Perhaps, as WB Yeats wrote, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. In response, he would rather be thought of as malevolent, hurting people’s feelings at will, but he says the truth is that: “I couldn’t make myself anything … neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect”. He knows “the highest and the best”, but he accepts that he’s not one of them and that the standards they set are unattainable, even though he was the only civil servant he knew not to be taking bribes.

In chapter 1, The Underground, he directly addresses the readers, trying to win them over to his viewpoint. In particular, he wrote in reaction against Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What is to Be Done? (1863), which argued for the means of production to be reorganised according to co-operative ideals.ĭostoevsky’s central character, however, will not work readily with anyone. Dostoevsky rejected the idea that people act in accordance to reason or their best interests and asserted the need for them to be able to behave as they choose, without fitting into Enlightenment ideas of “progress”. Certainly, the author identified strongly with his protagonist, calling him the “real man of the Russian majority”. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart.As well as referring to Notes from Underground as the first existential novel, some critics, including Leonid Grossman, have ascribed Underground Man’s opinions to Dostoevsky. I don't need to wish her anything, for she'll be happy with you. If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now. When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced.

Underground fyodor dostoevsky