Notes from Underground
Page 3
AUTHOR'S LIFE
LITERARY CONTEXT
1849
Netochka Nezvanova. Arrested and imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress. Mock execution. Sentenced to hard labor and Siberian exile.
Dickens: David Copperfield (to 1850).
1850
Arrives at Omsk penal colony.
Turgenev: A Month in the Country. Herzen: From the Other Shore.
1851
1852
Tolstoy: Childhood. Turgenev: A Sportsman's Notebook. Death of Gogol.
1853-6
1854
Posted to Semipalatinsk.
1855
1856
Turgenev: Rudin. Aksakov: A Family Chronicle. Nekrasov: Poems.
1857
Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva.
Flaubert: Madame Bovary. Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal.
1859
The Friend of the Family. Returns to St. Petersburg.
Turgenev: A Nest of Gentlefolk. Goncharov: Oblomov. Tolstoy: Family Happiness. Ostrovsky: The Storm. Darwin: The Origin of Species.
1860
Starts publication of House of the Dead.
Turgenev: On the Eve, First Love. George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss. Birth of Chekhov. Dickens: Great Expectations (to 1861).
1861
Time commences publication. The Insulted and Injured.
Herzen: My Past and Thoughts (to 1867).
1862.
Travels in Europe. Affair with Polina Suslova.
Turgenev: Fathers and Children. Hugo: Les Miserables. Chernyshevsky arrested.
1863
Further travel abroad. Time closed. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.
Tolstoy: The Cossacks. Chernyshevsky: What Is to Be Done?
1864
Launch of Epoch. Death of wife and brother. Notes from Underground.
Nekrasov: Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? (to 1876). Dickens: Our Mutual Friend (to 1865).
1865
Epoch closes. Severe financial difficulties.
Leskov: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.
1865-9
Tolstoy: War and Peace.
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
DATE
AUTHOR'S LIFE
LITERARY CONTEXT
1866
Crime and Punishment. The Gambler.
The Contemporary and The Russian Word suppressed.
1867
Marries Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Flees abroad to escape creditors.
Turgenev: Smoke.
1868
The Idiot. Birth and death of daughter, Sonya. Visits Switzerland and Italy.
Gorky born.
1869
Birth of daughter Liubov.
Goncharov: The Precipice. Flaubert: L'Education sentimentale.
1870
The Eternal Husband.
Death of Dickens and Herzen.
1871
Returns to St. Petersburg. Birth of son, Fyodor.
Ostrovsky: The Forest.
1871-2
Demons (The Devils/ The Possessed),
1872
Summer in Staraia Russa -becomes normal summer residence. Becomes editor of The Citizen.
Leskov: Cathedral Folk. Marx's Das Kapital published in Russia. George Eliot: Middlemarch.
i873
Starts Diary of a Writer.
.874
Resigns from The Citizen. Seeks treatment for emphysema in Bad Ems.
1875
The Adolescent (A Raw Youth). Birth of son, Alexey.
Saltykov-Shchedrin: The
Golovlyovs (to 1880).
1875-8
Tolstoy: Anna Karenina.
1876
1877
Turgenev: Virgin Soil.
1878
Death of Alexey. Visits Optina monastery with Vladimir Solovyov.
1879
1879-80
The Brothers Karamazov.
Tolstoy's religious crisis, during which he writes A Confession.
1880
Speech at Pushkin celebrations in Moscow.
Death of Flaubert and George Eliot.
1881
Dies of lung hemorrhage. Buried at Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St. Petersburg.
James: The Portrait of a Lady.
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
PART ONE
UNDERGROUND
I*
I am a sick man…I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. However, I don't know a fig about my sickness, and am not sure what it is that hurts me. I am not being treated and never have been, though I respect medicine and doctors. What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine. (I'm sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, sir, I refuse to be treated out of wickedness. Now, you will certainly not be so good as to understand this. Well, sir, but I understand it. I will not, of course, be able to explain to you precisely who is going to suffer in this case from my wickedness; I know perfectly well that I will in no way "muck things up" for the doctors by not taking their treatment; I know better than anyone that by all this I am harming only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't get treated, it is out of wickedness. My liver hurts; well, then let it hurt even worse!
I've been living like this for a long time - about twenty years. I'm forty now. I used to be in the civil service; I no longer am. I was a wicked official. I was rude, and took pleasure in it. After all, I didn't accept bribes, so I had to reward myself *Both the author of the notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional. Nevertheless, such persons as the writer of such notes not only may but even must exist in our society, taking into consideration the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed. I wished to bring before the face of the public, a bit more conspicuously than usual, one of the characters of a time recently passed. He is one representative of a generation that is still living out its life. In this fragment, entitled "Underground," this person introduces himself, his outlook, and seeks, as it were, to elucidate the reasons why he appeared and had to appear among us. In the subsequent fragment will come this person's actual "notes" about certain events in his life.
– Fyodor Dostoevsky at least with that. (A bad witticism, but I won't cross it out. I wrote it thinking it would come out very witty; but now, seeing for myself that I simply had a vile wish to swagger -I purposely won't cross it out!) When petitioners would come for information to the desk where I sat - I'd gnash my teeth at them, and felt an inexhaustible delight when I managed to upset someone. I almost always managed. They were timid people for the most part: petitioners, you know. But among the fops there was one officer I especially could not stand. He simply refused to submit and kept rattling his sabre disgustingly. I was at war with him over that sabre for a year and a half. In the end, I prevailed. He stopped rattling. However, that was still in my youth. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness? The whole thing precisely was, the greatest nastiness precisely lay in my being shamefully conscious every moment, even in moments of the greatest bile, that I was not only not a wicked but was not even an embittered man, that I was simply frightening sparrows in vain, and pleasing myself with it. I'm foaming at the mouth, but bring me some little doll, give me some tea with a bit of sugar, and maybe I'll calm down. I'll even wax tenderhearted, though afterwards I'll certainly gnash my teeth at myself and suffer from insomnia for a few months out of shame. Such is my custom.
And I lied about myself just now when I said I was a wicked official. I lied out of wickedness. I was simply playing around both with the petitioners and with the officer, but as a matter of fact I was never able to become wicked. I was conscious every moment of so very many elements in myself most opposite to that. I felt them simply swarming in me, those opposite elements. I knew they had been swarming in me all my life, asking to be let go out of me, but I would not let them, I would not, I purposely would not
let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame; they drove me to convulsions, and - finally I got sick of them, oh, how sick I got! But do you not perhaps think, gentlemen, that I am now repenting of something before you, that I am asking your forgiveness for something?… I'm sure you think so… However, I assure you that it is all the same to me even if you do…
Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure - primarily a limited being. This is my forty-year-old conviction. I am now forty years old, and, after all, forty years - is a whole lifetime; after all, it's the most extreme old age. To live beyond forty is indecent, banal, immoral! Who lives beyond forty - answer me sincerely, honestly? I'll tell you who does: fools and scoundrels do. I'll say it in the faces of all the elders, all these venerable elders, all these silver-haired and sweet-smelling elders! I'll say it in the whole world's face! I have the right to speak this way, because I myself will live to be sixty. I'll live to be seventy! I'll live to be eighty!… Wait! let me catch my breath…
You no doubt think, gentlemen, that I want to make you laugh? Here, too, you're mistaken. I am not at all such a jolly man as you think, or as you possibly think; if, however, irritated by all this chatter (and I already feel you are irritated), you decide to ask me: what precisely am I? - then I will answer you: I am one collegiate assessor. 1 I served so as to have something to eat (but solely for that), and when last year one of my distant relations left me six thousand roubles in his will, I resigned at once and settled into my corner. I lived in this corner before as well, but now I've settled into it. My room is wretched, bad, on the edge of the city. My servant is a village woman, old, wicked from stupidity, and always bad-smelling besides. I'm told that the Petersburg climate is beginning to do me harm, and that with my negligible means life in Petersburg is very expensive. I know all that, I know it better than all these experienced and most wise counsellors and waggers of heads. 2 But I am staying in
Petersburg; I will not leave Petersburg! I will not leave because… Eh! but it's all completely the same whether I leave or not.
But anyhow: what can a decent man speak about with the most pleasure?
Answer: about himself.
So then I, too, will speak about myself.
II
I would now like to tell you, gentlemen, whether you do or do not wish to hear it, why I never managed to become even an insect. I'll tell you solemnly that I wanted many times to become an insect. But I was not deemed worthy even of that. I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. For man's everyday use, ordinary human consciousness would be more than enough; that is, a half, a quarter of the portion that falls to the lot of a developed man in our unfortunate nineteenth century, who, on top of that, has the added misfortune of residing in Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe. (Cities can be intentional or unintentional.) As much consciousness, for example, as that by which all so-called ingenuous people and active figures live would be quite enough. I'll bet you think I'm writing all this out of swagger, to be witty at the expense of active figures, and swagger of a bad tone besides, rattling my sabre like my officer. But, gentlemen, who can take pride in his sicknesses, and swagger about them besides?
Though - what am I saying? - everyone does it; it's their sicknesses that everyone takes pride in, and I, perhaps, more than anyone. Let us not argue; my objection was absurd. But all the same I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness. I stand upon it. But let us also leave that for a moment. Tell me this: why was it that, as if by design, in those same, yes, in those very same moments when I was most capable of being conscious of all the refinements of "everything beautiful and lofty," 3 as we once used to say, it happened that instead of being conscious I did such unseemly deeds, such deeds as… well, in short, as everyone does, perhaps, but which with me occurred, as if by design, precisely when I was most conscious that I ought not to be doing them at all? The more conscious I was of the good and of all this "beautiful and lofty," the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it. But the main feature was that this was all in me not as if by chance, but as if it had to be so. As if it were my most normal condition and in no way a sickness or a blight, so that finally I lost any wish to struggle against this blight. I ended up almost believing (and maybe indeed believing) that this perhaps was my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, how much torment I endured in this struggle! I did not believe that such things happened to others, and therefore kept it to myself all my life as a secret. I was ashamed (maybe I am ashamed even now); it reached the point with me where I would feel some secret, abnormal, mean little pleasure in returning to my corner on some most nasty Petersburg night and being highly conscious of having once again done a nasty thing that day, and again that what had been done could in no way be undone, and I would gnaw, gnaw at myself with my teeth, inwardly, secretly, tear and suck at myself until the bitterness finally turned into some shameful, accursed sweetness, and finally - into a decided, serious pleasure! Yes, a pleasure, a pleasure! I stand upon it. The reason I've begun to speak is that I keep wanting to find out for certain: do other people have such pleasures? I'll explain to you: the pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one's own humiliation; in feeling that one had reached the ultimate wall; that, bad as it is, it cannot be otherwise; that there is no way out for you, that you will never change into a different person; that even if you had enough time and faith left to change yourself into something different, you probably would not wish to change; and even if you did wish it, you would still not do anything, because in fact there is perhaps nothing to change into. And chiefly, and finally, all this occurs according to the normal and basic laws of heightened consciousness and the inertia that follows directly from these laws, and consequently there is not only nothing you can do to change yourself, but there is simply nothing to do at all. So it turns out, for example, as a result of heightened consciousness: right, you're a scoundrel - as if it were a consolation for the scoundrel himself to feel that he is indeed a scoundrel. But enough… Eh, I've poured all that out, and what have I explained?… How explain this pleasure? But I will explain myself! I will carry through to the end! That is why I took a pen in my hands…
I have, for example, a terrible amour propre. I am as insecure and touchy as a hunchback or a dwarf, yet there have indeed been moments when if I had happened to be slapped, I might even have been glad of it. I say it seriously: surely I'd have managed to discover some sort of pleasure in that as well - the pleasure of despair, of course, but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And here, with this slap - you'll simply be crushed by the consciousness of what sort of slime you've been reduced to. But chiefly, however you shuffle, it still comes out that I always come out as the first to blame for everything and, what's most offensive, blamelessly to blame, according to the laws of nature, so to speak. I'm to blame, first, because I'm more intelligent than everyone around me. (I've always considered myself more intelligent than everyone around me, and, would you believe, have even felt slightly ashamed of it. At least I've somehow averted my eyes all my life, and never could look people straight in the face.) I'm to blame, finally, because even if there were any magnanimity in me, I would be the one most tormented by the consciousness of its utter futility. For I would surely be able to do nothing with my magnanimity: neither
to forgive, because my offender might have hit me according to the laws of nature, and the laws of nature cannot be forgiven; nor to forget, because even though it's the laws of nature, it's still offensive. Finally, even if I should want to be altogether unmagnanimous, if, on the contrary,