#notes from underground
And I am glad, I am glad that, though only in imagination, she should think of herself as having once been happy.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment.
are you mentally stable or does your list of ‘comfort’ reads include at least one of dostoevsky’s works
Notes from Underground Style:
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s appearance, mainly his majestic beard, resembles both the title character of his novel, The Idiot, as well as Nietzsche’s prophet who exclaimed that God was dead. It comes before its time to a world that was neither ready nor justified in acknowledging the difficult truths it poses.
Also, his coat is worn a bit loosely, just like the moral tendencies of the Brothers Karamazov.
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“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 preeminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man, is preeminently 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!”
hot take: dostoevsky had a degradation kink
