Status Updates From A Hero of Our Time

Love, like fire, dies out without fuel. Perhaps jealousy will succeed where my pleadings have failed.

Can it be, thought I, that my sole mission on earth is to destroy the hopes of others? Ever since I began to live and act, fate has somehow associated me with the denouement of other people's tragedies, as if without me no one could either die or give way to despair! I have been the inevitable fifth-act character, involuntarily playing the detestable role of the hangman or the traitor.

Everyone read signs of non-existent evil traits in my features. But since they were expected to be there, they did make their appearance.

"I beg of you quite earnestly—if you should ever take it into your mind to speak ill of me, take a knife instead and kill me. I believe you would not find it too difficult to do."
"Do I look like a murderer?"
"You are worse. . . . "

oh god i terribly missed classics 😭

And what is happiness? Pride gratified. Could I consider myself better and more powerful than anyone else in the world, I should be happy; were everybody to love me, I should find in myself unending well-springs of love. Evil begets evil; the first pain leads to a realization of how great is the pleasure of tormenting another;

I regard the sufferings and joys of others merely in relation to myself, as food to sustain my spiritual strength. Passions no longer are capable of
robbing me of my sanity, my ambition has been crushed by circumstances, but it has manifested itself in new form, for ambition is nothing but greed for power, and my greatest pleasure I derive from subordinating everything around me to my will.

I often ask myself why it is that I so persistently seek to win the love of a young girl whom I do not wish to seduce and whom I shall never marry. Why this feminine coquetry? Vera loves me better than Princess Mary ever will. Were she an unconquerable beauty, the difficulty of the undertaking might serve as an inducement. . . .

I really do not know why she loves me so. Especially since she is the only woman who has ever completely understood me with all my petty frailties and evil passions. . . . Can evil indeed be so attractive?