Escape into Dreams and Forced Social Contact — Notes from Underground

After each period of dissipation comes remorse, and then he grows used to the remorse too. His escape: the sublime and the beautiful. He was a terrible dreamer, dreaming for three months at a stretch in his corner. In those dreams he bore no resemblance to the man who had borrowed money for a German beaver collar. He became a hero. The six-foot lieutenant could not have been admitted to his presence.

The dreams were sweetest and most vivid just after spells of dissipation, arriving with remorse and tears and transports. In these moments there was not the faintest trace of irony. He had faith, hope, love. He believed blindly that by some miracle a ready-made vista of beneficent activity would open before him and he would come out into the light "almost riding a white horse and crowned with laurel." The dream was always the foremost place, that or grovelling in the mud, nothing between. When in the mud he comforted himself that he was really a hero inside; the hero was a cloak that made the mud bearable. For an ordinary man it would be shameful to defile himself; a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and so he might defile himself.

Crucially, the attacks of the sublime and the beautiful came even during periods of dissipation, not to banish it, but to add a zest to it by contrast. They served as an "appetising sauce" of contradictions, sufferings, and agonising inward analysis. This gave his dissipation a certain piquancy, even a significance. He could not have resigned himself to simple, vulgar, direct debauchery without it. He needed a lofty way of getting out of it all.

And what loving-kindness he felt in those dreams, though it was never applied to anything human in reality. There was so much of it that he didn't afterwards feel the impulse to apply it; it would have been superfluous. Everything passed into the sphere of art, largely stolen from poets and novelists. He was triumphant over everyone, they were in dust and ashes, he forgave them all. He was a poet and grand gentleman. He came in for countless millions and immediately devoted them to humanity. He confessed his shameful deeds (which had, of course, something in the Manfred style). Everyone kissed him and wept. He went barefoot preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. Then the band played a march, an amnesty was declared, the Pope agreed to retire from Rome to Brazil, a ball was held for the whole of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the shores of Lake Como, Lake Como having been transferred to the neighbourhood of Rome for the purpose, and then a scene in the bushes, and so on, and so on.

He acknowledges the fantasy is vulgar and contemptible. Then catches himself justifying it. Notes the justification is more contemptible than the fantasy. Notes that meta-observation is even more contemptible. "But that's enough, or there will be no end to it; each step will be more contemptible than the last."

He could never endure more than three months of dreaming before an irresistible desire to plunge into society overcame him. "Plunging into society" meant visiting Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin, his only permanent acquaintance. He had to time his desire to embrace all mankind so that it fell on a Tuesday, Anton Antonitch's at-home day. Anton Antonitch lived on the fourth floor in four low-pitched rooms of a particularly frugal and sallow appearance, two daughters with snub noses who whispered and giggled, an aunt who poured tea, a leather couch, grey-headed colleagues talking of excise duty and salaries and promotions and His Excellency. The Underground Man sat for four hours at a stretch without saying a word, sometimes perspiring, overcome by a sort of paralysis. He found it pleasant and good for him. On returning home, his desire to embrace all mankind was deferred.

He also had Simonov, an old schoolfellow, quiet, equable, some independence of character. He suspected Simonov had an aversion for him but was not quite certain, and so kept going. One day, knowing it was Thursday and Anton Antonitch's door would be closed, he visits Simonov. Climbing the stairs he thinks the man dislikes him and it is a mistake to go, but such reflections had always impelled him, as though purposely, to put himself into a false position. He goes in. It has been a year since he last saw Simonov.