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+++ title = "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877) by Fyodor Dostoevsky" date = 2026-05-02 +++
Page for page, one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.
{% h(at="01") %} I am a ridiculous man. Nowadays they call me mad. {% end %}
{% h(at="02") %} All of a sudden, I realised that it would not matter to me whether the world existed or whether there was nothing at all anywhere. I began to intuit and sense with all my being, that there was nothing around me. {% end %}
{% h(at="03") %} Suddenly, I noticed in one of these spaces a tiny star and began watching it intently. That was because that tiny star had given me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night. {% end %}
{% h(at="07") %} One might go so far as to say that the world was created for me alone, as it were: I will shoot myself and the world will cease to exist, at least for me. {% end %}
{% h(at="09") %} Now they were burying me in the earth. Everyone went away and I was alone. {% end %}
{% h(at="16") %} It may have been a dream, but it cannot be that it did not take place. {% end %}
{% h(at="16") %} Like a foul trichina*, like a pestilential germ bringing contagion to whole countries, I infected that earth, happy and sinless before my arrival. They learned how to lie, and grew to love lying and perceive its beauty. {% end %}
{% h(at="17") %} When they tookup criminality, they invented justice and enacted whole codes of law to preserve it, while for the maintenance of the codes they set up the guillotine. {% end %}
{% h(at="20") %} I won't accept, and refuse to believe that evil is the normal condition of men. {% end %}
{% h(at="21") %} Dream? What's a dream? Isn't this life of ours a dream? I'll go further: suppose it never, ever comes true, and there is no paradise (now that I do understand!), well, I'll still go on preaching. And yet how simple a matter it is: in one day, in one hour it could all be brought about at once! {% end %}
{% h(at="21") %} The chief thing is to love others as oneself, that's the main thing, and that's it—absolutely nothing more is necessary. {% end %}
{{ h(at="trichina", body="A parasitic nematode worm.") }}