Zverkov

Who He Is

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 Two). At school he was a handsome, lively boy whom everyone liked; he studied poorly and left school well thanks to patronage; in his last year he inherited two hundred souls and began to boast. The narrator describes him as vulgar in the highest degree and, at the same time, as a good fellow, even when he was boasting, and says that even those who called themselves full of honor made much of him, not for gain, but because he was a favorite of nature.

The surname comes from zvier, the Russian word for wild animal.

Everything known of him passes through the narrator, who has hated him since school. He hates the confident voice, the admiration for his own jokes, the handsome and foolish face (for which, he says, he would gladly trade his own clever one) and the manners of an officer of the 1840s. That is why Zverkov reaches the reader seen from below, and what he thinks, wants or fears appears only in gestures.

Trajectory

In ch. III of Part Two, before he appears, school sets the measure of the relationship. Once the narrator, who was silent, went on the attack when he boasted that no peasant woman in his village would escape the lord's right; the others applauded the bravado, and he attacked for that reason; he won the argument, but Zverkov laughed and kept the laugh on his side, without rancor, and afterward beat him several times in passing. Years later he stopped greeting him in the street, and the narrator supposes it was out of fear of compromising himself. He sees him once at the theater, in braided uniform, bowing before the daughters of an old general, and in the years that follow he watches him decline, swell and grow fat, to the point of foreseeing that by thirty he will be flabby. This is the man whom the narrator, inviting himself to the dinner, hopes to impress along with the others.

In ch. IV of Part Two Zverkov enters ahead of the others, greets him with a cautious courtesy, almost a general's, says with a lisp and drawn-out vowels that he is surprised by the narrator's wish to join them, and questions him about where he works, why he left his post, how much he earns. The narrator expected jokes and receives patronage, and the hypothesis that Zverkov considers himself incomparably superior without wishing to offend suffocates him more than an insult would. Zverkov finds the salary modest, notes that he has grown thinner and changed, looks at his clothes, silences the others when the argument heats up, and tells how he nearly married the day before, a story full of generals and chamberlains, in which he occupies almost first place. Later, on the sofa, he leans back with one foot on the little table and fulfills what Ferfichkin had predicted: he puts three of his own bottles on the table.

In the toast, the narrator makes an unplanned speech against phrases and phrase-makers, and ends by drinking to Zverkov's health. Zverkov stands up, bows, thanks him, pale with offense, restrains the others, and says he himself will know how to show how much he appreciates those words. Later, when the narrator asks his pardon and his friendship, after three hours of walking around the room, Zverkov answers with drawn-out syllables:

Before leaving, he shouts that Olympia is his, and the others laugh. After that he disappears from the book. In ch. V of Part Two the narrator runs after him to slap him, imagines him on the sofa with Olympia, and does not find him. Zverkov returns only as a subject: in ch. VIII of Part Two the narrator wants to save his reputation before him, and in ch. IX of Part Two he confesses to Liza that he went to the house to hit an officer and took out on her what he could not take out on him.

Themes Embodied

Zverkov is the offense that does not register. The narrator's Pride needs someone who feels struck, and Zverkov, on the only occasion when he seems struck, returns it with courtesy and then denies that any offense is possible. In this way he takes from the narrator what he had come to seek, a quarrel in which they would both exist. In Part Two, moreover, the world does not respond to the argument: the narrator has lucidity and loses, and Zverkov, whom he takes for a fool, closes the evening without having demonstrated anything.

The text does not give Zverkov's interior, and his gestures show a man who wants to be the center of a farewell with Olympia, wine and stories, and who welcomes the intruder with the generosity of someone who does not see him as a rival. What he knows, as far as one can see, is how to occupy the place: the others listen to him almost with veneration. Two readings of the final sentence: calculated contempt, which denies the narrator the dignity of being offended by him, or the naivety of someone who truly does not register him and speaks the truth. The narrator does not decide, and Part Two depends on that doubt.

Relationships

• The underground man: the colleague he hates for his beauty and luck, with whom he joins for the dinner and whom he decides to slap (ch. III of Part Two, ch. IV of Part Two, ch. V of Part Two).
• Simonov, Trudolyubov and Ferfichkin: those who organize the dinner, listen to him with admiration and surround him (ch. III of Part Two, ch. IV of Part Two).
• Liza: the girl who ends up receiving, because he was not at the house, the humiliation the narrator wanted to take out on him (ch. IX of Part Two).