Who She Is
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 sells and by night receives those with a recommendation (ch. V of Part Two, ch. VI of Part Two). She enters the scene without a name, at the end of ch. V of Part Two: fresh face, a little pale, straight dark eyebrows, serious and slightly startled gaze. Her name only appears in ch. VI of Part Two, when he wakes beside her and asks. Of the life that brought her there she says very little: she owes money to the landlady, has not decided to stay, and will leave as soon as she has paid (ch. VII of Part Two).
Everything known about her comes from the narrator, who describes her, folds her, humiliates her and loses her, and from a few lines of speech. What she does is little and always unexpected to him: she answers curtly, weeps into the pillow, runs to show a letter, goes to his house, embraces him and leaves a banknote on the table.
Trajectory
In the early morning of ch. VI of Part Two her answers are short. When he asks her to think of her father's house, she returns the question of whether it would not have been worse there, and when he sketches marriage for love, with the quarrel that ends in reconciliation and the baby that bites the breast, she begins a sentence timidly, cuts it off, and what comes out is the remark that he speaks as if from a book.
Что-то вы… точно как по книге, You sound... just as if from a book.
He hears only the mockery, and it is the mockery that decides the sermon of ch. VII of Part Two. The sermon strips from her, one by one, her health, her home, the memory of clean years in her father's house, and finally her name.
имя твое исчезнет с лица земли — так, как бы совсем тебя никогда не бывало и не рождалось!, your name will vanish from the face of the earth, as if you had never existed or been born!
She listens to him in the dark, and her response is of the body: face down, clutching the pillow, biting the pillow and her own hand until it bleeds, so that no one in the house will know of the torment. When he tries to speak and asks her to calm down, she grips his hands so hard that he understands it is not that, and falls silent. Before he leaves, she stops him at the door, runs back and hands him a letter from a medical student, written in an inflated style and with a feeling that cannot be faked: a respectful declaration of love from someone who knew her as a child in Riga and met her again at a ball. She shows it with an almost childlike triumph, after having heard the worst about herself. He reads it, says nothing, presses her hand and goes, having given her his address.
Liza only comes back at the end of ch. VIII of Part Two, some days later, when he had forgotten her in the morning and then thought of nothing else, and finds her in the middle of his quarrel with Apollon. In ch. IX of Part Two she is disturbed to see him in his dressing gown, sits, waits for something, and when he shouts the truth at her (he went to her house to hit an officer, did not find him, and took out on her the humiliation of the dinner), she turns pale, falls into the chair and listens to him with eyes open. Then, instead of leaving, she embraces him.
Она поняла из всего этого то, что женщина всегда прежде всего поймет, если искренно любит, а именно: что я сам несчастлив, She understood from all this what a woman always understands first, if she truly loves, namely: that I myself was unhappy.
The phrase is the narrator's, and the explanation he gives to her gesture comes from someone who has lost her. In ch. X of Part Two she withdraws behind the screen, sitting on the floor, and when he taps lightly on the screen she gets up, puts on her fur coat, looks at him heavily and says goodbye. He opens her hand and puts the money in it.
Но я не хочу лгать и потому говорю прямо, что я разжал ей руку и положил в нее… со злости, But I do not want to lie, and so I say plainly that I opened her hand and put it into hers... out of spite.
She leaves and leaves the banknote on the table. The narrator says he could not have expected this from her, runs after her, stops at a corner of the deserted street and turns back. What she feels afterwards is not told.
Themes Embodied
Liza is the point where the text takes from the underground man the account he makes of everything. She is the only person he cannot read through a stock of models: Pushkin's Silvio and Lermontov's Masquerade serve the slap, the model of redemption that the epigraph from Nekrasov evokes serves the sermon, but the embrace, the letter and the banknote do not come from a book. For that reason she concentrates Love, because it is with her that what he calls love shows itself as moral superiority; Pride, because the shame of being seen by her decides every gesture of ch. IX of Part Two; and Suffering, because hers, silent and physical, contrasts with what he says he feels and with what he arranges to feel.
What she wants, as far as she shows, is to pay her debt and leave, and to be seen as the letter sees her. What she fears is mockery: according to the narrator, the hesitation of ch. VI of Part Two is the defense of someone who has been touched and hides behind mockery. What she knows, from the first picture of marriage, is that he speaks in books, and this she says to his face. Where she is mistaken, if she is: in coming to his house expecting the savior he had sketched, as he shouts at her, although the text brings this only through his voice. Two readings of the embrace: an exact understanding of his unhappiness, as the narrator asserts, or the explanation that suits him, in which he is the unhappy one and she is the one who understands, and which leaves him free for the possession that follows.
Divergent Readings
Joseph Frank reads the episode as a parody of a scene in What Is to Be Done?, by Chernyshevsky, in which a hero redeems a prostitute with angelic ease, and sees in Liza's final gesture, leaving the money and going out in silence, the only intact dignity in the book.
The parody shows in the reversal: the redeemer is the one who ends up embraced and who cannot bear the exchange of roles. The text also leaves a less polemical reading: Liza is the only one who acts without a plan, and that is what the narrator cannot forgive.
Liza has an equivalent in Sonia in Crime and Punishment, and the difference lies in the ending: Sonia goes to Siberia after Raskolnikov, and Liza vanishes, without the narrator knowing of her.
Никогда больше я не встречал Лизу и ничего не слыхал о ней, I never met Liza again and heard nothing about her.
Relationships
- The underground man: the one who seeks her without knowing what he is looking for, humiliates her out of shame and loses her without ever knowing what became of her (ch. VI of Part Two, ch. VII of Part Two, ch. IX of Part Two, ch. X of Part Two).
- Apollon: the servant who shows her into the room and watches them with irony, and whose entrance with the tea frightens her (ch. VIII of Part Two, ch. IX of Part Two).
- Zverkov: the officer whom the narrator went to beat and did not find, the reason he stopped there that night and why she paid for it (ch. IX of Part Two).