Against Happiness: Guilt and Memory in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground
Introduction Looking back, individuals tend to organize their life stories around what broke them rather than around what quietly held them together. This asymmetry, already noted in classical ethics, finds one of its most radical literary articulations in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). The text presents a form of consciousness that does not merely overlook happiness but actively repudiates it, treating suffering as the sole morally serious mode of existence. Read alongside The Idiot , where well-being appears without demanding reflection or self-justification, Notes from Underground reveals how pain can become not simply an experience among others, but the organizing principle of memory, identity, and self-judgment. Pain, Consciousness, and Moral Authority From its opening pages, Notes from Underground ( Записки из подполья ) announces its hostility toward harmony and satisfaction. The unnamed narrator introduces himself bluntly as “a sick man” (Dostoye...