Notities bij boeken

Fyodor DOSTOEVSKY
Notes from underground [vertaald uit het Russisch door Pevear & Volokhonsky 1993]
Treebeard Everyman's Library, oorspr. 1864;
ISBN: 14 0004 1910

(39) Part One - Underground

"What's more, I am also superstitious in the extreme; well, at least enough to respect medicine."(39)

De ik-figuur - zo vertelt hij aan zijn denkbeeldige publiek - heeft altijd enorm zijn best gedaan om slecht te zijn, om niet te deugen. Hij liegt en bedriegt omdat hij dat leuk vindt, omdat hij er plezier aan beleeft.

"Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something."(42)

"I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. For man's everyday use, ordinary human consciousness would be more than enough ..."(46)

"The more conscious I was of the good and of all this “beautiful and lofty,” the deeper I kept sinking into my mire, and the more capable I was of getting completely stuck in it. But the main feature was that this was all in me not as if by chance, but as if it had to be so. As if it were my most normal condition and in no way a sickness or a blight, so that finally I lost any wish to struggle against this blight."(47)

"I say it seriously: surely I'd have managed to discover some sort of pleasure in that as well – the pleasure of despair, of course, but it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one's position."(50)

(113) Part Two - Apropos of the wet snow