Notes From Underground

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Natasha Randall

• Publisher: Canongate Canons
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857861283
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

'I am a sick person. I am a spiteful person. An unattractive person, too...'In the depths of a cellar in St. Petersburg, a retired civil servant spews forth a passionate and furious note on the ills of society. The underground man's manifesto reveals his erratic, self-contradictory and even sadistic nature. Yet Dostoyevsky's disturbing character causes an uncomfortable flicker of recognition, and we see in him our own human condition.

PART ONE

THE UNDERGROUND¹

I

I am a sick person . . . A spiteful one. An unattractive person, too. I think my liver is diseased. But I don’t give a damn about my disease and in fact I don’t even know what’s wrong with me. I do not seek treatment and have never sought treatment, though I respect medicine and doctors. Furthermore, I am superstitious to an extreme – well, only enough to respect medicine. (I am sufficiently educated that I shouldn’t be superstitious, but I am superstitious.) No, sir, I won’t seek treatment out of spite. And this, I suppose, you won’t deign to understand. Well, sir, I do understand it. Of course, in this case, I won’t be able to explain it to you, whom I season with my spite. I know perfectly well that I cannot ‘befoul’ the doctors with the fact that I’m not being treated by them; I know better than anyone that I am only harming myself with all this, and no one else. But nonetheless, if I do not seek treatment, it is out of spite. My little old liver is diseased – and may it be even more severely diseased!

I have been living like this for a while now – about twenty years. Now I’m forty. I used to be in the civil service, but now I’m not. I was a spiteful civil servant. I was rude and I found pleasure in it. I did not take bribes, you see, and consequently I had to reward myself with something. (A bad witticism, but I won’t cross it out. I wrote it thinking that it would come out sharp-witted and now, as I can see for myself, I was just showing off grossly – I won’t cross it out on purpose!) Whenever people came to the desk where I sat, to ask for information, I’d gnash my teeth at them and I felt an inexorable pleasure when it succeeded in distressing someone. It almost always succeeded. For the most part they were a shy people; they were applicants, you know what I mean. Among the dandies, though, there was one officer in particular that I couldn’t stand. He just wouldn’t show any respect, and he clanked his sword in a loathsome way. I had a feud with him for a year and a half over that sword. I was victorious in the end. He stopped his clanking. But that happened in my youth.

Gentlemen, do you know what constituted the main point of my spitefulness? Well, there’s the joke, there’s the utter filthiness of it all – at every moment, even my most bilious moment, I could acknowledge to myself in shame that I am not a spiteful person, I’m not even an embittered one, I am only scaring sparrows in vain, and amusing myself with it. I may foam at the mouth, but bring me some kind of dolly to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar, and I will likely settle down. My soul might soften, even, but no doubt afterwards I will probably gnash my teeth at you and then suffer from insomnia for several months out of shame. Such, indeed, is my habit.

I lied about myself just now, about being a spiteful civil servant. I lied with spite. I was just making mischief with the applicants and the officers, but in reality I could never be spiteful. At every moment I was conscious within myself of many, many elements most opposite to such spite. I felt that they were teeming within me, these contrary elements. I knew that they had been teeming within me my whole life and they had asked to be released but I wouldn’t let them, I just wouldn’t let them, I would not let them out on purpose. They tortured me to the point of shame; they led me to the point of convulsions – and I’ve had enough of them. I’ve really had enough! It must certainly seem to you, gentlemen, that I am now repenting of something before you, that I am asking that you forgive me for something. I am sure that it would seem so to you . . . However, I assure you, I don’t care if it does indeed seem that way.

It wasn’t just that I was unable to become spiteful, I couldn’t become anything else either: I am not spiteful nor kind, not a scoundrel nor honest, not a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my days in my corner, teasing myself with the malicious, unhelpful consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously make anything of himself, that only a fool can become something. Indeed, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century should be, and is morally obliged to be, for the most part, a characterless being; a man with character, a man of action is, for the most part, a limited being. This is my conviction of forty years. Now I am forty years old and yes, forty years is an entire lifetime; indeed it is deepest old age. It is unseemly to live beyond forty years – vulgar, immoral! Who lives beyond forty years – answer me in earnest, honestly? Well, I will tell you who does that: fools and rascals. I will say this to the face of all of my elders, to all those respectable elders, to all those silver-haired and sweet-smelling elders! I’ll say it to the face of the whole world! I have the right to speak like this, since I myself will live to sixty years. To seventy years, I will live! To eighty years, I will live! Hold on! Let me catch my breath . . .

You probably think, gentlemen, that I want to make you laugh? Well, you’re wrong about that, too. I am not as cheerful a man as it seems to you, or might seem to you; however, if you are irritated by all this chatter, (and I can already feel that you are irritated) then why not ask me, who am I? And to that I will answer: I am a collegiate assessor. I went into the civil service so I’d have something to eat (and only for this reason), and when last year one of my distant relatives left me six thousand roubles in his will, I immediately retired and settled into my own corner. I lived in this corner before but now I have settled into this corner. My room is rotten and awful, on the outskirts of the city. My maid is a village woman, old and lousy with stupidity, and moreover she always gives off a foul smell. They tell me that the Petersburg climate will be harmful for me and that with my paltry means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know all this, more than those experienced and wise counsel-givers, and those that shake their heads. But I am staying in Petersburg; I will not leave Petersburg! I will not leave because . . . ah! Well, it doesn’t matter at all, whether I leave or don’t leave.

Now, what can a proper man speak about with utmost pleasure?

The answer: himself.

So then, I will talk about myself.

II

I would like now to tell you, gentlemen, whether or not you wish to hear it, why I have never been able to become even an insect. I will tell you solemnly that I have often wanted to become an insect. But I have yet to earn even that honour. I swear to you, gentlemen, that being too conscious is a disease, a real and total disease. Ordinary human consciousness would easily satisfy man’s daily needs – that is, half or a quarter less than is apportioned to the developed man of the nineteenth century, who furthermore has the particular misfortune of living in St Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city of the entire earthly sphere. (Cities occur as both intentional and unintentional.) It would have been completely sufficient, for example, to have the kind of consciousness with which all the so-called spontaneous people and men of action live. I’d place a bet that you think I’m writing this to show off, to be witty at the expense of men of action, and it’s with bad taste that I show off, clanking my sword like that officer did. But, gentlemen, who can take pride in his diseases and then show off about them too?

But what am I on about – everyone does it; people take pride in their diseases, and I do perhaps more than anyone. Let’s not argue; my objections were absurd. But all the same, I am firmly convinced that it is not just that a great deal of consciousness is a disease but that any kind of consciousness is a disease. I’ll stand by that. But let’s put that aside for a minute. Tell me something: why is it, as though on purpose, that at the exact, yes, at the very exact moments when I might be most conscious of the intricacies of ‘all that is beautiful and elevated’¹ ( as they used to say in these parts), it seems that I am not conscious of them, and I do such ugly deeds, which . . . well, yes, in short, everyone does, but which, to make things worse, occur to me just when I am most conscious of the fact that I should absolutely not do them? The more I was conscious of goodness and of all that is ‘beautiful and elevated,’ the deeper I sank into my mire and the more able I was to get completely stuck in it. But the main feature of all this was that it didn’t seem to be accidental within me; it was as if it were meant to be so. It was as though this were my most normal condition and not at all a disease or corruption, so much so that finally the desire in me to struggle against this corruption passed. In the end, I nearly believed (or maybe I did believe in fact) that this, very likely, was indeed my normal condition. But to start with, at the beginning, how much torture did I endure in this struggle! I didn’t believe that this happened to others, and so I hid this about myself my whole life, like a secret. I was ashamed (maybe I am ashamed even now); I went so far as to feel a little kind of mysterious, abnormal, base delight in frequently returning to my own corner, on particularly nasty Petersburg nights, and becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that I had done another mischief that day, and that what’s done can’t be undone, and that inwardly, secretly you gnaw and gnaw at yourself with your teeth, you nag at and suck yourself until the point when the bitter taste turns finally into a kind of ignominious, accursed sweetness and finally . . . into absolute, serious pleasure! Yes, into pleasure, into pleasure! I will stand by that. I have mentioned this as I want to know everything for certain: do others experience such pleasure? I will explain to you: this pleasure was derived precisely from an over-bright consciousness of my humiliation; from the fact that you already feel you’ve reached the final wall; that this is bad but that it can’t be any other way; that there’s no other way out for you, that you’ll never make another person of yourself; that even if time and faith were sufficient for you to remake yourself into something else, then for sure, you wouldn’t want to be remade anyway; but if you did want to, you’d still do nothing because in actuality, there might be nothing to remake yourself into. But mainly and ultimately, this all happens according to the normal and basic laws of heightened consciousness and from the inertia flowing straight from these laws, and consequently, it’s not just that you won’t remake yourself, you simply won’t do anything at all. So one could conclude, for example, that the result of heightened consciousness is: yes, you’re a scoundrel, and it’s some kind of comfort to the scoundrel that he feels himself actually to be a scoundrel. But, enough. Ugh, I’ve talked a lot of nonsense, but what have I explained? How to explain this pleasure? Well, I’m explaining myself! I will take this to its conclusion! That is why I picked up my pen . . .

I, for example, am horribly proud. I’m as mistrustful and touchy as a hunchback or a dwarf, but it’s true, I’ve experienced such moments that if someone had slapped me, I might even have been glad of it. I’m serious: I would probably have been able to discover in it my own kind of pleasure, the pleasure of despair, of course, but even in despair there are the most burning pleasures, especially when you are already very strongly conscious of the inevitability of your situation. And when you are slapped, you are struck with the consciousness of the grease you’ve been rubbed with. The main thing is that no matter how you pitch it, it comes out that I am always the most to blame, and most insulting of all is that I’m to blame without blame, so to speak, according to the laws of nature. I am to blame as I am cleverer than those around me. (I always consider myself to be cleverer than those around me, and sometimes, would you believe, I have even been ashamed of it. At least, throughout my life I have always looked away and have never been able to look people right in the eye.)

But in the end I am to blame because, even if I had possessed magnanimity, then I would have more suffering from the consciousness of its total uselessness. Indeed, I could probably do nothing with my magnanimity: I couldn’t forgive, because the offender, possibly, hit me according to the laws of nature, and you can’t forgive the laws of nature; nor could I forget, because though they are the laws of nature, it’s insulting all the same. Finally, even if I’d wanted to be totally magnanimous and to the contrary had desired to take revenge on my insulter, then I wouldn’t be able to get revenge on anyone because it is certain that I wouldn’t have had the resolve to do anything even if I could have. And why wouldn’t I have had the resolve? About this I want to say a couple of words especially.

III

For those people who are able to take revenge on others and generally stand up for themselves – how does it come to pass, for example? It seizes them, let’s say, this feeling of vengeance, and then nothing else remains in their being apart from this feeling. Such a gentleman just barges straight towards his goal, like a maddened bull dipping its horns, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (Incidentally, in the face of a wall, such gentlemen, that is spontaneous people and men of action, sincerely give up. The wall is not an obstacle for them as it is for us thinking and therefore not active people; it isn’t a pretext to turn off the path, a pretext in which our brotherhood usually doesn’t believe but which we are always glad to follow. No, they give up in all sincerity. The wall, to them, has something of a calming effect, it is morally settling and conclusive, perhaps even mystical . . . but more later on the wall.)

So, I consider such a spontaneous man to be a real, normal man, just as tender Mother Nature wanted to see him when she graciously delivered him to this earth. I envy such a man to a bilious extreme. He is stupid, I’m not arguing with you on that, but maybe the normal man should be stupid – how do we know? Maybe this is a very beautiful fact, even. And I am furthermore convinced of the suspicion, so to speak, that if you take the antithesis of a normal man, that’s to say a man of heightened consciousness, who comes not from the bosom of nature, of course, but from a distilling jar (this is almost mysticism at this point, gentlemen, and I am suspicious of that, also), then this distilling-jar man sometimes gives up in the face of his antithesis, so that, with all his heightened consciousness, in good conscience, he considers himself to be a mouse, and not a man. He may well be a mouse of heightened consciousness, but he’s a mouse all the same, and here’s this man before him, and so, therefore . . . and so on. And, most importantly, he thinks himself a mouse; no one asks this of him, and this is an important point.

Let’s now look at this mouse in action. Suppose, for example, that it has also been insulted (and it is almost always insulted) and it also wants to get revenge. Perhaps even more spite will have accumulated in it than in l’homme de la nature et de la verité. The vile and base desire to repay the offender with the same malice may scratch even more nastily within it than in l’homme de la nature et de la verité, because l’homme de la nature et de la verité, according to his inborn stupidity, considers his revenge to be justice, plain and simple; but the mouse, as a result of his heightened consciousness, says there is no justice here. We come, eventually, to the matter itself, to the act of vengeance itself. The unfortunate mouse, apart from one initial mischief, has managed already to heap up around himself, in the guise of questions and doubts, a great deal of other mischiefs. This single question has brought up so many unresolved questions, that against its will some accursed muck has collected around it, a stinking filth, made up of its doubts, worries and finally, of spittle, pouring forth upon it from the spontaneous men of action, solemnly surrounding it as judges and dictators, laughing at it with the full force of their hearty throats. Of course, all that it can do then is wave it all away with its paw and, with a smile of assumed contempt, which it doesn’t itself believe, crawl shamefully into its mouse hole. There, in the vile and stinking underground, our insulted, downtrodden, ridiculed mouse is immediately buried in a cold, venomous and above all, everlasting spite. For forty years running it will remember its insult to the last, most shameful, detail and each time it will add even more shameful details of its own, spitefully teasing and irritating itself with its own fantasies. It will be ashamed itself of its fantasies, but nonetheless it will remember everything, twist everything, inventing fables about itself, under the pretext that they also might well have happened, and it won’t forgive anything. Perhaps it will start to get its revenge somehow, in fits and starts, in trifles, from behind the stove, incognito, not believing in either its right to get revenge nor in the success of its revenge, and knowing in advance that with all its attempts to get revenge, it will suffer itself a hundred times more than him on whom it seeks revenge, and that person, probably, won’t even feel an itch. On its deathbed it will again remember everything, with an interest that has amassed during all that time and . . . But it is exactly in this, the cold, foul half-despair, half-belief; in this conscious burying of oneself alive in the underground for forty years out of woe; in the strongly founded and yet somewhat doubtful hopelessness of its situation; in all the venom of unsatisfied desire that has entered inside; in this fever of vacillations, the decisions that took forever and then in one minute were taken with regret . . . in all this can be found the essence of that strange pleasure about which I was speaking. It is so subtle, so unyielding to consciousness sometimes, that even slightly limited people or simply people with strong nerves won’t understand a single feature of it.

‘Maybe some others won’t understand it either,’ you add, grinning, ‘like those who have never had a slap in the face.’ And you will be hinting at me that perhaps I have also experienced in my life a slap in the face and that’s why I speak like an expert. I’d wager that you think that. But calm down, gentlemen, I haven’t received a slap in the face, even though it would be all the same to me, no matter what you may think of it. Maybe I myself regret that I haven’t been slapped in the face too often in my life. But that’s enough, not one more word on this subject that is so extraordinarily interesting to you.

I will calmly continue describing people with strong nerves who don’t understand this particular refinement of pleasure. These gentlemen, in certain cases, for example, may bellow like bulls with the full force of their voices and even though, let’s say, this brings them great honour, in the face of the impossible, as I have already explained, they submit themselves at once. The impossible – meaning the stone wall? Which stone wall? Well, of course, the laws of nature, the conclusions of the natural sciences and mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for example, that you are descended from the monkey, then there’s no point in grimacing, just take it for what it is. As soon as they prove to you that in actuality, one drop of your own fat should be more valuable to you than a hundred thousand of your brethren, and this conclusion finally settles all the so-called virtues and duties and other ravings and prejudices, then take it as such; there’s nothing else to do because two times two is mathematics. Just you try and refute it. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ they’ll shout at you, ‘you musn’t protest: two twos are four! Nature isn’t asking your permission, her business is nothing to do with your desires and whether you like her laws or you don’t. You are obliged to accept her just as she is, and consequently, all her conclusions as well. A wall, therefore, is a wall . . . etc., etc.’

Good God, what are the laws of nature and arithmetic to me, when for some reason I don’t like these laws and the idea that two times two is four? Clearly, I won’t break through that wall with my forehead if indeed I don’t have the strength to break through it, but I won’t be reconciled with it only because I have a stone wall before me and I lack the strength.

It’s as though such a stone wall is in fact a reassurance and does in fact contain some signal to the world, simply because it is two-times-two-is-four. Oh, the absurdity of absurdities! But it is quite a different matter to understand everything, to be aware of everything, all impossibilities and the stone wall; or to be reconciled with none of these impossibilities and stone walls, if it disgusts you to be so reconciled; or to follow the path of the most inevitable, logical combinations to the most revolting conclusion on the eternal theme that says that you may find yourself to blame for something even in a stone wall, even though it is starkly evident that you’re not to blame at all, and consequently, powerlessly and silently, you gnash your teeth, sensually frozen into inertia, dreaming about the fact that it turns out that there’s no one to spite; that you won’t find an object for it, and maybe you will never find one, that th...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE: THE UNDERGROUND
• I
• PART TWO: A STORY ABOUT WET SNOW
• I
• NOTES