Notes from the Underground
Why? To fall down before her, to sob with remorse, to kiss her feet, to
entreat her forgiveness! I longed for that, my whole breast was being
rent to pieces, and never, never shall I recall that minute with
indifference. But—what for? I thought. Should I not begin to hate her,
perhaps, even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today?
Should I give her happiness? Had I not recognised that day, for the
hundredth time, what I was worth? Should I not torture her?
I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness and pondered
this.
“And will it not be better?” I mused fantastically, afterwards at home,
stifling the living pang of my heart with fantastic dreams. “Will it
not be better that she should keep the resentment of the insult for
ever? Resentment—why, it is purification; it is a most stinging and
painful consciousness! Tomorrow I should have defiled her soul and have
exhausted her heart, while now the feeling of insult will never die in
her heart, and however loathsome the filth awaiting her—the feeling of
insult will elevate and purify her ... by hatred ... h’m! ... perhaps,
too, by forgiveness.... Will all that make things easier for her
though? ...”
And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which
is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?
So I dreamed as I sat at home that evening, almost dead with the pain
in my soul. Never had I endured such suffering and remorse, yet could
there have been the faintest doubt when I ran out from my lodging that
I should turn back half-way? I never met Liza again and I have heard
nothing of her. I will add, too, that I remained for a long time
afterwards pleased with the phrase about the benefit from resentment
and hatred in spite of the fact that I almost fell ill from misery.
Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory.
I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes”
here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I
have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s
hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long
stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in
my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from
real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly
not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an
anti-hero are _expressly_ gathered together here, and what matters
most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced
from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are
so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real
life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost
to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are
all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and
fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We
don’t know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant
prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a
little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our
activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should
be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very
likely be angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping.
Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your
underground holes, and don’t dare to say all of us—excuse me,
gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that “all of us.” As for
what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an
extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you
have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in
deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in
me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don’t even know
what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us
alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We
shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and
what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at
being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of
it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of
impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past
have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and
better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be
born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don’t want to write more from
“Underground.”
[The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not
refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop
here.]