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    Notes From the Underground
    Notes From the Underground
    Notes From the Underground
    Ebook143 pages2 hours

    Notes From the Underground

    By Fyodor Dostoevsky

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    A predecessor to such monumental works as "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov", "Notes From Underground" represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing towards the more political side. In this work we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives withdraws from that society into the underground. A dark and politically charged novel, "Notes From Underground" shows Dostoyevsky at his best.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9781596250260
    Author

    Fyodor Dostoevsky

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He died in 1881 having written some of the most celebrated works in the history of literature, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov.

    Read more from Fyodor Dostoevsky

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    Reviews for Notes From the Underground

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Amazing how he can twist and turn a thought from nowhere and make it grow into a full blown psychological drama.
    • 4/5
      Short and enjoyable. I can't get enough. Feels like a slice from the mind of one of Dostoevsky's more expanded characters, in a good way. It's all been distilled into 130 pages and it really made me think. How is he so darn good at writing melodramatic and insane people? I probably relate a little too much to this guy.

      And in there, also a nugget of truth re: philosophy of science "Man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready intentionally to distort the truth, to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, only so as to justify his logic.".
    • 3/5
      Shooting from my hip, I'd guess that Notes From The Underground emerged via the tradition of epistolary novels and the recent triumph of Gogol's Diary of a Madman. There is little need here to measure the impact and influence of Dostoevsky's tract. Nearly all of noir fiction is indebted. The monologue as a novella continues to thrive, finding its zenith, perhaps, in the work of Thomas Bernhard.

      Notes is a work for the young. Its transgressions can't begin to shock anymore. Its creative instability has to be appreciated for its technical merit. This hardly works on old sods like me. Somehow in this tale of honor lost and self deception I kept thinking of the Arab Spring. Dangerous potentials are unearthed when you cleave away traditions and don't offer realized possibilities.
    • 5/5
      All of Dostoyevsky's novels are works of genius, but, as far as I am concerned, this is the best one of them all.
    • 4/5
      My first Dostoyevsky reading, and I really enjoyed it. Soon I'll begin reading his longer works, this was a good introduction.
    • 4/5
      Notes from the Underground. Fyodor Dostoevsky. 1993. I tried to like this book, but, alas, I didn’t. I know it is a classic and that people far smarter than I am think it is a great novel. It was just an ordeal to get through. If you want to read Dostoevsky, try Crime and Punishment first.
    • 5/5
      painful articulation of the internal side of a self marginalized person
    • 4/5
      For such a short work I was finding this hard going until I realised the problem was with my mindset and over reverent reading of Russian literature. When I realised it was a comedy and worked out something of the Russian sense of humour it all clicked - it's viciously funny enough to anticipate the satire boom of the mid 20th century. Still have problems with the sort of existentialist viewpoint presented here, but at least Dostoyevsky's wit makes it enjoyably palatable.
    • 5/5
      You can't help getting drawn into Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" as you follow the rantings of a spiteful, bitter person. Dostoyevsky has created a character whose every action leads to his own self-destruction, pain and alienation from others.
    • 5/5
      My favourite Dostoyevsky and have read several times.
    • 5/5
      Wow, talk about your unreliable narrators. The underground man presages later existential heroes (which probably by definition means antiheroes), but he's not just arguing a case like Meursault, or trying to drown out his own nobler impulses like Yossarian, or clacking his horrible mandibles together and going "LLLOOOOVVVVVEEEEEE SSSSAAAAAMMMMMMSSSSSSSAAAAAAAA" like Gregor Samsa (and, as I've read Nabokov used his lepidopterist skills to establish, never realizing that he had turned into a bug that had wings under its shell and could just buzz off into the sky and let his bug flag fly. But Nabokov also thought Dostoevsky was boring and derivative, so who cares what he thinks?). The underground man is doing all these things, and there's a bushel of straight nihilism in his Notes to boot, but mostly what he's doing is fucking us around. Not leading us down the garden path to cause us to come to the same conclusions about human worthlessness and venality that he has; leading us down the garden path to make us think that's what he's doing, when really he just wants to dick us around. "You despise me, vividly and at length?" he cries? "Well, I gave you that me that you despise. I told you about him. He is a straw man and I gave you the words you used to despise him, to boot, ass."

      He's Ambrose Bierce without the relish, and the only thing that can rescue a narrative from that much self-loathing is a healthy dose of clinical honesty. Which is a big problem for the first half of this book, the "essay". Because one true thing about the UM is that he needs us to know how smart he is (that's part of what ultimately salvages the book from the brink of failure); so he makes sure we know right from the start that he is capable of saying savagely perceptive things in a surgically precise way. But then he wastes that talent--hacking down 19th-century positivism, utopian socialism, enlightened self-interest, other ideas which I'm not going to suggest don't deserve hacking down, or which to portions of Dostoevsky's 1860s audience it might not even have been revelatory to see hacked down, but which to a book as many lightyears ahead of its time as this one is it's a waste of time to even bother with. It's like Gilles Deleuze (who ever would have thought, Deleuzie, when I gave your What is Philosophy two stars in a LibraryThing review in 2007 that you would come to be my go-to example of a forwardthinker for this review less than four years later?) spending time dismantling Descartes instead of nurturing rhizomes; or to take a real example instead of a hypothetical one, it's the was psychology as a profession is so fixated on the ghost of Freud and the shadow he casts over them that every textbook spends time attacking him and thus validating his continued relevance as a pole of debate via the good ol' Oedipus complex (kill your fathers!) instead of letting him be and going about their fMRIs.

      Phew! What I'm saying here is that hacking on the absurdity of the safe little herd beliefs of the herd is boring, and people have always believed stupid shit and who gives a shit, and if it's the beginning of, like, a sociological investigation into the negative effects of said beliefs, or a psychological sketch of how the personality that attacks them with so much rage and yet such palpable self-loathing also comes to be, then fine, but here it's not--or the first half's not. It's just venom, and every time the UM gives us a premise or principle or alludes to a fictional event that might serve for orientation, he then moves the goalposts on us, reminds us that he's fucking us around, and so what good is he then? We're willing to believe for the moment that life is hell, but then he refuses to help us derive meaning from that, even nihilistic meaning/lessness; we want Virgil in Hell and we get the Joker in Arkham.

      The intro to my edition of Notes from Underground states that each section makes the other magnificent. Certainly that's not true of the first. As discussed, I find it on its own to be practically worthless, although exquisitely done; but the melting-snowflake sadness that suffuses the second half, the "story", is nowhere present in the "essay". The "story" makes the essay make sense--the pointless seething spittard that we see in the first half is revealed as someone very lonely and sad, who finally wants to be loved and esteemed but is far too clever and aware of his defense mechanisms to ever be able to dismantle them. You see how Dostoevsky was on his way to religion of a very true and hardheaded sort--on his way to the conviction that the fundamental crisis of human life isn't human corruption or venality or selfishness, but human pain. A totally unlovable man is obsessed with the officer who once moved him dismissively out of the way. He plots his revenge in a way too pathetic to be disguised by all his cleverness (but of course he is still feeding us our material, and the fact that only by presenting his ugliest self can he get us to feel sorry enough for him to love him may well be his last trick on us and himself). It gives him a reason to live, this revenge, for a couple of weeks at least, and he prepares for it like his wedding day. Even as your lip curls in scorn you wince at how he hits the tender places--the piece of each of us that feels fundamentally unloveable and yet like we have to trick someone into loving us as is because we're the only us we've got. The beaver collar was the most devastating detail for me.

      And when he makes his big move it's meaningless, of course, but he pretends it isn't--diffidently, desultorily--as an excuse to keep going. To keep sneering after love. The party scene is excruciating (although it does bring up a sliver of doubt I have about this messy thesis as well, the way it reminds me of a thirteen-year-old nerd's birthday party. Are any adults like this? No, and the UM's got that covered, right at the end when he reminds us that he has presented us with the deliberate collection of all the traits necessary for an antihero. But still--you could argue that he is a psychological representation of all the ugly cravings and tantrums that grown-ups hide away, but I think what grown-ups do is actually much healthier for the most part--they learn to garner love by being loveable, to the degree they can--funny, reliable, affectionate, whatever it is. Anyone gonna argue that fifty-year-olds on average are more selfish than fifteen-year-olds? More spiteful, maybe, with heads fuller of bad memories, but I truly think that we overcome demons, as an aggregate species, faster than new ones are spawned. Moral arithmetic).

      And all the cruelty and pathos of the UM's encounter with Liza at the end, the way he toys with her and drives her away and blames literature for his problems and then himself and then us--it's heartbreaking but also so predictable, down to the big tease-reveal that it was five rubles he pressed into her hand, making her back into a prostitute (called it). The second half of the book is called "Apropos of the Wet Snow", and I'm maybe trying to cut a Petersburg knot by making "the need for love" my keyword for this text in toto (in which case consider this meandering review to represent also my prior attempts to untie it), but what else makes the icy malice and slushy yearning and grey despair so touching instead of repugnant? The first half of Notes without the second half would be pointlessly unpleasant, a slapup of laughable, spiteful, adolescent nonsense; the perfect, tragic-in-the-most-exact-sense second half would, okay, exert somewhat less fascination without the extensive preparation of the first. Fine, Dosty knew what he was doing.

    • 3/5
      Vrijmoedige monoloog van een eigenzinnig, arrogant en wispelturig man. Het eerste deel is absoluut een sleutel tot het hele oeuvre van Dostojevski, het tweede deel doet erg gogoliaans aan. Onderliggende boodschap: de verscheurde moderne mens als gevolg van het wetenschappelijk positivisme.Eerste lectuur toen ik 17 jaar was, onmiddellijk herkend als sleutelroman
    • 5/5
      Who would have imagined that the thoughts of such a loathsome and miserable person could make for such entertaining reading? In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic Notes from Underground, we meet Underground Man, a menial Russian bureaucrat living a squalid existence in St. Petersburg “that most abstract and pre-meditated city.” The novel is divided into two sections. The first part comprises Underground Man’s philosophical musings—sometimes thoughtful, sometimes wildly contradictory—arguing that people are neither enlightened nor rational, and only too willing to deny the simple fact that “twice two is four” merely for the perversity of doing so. The second part of the book then details three specific episodes from his past in which he was either offended by someone else’s actions or behaved very badly—almost hysterically foolish, in fact—to a variety of his acquaintances and colleagues.Some critics have labeled Notes from Underground as the first Modernist novel while others have called it the first Existentialist novel. Whatever the truth of those lofty claims, it is easy to see the influence that this book has had on the development of literature over the subsequent 150 years, including the work of Kafka, Camus, and Sartre right up through that of Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway, and Faulkner. In Underground Man, the author has created one of the most compelling and frustrating characters I have ever come across; he is at once intelligent and hopelessly naïve, arrogant and frightened, lucid and self-delusional, as well as someone who desperately craves love but is incredibly cruel to a decent young woman who might provide it. He is someone who, through his actions and words, has much to teach us about ourselves, although that is likely the last thing he would ever want to do. Nevertheless, Underground Man is not a person you would want to have as a friend or even be forced to sit next to at a dinner party.
    • 5/5
      With the opening sentences: "Dostoevsky introduces the unifying idea of his tale: the instability, the perpetual 'dialectic' of isolated consciousness". - Richard Pevear in the introduction.

      I've read two other translations. This one is excellent. It was like seeing an old friend with new clothes, ones that fit better and were complementary.
    • 4/5
      I think this may be the shortest work by a Russian novelist I have ever read. That being said, I don't know that this book is truly a novel so much as it is an extended short story told from the perspective of a Russian man who tends to rabble and who once drove away a woman who might have been able to love him. Overall, I liked the book, although the first part was certainly difficult to get through, the second (which actually relates a story instead of just philosophizing) more than made up for it.
    • 5/5
      This is a fantastic book that addresses the question of "what is the self?". The underground man can only represent us who find ourselves lost and unsure yet despised by our own ineptitude. For those who have not yet to begin exploring "what a self is" or "what and why makes the self?" I highly suggest you start here.
    • 3/5
      This guy is batcrap crazy. I don't think I'd ever want him as a friend (though I guarantee I would be his friend, because I seem to attract crazy), but he's certainly amusing to watch/listen to.
    • 2/5
      What a horrible person -- sad, sick, poisonous. If this guy is supposed to be a metaphor for modern man, what's the point of going on?
    • 3/5
      Torment and pain on the road to existentialism. As only a Russian could write it. One gets bogged down in the dismal slush of it all and hankers for some ray of hope in this eternal uphill struggle. Great literature, perhaps, but a slog nevertheless.
    • 3/5
      This rating is provisional - I'm going to need some time for this novel to stew before coming to a final decision. I read this as part of a challenge to read cult classics which seemed a good opportunity to read a famous Russian author whose work I have been avoiding since attempting Crime and Punishment as a teenager.

      If you, like myself, are coming to this book knowing little about it, a word of advice - don't let the first part make you quit! I disliked it and found it boringly pretentious; at this point I was sure I was going to hate the book and was tempted to stop. The second part I found much more interesting; although the neurotic narrator was just as pretentious, the overall style was more accessible.
    • 5/5
      In this book dostoevsky historicly draws the line between nihalism and existentialism.The 1st part is almost pure philosophical:the author/hero write his thoughts about the confused,and over-knowledged modern man, that results a negative modern human being.Kafka and Musil took that example and developed it,the existentialists tried to solve the problem aroused.The 2nd part is the prose story and it's magnificent.Dostoevsky is not the best user of words in fiction, but he is genius regardless - describing human nature,both psychologiclly and philosophiclly.
    • 4/5
      An entertaining at times critique of philosophy such as rationalism among others, overall not my cup of tea.
    • 1/5
      I have virtually no idea why this book is considered a classic. More of a "personal manifesto" than an actual story, this is a disjointed reasoning of why the narrator feels and acts so outlandishly. Though I can sympathize with some of his emotions on my very worst days, 'Notes' as a whole left me feeling exhausted and a little dull. The second part of the book does try to assume some semblance of a story, yet the other characters are hardly developed, the plot is weak, and the climax is wholly anticlimactic. The only saving grace is the scene with the prostitute, yet even that promise is not only not fulfilled, it is swept with disgust under the carpet.
    • 3/5
      I can see what it is that literary critics like about this book but I found that it required a bit more concentration than I was willing to give it.
    • 5/5
      Dostoevsky's novella is part narrative and part manifesto, all awash in anguish. The book is the indelible cornerstone of existential literature, being a violent confrontation with the human condition and the nature of life. There are a number of quotable passages here, and the writing is smooth and digestible in contrast to the narrator. He is not likable, though he is interesting in much the same way as a car crash or the aftermath of disaster, and it is probable that most readers can relate to his bitterness, though maybe not at such extreme levels.
    • 4/5
      This book is broken into two parts.The first part is the journal to the underground man - it completely blew me away... At times I would laugh at out loud at the madness of his logic, while other times I would be dumbfounded by his incredible line of thinking and view on the world/life.Very few books make me question the way I think/rationalize like this book succeeded in doing.The second part is a story of the underground man, showcasing his thoughts/actions from his journal in story form. I found this part to be a tad boring and drawn out, but interesting as it still held the same logic from the first part.Overall, its verbiage is tough to read depending on the translation you get, and you have to pay extremely close attention - I had to re-read things multiple times to 'get it.' But this is not a book that you just want to finish, you really do want to 'get it.' So take the time to read it slowly, and find a quiet coffee house with minimal distractions, cause it will be worth it.
    • 5/5
      I kind of dreaded reading this book, as if I needed to read it to get into Dostoevsky's work. But this book is still quite funny and a very interesting read, especially for its take on human nature and idealism.
    • 4/5
      The story of a man that goes through his life and no one seems to notice him. On the few occasions that they do he feels compelled to drive them away with his self loathing.. I think many people do live lives similar to the protagonist here that become reclusive and spiteful and don't realize that many of their problems that bring on themselves. As always with Dostoevsky the writing is beautiful as well as painful to read. An existential nowhere man living a life of terrible insignificance.
    • 5/5
      I've met the underground man before. After years of pastoring, I've seen traces of him in all sorts of people—even myself. I've witnessed the painfully thorough introspection that causes otherwise rational people's thoughts to cycle through an internal feedback loop. I've been privy to the inflated sense of pride that imagines absurd revenge scenarios in response to the slightest unintentional personal infraction. There's plenty of underground man in our world today.It's uncanny how a nineteenth century Russian man is reflected so clearly in our capitalistic western culture. Perhaps the rejection of any sort of utopian vision is the common thread. The idea that the world isn't getting better and better draws strange people together.This was my first foray into Dostoyevsky (I'm ashamed to say). He's created a compelling character that elicits empathy while simultaneously thoroughly frustrating the reader. This sort of tortured complexity will keep me coming back to Dostoyevsky for a long time.
    • 3/5
      Possibly the first existential novel (novella). The unnamed writer, 40 years old, tells us he is writing to no one but argues that man must choose (free will) and will choose not to live by logic and in fact will choose against logic. The second part, gives us the background of the writer and how he ended up underground. Then the very end, we learn that even this has been edited and we the reader do not know what is the truth. Rating 3.43.

    Book preview

    Notes From the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

    NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

    BY FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

    A Digireads.com Book

    Digireads.com Publishing

    Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-2689-7

    Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-59625-026-0

    This edition copyright © 2011

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    CONTENTS

    PART I. Underground

    PART II. A Propos of the Wet Snow

    PART I. Underground{1}

    I

    I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. 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. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot pay out the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!

    I have been going on like that for a long time—twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!) When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people—of course, they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.

    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. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and—sickened me, at last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that... However, I assure you I do not care if you are...

    It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!... Stay, let me take breath...

    You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am—then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand rubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled down in my corner. I used to live in this corner before, but now I have 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. I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know all that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and monitors... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away from Petersburg! I am not going away because... ech! Why, it is absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.

    But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?

    Answer: Of himself.

    Well, so I will talk about myself.

    II

    I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and unintentional towns.) It would have been quite enough, for instance, to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men of action live. I bet you think I am writing all this from affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and even swagger over them?

    Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone. We will not dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is sublime and beautiful, as they used to say at one time, it would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do such ugly things, such that... Well, in short, actions that all, perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was sublime and beautiful, the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last—into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one's own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into. And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he actually is a scoundrel. But enough... Ech, I have talked a lot of nonsense, but what have I explained? How is enjoyment in this to be explained? But I will explain it. I will get to the bottom of it! That is why I have taken up my pen...

    I, for instance, have a great deal of amour propre. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that a peculiar sort of enjoyment—the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position. And when one is slapped in the face—why then the consciousness of being rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The worst of it is, look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I was always the most to blame in everything. And what is most humiliating of all,

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