Who He Is
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 greased with oil, a severe mouth and the air of someone who has never doubted himself, with a pedantry the narrator compares to the vanity of Alexander of Macedon. He lisps, and seems proud of it, and reads the Psalter aloud in a sing-song voice behind the partition in the evening, like someone ordering a funeral. He charges seven rubles a month, without food, for doing, in the narrator's words, almost nothing (ch. III of Part Two, ch. VIII of Part Two).
He has been with him for seven years, and the narrator cannot dismiss him. The apartment is the shell in which he hides from humanity, and Apollon, without the narrator knowing why, seems to belong to that shell. He calls him an ulcer and a scourge sent by providence.
Trajectory
Apollon appears before entering the scene, through money. In ch. III of Part Two, on the eve of the dinner, of the nine rubles the narrator has, seven are the servant's wages, due the next day, and the narrator knows it would be impossible not to pay them, given the man's temper, and yet knows he will not pay and will go. On the afternoon of the dinner, Apollon has been waiting for his pay since morning and, out of pride, says nothing, and the narrator leaves without looking at him. In ch. VIII of Part Two, when the narrator asks him to take Simonov a letter with six rubles inside, the servant becomes more respectful on learning there is money, and agrees to go.
In those days the narrator, furious with everyone, decides to punish him and not to pay for two weeks, a plan he had cherished for two years, just to prove he can.
«не хочу, не хочу, просто не хочу выдать ему жалованье, не хочу, потому что так хочу», потому что на это «моя воля господская», I do not want to, I do not want to, I simply do not want to pay him his wages, I do not want to because I want it that way, because for that I have my lordly will.
Apollon answers without speaking. He fixes him with a severe look for minutes, on entering and on leaving; he enters the room slowly, stops at the door with one hand behind him and looks with contempt; he goes out and comes back two hours later; he sighs, measuring with the sigh the depth of the master's moral fall. The narrator says he knows this tactic by heart and cannot resist it: it lasts no more than four days. He explodes, demands to be answered, calls the servant a hangman, shows the seven rubles and says he will hand them over only if the man comes with his head bowed to ask pardon. Apollon answers that he has nothing to ask pardon for, and that the master, by calling him a hangman, gave him cause to complain to the district police officer. When the narrator, overwrought, orders him to summon the inspector against himself, Apollon laughs, asks where anyone has ever seen a man go to the authorities against himself, and goes on threading his needle.
It is at this moment that Liza opens the door. Apollon, looking severely at the narrator, gives her way and does not want to leave the room, observing the two of them with irony.
In ch. IX of Part Two he stands for two minutes before them and leaves, without this improving anything. The narrator rushes to him, throws him the seven rubles and asks him in whispers to bring tea and ten biscuits from the tavern. Apollon glances at the money sideways, without saying anything, finishes threading the needle, rises slowly, takes off his spectacles slowly, counts the money slowly, asks over his shoulder whether he should take the whole portion, and leaves. He returns with the tea and leaves again without looking at either of them, and the tea seems to the narrator, after everything, indecently banal. The narrator adds, in describing him, what he came to be: Apollon now hires himself out to read the Psalter at burials, exterminates rats and makes shoe polish.
Themes Embodied
Apollon shows the limit of the independent will that the narrator defends in Part One. The lordly will he rehearses, willing because one wills, is exercised only if the other asks, and that is exactly what the servant does not do; the caprice that should affirm independence depends on a gesture that does not come. Apollon is therefore Fate and Free Will on a small scale and Action and Inaction in victory: he hardly does anything, and he is the one who decides the outcome of every clash. His Pride, which does not ask for wages, confronts the master's, which does not pay them, and his lasts longer.
The text gives Apollon only through the narrator's mouth, and it is necessary to separate what is seen from what is supposed. What is seen is that he wants the wages without asking for them, that he knows the master's weak point, and that he never loses his composure. What is supposed, on the narrator's account, is that he takes him for the last fool in the world and keeps him only because of the monthly pay. Two readings of the character: the only antagonist who wins every time, and whom the narrator for that reason hates like no one else; or the mirror in which he sees his own impotence, a figure of pedantry and silence that he cannot expel because he belongs to the shell in which he lives.
Relationships
- The underground man: the master he serves without effort and whose wages he awaits without asking, and whose letter to Simonov he carries after learning there is money inside (ch. III of Part Two, ch. VIII of Part Two, ch. IX of Part Two).
- Liza: the visitor he shows into the room and watches with irony, and who is frightened of him when he brings the tea (ch. VIII of Part Two, ch. IX of Part Two).
- Simonov: the recipient of the letter he carries (ch. VIII of Part Two).