"They won't let me… I can't be… good!" I barely articulated, then went to the sofa, fell face down, and sobbed for a quarter of an hour in real hysterics. She leaned towards me, embraced me, and remained as if frozen in that embrace.
But still, the hitch was that the hysterics did have to end. And so (I am writing the loathsome truth), lying prone on the sofa, my face buried hard in the wretched leather cushion, I began little by little, remotely, involuntarily, but irresistibly, to feel that it would be awkward now to raise my head and look straight into Liza's eyes. What was I ashamed of? I don't know, but I was ashamed. It also came into my agitated head that the roles were now finally reversed, that she was now the heroine, and I was the same crushed and humiliated creature as she had been before me that night - four days ago… And all this came to me during those minutes when I was still lying prone on the sofa!
My God! but can it be that I envied her then?
I don't know, to this day I cannot decide, and then, of course, I was even less able to understand it than now. For without power and tyranny over someone, I really cannot live… But… but reasoning explains nothing, and consequently there's no point in reasoning.
I mastered myself, however, and raised my head; indeed, I had to raise it sometime… And then - I am convinced of it even to this day - precisely because I was ashamed to look at her, another feeling suddenly kindled and flared up in my heart… the feeling of domination and possession. My eyes gleamed with passion, and I squeezed her hands hard. How I hated her and how drawn I was to her at that moment! One feeling intensified the other. This was almost like revenge!… At first, a look as if of perplexity, even as if of fear, came to her face, but only for a moment. She embraced me rapturously and ardently.
X
A quarter of an hour later I was running up and down my room in furious impatience, going to the screen every other minute and peeking at Liza through a crack. She was sitting on the floor, her head leaning against the bed, and was probably crying. But she wouldn't leave, and that was what irritated me. This time she knew everything. I had given her the final insult, but… no use talking about it. She guessed that my burst of passion was precisely revenge, a new humiliation for her, and that to my previous, almost pointless hatred there had now been added a personal, envious hatred of her… I do not insist, by the way, that she understood it all clearly; but on the other hand she fully understood that I was a loathsome man and, above all, incapable of loving her.
I know I shall be told that all this is inconceivable, that it is inconceivable to be as wicked, as stupid, as I was; perhaps it will also be added that it was inconceivable not to love her, or at least not to appreciate her love. But why inconceivable? First, I was no longer able to love, because, I repeat, for me to love meant to tyrannize and to preponderize morally All my life I've been incapable even of picturing any other love, and I've reached the point now of sometimes thinking that love consists precisely in the right, voluntarily granted by the beloved object, to be tyrannized over. In my underground dreams as well, I never pictured love to myself otherwise than as a struggle; for me it always started from hatred and ended with moral subjugation, and afterwards I couldn't even picture to myself what to do with the subjugated object. And how is it inconceivable, if I had managed so to corrupt myself morally, had grown so unaccustomed to "living life," that I had dared just before to reproach and shame her for coming to me to hear "pathetic words"; and I myself never guessed that she had come to me not at all to hear pathetic words, but to love me, because for a woman it is in love that all resurrection, all salvation from ruin of whatever sort, and all regeneration consists, nor can it reveal itself in anything else but this. However, I did not hate her all that much as I was running about my room and peeking behind the screen through a crack. I simply felt it unbearably burdensome that she was there. I wanted her to disappear. I longed for "peace," I longed to be left alone in the underground. "Living life" so crushed me, unaccustomed to it as I was, that it even became difficult for me to breathe.
But several more minutes passed and she still did not get up, as if she were oblivious. I was shameless enough to tap softly on the screen to remind her… She suddenly roused herself, started up from her place, and rushed to look for her scarf, her hat, her fur coat, as if to escape from me somewhere… Two minutes later she came slowly from behind the screen and gave me a heavy look. I grinned spitefully, though forcedly, for decency's sake, and turned away from her look.
"Good-bye," she said, making for the door.
I suddenly ran to her, seized her hand, opened it, put… and closed it again. Then I turned at once and quickly sprang away to the opposite corner, so as at least not to see…
I was going to lie right now - to write that I did it accidentally, in distraction, at a loss, out of foolishness. But I don't want to lie, and so I'll say directly that I opened her hand and put… in it out of malice. The thought of doing it occurred to me while I was running up and down my room and she was sitting behind the screen. But this much I can say with certainty: although I did this cruelty on purpose, it came not from my heart, but from my stupid head. This cruelty was so affected, so much from the head, so purposely contrived, so bookish, that I myself could not bear it even for a minute - first I sprang away to the corner so as not to see, then in shame and despair I rushed after Liza. I opened the door to the landing and began to listen.
"Liza! Liza!" I called out to the stairway, but timidly, in a low voice…
There was no answer; I thought I could hear her footsteps down below.
"Liza!" I called more loudly.
No answer. But at that moment I heard from below the tight glass outer door to the street creak open heavily and slam tightly shut again. The bang echoed up the stairway.
She was gone. I went back to my room, pondering. I felt terribly heavy.
I stopped by the table next to the chair on which she had been sitting, and stared senselessly before me. About a minute passed; suddenly I gave a great start: there before me, on the table, I saw… in short, I saw a crumpled blue five-rouble bill, the very one I had pressed into her hand a moment before. It was that bill; it couldn't have been any other; there wasn't any other in the house. So she had managed to fling it from her hand onto the table just as I jumped away to the opposite corner.
Well, then? I could have expected her to do that. Could have expected? No. I was so great an egoist, I had in fact so little respect for people, that I could scarcely imagine she, too, would do that. I couldn't bear it. A second later I rushed like a madman to get dressed, threw on in a flurry whatever I could find, and raced headlong after her. She couldn't have gone more than two hundred steps before I ran out to the street.
It was still, and the snow was falling heavily, almost perpendicularly, laying a pillow over the sidewalk and the deserted roadway. Not a single passer-by, not a sound to be heard. The street-lamps flickered glumly and uselessly. I ran about two hundred steps to the intersection and stopped.
"Where did she go? And why am I running after her? Why? To fall down before her, to weep in repentance, to kiss her feet, to beg forgiveness! I wanted it; my whole breast was tearing apart, and never, never will I recall this moment with indifference. But - why?" came the thought. "Won't I hate her, maybe tomorrow even, precisely for kissing her feet today? Will I bring her happiness? Haven't I learned again today, for the hundredth time, just how much I'm worth? Won't I torment her to death!"
I stood in the snow, peering into the dull darkness, and thought about that.
"And won't it be better, yes, better," I fancied later, back at home, stifling the living pain in my heart with fantasies, "won't it be better if she now carries an insult away with her forever? An insult - but this is purification; it's the most stinging and painful consciousness! By tomorrow I'd have already dirtied her soul with myself and worn out her heart. But now the insult will never die in her, and however vile the dirt that awaits her - the insult will elevate and purify her… th
rough hatred… hm… maybe also forgiveness… Though, by the way, will all that make it any easier for her?" And in fact I'm now asking an idle question of my own: which is better - cheap happiness, or lofty suffering? Well, which is better?
Such were my reveries as I sat at home that evening, barely alive from the pain in my soul. Never before had I endured so much suffering and repentance; but could there have been even the slightest doubt, as I went running out of the apartment, that I would turn back halfway? Never have I met Liza again, or heard anything about her. I will also add that for a long time I remained pleased with the. phrase about the usefulness of insult and hatred, even though I myself almost became sick then from anguish.
Even now, after so many years, all this comes out somehow none too well in my recollection. Many things come out none too well now in my recollections, but… shouldn't I just end my Notes here? I think it was a mistake to begin writing them. At least I've felt ashamed all the while I've been writing this story: so it's no longer literature, but corrective punishment. Because, for example, to tell long stories of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of milieu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground - is not interesting, by God; a novel needs a hero, and here there are purposely collected all the features for an anti-hero, and, in the first place, all this will produce a most unpleasant impression, because we've all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all lame, each of us more or less. We've even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real "living life," and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we've reached a point where we regard real "living life" almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it's better from a book. And why do we sometimes fuss about, why these caprices, these demands of ours? We ourselves don't know why. It would be the worse for us if our capricious demands were fulfilled. Go on, try giving us more independence, for example, unbind the hands of any one of us, broaden our range of activity, relax the tutelage, and we… but I assure you: we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage. I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: "Speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying 'we all.'"
Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more "living" than you. Take a closer look! We don't even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or what it's called! Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we'll immediately get confused, lost - we won't know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. It's a burden for us even to be men - men with real, our own bodies and blood; we're ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We're stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We're acquiring a taste for it. Soon we'll contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write any more "from Underground"…
However, the "notes" of this paradoxalist do not end here. He could not help himself and went on. But it also seems to us that this may be a good place to stop.
NOTES
part one: underground i. Collegiate assessor was the eighth of the fourteen ranks in the Imperial Russian civil service, equivalent to the military rank of major. The narrator had attained this rank by the time he quit the service, a year before writing his "notes" (1864), not at the time of the episodes he describes in Part Two (1848-50).
2. The language here is biblical, reminiscent of many passages in the Psalms, the Book of Job, and the Gospels in which the righteous man is confronted by skeptical critics. Isaiah 19:11 refers specifically to the "wise counsellors" of Pharaoh; "waggers of heads" are mentioned in Matthew 27:39 and Mark 15:29.
3. This combination of terms goes back to such eighteenth-century treatises as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), by the Anglo-Irish writer and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-97), and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The Russian phrase, replacing "sublime" with the less rhetorical "lofty," became a critical commonplace in the 1840s, but acquired an ironic tone in the utilitarian and anti-aesthetic 1860s.
4. "The man of nature and truth" (French), Dostoevsky's mocking distortion of a sentence from the prefatory note of Confessions by the French philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-78): "Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly from nature and in all its truth, that exists and probably ever will exist."
5. Glancing references are made here to "Darwinism" and to the theory of "enlightened self-interest" put forward by the English utilitarians in the 1830s and -40s. Darwin avoided the question of human evolution from other animals in his Origin of Species (1859); not so T. H. Huxley (1825-95), whose book Man's Place in Nature (1863) openly stated the case. A Russian translation of this book was published early in 1864, just as Dostoevsky was writing Notes from Underground.
6. According to the General Address Book of Petersburg, there were eight dentists named Wagenheim practicing in the city at the time.
7. In fact, the phrase was characteristic of articles published in Time and Epoch, magazines edited by Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail in 1861-65.
8. A "no-account" or "rascal" (French), from the German Schnapphahn, a pilferer.
9. The Russian genre painter N. N. Ge (1831-94) exhibited a painting entitled The Last Supper at the Academy of Art in 1863. Dostoevsky detested the painting, and here takes advantage of the fact that the artist's name (pronounced almost like the English word "gay") sounds the same as the first letter - often used as a genteel euphemism - of the Russian word govno, "shit." Hence the odd structure of the sentence.
10. Dostoevsky's ideological opponent M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89) published an article with this title in the liberal monthly The Contemporary (1863, no. 7). Dostoevsky pokes fun at him by taking the title literally. Saltykov-Shchedrin had written an article praising Ge's Last Supper for the same journal (1863, no. 11).
11. The English historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62), in his History of Civilization in England (1807-61), formulated the idea that the development of civilization leads to the cessation of war between nations.
12. The wars of the "great" Napoleon (1769-1821) are well known. His nephew Napoleon III (1808-73; emperor 1852-70) started the Crimean War against Russia (1854-56), took Cochin China for France (1859-62), intervened in Mexico on the losing side of the emperor Maximilian, and finally declared war on Prussia (1870), which led to his capitulation and removal from power. At the time that Dostoevsky was writing Notes from Underground, the North American union was enduring the test of the Civil War, and Prussia was at war with Denmark over possession of the province of Schleswig-Holstein, which had been under Danish hegemony since 1773.
13. Attila (406?-53), "the Scourge of God," king of the Huns, led devastating military campaigns against the Eastern Roman Empire, Persia, and Gaul, before he was defeated near Chalons in 451 and driven back across the Danube. Stepan Timofeevich ("Stenka") Razin (?-1671), a Don Cossack, led a peasant uprising in Russia (1667-71), which made him a popular hero.
14. The metaphor of the piano key may go back to the French materialist philosopher and writer Denis Diderot (1713-84), who wrote in his Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot (1769): "We are instruments endowed with sense and memory. Our senses are piano keys upon which surrounding nature plays, and which often play upon themselves."
15. The "crystal palace" is an allusion to "The Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna" from the novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), by N. G. Che
rnyshevsky (1828-89), one of Dostoevsky's main ideological enemies and the target of much of the satire in Notes from Underground. Chernyshevsky's thought combined the humanitarian socialism of the 1840s with the utilitarianism of the 1860s. This chapter of Notes attacks the theory of "rational egoism" set forth in Chernyshevsky's The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (1860); the episodes of the "bumped officer" and the "rescued prostitute" in Part Two of Notes are to some extent reversed parodies of episodes from What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky's "crystal palace," a vision of the ideal living space for the future Utopian communist society, based on the "phalanstery" defined by the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837), drew its physical details from the cast-iron and glass pavilion designed by Sir Joseph Paxton for the London Exposition of 1851.
16. Dostoevsky first heard of the bird Kagan, a folkloric bringer of happiness, during his imprisonment in Omsk (1849-53).
17. The Colossus of Rhodes, a 100-foot-high statue of Helios, the sun god, made in 280 B.C., stood in the harbor of the Greek island of Rhodes; it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. A. E. Anaevsky (1788-1866), a hackwriter, was the object of much mockery in the press of the 1840S-60S.
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