she feels living in her heart. Unfortunately Raskolnikov and Mr. Golyadkin, who care nothing for the life of the heart, must rely only on themselves for strength and they discover that their inventions of themselves are not as reliable as they think.
The young Dostoevsky wrote The Double around the age of 25, two or three years before he received his second pair of eyes. As he stood before rifles pointed at him waiting for death, his reason at last allowed his imagination to abandon completely its duty to invent a self adapted to the selves of our world and let it go free to invent a self suitable to any world at all. A self for any world! But why not a self that did not fit in any world and that did not even need to make rational sense as a self? Bullets would fly at him in a few moments and when they arrived he would no longer have time or being or mind. The ground below his feet in seconds would no longer feel like ground. He would be timeless and groundless and his mind would no longer be able to pretend that rational forms of behavior were the only true basis of his true self.
Eighteen years after The Double, after four years of imprisonment at hard labor in Siberia, he wrote the short novel, Notes From The Underground, in which he takes up for treatment the subject of groundlessness. A man from the underground, from a corner of a room where he lives, like Raskolnikov, in self-isolation from the outside world, addresses us in a way that is extremely egotistical, proclaiming his complete freedom and his right to be irrational. He declares himself against not only all the normal customs of social life but also against all the natural laws of science and of mathematics. Unlike Raskolnikov, he uses his reason against reason, his logic against logic. “Merciful heavens!,” he shouts at us, “But what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic when, for some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that two times two makes four?” In other words, to hell with all laws! He lives in a corner of his room hidden away underground for forty years from the world outside. He has difficulty explaining to normal people the “strange enjoyment” that results from his lonely struggle. “But it is just in that cold, abominable half-despair, half-belief, in that conscious burying of oneself alive for grief in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognized and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one's position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later – that the savor of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies. It is so subtle, so difficult of analysis, that persons who are a little limited, or even simply persons of strong nerves, will not understand a single atom of it.”