In Dostoevsky, awareness of human insufficiency leads to an almost hysterical signalling of vice from characters who retain any vestige of social respectability, whether an old Karamazov, a Marmeladov or a Raskolnikov. These characters and many others intermittently seek exterior humiliation in the eyes of society while refusing to see the full contemptibility of their lives; thus they court punishment rather than mercy. They are honest enough to judge themselves harshly, but their pride in such self-condemnation – combined with an awareness that other people share their vileness without exercising a similar honesty of judgment – leads them to assume that they have seen the fullness of their debased condition. This is a false humiliation that, in the words of the old Russian proverb, is `worse than pride'. This false humiliation, if maintained, will lead its bearer to seek extinction. Dostoevsky mercilessly pushes the reader onwards to see that anyone who fully understands the depths of his own sinful negations can have only the response of complete humiliation, one so profound that it cannot speak at all except to ask for grace or extinction. Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow for much of Dostoevsky's lifetime, explains this vision: `All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness.

From, 'Beyond the will: Humiliation as Christian necessity', by Henry M. W. Russell