Notes From The Underground | Page 7

in the form of
doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there
inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts,
emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand
solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of
course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a
smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously
into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed
and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all,
everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest,
most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more
ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will
itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over
every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things
might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as
it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing
either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from
all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges
itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it
all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years and ...
But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying
oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet
partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned
inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of
again a minute later--that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken
lies. It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even
simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it. "Possibly," you
will add on your own account with a grin, "people will not understand it either who have
never received a slap in the face," and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too,

perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and so I speak as one
who knows. I bet that you are thinking that. But set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have
not received a slap in the face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what
you may think about it. Possibly, I even regret, myself, that I have given so few slaps in
the face during my life. But enough ... not another word on that subject of such extreme
interest to you.
I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not understand a
certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain circumstances these gentlemen
bellow their loudest like bulls, though this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit,
yet, as I have said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once. The
impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature,
the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance,
that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact.
When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you
than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final
solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you
have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just
try refuting it.
"Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two
makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes,
and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and
consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall ... and so on, and so on."
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for
some reason I dislike those laws and