit, but as though you had ruined her, beggared her, robber her. 70

And you won’t dare to say a word, not half a word when they drive you away from here; you will go away as though you were to blame. You will change to another house, then to a third, then somewhere else, till you come down at last to the Haymarket. There you will be beaten at every turn; that is good manners there, the visitors don’t know how to be friendly without beating you. You don’t believe that it is so hateful there? 70

“And will it not be better?” I mused fantastically, afterwards at home, stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dream. “Will it not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for ever? Resentment—why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and painful consciousness! Tomorrow I should have defiled her soul and have exhausted her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her—the feeling of insult will elevate and purify her…by hatred…h’m!...perhaps, too, by forgiveness… Will all that make things easier for her thought?...” 90