Dostoevsky's literary character quoted on the impossibility of becoming anything meaningful and the moral paralysis of the intelligent nineteenth-century man
""I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossib"