Notes from Underground

Characters

The Underground Man The underground man has no name. The one who writes is a former clerk of forty, a collegiate assessor (a middle rank in the imperial civil service), who served only to have something to eat, inherited six thousand rubles from a distant relative and retired... Liza Liza is the girl of the house to which the underground man goes after dinner. She is twenty, Russian, from Riga, the daughter of petty bourgeois who live there, and has been in the house for two weeks, a dressmaking shop that is only a front, which by day... Zverkov Zverkov is the school friend of the underground man in whose honor the dinner at the Hôtel de Paris takes place. An officer, he is leaving to serve in a distant province, and the former schoolmates club together to give him a farewell dinner (ch. III of Part... Apollon Apollon is the servant of the underground man, and the portrait the narrator gives him in ch. VIII of Part Two is the longest the book devotes to a minor character. He is an older man, solemn, who sometimes works as a tailor: very blond hair, with a quiff... Simonov Simonov is the only former school friend whom the underground man still visits. He avoids the others since leaving school, which he curses like years of hard labor, and perhaps changed offices precisely so as not to meet them (ch. II of Part Two). At school... Trudolyubov Trudolyubov is one of the two school friends whom the underground man meets at Simonov's house. He is a military man, tall, with a cold face, and the narrator describes him as quite honest, but deferential to any success and capable of talking only about... Ferfichkin Ferfichkin is the other school friend whom the underground man meets at Simonov's house. He is Russian of German origin, small, with a monkey's face, and the narrator presents him as a fool who laughs at everything and everyone, his worst enemy since the...

Other characters

Anton Antonovich Setochkin: the section chief who lends him money twice, hesitating the first time and in good humor the second, and whom he visits on Tuesdays at the Five Corners, not knowing what to say beside the gray-haired clerks (Part Two, ch. I, Part Two, ch. II, Part Two, ch. VIII)
The officer: the big man who moves him out of the way in the billiard room without noticing him, and whom he pursues for years until the collision on Nevsky Prospect, where he pretends not to have felt the impact (Part Two, ch. I)
The officer with the saber: the man whose saber clanked and with whom he waged a year-and-a-half war when he was a clerk, until he won (Part One, ch. I)
Setochkin's daughters: the two girls of thirteen and fourteen who whisper and giggle together during the visits, which leaves him ill at ease on Tuesdays (Part Two, ch. II)
The only school friend: the schoolmate who gave himself wholly to the narrator and was pushed away with hatred, as if he were good for nothing but being defeated (Part Two, ch. III)
Kolya: the hussar prince, owner of three thousand souls, whom Zverkov mentions at dinner and who, in the narrator's words, did not even come to say goodbye (Part Two, ch. IV)
Olympia: the woman whom Zverkov shouts, at the end of dinner, is his, and whom the narrator imagines dragging by the hair in the slap scene (Part Two, ch. IV, Part Two, ch. V)
The coachman: the man in a coarse coat who drives the narrator in the sledge under the wet snow, takes a punch in the neck and whips the mare (Part Two, ch. V)
The landlady: the woman with a foolish smile who receives the narrator at the dressmaker's shop and to whom Liza owes money, a debt that, in the sermon, he says she will go on owing until the lodgers are disgusted by her (Part Two, ch. V, Part Two, ch. VII)
The medical student: the young man who knew Liza as a child in Riga, danced with her at a ball and wrote her the respectful letter she shows the narrator (Part Two, ch. VII)