Notes From Underground Page #12

"Notes from Underground" is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1864. The work is presented as the ramblings of an unnamed narrator, often referred to as the Underground Man, who is a retired, bitter civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The Underground Man reflects on his life, society, and the nature of free will, revealing deep existential angst and a profound disdain for the rationalism of his time. The novella explores themes of isolation, morality, and the complexities of human psychology, ultimately challenging the reader to confront the contradictions of modern existence. Its innovative structure and intense philosophical inquiries have made it a cornerstone of existential literature.

• Novel

								

looking, and I would have been quite satisfied if I could have looked
intelligent. In fact, I would even have put up with looking base if, at
the same time, my face could have been thought strikingly intelligent.

Of course, I hated my fellow clerks one and all, and I despised them
all, yet at the same time I was, as it were, afraid of them. In fact, it
happened at times that I thought more highly of them than of myself. It
somehow happened quite suddenly that I alternated between despising them
and thinking them superior to myself. A cultivated and decent man cannot
be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and
without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments. But
whether I despised them or thought them superior I dropped my eyes
almost every time I met any one. I even made experiments whether I could
face so and so's looking at me, and I was always the first to drop my
eyes. This worried me to distraction. I had a sickly dread, too, of
being ridiculous, and so had a slavish passion for the conventional in
everything external. I loved to fall into the common rut, and had a
whole-hearted terror of any kind of eccentricity in myself. But how
could I live up to it? I was morbidly sensitive, as a man of our age
should be. They were all stupid, and as like one another as so many
sheep. Perhaps I was the only one in the office who fancied that I was a
coward and a slave, and I fancied it just because I was more highly
developed. But it was not only that I fancied it, it really was so. I
was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest
embarrassment. Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.
That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made
and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing
to some casual circumstances, but always, at all times, a decent man is
bound to be a coward and a slave. It is the law of nature for all decent
people all over the earth. If any one of them happens to be valiant
about something, he need not be comforted nor carried away by that; he
would show the white feather just the same before something else. That
is how it invariably and inevitably ends. Only donkeys and mules are
valiant, and they only till they are pushed up to the wall. It is not
worth while to pay attention to them for they really are of no
consequence.

Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no
one like me and I was unlike any one else. "I am alone and they are
every one," I thought--and pondered.

From that it is evident that I was still a youngster.

The very opposite sometimes happened. It was loathsome sometimes to go
to the office; things reached such a point that I often came home ill.
But all at once, à propos of nothing, there would come a phase of
scepticism and indifference (everything happened in phases to me), and I
would laugh myself at my intolerance and fastidiousness, I would
reproach myself with being romantic. At one time I was unwilling to
speak to any one, while at other times I would not only talk, but go to
the length of contemplating making friends with them. All my
fastidiousness would suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, vanish. Who
knows, perhaps I never had really had it, and it had simply been
affected, and got out of books. I have not decided that question even
now. Once I quite made friends with them, visited their homes, played
preference, drank vodka, talked of promotions.... But here let me make a
digression.

We Russians, speaking generally, have never had those foolish
transcendental "romantics"--German, and still more French--on whom
nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France
perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not
even have the decency to affect a change, but would still go on singing
their transcendental songs to the hour of their death, because they are
fools. We, in Russia, have no fools; that is well known. That is what
distinguishes us from foreign lands. Consequently these transcendental
natures are not found amongst us in their pure form. The idea that they
are is due to our "realistic" journalists and critics of that day,
always on the look out for Kostanzhoglos and Uncle Pyotr Ivanitchs and
foolishly accepting them as our ideal; they have slandered our
romantics, taking them for the same transcendental sort as in Germany or
France. On the contrary, the characteristics of our "romantics" are
absolutely and directly opposed to the transcendental European type, and
no European standard can be applied to them. (Allow me to make use of
this word "romantic"--an old-fashioned and much respected word which has
done good service and is familiar to all). The characteristics of our
romantic are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it
often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it;
to refuse to accept anyone or anything, but at the same time not to
despise anything; to give way, to yield, from policy; never to lose
sight of a useful practical object (such as rent-free quarters at the
government expense, pensions, decorations), to keep their eye on that
object through all the enthusiasms and volumes of lyrical poems, and at
the same time to preserve "the good and the beautiful" inviolate within
them to the hour of their death, and to preserve themselves also,
incidentally, like some precious jewel wrapped in cotton wool if only
for the benefit of "the good and the beautiful." Our "romantic" is a man
of great breadth and the greatest rogue of all our rogues, I assure
you.... I can assure you from experience, indeed. Of course, that is, if
he is intelligent. But what am I saying! The romantic is always
intelligent, and I only meant to observe that although we have had
foolish romantics they don't count, and they were only so because in the
flower of their youth they degenerated into Germans, and to preserve
their precious jewel more comfortably, settled somewhere out there--by
preference in Weimar or the Black Forest.

I, for instance, genuinely despised my official work and did not openly
abuse it simply because I was in it myself and got a salary for it.
Anyway, take note, I did not openly abuse it. Our romantic would rather
go out of his mind--a thing, however, which very rarely happens--than
take to open abuse, unless he had some other career in view; and he is
never kicked out. At most, they would take him to the lunatic asylum as
"the King of Spain" if he should go very mad. But it is only the thin,
fair people who go out of their minds in Russia. Innumerable "romantics"
attain later in life to considerable rank in the service. Their
many-sidedness is remarkable! And what a faculty they have for the most
contradictory sensations! I was comforted by this thought even in those
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