She was gone. I went back to my room, pondering. I felt terribly heavy.
I stopped by the table next to the chair on which she had been sitting, and stared senselessly before me. About a minute passed; suddenly I gave a great start: there before me, on the table, I saw… in short, I saw a crumpled blue five-rouble bill, the very one I had pressed into her hand a moment before. It was that bill; it couldn't have been any other; there wasn't any other in the house. So she had managed to fling it from her hand onto the table just as I jumped away to the opposite corner.
Well, then? I could have expected her to do that. Could have expected? No. I was so great an egoist, I had in fact so little respect for people, that I could scarcely imagine she, too, would do that. I couldn't bear it. A second later I rushed like a madman to get dressed, threw on in a flurry whatever I could find, and raced headlong after her. She couldn't have gone more than two hundred steps before I ran out to the street.
It was still, and the snow was falling heavily, almost perpendicularly, laying a pillow over the sidewalk and the deserted roadway. Not a single passer-by, not a sound to be heard. The street-lamps flickered glumly and uselessly. I ran about two hundred steps to the intersection and stopped.
"Where did she go? And why am I running after her? Why? To fall down before her, to weep in repentance, to kiss her feet, to beg forgiveness! I wanted it; my whole breast was tearing apart, and never, never will I recall this moment with indifference. But - why?" came the thought. "Won't I hate her, maybe tomorrow even, precisely for kissing her feet today? Will I bring her happiness? Haven't I learned again today, for the hundredth time, just how much I'm worth? Won't I torment her to death!"
I stood in the snow, peering into the dull darkness, and thought about that.
"And won't it be better, yes, better," I fancied later, back at home, stifling the living pain in my heart with fantasies, "won't it be better if she now carries an insult away with her forever? An insult - but this is purification; it's the most stinging and painful consciousness! By tomorrow I'd have already dirtied her soul with myself and worn out her heart. But now the insult will never die in her, and however vile the dirt that awaits her - the insult will elevate and purify her… through hatred… hm… maybe also forgiveness… Though, by the way, will all that make it any easier for her?" And in fact I'm now asking an idle question of my own: which is better - cheap happiness, or lofty suffering? Well, which is better?
Such were my reveries as I sat at home that evening, barely alive from the pain in my soul. Never before had I endured so much suffering and repentance; but could there have been even the slightest doubt, as I went running out of the apartment, that I would turn back halfway? Never have I met Liza again, or heard anything about her. I will also add that for a long time I remained pleased with the. phrase about the usefulness of insult and hatred, even though I myself almost became sick then from anguish.
Even now, after so many years, all this comes out somehow none too well in my recollection. Many things come out none too well now in my recollections, but… shouldn't I just end my Notes here? I think it was a mistake to begin writing them. At least I've felt ashamed all the while I've been writing this story: so it's no longer literature, but corrective punishment. Because, for example, to tell long stories of how I defaulted on my life through moral corruption in a corner, through an insufficiency of milieu, through unaccustom to what is alive, and through vainglorious spite in the underground - is not interesting, by God; a novel needs a hero, and here there are purposely collected all the features for an anti-hero, and, in the first place, all this will produce a most unpleasant impression, because we've all grown unaccustomed to life, we're all lame, each of us more or less. We've even grown so unaccustomed that at times we feel a sort of loathing for real "living life," and therefore cannot bear to be reminded of it. For we've reached a point where we regard real "living life" almost as labor, almost as service, and we all agree in ourselves that it's better from a book. And why do we sometimes fuss about, why these caprices, these demands of ours? We ourselves don't know why. It would be the worse for us if our capricious demands were fulfilled. Go on, try giving us more independence, for example, unbind the hands of any one of us, broaden our range of activity, relax the tutelage, and we… but I assure you: we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage. I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: "Speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying 'we all.'"
Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more "living" than you. Take a closer look! We don't even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or what it's called! Leave us to ourselves, without a book, and we'll immediately get confused, lost - we won't know what to join, what to hold to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. It's a burden for us even to be men - men with real, our own bodies and blood; we're ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace, and keep trying to be some unprecedented omni-men. We're stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers, and we like this more and more. We're acquiring a taste for it. Soon we'll contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write any more "from Underground"…
However, the "notes" of this paradoxalist do not end here. He could not help himself and went on. But it also seems to us that this may be a good place to stop.
NOTES
part one: underground i. Collegiate assessor was the eighth of the fourteen ranks in the Imperial Russian civil service, equivalent to the military rank of major. The narrator had attained this rank by the time he quit the service, a year before writing his "notes" (1864), not at the time of the episodes he describes in Part Two (1848-50).
2. The language here is biblical, reminiscent of many passages in the Psalms, the Book of Job, and the Gospels in which the righteous man is confronted by skeptical critics. Isaiah 19:11 refers specifically to the "wise counsellors" of Pharaoh; "waggers of heads" are mentioned in Matthew 27:39 and Mark 15:29.
3. This combination of terms goes back to such eighteenth-century treatises as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), by the Anglo-Irish writer and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-97), and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). The Russian phrase, replacing "sublime" with the less rhetorical "lofty," became a critical commonplace in the 1840s, but acquired an ironic tone in the utilitarian and anti-aesthetic 1860s.
4. "The man of nature and truth" (French), Dostoevsky's mocking distortion of a sentence from the prefatory note of Confessions by the French philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (1712-78): "Here is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly from nature and in all its truth, that exists and probably ever will exist."
5. Glancing references are made here to "Darwinism" and to the theory of "enlightened self-interest" put forward by the English utilitarians in the 1830s and -40s. Darwin avoided the question of human evolution from other animals in his Origin of Species (1859); not so T. H. Huxley (1825-95), whose book Man's Place in Nature (1863) openly stated the case. A Russian translation of this book was published early in 1864, just as Dostoevsky was writing Notes from Underground.