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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
An Omnibus of Guilt and Redemption – 4 Classic Moral Reckoning Tales is a profound exploration of the human spirit as it grapples with the dichotomies of morality and remorse. This anthology weaves together four timeless narratives that delve into the depths of guilt and the pursuit of redemption, set against the backdrop of diverse literary styles that transcend cultural boundaries. From trenchant realism to eloquent prose, these stories unravel the intricate tapestry of human conscience, offering readers a poignant glimpse into the complexities of ethical dilemmas and the relentless quest for atonement. Collectively, these works challenge readers to reflect on the moral imperatives that bind society, making it a cornerstone in classic literary discourse. The authors featured in this collection—Fyodor Dostoevsky, Émile Zola, and Oscar Wilde—represent a formidable confluence of nineteenth-century literary prowess. Their works resonate with the tumultuous socio-political landscapes of their times, capturing the zeitgeist that fueled the respective Realist and Aesthetic movements. Each contributor, hailing from distinct cultural and historical milieus, enriches the anthology's thematic exploration with narratives steeped in psychological depth and existential introspection. Their collective literary contributions provide an intricate analysis of guilt and redemption, illuminating universal truths that remain relevant in contemporary discourse. This anthology is indispensable for anyone seeking an intimate engagement with multi-faceted moral inquiries through the lens of literary giants. The volume offers a unique opportunity to explore a spectrum of philosophical perspectives within a single curated compendium, catering to scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike. By immersing in these narratives, readers will encounter a rich educational experience, gaining insights that transcend simple storytelling. This dialogue of diverse narratives is an invitation to traverse the profound landscapes of literary genius and moral exploration.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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An Omnibus of Guilt and Redemption – 4 Classic Moral Reckoning Tales
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
This collection brings together Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, Theresa Raquin, and The Picture of Dorian Gray to trace a single problem: how human beings reckon with guilt and imagine redemption. Though emerging from distinct sensibilities, each work tests the limits of conscience, self-justification, and moral awakening. The through-line is philosophical as much as narrative: freedom collides with necessity, pleasure strains against responsibility, and interior testimony confronts the gaze of others. Presented together, these works invite sustained reflection on moral crisis, not as doctrine but as lived experience, exposing competing vocabularies of sin, shame, punishment, and the possibility of renewal.
Notes from Underground offers a corrosive self-portrait of resentment and lucidity; Crime and Punishment stages an ethical drama under the pressure of rationalization and remorse; Theresa Raquin anatomizes desire and consequence with relentless clarity; The Picture of Dorian Gray proposes a parable of aesthetic self-fashioning and its cost. Taken together, these modes—confessional monologue, psychological inquiry, naturalist case study, and moral fable—compose a spectrum of narrative strategies for thinking about wrongdoing. The selection emphasizes variety of voice and form while retaining a common core: the restless dialogue between what one wills, what one does, and what one becomes afterward.
The curatorial aim is to illuminate how guilt is narratively constructed and spiritually contested across divergent temperaments. Rather than celebrating transgression or merely condemning it, the collection maps an arc from bravado and denial toward recognition and the prospect of repair. The juxtaposition highlights recurring motifs—doubling, fever, silence, and the burden of memory—while foregrounding tensions between intellectual pride and empathic surrender. Readers encounter a set of experiments in moral speech: the jeer, the plea, the diagnosis, the warning. What emerges is not a single lesson but a coherent field of questions about suffering, responsibility, and the possibility of change.
Unlike approaching each work in isolation, the quartet assembled here allows comparisons across idioms without privileging a single tradition. Read side by side, Dostoevsky’s investigations of conscience frame and challenge Zola’s naturalist exactitude and Wilde’s glittering paradoxes, while the latter two, in turn, sharpen the ethical stakes implicit in the former. The result is a deliberately composite lens: psychological depth meets social causality and aesthetic speculation, producing a conversation neither confined to national schools nor reducible to genre labels. This arrangement situates moral reckoning not as a fixed doctrine but as a dynamic interplay of voices, exposures, and tests.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Together these works meditate on the alibis of wrongdoing. One text builds a defiant philosophy that seeks to outwit morality; another probes the oscillation between calculation and contrition; a third treats impulse and environment as determining forces; a fourth imagines beauty sheltering desire from consequence. Each alibi erodes under pressure. Recurring images—stifling rooms, oppressive weather, restless nights, mirrors, stains—register guilt’s material aftermath. Equally recurrent is the public gaze: crowds, whispers, and the intuition of being watched. Across the set, action generates an echo chamber where self-justification fractures and the body bears witness to the soul’s unresolved account.
Contrasts in voice shape the dialogue. Notes from Underground addresses its reader with abrasive intimacy, making doubt itself a protagonist. Crime and Punishment layers interior turmoil with a procedural momentum, testing ethical hypotheses against mounting consequence. Theresa Raquin adopts observational poise, insisting that temperament and circumstance have causal weight. The Picture of Dorian Gray frames temptation in aphoristic glitter and Gothic shimmer, dramatizing charm as a trial. The tension among confession, detection, diagnosis, and parable produces a counterpoint in which tone becomes argument: irony challenges earnestness, detachment interrogates pity, and theatrical elegance confronts the gravity of remorse.
Motifs move across these pages with a family resemblance. The trope of doubling—alter egos, masks, or split selves—recurs as characters negotiate competing images of who they are. So do images of illness and fever, suggesting that guilt is both a thought and a temperature. Urban spaces constrain and accelerate choices: alleys, bridges, and cramped interiors compress time and perspective. Objects accrue ethical charge: a letter, a room, a portrait. Silence, too, speaks, punctuating speech with the dread of disclosure. Each work orchestrates these motifs differently, yet their convergence forms a shared lexicon of moral and psychological unease.
These texts also test the pathways toward repair. One foregrounds suffering as inner transformation; another explores responsibility as social answerability; a third suggests that consequence follows from temperament and situation; a fourth presents moral image-making as both refuge and indictment. The friction among these pathways prevents closure from hardening into rule. By placing ethical causality alongside aesthetic seduction and physiological constraint, the collection invites readers to consider whether redemption is a gift, a labor, a sentence, or an illusion. The interplay respects each work’s autonomy while letting their disagreements deepen the stakes of judgment and forgiveness.
While direct lines of influence are complex, resonances are clear. The abrasive candor of Notes from Underground anticipates later psychological candor, against which the lush moral theater of The Picture of Dorian Gray strikingly refracts conscience as spectacle. Crime and Punishment’s sustained attention to motive and aftermath provides a counterweight to Theresa Raquin’s sober emphasis on temperament and environment. Together they form a conversation across neighboring concerns: confession versus exposure, freedom versus compulsion, and elegance versus severity. These convergences and frictions allow each author’s preoccupations to be heard more distinctly, as if amplified by the counterpoints surrounding them.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These works remain vital because they tarry with enduring questions about agency, responsibility, and the formation of conscience under pressure. Modern discussions of culpability, from legal debates to therapeutic vocabularies, repeatedly circle themes these texts dramatize: rationalization, shame, confession, and the hunger for absolution. The quartet also endures aesthetically. The distinctive voices—acerbic, investigative, clinical, and ornate—continue to shape how narrative renders inner life and moral consequence. Beyond the page, these stories have traveled widely in performance and visual culture, inspiring adaptations, citations, and echoes that testify to their durable ability to challenge and reorient moral perception.
Critical reception has long recognized the psychological daring of Dostoevsky, the rigorous observation of Zola, and the paradoxical elegance of Wilde. Debates have ranged over whether these works indict or complicate their protagonists, whether suffering purifies or merely exposes, and how social forces intersect with personal choice. The conversation has moved freely between ethics and aesthetics, acknowledging narrative technique as part of the argument about responsibility. Over time, the titles gathered here have become touchstones for discussions of modern interiority, exemplifying how fiction can model moral thinking without collapsing into prescription, and how style can itself become ethical inquiry.
Situated together, these narratives model a composite ethics attentive to motive, consequence, and imagination. Their afterlives in classrooms, theaters, and public discourse attest to a persistent need for stories that neither excuse nor sensationalize wrongdoing. The collection’s power lies in its capacity to hold contradictions in view: the allure of autonomy and the ache of community; the thrill of transgression and the cost of repair. Revisited today, they sharpen questions about accountability, compassion, and the narratives societies tell to reconcile harm. The result is an enduring forum where guilt is examined and redemption remains an ever-demanding horizon.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Mid-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg—seat of autocracy and experiment—frames the moral turbulence of Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. The Emancipation of the serfs (1861) and the Great Reforms opened civic life while preserving hierarchical power. A swelling bureaucracy, debt-laden students, and precarious clerks inhabited cramped rooms and endless corridors, conditions that fostered resentment, self-scrutiny, and defiant postures against state and society. In this uneasy modernization, the promise of rational planning collided with spiritual and social dislocation. Dostoyevsky’s protagonists move through a city where police, courts, and charity societies expand, yet the individual feels more isolated, exposed, and morally unmoored.
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War had sharpened debates over national destiny, Westernization, and technocratic reform. Censorship remained forceful, but journals multiplied, nurturing ideological manifestos and counter-manifestos. Student circles argued over whether happiness could be engineered through reason and utility, or whether such schemes crushed the human soul. Surveillance intensified alongside public discussion, creating a paradox: voices multiplied, but so did files and dossiers. Notes from Underground answers this climate by dramatizing a consciousness reacting to reformist blueprints and bureaucratic rationality with sabotage and self-contradiction, while Crime and Punishment explores how poverty, pride, and policy intersect in a city that quantifies misery and guilt.
Judicial reform in 1864 introduced jury trials, defense advocacy, and clearer procedures, transforming the performance of guilt and confession. Newspapers reported proceedings in vivid detail, turning crimes into civic spectacles and bringing the language of psychology into the courtroom. Debates over capital punishment, prison labor, and moral rehabilitation pervaded philanthropic and municipal circles. Crime and Punishment positions its inquiry within these very arguments, probing whether conscience, law, or community can heal transgression. Notes from Underground meanwhile rejects any neat alignment between legal reform and moral progress. Both narratives test the new machinery of justice against the stubborn opacity of inner life.
Theresa Raquin unfolds under the French Second Empire, amid Haussmann’s boulevards, covered passages, and department stores that reconceived Parisian space and desire. Political stability was carefully staged, with censorship policing morality and the press. Beneath the façade, cramped shops and damp apartments housed small traders and clerks whose constrained ambitions fed the era’s fascination with medicalized explanations of temperament and vice. The novel situates a petty-bourgeois milieu under pressure from modern commerce and spectacle, dramatizing how intimate decisions are steered by architecture, routine, and social scrutiny. The Second Empire’s blend of display and discipline gives the book’s domestic setting its relentless, suffocating charge.
The Picture of Dorian Gray appears at the fin de siècle under high Victorian propriety and imperial self-confidence, yet amid sharpening anxieties about urban decadence, sexuality, and class masquerade. Obscenity prosecutions, tightened postal and publication laws, and vigilant periodical editors policed the boundary between art and public morality. London’s clubs, galleries, and newspapers served both as stages for aesthetic provocation and as tribunals of taste. Wilde’s novel tests how far beauty, privilege, and wit can insulate transgression within a culture obsessed with respectability. Its London, like St. Petersburg and Paris, is a moral theater where law, gossip, and commerce conspire to adjudicate character.
Across these settings, industrial capital, rail networks, and the telegraph shrank distances, while urban growth created new forms of anonymity and spectacle. The metropolis offered crowds, commodities, and chances to reinvent the self, but also produced policing innovations and moral panics about crime and vice. In France, military defeat and insurrection soon unsettled the Second Empire’s legacy; in Russia, populist agitation and repression escalated; in Britain, sensational trials fed a vigilant moral press. Each novel traces how modern power alternates between benevolent reform and punitive exposure, locating guilt at the meeting point of inner compulsion and the city’s dazzling, coercive surfaces.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
Notes from Underground intervenes against tidy programs promising to optimize human happiness through rational self-interest and social engineering. Such schemes circulated widely in reformist Russia, where calculation and utility were imagined as moral instruments. The underground voice overturns those premises, insisting that human beings sabotage formulas precisely to prove their freedom. This critique underwrites the anthology’s broader suspicion of moral arithmetic: each book asks whether a life can be accounted for by incentives and constraints, or whether the will insists on excess, spite, and grace. The result is a psychology of friction rather than equilibrium, drama rather than blueprint.
Crime and Punishment extends this inquiry through the city’s nerves and markets. The novel blends confessional tradition with a newly charged attention to street physiognomies, room interiors, and the rhythms of pawnshops and taverns. It anticipates modern criminology’s interest in motive while resisting reduction to type or statistic. Religious vocabulary and secular psychology jostle inside the same scenes, yielding a grammar of guilt that is social, ethical, and bodily at once. The confession here is neither simply judicial nor sacramental; it is a contested performance shaped by headlines, hunger, clerks’ ledgers, and the watchful eyes of neighbors.
Theresa Raquin exemplifies a naturalist wager: observe characters as if in a laboratory and render how environment and heredity trap or tilt decision. The shop, the passageway, and the sickroom become experimental apparatuses, recording the effects of routine, damp, diet, and monotony on impulse and remorse. The novel adopts clinical metaphors, inventories symptoms, and aligns domestic life with case history. Yet its tight focus refuses to let causes absolve responsibility. Rather than yielding a final verdict—nature or choice—it stages their entanglement. Its method, cool and relentless, also relies on melodramatic pressure, proving that observation and sensation, report and shudder, can coexist.
The Picture of Dorian Gray draws upon aestheticism and decadent stylings to treat life as an art project and art as an amoral sanctuary. It mobilizes Gothic devices—doubles, locked rooms, whispered bargains—to test whether beauty can quarantine consequence. The London interior becomes a gallery of objects, scents, and textures where desire circulates like currency. Yet the novel also speaks to consumer modernity: images can be acquired, curated, and concealed, while the self is edited through taste. By staging artworks as mirrors and masks, it probes how representation both reveals and disavows, turning ethics into an affair of surfaces that refuse to stay inert.
These works also register a competitive literary marketplace in which manifestoes, prefaces, and reviews fought over the purpose of fiction. Realist scruple, naturalist experiment, Gothic frisson, and aesthetic provocation contended for readers’ attention. Periodicals demanded episodes that sparked debate without triggering suppression, prompting calculated strategies of suggestion and ellipsis. Editors urged revisions; courts hovered. The anthology captures that contested field: between laboratory coolness and feverish confession, between moral pedagogy and sovereign art, between the seen crime and the felt sin. Rival schools are less enemies than sparring partners, each testing where representation’s obligations to truth, beauty, and society begin and end.
Scientific and technological novelties inflect the narrative logics. Gaslight extends the day, altering labor and temptation; photography promises durable likeness and new forms of exposure; identification sciences and modern policing cultivate a belief that secrets can be measured. The city’s circulatory systems—arcades, embankments, trams—restructure chance encounters and pursuits. Medical discourse furnishes taxonomies of temperament and pathology that fiction borrows, questions, and recasts as fate or folly. In this milieu, confession competes with diagnosis, conscience with symptom. The four novels metabolize these tools selectively, using technique to press an older question: can knowledge redeem, or does it merely refine the art of concealment?
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial receptions were charged. Notes from Underground baffled and provoked, a slap at reformist optimism. Crime and Punishment drew intense attention from jurists and moralists, its depictions of poverty, delirium, and confession feeding public debates about punishment. Theresa Raquin was attacked for morbidity yet defended as a study in causes and effects. The Picture of Dorian Gray stirred controversy over propriety and influence; its author faced scrutiny that blurred art and biography. Early stage versions and serialized extracts often softened ambiguity to appease censors, even as readers recognized the books’ unsettling capacity to make guilt feel both private and social.
Revolution, war, and regime change re-scripted interpretation. In Russia, 1905 and 1917 prompted readings of Crime and Punishment as either an indictment of solitary revolt or a defense of communal ethics, while Notes from Underground was treated as anatomy of a type spawned by uneven modernization. In France, republican consolidation reframed Theresa Raquin as a cautionary tale about neglected social duty and the costs of urban anonymity. In Britain, legal and cultural judgments around morality tightened and then fractured; The Picture of Dorian Gray became inseparable from the spectacle of its author’s trials, a case study in how the law polices aesthetics and desire.
Across the interwar and postwar decades, existential and psychological vocabularies reenergized all four texts. Readers sought in Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment dramas of freedom under pressure and authenticity under surveillance. Film and radio adaptations emphasized suspense and atmosphere, aligning these tales with noir sensibilities and urban dread. Theresa Raquin’s grim determinism appealed to directors exploring claustrophobic worlds, while The Picture of Dorian Gray stood as a parable of image culture and postwar disillusion. Meanwhile, penal reform movements revisited these narratives as arguments—sometimes cautionary, sometimes aspirational—about redemption within modern institutions.
Late twentieth-century criticism diversified approaches. Feminist scholars interrogated the gendered economies of domestic labor and desire in Theresa Raquin and reexamined the roles of caretaking, poverty, and violence in Crime and Punishment. Queer readings placed The Picture of Dorian Gray at the center of debates about secrecy, performance, and intimate citizenship, tracing how aesthetic surfaces encode risk and belonging. Studies of urban governance recast the Russian novels as inquiries into the carceral city. Psycho-social approaches reframed compulsions and remorse as more than sin or pathology, returning ambiguity to motives long tidied by moralism or diagnosis.
Contemporary reassessment situates these books within a world of ubiquitous images, algorithmic profiling, and revived true-crime fascination. The Picture of Dorian Gray speaks to curated identities and the dream of consequence-free self-fashioning, now filtered through screens. Crime and Punishment is reread alongside restorative justice and mental-health debates, while Notes from Underground resonates with online performances of alienation and defiance. Theresa Raquin’s attention to space and routine informs critiques of precarious labor and domestic coercion. New translations, stage works, and adaptations keep redefining tone and emphasis, sustaining arguments over whether these tales promise redemption or merely diagnose its longing.
An Omnibus of Guilt and Redemption – 4 Classic Moral Reckoning Tales
Conscience and Inner Reckoning
Transgression, Society, and Retribution
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from Underground
Part I
Underground
The author of the diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, when we consider the circumstances in the midst of which our society is formed. I have tried to expose to the view of the public more distinctly than is commonly done, one of the characters of the recent past. He is one of the representatives of a generation still living. In this fragment, entitled “Underground,” this person introduces himself and his views, and, as it were, tries to explain the causes owing to which he has made his appearance and was bound to make his appearance in our midst. In the second fragment there are added the actual notes of this person concerning certain events in his life. — AUTHOR’S NOTE.
Chapter I
I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well — let it get worse!
I have been going on like that for a long time — twenty years. Now I am forty. I used to be in the government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful official. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not take bribes, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not scratch it out. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not scratch it out on purpose!)
When petitioners used to come for information to the table at which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy. I almost did succeed. For the most part they were all timid people — of course, they were petitioners. But of the uppish ones there was one officer in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for eighteen months over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth, though. But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.
I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the petitioners and with the officer, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me till I was ashamed: they drove me to convulsions and — sickened me, at last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying, gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that ... However, I assure you I do not care if you are. ...
It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty! ... Stay, let me take breath ...
You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am — then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor. I was in the service that I might have something to eat (and solely for that reason), and when last year a distant relation left me six thousand roubles in his will I immediately retired from the service and settled down in my corner. I used to live in this corner before, but now I have settled down in it. My room is a wretched, horrid one in the outskirts of the town. My servant is an old country- woman, ill-natured from stupidity, and, moreover, there is always a nasty smell about her. I am told that the Petersburg climate is bad for me, and that with my small means it is very expensive to live in Petersburg. I know all that better than all these sage and experienced counsellors and monitors. ... But I am remaining in Petersburg; I am not going away from Petersburg! I am not going away because ... ech! Why, it is absolutely no matter whether I am going away or not going away.
But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?
Answer: Of himself.
Well, so I will talk about myself.
Chapter II
I want now to tell you, gentlemen, whether you care to hear it or not, why I could not even become an insect. I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness. For man’s everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe. (There are intentional and unintentional towns.) It would have been quite enough, for instance, to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men of action live. I bet you think I am writing all this from affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and even swagger over them?
Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on their diseases, and I do, may be, more than anyone. We will not dispute it; my contention was absurd. But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease. I stick to that. Let us leave that, too, for a minute. Tell me this: why does it happen that at the very, yes, at the very moments when I am most capable of feeling every refinement of all that is “sublime and beautiful,” as they used to say at one time, it would, as though of design, happen to me not only to feel but to do such ugly things, such that ... Well, in short, actions that all, perhaps, commit; but which, as though purposely, occurred to me at the very time when I was most conscious that they ought not to be committed. The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was “sublime and beautiful,” the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether. But the chief point was that all this was, as it were, not accidental in me, but as though it were bound to be so. It was as though it were my most normal condition, and not in the least disease or depravity, so that at last all desire in me to struggle against this depravity passed. It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last — into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.
And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any consolation to the scoundrel once he has come to realise that he actually is a scoundrel. But enough. ... Ech, I have talked a lot of nonsense, but what have I explained? How is enjoyment in this to be explained? But I will explain it. I will get to the bottom of it! That is why I have taken up my pen. ...
I, for instance, have a great deal of AMOUR PROPRE. I am as suspicious and prone to take offence as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it. I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that a peculiar sort of enjoyment — the enjoyment, of course, of despair; but in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position. And when one is slapped in the face — why then the consciousness of being rubbed into a pulp would positively overwhelm one. The worst of it is, look at it which way one will, it still turns out that I was always the most to blame in everything. And what is most humiliating of all, to blame for no fault of my own but, so to say, through the laws of nature. In the first place, to blame because I am cleverer than any of the people surrounding me. (I have always considered myself cleverer than any of the people surrounding me, and sometimes, would you believe it, have been positively ashamed of it. At any rate, I have all my life, as it were, turned my eyes away and never could look people straight in the face.) To blame, finally, because even if I had had magnanimity, I should only have had more suffering from the sense of its uselessness. I should certainly have never been able to do anything from being magnanimous — neither to forgive, for my assailant would perhaps have slapped me from the laws of nature, and one cannot forgive the laws of nature; nor to forget, for even if it were owing to the laws of nature, it is insulting all the same. Finally, even if I had wanted to be anything but magnanimous, had desired on the contrary to revenge myself on my assailant, I could not have revenged myself on any one for anything because I should certainly never have made up my mind to do anything, even if I had been able to. Why should I not have made up my mind? About that in particular I want to say a few words.
Chapter III
With people who know how to revenge themselves and to stand up for themselves in general, how is it done? Why, when they are possessed, let us suppose, by the feeling of revenge, then for the time there is nothing else but that feeling left in their whole being. Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him. (By the way: facing the wall, such gentlemen — that is, the “direct” persons and men of action — are genuinely nonplussed. For them a wall is not an evasion, as for us people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not an excuse for turning aside, an excuse for which we are always very glad, though we scarcely believe in it ourselves, as a rule. No, they are nonplussed in all sincerity. The wall has for them something tranquillising, morally soothing, final — maybe even something mysterious ... but of the wall later.)
Well, such a direct person I regard as the real normal man, as his tender mother nature wished to see him when she graciously brought him into being on the earth. I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He is stupid. I am not disputing that, but perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact. And I am the more persuaded of that suspicion, if one can call it so, by the fact that if you take, for instance, the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retort (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man. It may be an acutely conscious mouse, yet it is a mouse, while the other is a man, and therefore, et caetera, et caetera. And the worst of it is, he himself, his very own self, looks on himself as a mouse; no one asks him to do so; and that is an important point. Now let us look at this mouse in action. Let us suppose, for instance, that it feels insulted, too (and it almost always does feel insulted), and wants to revenge itself, too. There may even be a greater accumulation of spite in it than in L’HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. The base and nasty desire to vent that spite on its assailant rankles perhaps even more nastily in it than in L’HOMME DE LA NATURE ET DE LA VERITE. For through his innate stupidity the latter looks upon his revenge as justice pure and simple; while in consequence of his acute consciousness the mouse does not believe in the justice of it. To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses 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 the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
As though such a stone wall really were a consolation, and really did contain some word of conciliation, simply because it is as true as twice two makes four. Oh, absurdity of absurdities! How much better it is to understand it all, to recognise it all, all the impossibilities and the stone wall; not to be reconciled to one of those impossibilities and stone walls if it disgusts you to be reconciled to it; by the way of the most inevitable, logical combinations to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card- sharper’s trick, that it is simply a mess, no knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache.
Chapter IV
“Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next,” you cry, with a laugh.
“Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment,” I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is “divorced from the soil and the national elements,” as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha’porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: “I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache. I am not a hero to you now, as I tried to seem before, but simply a nasty person, an impostor. Well, so be it, then! I am very glad that you see through me. It is nasty for you to hear my despicable moans: well, let it be nasty; here I will let you have a nastier flourish in a minute. ... ” You do not understand even now, gentlemen? No, it seems our development and our consciousness must go further to understand all the intricacies of this pleasure. You laugh? Delighted. My jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking self-confidence. But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
Chapter V
Come, can a man who attempts to find enjoyment in the very feeling of his own degradation possibly have a spark of respect for himself? I am not saying this now from any mawkish kind of remorse. And, indeed, I could never endure saying, “Forgive me, Papa, I won’t do it again,” not because I am incapable of saying that — on the contrary, perhaps just because I have been too capable of it, and in what a way, too. As though of design I used to get into trouble in cases when I was not to blame in any way. That was the nastiest part of it. At the same time I was genuinely touched and penitent, I used to shed tears and, of course, deceived myself, though I was not acting in the least and there was a sick feeling in my heart at the time. ... For that one could not blame even the laws of nature, though the laws of nature have continually all my life offended me more than anything. It is loathsome to remember it all, but it was loathsome even then. Of course, a minute or so later I would realise wrathfully that it was all a lie, a revolting lie, an affected lie, that is, all this penitence, this emotion, these vows of reform. You will ask why did I worry myself with such antics: answer, because it was very dull to sit with one’s hands folded, and so one began cutting capers. That is really it. Observe yourselves more carefully, gentlemen, then you will understand that it is so. I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way. How many times it has happened to me — well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose, for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last to the point of being really offended. All my life I have had an impulse to play such pranks, so that in the end I could not control it in myself. Another time, twice, in fact, I tried hard to be in love. I suffered, too, gentlemen, I assure you. In the depth of my heart there was no faith in my suffering, only a faint stir of mockery, but yet I did suffer, and in the real, orthodox way; I was jealous, beside myself ... and it was all from ENNUI, gentlemen, all from ENNUI; inertia overcame me. You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all “direct” persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise myself in reflection, and consequently with me every primary cause at once draws after itself another still more primary, and so on to infinity. That is just the essence of every sort of consciousness and reflection. It must be a case of the laws of nature again. What is the result of it in the end? Why, just the same. Remember I spoke just now of vengeance. (I am sure you did not take it in.) I said that a man revenges himself because he sees justice in it. Therefore he has found a primary cause, that is, justice. And so he is at rest on all sides, and consequently he carries out his revenge calmly and successfully, being persuaded that he is doing a just and honest thing. But I see no justice in it, I find no sort of virtue in it either, and consequently if I attempt to revenge myself, it is only out of spite. Spite, of course, might overcome everything, all my doubts, and so might serve quite successfully in place of a primary cause, precisely because it is not a cause. But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began with that just now, you know). In consequence again of those accursed laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again — that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause. And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself. Result: a soap-bubble and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
Chapter VI
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that I was positively defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me. “Sluggard”— why, it is a calling and vocation, it is a career. Do not jest, it is so. I should then be a member of the best club by right, and should find my occupation in continually respecting myself. I knew a gentleman who prided himself all his life on being a connoisseur of Lafitte. He considered this as his positive virtue, and never doubted himself. He died, not simply with a tranquil, but with a triumphant conscience, and he was quite right, too. Then I should have chosen a career for myself, I should have been a sluggard and a glutton, not a simple one, but, for instance, one with sympathies for everything sublime and beautiful. How do you like that? I have long had visions of it. That “sublime and beautiful” weighs heavily on my mind at forty But that is at forty; then — oh, then it would have been different! I should have found for myself a form of activity in keeping with it, to be precise, drinking to the health of everything “sublime and beautiful.” I should have snatched at every opportunity to drop a tear into my glass and then to drain it to all that is “sublime and beautiful.” I should then have turned everything into the sublime and the beautiful; in the nastiest, unquestionable trash, I should have sought out the sublime and the beautiful. I should have exuded tears like a wet sponge. An artist, for instance, paints a picture worthy of Gay. At once I drink to the health of the artist who painted the picture worthy of Gay, because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.” An author has written AS YOU WILL: at once I drink to the health of “anyone you will” because I love all that is “sublime and beautiful.”
I should claim respect for doing so. I should persecute anyone who would not show me respect. I should live at ease, I should die with dignity, why, it is charming, perfectly charming! And what a good round belly I should have grown, what a treble chin I should have established, what a ruby nose I should have coloured for myself, so that everyone would have said, looking at me: “Here is an asset! Here is something real and solid!” And, say what you like, it is very agreeable to hear such remarks about oneself in this negative age.
