Fyodor Dostoevsky, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The Underground Man was not a character I invented to illustrate a thesis. He erupted from something I had been carrying for years — the recognition that the Russian educated man of my century was being slowly strangled by a particular kind of self-consciousness, and that this strangling was not an accident but the logical consequence of the ideas he had swallowed whole from European rationalism.
What drove me to write it was this paradox, which I could not shake: the more acutely a man becomes conscious of goodness, of what we then called "the sublime and beautiful," the more readily he sinks into the mire.1 Not despite his consciousness — because of it. The man of action, the officer rattling his sword, does not suffer this. He acts.
He is stupid enough, or fortunate enough, to have only the ordinary share of consciousness that life requires.2 The underground man has too much, and that excess is a disease — I said so plainly, and I meant it plainly, not as a metaphor.3 But there was a second target, and this one was more urgent in 1864. Nikolai Chernyshevsky had just published his novel What Is to Be Done?, with its Crystal Palace of rational human happiness — the utopia in which all human desire would be reformed according to the conclusions of science and arithmetic, and man would finally be cured of his irrational wants.
I wanted to ask: by what right do you assume that man should be remade like that? How do you know that such a reformation is a gain to him?4 Twice-two-makes-four is a perfectly excellent thing — and yet it is also, in my humble opinion, a piece of impudence, a farcical fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.5 After twice-two there is nothing left to do, nothing left to learn.
You stop up your five senses and sink into contemplation.6 That is not liberation. That is a very elegant tomb. And man will not accept it. He loves suffering — passionately, undeniably, in ways that no table of rational benefits can account for.7 Suffering is the sole cause of consciousness, and consciousness — even when it is a disease, even when it produces that shameful, damnable sweetness of self-laceration I described — is infinitely superior to twice-two.8
The Underground Man is not a hero. He is not an ideal. He is what happens when a man is too honest to pretend that the Crystal Palace solves the problem of being human. I wrote the book because I had lived underground myself — not as a metaphor, but in a Siberian stockade, and then in the cramped Petersburg apartments of a man perpetually in debt, perpetually conscious, perpetually unable to stop the machinery of his own mind.
The man who confesses to that secret, abnormal, contemptible delight in his own dastardly actions — I knew him from the inside.9 I did not write him to condemn him. I wrote him to show what a century of wrong ideas does to a genuinely sensitive human soul.
The more conscious I became of goodness and all that was 'sublime and beautiful,' the more deeply did I sink into the mire and the more ready I was to sink into it altogether.Best Short Stories Anthology, pp. 109–110
It would have been quite sufficient for the business of everyday life to possess the ordinary human consciousness, that is to say, half or even a quarter of the share which falls to the lot of an intelligent man of our unhappy nineteenth century.Best Short Stories Anthology, p. 109
I assure you, gentlemen, that to be too acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.Best Short Stories Anthology, p. 109
how do you know that man not only could but should be remade like that? And what leads you to conclude that human desires must necessarily be reformed? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a gain to man?Best Short Stories Anthology, pp. 130–131
Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.Best Short Stories Anthology, pp. 132–133
After twice-two there is nothing left for you to do, or even to learn. All you could do then would be to stop up your five senses and sink into contemplation.Best Short Stories Anthology, pp. 132–133
man loves suffering very much sometimes. He loves it passionately. That is an undeniable fact.Best Short Stories Anthology, pp. 132–133
Suffering! Why, it's the sole cause of consciousness! And though at the beginning I did argue that consciousness was the greatest misfortune to man, yet I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice-two.Best Short Stories Anthology, pp. 132–133
I used to realise intensely that again I had been guilty of some particularly dastardly action that day... and inwardly, secretly, I used to go on nagging myself, worrying myself, accusing myself, till at last the bitterness I felt turned into a sort of shameful, damnable sweetness, and finally, into real, positive delight!Best Short Stories Anthology, pp. 109–110