There is not, I believe, one single deformation or deviation of character--these kinks that make so many of Dostoevsky’s characters so strangely morbid and disturbing--but which has its beginning in some humiliation. _Insulted and Injured_ is the title of one of his first books, and his work as a whole is obsessed without ceasing by the idea that humiliation damns, whereas humility sanctifies. Heaven, as Alyosha Karamazov dreams and describes it to us, is a world where there will be no injured, neither insulted. The strangest, most disturbing figure of these novels, the terrible Stavrogin in _The Possessed_, whose character at first is so different from all others, is explained, and his demoniac nature accounted for, by certain passages in the book: “Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin,” says one of the other characters, “was leading at that time in Petersburg a life, so to say, of mockery. I can’t find another word to describe it, because he is not a man who falls into disillusionment, and he disdained to be occupied with work at that time.”[50] And Stavrogin’s mother, to whom these remarks were addressed, says a little farther on: “No, it was something more than eccentricity, and I assure you, something sacred even! A proud man who has suffered humiliation early in life and reached the stage of ‘mockery,’ as you so subtly called it.”[51] And later: “And if Nikolay had always had at his side (Varvara Petrovna almost shouted) a gentle Horatio, great in his humility--another excellent expression of yours, Stepan Trofimovitch!--he might long ago have been saved from the sad and sudden demon of irony, which has tormented him all his life.”[52] It happens that some of Dostoevsky’s characters, whose natures have been profoundly warped by humiliation, find as it were delight and satisfaction in the resultant degradation, loathsome though it be. “Was there resentment in my heart?” says the hero of _A Raw Youth_ just when his amour-propre had been cruelly wounded, “I don’t know. Perhaps there was. Strange to say, I always had, perhaps from my earliest childhood, one characteristic; if I were ill-treated, absolutely wronged and insulted to the last degree, I always showed at once an irresistible desire to submit passively to the insult, and even to accept more than my assailant wanted to inflict on me, as though I would say: ‘All right, you have humiliated me, so I will humiliate myself even more; look and enjoy it.’”[53] For if humility be a surrender of pride, humiliation, on the other hand, but serves to strengthen it. Listen to the tale told by the wretched hero of the _Notes from Underground_: