Notes From Underground

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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.]

  **End of The Project Gutenberg Etext Notes from the Underground by

  Feodor Dostoevsky**