Underground (Part One)

The author of these notes and the notes themselves are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living. In this fragment, entitled "Underground," this person introduces himself and his views, and, as it were, tries to explain the causes owing to which he has made his appearance and was bound to make his appearance in our midst. In the second fragment there are added the actual notes of this person concerning certain events in his life. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

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 — enough, at any rate, to respect medicine. (I am 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.

I have been living like this 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. 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.

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. 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 was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite. Not only could I 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 that only a fool becomes anything.

I retired from the service as soon as a distant relative left me six thousand roubles. I live in a wretched, horrid room on 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. 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 ordinary human life it would be more than 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 misfortune to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe.

Tell me this: why does it happen that 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, I commit the most contemptible actions? The more conscious I was of goodness, the more deeply I sank into my mire. And I came at last to a 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, and gnawing at myself for it, until at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful, accursed sweetness, and at last into real, positive enjoyment. Yes, into enjoyment! The enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one's own degradation: from feeling 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 could never become a different man.

III

How do people who know how to revenge themselves, and to stand up for themselves in general, do it? When they are possessed by the feeling of revenge, there is nothing else for the time in their whole being. Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. Before a wall such straightforward people — men of action — genuinely give way. For them a wall is not an evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; for them the wall has something tranquillising, morally soothing, final — maybe even something mysterious.

I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He is stupid, I am not disputing that. But perhaps the normal man ought to be stupid. And the man of acute consciousness, set against him, regards himself as a mouse, not a man. An intensely conscious mouse, but a mouse all the same. When the mouse is insulted, it wants to revenge itself too; but around the one fundamental nastiness the unhappy mouse succeeds in creating so many other nastinesses, in the form of doubts and questions, that it is drowned in a fatal mire of its own making. There is nothing left for it but to retreat into its mouse-hole, and there, in its nasty, stinking underground, to plunge for forty years into cold, malignant, everlasting spite, remembering the insult in every detail, inventing new ones, and not forgiving itself for a single thing.

They will shout at you: "It is impossible to protest; it is twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission; you must accept her as she is. The wall, that is, is a wall." Merciful Heavens! But what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down; but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

IV

"Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh. "Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan. But these moans are not candid moans; they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The sufferer's moans express his consciousness of the humiliating uselessness of his pain, his consciousness that he has no enemy to punish, but that he has pain; that you, with all your dentists, are wholly in the power of your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months. And in these recognitions and disgraces lies a voluptuous pleasure. "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then. I am a scoundrel, and I want you to know it."

V–VI

Can a man of perception respect himself at all? I have never been able to do anything except from spite or from inertia. The direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia — that is, conscious sitting with the hands folded. Men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. They take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and so persuade themselves that they have found a firm foundation for their activity. But where am I to find the primary cause on which to build? Where are my foundations? Every primary cause at once draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity.

Oh, if only I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself then! I should have respected myself because at least I should have been capable of being lazy. A sluggard — why, it is a calling and a vocation, it is a career! I should have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but one who sympathised with everything sublime and beautiful, who drank to the health of everything beautiful and lofty, and who wept over every picture worthy of Gay.

VII

But these are all golden dreams. Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests; and that if he were enlightened, he would at once become good and noble, because he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can knowingly act against his own interests? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when man has acted only from his own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track?

Advantage! What is advantage? And how will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of man consists? What if it so happens that a man's advantage sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself? There is one most advantageous advantage, which you have left out of all your tables: one's own free, unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy. That is the most advantageous advantage, which is always left out, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.

And look at history: civilisation has made man, if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. The most refined shedders of blood have been almost always the most civilised gentlemen.

VIII–IX

"Ha! ha! ha! But you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you like," you will interpose. "Science has succeeded in so far analysing man that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will is nothing else than —" Well, if they discover a formula for all our desires and caprices, so that everything is calculated, then man will at once cease to feel desire. Who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ, a piano key?

All the same, even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means, he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse, by his curse alone he will attain his object — that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key! The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

Man loves to create roads, that is beyond dispute. But may it not be that he also loves destruction and chaos? May it not be that he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly convinced that only the normal and the positive — in other words, only what is conducive to welfare — is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering. Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering. Suffering — why, it is the sole origin of consciousness.

X

You believe in a crystal palace that can never be destroyed — a palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice: that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed, and that one cannot put one's tongue out at it even on the sly.

You see, if it were not a palace but a henhouse, I might creep into it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the henhouse a palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say that in such circumstances a henhouse is as good as a mansion. Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain. But what is to be done if I have taken it into my head that that is not the only object in life, and that if one must live, one had better live in a mansion? That is my choice, my desire. You will only eradicate it when you have changed my preference.

XI

The long and the short of it is, gentlemen, that it is better to do nothing! Better conscious inertia! And so hurrah for underground! Though I have said that I envy the normal man to the last drop of my bile, yet I should not care to be in his place such as he is now (though I shall not cease envying him). No, no; anyway the underground life is more advantageous. There, at any rate, one can — Oh, but even now I am lying! I am lying because I know myself that it is not underground that is better, but something different, quite different, for which I am thirsting, but which I cannot find! Damn underground!

"Then why have you written all this?" you will say to me. I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form — I shall never have readers. Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth.

Just now a memory oppresses me, which came back to me some days ago, and has remained hanging about me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. Perhaps if I write it down I shall be rid of it. Why not try?

Today, for instance, it is snowing — a yellow, dingy, wet snow. It fell yesterday, too, and a few days ago. I fancy it is the wet snow that has reminded me of that incident which I cannot shake off now. And so let it be a story apropos of the wet snow.