I should wish to take revenge on my offender, I wouldn't be able to take revenge on anyone in any way, because I surely wouldn't dare to do anything even if I could. Why wouldn't I dare? About that I would like to say a couple of words in particular.
III
What happens, for example, with people who know how to take revenge and generally how to stand up for themselves? Once they are overcome, say, by vengeful feeling, then for the time there is simply nothing left in their whole being but this feeling. Such a gentleman just lunges straight for his goal like an enraged bull, horns lowered, and maybe only a wall can stop him. (Incidentally: before a wall, these gentlemen - that is, ingenuous people and active figures - quite sincerely fold. For them a wall is not a deflection, as it is, for example, for us, people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not a pretext for turning back, a pretext which our sort usually doesn't believe in but is always very glad to have. No, they fold in all sincerity. For them a wall possesses something soothing, morally resolving and final, perhaps even something mystical… But of the wall later.) Well, sirs, it is just such an ingenuous man that I regard as the real, normal man, the way his tender mother - nature - herself wished to see him when she so kindly conceived him on earth. I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile. He is stupid, I won't argue with you about that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful. And I am the more convinced of this, so to speak, suspicion, seeing that if, for example, one takes the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of heightened consciousness, who came, of course, not from the bosom of nature but from a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect that, too), this retort man sometimes folds before his antithesis so far that he honestly regards himself, with all his heightened consciousness, as a mouse and not a man. A highly conscious mouse, perhaps, but a mouse all the same, whereas here we have a man, and consequently… and so on… And, above all, it is he, he himself, who regards himself as a mouse; no one asks him to; and that is an important point.
Let us now have a look at this mouse in action. Suppose, for example, that it, too, is offended (and it is almost always offended), and it, too, wishes to take revenge. For it may have stored up even more spite than l'homme de la nature et de la verite. 4 The nasty, base little desire to pay the offender back with the same evil may scratch still more nastily in it than in l'homme de la nature et de la verite, because l'homme de le nature et de la verite, with his innate stupidity, regards his revenge quite simply as justice; whereas the mouse, as a result of its heightened consciousness, denies it any justice. Things finally come down to the business itself, to the act of revenge itself. The wretched mouse, in addition to the one original nastiness, has already managed to fence itself about with so many other nastinesses in the form of questions and doubts; it has padded out the one question with so many unresolved questions that, willy-nilly, some fatal slops have accumulated around it, some stinking filth consisting of its dubieties, anxieties, and, finally, of the spit raining on it from the ingenuous figures who stand solemnly around it like judges and dictators, guffawing at it from all their healthy gullets. Of course, nothing remains for it but to wave the whole thing aside with its little paw and, with a smile of feigned contempt, in which it does not believe itself, slip back shamefacedly into its crack. There, in its loathsome, stinking underground, our offended, beaten-down, and derided mouse at once immerses itself in cold, venomous, and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years on end it will recall its offense to the last, most shameful details, each time adding even more shameful details of its own, spitefully taunting and chafing itself with its fantasies. It will be ashamed of its fantasies, but all the same it will recall everything, go over everything, heap all sorts of figments on itself, under the pretext that they, too, could have happened, and forgive nothing. It may even begin to take revenge, but somehow in snatches, with piddling things, from behind the stove, incognito, believing neither in its right to revenge itself nor in the success of its vengeance, and knowing beforehand that it will suffer a hundred times more from all its attempts at revenge than will the object of its vengeance, who will perhaps not even scratch at the bite. On its deathbed it will again recall everything, adding the interest accumulated over all that time, and… But it is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one's position, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires penetrating inward, in all this fever of hesitations, of decisions taken forever, and repentances coming again a moment later, that the very sap of that strange pleasure I was talking about consists. It is so subtle, sometimes so elusive of consciousness, that people who are even the slightest bit narrow-minded, or who simply have strong nerves, will not understand a single trace of it. "Perhaps," you will add, grinning, "those who have never been slapped will also not understand" - thereby politely hinting that I, too, may have experienced a slap in my life, and am therefore speaking as a connoisseur. I'll bet that's what you think. But calm yourselves, gentlemen, I have not received any slaps, though it's all quite the same to me whatever you may think about it. Perhaps I myself am sorry for having dealt out too few slaps in my life. But enough, not another word on this subject which you find so extremely interesting.
I calmly continue about people with strong nerves, who do not understand a certain refinement of pleasure. In the face of some mishaps, for example, these gentlemen may bellow at the top of their lungs like bulls, and let's suppose this brings them the greatest honor, but still, as I've already said, they instantly resign themselves before impossibility. Impossibility - meaning a stone wall? What stone wall? Well, of course, the laws of nature, the conclusions of natural science, mathematics. Once it's proved to you, for example, that you descended from an ape, there's no use making a wry face, just take it for what it is. Once it's proved to you that, essentially speaking, one little drop of your own fat should be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow men, and that in this result all so-called virtues and obligations and other ravings and prejudices will finally be resolved, go ahead and accept it, there's nothing to be done, because two times two is - mathematics. Try objecting to that. 5
"For pity's sake," they'll shout at you, "you can't rebel: it's two times two is four! Nature doesn't ask your permission; it doesn't care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You're obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well. And so a wall is indeed a wall… etc., etc." My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking? To be sure, I won't break through such a wall with my forehead if I really have not got strength enough to do it, but neither will I be reconciled with it simply because I have a stone wall here and have not got strength enough.
As if such a stone wall were truly soothing and truly contained in itself at least some word on the world, solely by being two times two is four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! Quite another thing is to understand all, to be conscious of all, all impossibilities and stone walls; not to be reconciled with a single one of these impossibilities and stone walls if you are loath to be reconciled; to reach, by way of the most inevitable logical combinations, the most revolting conclusions on the eternal theme that you yourself seem somehow to blame even for the stone wall, though once again it is obviously clear that you are in no way to blame; and in consequence of that, silently and impo-tently gnashing your teeth, to come to a voluptuous standstill in inertia, fancying that, as it turns out, there isn't even anyone to be angry with; that there is no object to be found, and maybe never will be; that it's all a sleight-of-hand, a stacked deck, a cheat, that it's all just slops - nobody knows what and nobody knows who, but in spite of all the uncertainties and stacked decks, it still hurts, and the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!
&n
bsp; IV
Ha, ha, ha! Next you'll be finding pleasure in a toothache!" you will exclaim, laughing. "And why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache," I will answer. I had a toothache for a whole month; I know there is. Here, of course, one does not remain silently angry, one moans; but these are not straightforward moans, they are crafty moans, and the craftiness is the whole point. These moans express the pleasure of the one who is suffering; if they did not give him pleasure, he wouldn't bother moaning. It's a good example, gentlemen, and I shall develop it. In these moans there is expressed, first, all the futility of our pain, so humiliating for our consciousness, and all the lawfulness of nature, on which, to be sure, you spit, but from which you suffer all the same, while it does not. There is expressed the consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, and yet there is pain; the consciousness that, despite all possible Wagenheims, 6 you are wholly the slave of your teeth; that if someone wishes, your teeth will stop aching, and if not, they will go on aching for another three months; and that, finally, if you still do not agree, and protest even so, then the only consolation you have left is to whip yourself, or give your wall a painful beating with your fist, and decidedly nothing else. Well, sir, it is with these bloody offenses, with these mockeries from no one knows whom, that the pleasure finally begins, sometimes reaching the highest sensuality. I ask you, gentlemen: listen sometime to the moaning of an educated man of the nineteenth century who is suffering from a toothache - say, on the second or third day of his ailment, when he's beginning to moan not as he did on the first day, that is, not simply because he has a toothache, not like some coarse peasant, but like a man touched by development and European civilization, like a man who has "renounced the soil and popular roots," as they say nowadays. 7 His moans somehow turn bad, nastilv wicked, and continue for whole davs and nights. Yet he himself knows that his moans will be of no use to him; he knows better than anyone that he is only straining and irritating himself and others in vain; he knows that even the public before whom he is exerting himself, and his whole family, are already listening to him with loathing, do not believe even a pennyworth of it, and understand in themselves that he could moan differently, more simply, without roulades and flourishes, and that it's just from spite and craftiness that he is playing around like that. Now, it is in all these consciousnesses and disgraces that the sensuality consists. "So I'm bothering you, straining your hearts, not letting anyone in the house sleep. Don't sleep, then; you, too, should feel every moment that I have a toothache. For you I'm no longer a hero, as I once wished to appear, but simply a vile little fellow, a chenapan. 8 Well, so be it! I'm very glad you've gotten to the bottom of me. It's nasty for you listening to my mean little moans? Let it be nasty, then; here's an even nastier roulade for you…" You still don't understand, gentlemen? No, evidently one must attain a profundity of development and consciousness to understand all the curves of this sensuality! You're laughing? I'm very glad. To be sure, gentlemen, my jokes are in bad tone - uneven, confused, self-mistrustful. But that is simply because I don't respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?
V
No, how is it possible, how is it at all possible for a man to have the slightest respect for himself, if he has presumed to find pleasure even in the very sense of his own humiliation? I am not speaking this way now out of some cloying repentance. And, generally, I hated saying: "Forgive me, papa, I won't do it again" - not because I was incapable of saying it, but, on the contrary, perhaps precisely because I was all too capable of it. And how! As if on purpose, I used to bumble into it on occasions when I'd never thought or dreamed of doing anything wrong. That was the nastiest thing of all. And there I'd be again, waxing tenderhearted, repenting, shedding tears, and certainly hoodwinking myself, though I wasn't pretending in the least. It was my heart that somehow kept mucking things up… Here even the laws of nature could no longer be blamed, though still, throughout my life, the laws of nature have offended me constantly and more than anything else. It's nasty to look back on it all, and it was nasty then as well. For a minute or so later I'd be reasoning spitefully that it was all a lie, a lie, a loathsome, affected lie - that is, all these repentances, tenderheartednesses, all these vows of regeneration. And you ask why I twisted and tormented myself so? Answer: because it was just too boring to sit there with folded arms, that's why I'd get into such flourishes. Really, it was so. Observe yourselves more closely, gentlemen, and you'll understand that it is so. I made up adventures and devised a life for myself so as to live, at least somehow, a little. How many times it happened to me - well, say, for example, to feel offended, just so, for no reason, on purpose; and I'd know very well that I felt offended for no reason, that I was affecting it, but you can drive yourself so far that in the end, really, you do indeed get offended. Somehow all my life I've had an urge to pull such stunts, so that in the end I could no longer control myself. Another time, twice even, I decided to force myself to fall in love. And I did suffer, gentlemen, I assure you. Deep in one's soul it's hard to believe one is suffering, mockery is stirring there, but all the same I suffer, and in a real, honest-to-god way; I get jealous, lose my temper… And all that from boredom, gentlemen, all from boredom; crushed by inertia. For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia - that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms. I've already mentioned this above. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow-minded. How to explain it? Here's how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. So, once again it's the laws of nature. And what, finally, is the result? The same old thing. Remember: I was speaking just now about revenge. (You probably didn't grasp it.) I said: a man takes revenge because he finds justice in it. That means he has found a primary cause, a basis - namely, justice. So he is set at ease on all sides and, consequently, takes his revenge calmly and successfully, being convinced that he is doing an honest and just thing. Whereas I do not see any justice here, nor do I find any virtue in it, and, consequently, if I set about taking revenge, it will be solely out of wickedness. Wickedness could, of course, overcome everything, all my doubts, and thus could serve quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely in that it is not a cause. But what's to be done if there is also no wickedness in me? (I did begin with that just now.) The spite in me, again as a consequence of those cursed laws of consciousness, undergoes a chemical breakdown. Before your eyes the object vanishes, the reasons evaporate, the culprit is not to be found, the offense becomes not an offense but a fatum, something like a toothache, for which no one is to blame, and, consequently, what remains is again the same way out - that is, to give the wall a painful beating. And so you just wave it aside, because you haven't found the primary cause. But try getting blindly carried away by your feelings, without reasoning, without a primary cause, driving consciousness away at least for a time; start hating, or fall in love, only so as not to sit with folded arms. The day after tomorrow, at the very latest, you'll begin to despise yourself for having knowingly hoodwinked yourself. The result: a soap bubble, and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what'
s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble - that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.
VI
Oh, if I were doing nothing only out of laziness. Lord, how I'd respect myself then. Respect myself precisely because I'd at least be capable of having laziness in me; there would be in me at least one, as it were, positive quality, which I myself could be sure of. Question: who is he? Answer: a lazybones. Now, it would be most agreeable to hear that about myself. It means I'm positively defined; it means there's something to say about me. "Lazybones!" - now, that is a title and a mission, it's a career, sirs. No joking, it really is. By rights I'm then a member of the foremost club, and my sole occupation is ceaselessly respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself all his life on being a fine judge of Lafite. He regarded it as his positive merit and never doubted himself. He died not merely with a serene but with a triumphant conscience, and he was perfectly right. And so I would choose a career for myself: I would be a lazybones and a glutton, and not just an ordinary one, but, for example, one sympathizing with everything beautiful and lofty. How do you like that? I've long been fancying it. This "beautiful and lofty" has indeed weighed heavy on my head in my forty years; but that's my forty years, while then -oh, then it would be different! I would at once find an appropriate activity for myself - namely, drinking the health of all that is beautiful and lofty. I would seize every occasion, first to shed a tear into my glass, and then to drink it for all that is beautiful and lofty. I would then turn everything in the world into the beautiful and lofty; in the vilest, most unquestionable trash I would discover the beautiful and lofty. I'd become as tearful as a sodden sponge. An artist, for example, has painted a Ge picture. 9 I immediately drink the health of the artist who has painted the Ge picture, because I love all that is beautiful and lofty. An author has written "as anyone pleases"; 10 I immediately drink the health of "anyone who pleases," because I love all that is "beautiful and lofty." For this I'll demand to be respected, I'll persecute whoever does not show me respect. I live peacefully, I die solemnly - why, this is charming, utterly charming! And I'd grow myself such a belly then, I'd fashion such a triple chin for myself, I'd fix myself up such a ruby nose that whoever came along would say, looking at me: "Now, there's a plus! There's a real positive!" And, think what you will, it's most agreeable to hear such comments in our negative age, gentlemen.
Notes from Underground Page 4