“Notes from the Underground is a heart-rending cry of terror that has escaped from a man suddenly convinced that all his life he had been lying and pretending when he assured himself and others that the loftiest purpose in life is to serve the “humblest man.” Up to this point, he had considered himself marked by fate to do a great work. But now he suddenly felt that he was not a bit better than anyone else, that he cared as little for all ideas as the most common mortal. Let ideas triumph a thousand times over: let the peasants be freed, let just and merciful courts be set up, let military conscription be abolished - his heart would be no lighter, no happier because of it. He was obliged to tell himself that if, instead of all those great and fortunate events, misfortune were to befall Russia, he would feel no worse-perhaps even better. What in the world is a man to do who has discovered in himself such a hideous and disgusting idea? And particularly a writer accustomed to thinking that he is duty-bound to share with his readers all that goes on in his soul? Is he to tell the truth? To go out to the city square and openly admit to the public that his entire past life, that all of his past words, had been nothing but lies, pretense, and hypocrisy, that while he was crying over Makar Devushkin he was not in the least thinking of the poor wretch, but merely drawing pictures to console himself and the public?”
