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Notes from Underground · Part Two

Apropos of Wet Snow

LovePrideReasonFate and Free WillAction and InactionSuffering

Summary of the part

The thread of this part is the passage from thesis to life. In Part One the underground man argues; here he tells, from the age of twenty-four, three episodes in which the lucidity he praises does not keep him from doing precisely what he knows to be ridiculous, and in which each step is rehearsed beforehand like a scene from a book. The episodes are linked by humiliation and revenge: the officer who moves him aside at billiards without seeing him, the dinner at Zverkov's to which he invites himself, and Liza, the young woman from the brothel onto whom he unloads the shame his schoolmates gave him. The turning point is in chapter IX: Liza, instead of answering cruelty with anger, understands that he is unhappy and embraces him, and he can see in this only an exchange of roles. The part ends without redemption, with the writing interrupted and the accusation turned toward the reader.

Chapter I: The Officer and the Collision

PrideAction and Inaction

Chapter summary

The chapter opens with verses by Nekrasov, the poem of the man who pulls a fallen woman out of vice with the burning word and sees her weep with shame, and then the narrator goes back to being twenty-four. The underground man lives alone and avoids people; at the office he avoids looking at his colleagues and imagines that they look at him with disgust. He now admits that it was he who felt disgust for himself (he hated his own face, which he thought ugly and silly, and strove to display nobility), and that he attributed that look to others. In everyday life he lowers his eyes before almost anyone he meets, and it is from this that he draws his thesis:

Analysis

Всякий порядочный человек нашего времени есть и должен быть трус и раб. Это нормальное его состояние, Every decent man of our time is, and must be, a coward and a slave. This is his normal state.

The sentence comes right after he declares himself a coward and a slave without shame, and it works as a defense: if every decent man is like this, what humiliates him is the price of being developed, and whoever shows himself brave is an ass. Two readings: self-knowledge without shame, or a consolation that turns weakness into a criterion of merit.

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Chapter II: The Dreams and the Visit to Simonov

Action and Inaction

Chapter summary

When each phase of debauchery is over, the underground man is left with nausea and remorse; he pushes the remorse away because it sickens him too much, and ends up getting used to it, or rather agreeing of his own free will to bear it. His way out is to take refuge, in dreams, in the beautiful and the sublime. He dreams for three months in a row, shut in his corner, and in those days he does not even recognize himself in the man who was anxiously sewing the beaver collar onto his greatcoat. The dreams come sweeter after the debauchery, with regret and tears, and they bring the faith that some outside circumstance will suddenly open a horizon of beneficial and ready activity, and he will appear in the light of day with a laurel on his head, riding a white horse. A supporting role he cannot even imagine, and that is why, he says, he in reality occupies the last place without complaint:

Analysis

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Chapter III: The Dinner He Invites Himself To

LovePrideFate and Free Will

Chapter summary

At Simonov's house, the underground man finds two other schoolmates, Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov, and neither of them notices him: they treat him like the most ordinary fly, which they never did even at school, and he supposes they despise him for his failure in his career and his worn clothes. Ferfichkin, a small Russian of German descent with a monkey-like face, is a fool who laughs at everything and has been his enemy since the first grades; Trudolyubov is a military man, tall and cold, honest but deferential toward any success, able to talk only of promotion, and, as a distant relative of Zverkov, he carries a certain weight among them. They discuss the farewell dinner they will give Zverkov the next day, a colleague leaving to take up a post as an officer in the provinces.

Zverkov was his schoolmate the whole time, and the narrator had hated him since the first grades. At school he was a handsome, lively boy whom everyone loved, and the narrator hated him for exactly that; he studied poorly, inherited two hundred souls in his last year and began to boast, and even those who prided themselves on their honor fawned over him, not out of interest, but because he was one of nature's favorites. The narrator hated the self-assured voice, the admiration for his own jokes, the handsome, foolish face (for which, by the way, he would gladly trade his own, intelligent one), and the manners of an officer of the forties. Once, silent as always, he attacked Zverkov when the latter boasted that no peasant girl in his village would escape the lord's right, and the others applauded, not out of pity for the girls, but because they saw such an insect being applauded; he won the argument, but Zverkov laughed and kept the laughter on his side, without rancor, and afterward beat him in passing several more times, while he answered with silent contempt. Years later he stopped greeting him in the street, and the narrator saw him once at the theater, in his braided uniform, bowing before the daughters of an old general.

They decide to chip in seven rubles each for a dinner at the Hôtel de Paris the next day, at five. They count three, twenty-one rubles, because Zverkov does not pay. It is then that the underground man, thinking it fine and unexpected to offer himself all at once, and believing that in this way he will defeat them all and that they will look at him with respect, says that, counting him, there are twenty-eight. They refuse without saying no: Simonov, who knows him inside out, avoids looking at him; Ferfichkin asks where they would look for him; Trudolyubov reminds them that he has always been at odds with Zverkov. He clings to the argument and replies that perhaps he wants to go precisely because he was at odds with him before; Trudolyubov mocks these lofty airs, and Simonov has him put on the list. When they stand up, Ferfichkin whispers about the money, Trudolyubov says that if he wants to come so badly, let him come, and Ferfichkin adds that the group is a circle of friends and that perhaps they do not even want him.

Analysis

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Chapter IV: The Hôtel de Paris

Pride

Chapter summary

The Underground Man arrives first, at five on the dot, as agreed, and finds no one: the table is not even laid, and the servants tell him the dinner was set for six. Simonov forgot to tell him about the change of time. He waits almost an hour in an empty room, listening from a more distant room to the uproar of a dinner with ladies, and when his colleagues come in at six he is so glad to see them that he almost forgets to look offended. Zverkov comes in first, affected, and greets him with a general's amiability, full of caution, saying, with lisps and drawn-out vowels, that he was surprised by his wish to join them. The narrator expected dull jokes and armed himself against them; what he receives is a tone of protection, and the notion that Zverkov considers himself incomparably superior, without even meaning to offend, suffocates him more than any insult would.

When Trudolyubov asks whether he has been waiting long, he answers loudly and irritably that he arrived at five, as he was told; Simonov, without apologizing, goes off to see to the appetizers. At the round table Zverkov questions him with an interest that seems like patronage: where he works, why he left his old post, how much he earns. He answers rudely and red with shame. Zverkov finds the salary modest, Ferfichkin says you cannot even eat lunch at a restaurant on that, Trudolyubov calls it poverty, and Zverkov notices that he has grown thin and changed, glancing at his clothes. When Ferfichkin laughs and asks them not to embarrass him, he explodes: he is dining here with his own money, not with theirs. Ferfichkin attacks back, Zverkov tells them to stop and recounts how he nearly got married the day before yesterday, a story full of generals, colonels, and chamberlains, in which he is nearly the central figure. They all leave him behind, and the underground man is crushed.

He thinks of getting up and leaving out of contempt, leaving the duel for the next day, and he stays. He drinks Lafitte and sherry from wine glasses and quickly gets drunk for lack of habit, and with the drunkenness his anger grows: he wants to insult them in the boldest way and only then leave. He interrupts Zverkov's talk about the hussar prince Kolya, owner of three thousand souls, to say that Kolya, by the way, did not come to say goodbye; Trudolyubov remarks that he is already drunk, and Zverkov looks at him as at an insect. At the toast, when everyone drinks, he keeps his glass full, says he wants to make his speech separately and only drink afterward, and, not knowing what he will say, makes three points: he hates the phrase and the people who mouth phrases, he hates debauchery and debauchees, he loves truth, sincerity, and honesty, and he wants companionship on an equal footing, not... hm. He ends by drinking to Zverkov's health and wishing him to seduce Circassian women and shoot the enemies of the fatherland.

Analysis

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Chapter V: The Sleigh on the Wet Snow and the House

LoveReasonFate and Free WillAction and Inaction

Chapter summary

The underground man runs down the stairs at full tilt, muttering that the clash with reality has finally come, and in the same breath scolds himself: if he laughs at it now, he is a scoundrel. He already knows where his colleagues have gone. In front of the door there is a hired coachman, in a coarse cloth coat and covered in snow that keeps falling, warm and wet, and a small, shaggy, dappled mare that coughs. As he goes to climb in, the memory of Simonov nearly throwing the six rubles at him knocks him down, and he falls like a sack into the slatted sleigh. He swears there is still a great deal to do to redeem all of this and that he will do it, or he will die right there that very night, and tells the coachman to go.

On the way his head spins. That the others should beg for his friendship on their knees is a mirage, the same as the ball on the shore of Lake Como; therefore, he resolves, he must slap Zverkov, and he already plans how: without preamble, straight out, while the others are in the room and Zverkov is on the sofa with Olympia, who once laughed at his face and rejected him. He will drag Olympia by the hair and Zverkov by an ear through the whole room; let them thrash him and throw him out, since the slap is the initiative, and by the code of honor Zverkov must wash it away in a duel. A dawn duel, pistols bought with an advance on his salary, and the second will be the first person who passes in the street or the director himself, out of chivalry. With each step the plot grows: if Zverkov refuses the duel out of contempt, he will hurl himself at him in the post office yard, bite his hand, and shout to the crowd to see to what a desperate man can be driven. He goes to prison, he goes to Siberia, and fifteen years later he drags himself after him, a beggar, and finds him married and happy in some provincial town. He will say he lost everything because of him, and he will fire into the air, forgiving him.

Analysis

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Chapter VI: Liza, the Conversation at Dawn

LoveReason

Chapter summary

The chapter opens with ellipses and a clock behind the partition that hisses, as if someone were choking it, and strikes two. The underground man wakes in a narrow, low room, crammed with a wardrobe and boxes, almost in darkness; the candle is nearly spent. He remembers everything at once and, with it, the day seems distant, as if he had already survived it. Then he sees two open eyes beside him, watching him with curiosity and coldness, and the thought comes to him like the sensation of entering a damp, mildewed underground: two hours beside this creature without a word exchanged, and before, that had pleased him, and now he sees with disgust the idea of a vice without love, one that begins with what true love crowns. He asks her name, to be done with it: Liza, she answers in an almost whisper, without warmth. She is from Riga, Russian, twenty years old, and has been there two weeks; her parents are petty bourgeois and live there. Why did she leave their home? She answers only this, with nothing more, and he understands it to mean: leave me alone, I am sick of you.

Analysis

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Chapter VII: The Sermon on Haymarket and the Letter

LoveReasonSuffering

Chapter summary

Wounded by Liza's remark, the underground man replies that it is no book, that he himself is disgusted by all of it, and begins the longest monologue of the part. He asks whether she really thinks she will never grow old and that they will keep her there forever; he says he woke up disgusted at being with her, that one goes to that house only when drunk, and that elsewhere, living as decent people do, he might fall in love, wait at the door, kneel. There, however, a whistle is enough to bring her, and it is not he who asks about her will, it is she who asks about his. What she gives, her soul, is being put into servitude along with her body; love, the young woman's treasure, is handed over to any drunkard, and a woman bought outright has no reason to be loved. The lovers she is allowed to take are a game and a mockery, and one of them cheats and robs her; she owes the landlady and will go on owing until the guests are disgusted with her, and then the reproaches will come, and her fellow women, who have lost their conscience and their pity, will turn against her to please the landlady.

He paints the road that is left: one house after another, down to Sennaya, where they stop on the way. He says he saw there, one New Year's Eve, a woman at the door, put out as a joke by her companions to cool her off a little for crying so much, and that by nine in the morning she was drunk, disheveled, half-naked, beaten, with blood on her nose and teeth, sitting on a stone staircase with a salted fish in her hand, beating the fish against the steps while drunken drivers and soldiers taunted her. He asks whether Liza does not believe she will end up like that; perhaps, ten years ago, that woman too arrived as fresh as a cherub. And he imagines that at that very moment, beating the fish against the steps, she remembers the clean years in her father's house, the neighbor's son who waited for her on the road and swore he would love her all his life. For Liza, he says, happiness would be to die young of consumption in a corner of a cellar, like the dead girl of today; and the landlady may not even send her to the hospital, if she is still useful to her. He keeps painting the death: the water begged for and served with curses; the body shoved into the foulest corner of the cellar, laid out in haste by strange hands; the coffin bought, the drink in her memory taken at the tavern; the grave full of mud and wet snow; the gravediggers lowering the coffin with grumbles, one telling the other to shorten the rope because it has slipped sideways, and soon covering it with wet blue clay.

Analysis

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Chapter VIII: Waiting for Liza, and Apollon

LovePrideFate and Free WillAction and InactionSuffering

Chapter summary

The next morning, after a few hours of heavy sleep, the underground man is astonished at his sentimentality of the day before and dismisses it as a fit of nerves, a woman's hysterics; he thinks he should not have given Liza his address, but if she comes, let her come. What matters now is saving his reputation before Zverkov and Simonov, and in the busyness of the morning he forgets Liza. First of all he must pay Simonov the debt from yesterday, and for this he turns to Anton Antonych, from whom he asks for fifteen rubles; the man is in excellent spirits and hands them over at once, and signs the receipt, mentioning in passing, with the air of a reveler, that the previous evening they had enjoyed themselves at the Hôtel de Paris, saying goodbye to a childhood companion, a rich, witty man from a good family, and that they had drunk a few bottles too many. At home he writes Simonov a gentlemanly letter, light and almost offhand, in which he accuses himself of everything, blames the drunkenness on his lack of practice and on a glass taken before the others arrived, asks forgiveness above all from Simonov, and mentions Zverkov, whom, as in a dream, he seems to have offended. He proudly approves of the tone, which suggests he regards the previous day's story with independence, head held high, like a gentleman who respects himself. He has lied: he did not drink a drop beforehand. He puts six rubles in the letter and asks Apollon to take it; on learning there is money inside, the servant becomes more respectful and agrees to go.

In the afternoon he goes out for a walk, his head still spinning. As night falls, his impressions and thoughts blend more and more, and something that does not die within him, deep in his heart and conscience, makes itself felt as burning anguish. He walks through the busiest streets, among people coming home from work with faces full of worry, and he likes the bustle of people haggling over pennies. This time the crowd only irritates him. He returns home as if he carried a crime in his soul.

One thought torments him: Liza will come. Of the previous day, only the memory of her pursues him, set apart from the rest; he has forgotten the rest of the night and remains pleased with the letter. He imagines her seeing how he lives, the oilcloth sofa with the stuffing sticking out, the dressing gown he cannot wrap himself in properly, and Apollon, who will surely insult her just to be rude to him; and he, out of habit, cowardly, will start covering himself with the flaps, smiling, lying. That is bad, but not the worst: there is something graver, more vile, which is to put that dishonest, lying mask on again. When he reaches this idea, he protests that he spoke sincerely, that there was true feeling, and that he wanted to awaken noble feelings in her. This does not calm him. Even after nine, when she can no longer come, she appears to him, always in the same pose: the moment he struck the match and saw the pale, twisted face, with a martyr's gaze and a pitiful, unnatural, crooked smile. He does not yet know that fifteen years later he will see her like this.

Analysis

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Chapter IX: Liza at Home, the Confession and the Embrace

LovePrideFate and Free WillSuffering

Chapter summary

The chapter opens with an epigraph from the same poet as at the beginning, Nekrasov: a man invites the woman he has saved to enter his house boldly, free, and as its full mistress. The invitation works as irony on what follows. The underground man stands before Liza, shattered, demoralized, and ashamed to the point of nausea, smiling and trying to pull the fluffy, quilted dressing gown closed with its flaps, exactly as he had imagined in his days of dejection. Apollon stands there for two minutes and leaves, and nothing improves. Worse still, Liza is disturbed too, more than he expected. He orders her to sit; she obeys and keeps looking at him, waiting for something; the naivety of this waiting infuriates him, and he restrains himself. He has a vague certainty that she will pay dearly for all of this.

He begins badly, stammering: he has caught her in an awkward situation; he is not ashamed of his poverty, he looks at her with pride, he is poor but noble, and, by the way, would she like some tea? He asks her to wait, runs to Apollon, throws down before him the seven rubles he had been clutching in his fist all this time, and begs him, in whispers and feverishly, to save him: to bring tea and ten biscuits from the tavern. He says that if Apollon does not go, he will make a man unhappy, and that he does not know what kind of woman she is, for she is everything. Apollon glances at the money sideways, says nothing, and goes on threading the needle; and finally, with his arms folded in Napoleonic fashion, the underground man waits three minutes, pale, sweat on his temples. Apollon rises slowly, takes off his glasses slowly, counts the money slowly, asks over his shoulder whether he should take the whole portion, and leaves. Returning to Liza, the underground man thinks of fleeing anyway, in his dressing gown, wherever his eyes might lead.

They sit in silence, and he suddenly slams his fist on the table, and the ink spills: he is going to kill Apollon. She is startled; he shouts that Apollon is his executioner and bursts into tears, in a fit that is genuine, though he affects a feeble voice to save appearances. Liza fetches him water, bewildered; Apollon arrives with the tea, which now seems to him an indecently mundane thing, and leaves without looking. He asks, trembling with impatience, whether she despises him; she does not know how to answer. He angrily orders her to drink her tea, and in his thoughts swears not to say a word, to take revenge, because she is the cause of everything. Five minutes pass in silence, he refusing to start drinking only so as to weigh more heavily on her. Then Liza tries to break the silence with what she should not say: that she wants to leave there for good. He feels pity for her awkwardness and her useless frankness, but something ugly quickly smothers the pity and even spurs him on: let everything be lost. Five more minutes, and she asks, timidly and almost without voice, whether she is not in his way, and begins to rise. The first spark of wounded dignity makes him tremble with rage and explode.

Analysis

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Chapter X: The Money, the Flight and the Ending

LovePrideReasonAction and InactionSuffering

Chapter summary

A quarter of an hour later the underground man paces back and forth, impatient, and peeks at Liza through a gap in the screen: she is sitting on the floor, her head resting against the bed, probably weeping. She does not leave, and that is what irritates him. This time she already knew everything. He had offended her once and for all, and she guessed that his outburst had been revenge, a new humiliation, and that to his hatred, previously almost without an object, a personal, envious hatred of her had now been added. He does not claim she understood this clearly, but she understood completely that he was a sordid man and, above all, incapable of loving her.

Analysis

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Reading of the Part

Analysis

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