In Saint Petersburg, in the corner where he has lived since he retired, a forty-year-old former clerk, nameless, writes for readers he invents and tells two things: what he thinks and what he did. Part One is what he thinks, a monologue against reason, the calculation of interest and the crystal palace, without plot. Part Two is what he did at twenty-four, a memory that the wet snow of the day he is writing brings back to him: the bump into an officer on Nevsky Prospect, the farewell dinner for a colleague and the night with a young woman from a brothel, Liza. The arc runs from the refusal to treat his liver to the five-ruble note left on a table, and ends with the editor saying that the author's memoirs do not end there, but that one can stop there.
Part One: The Underground
Sick, spiteful and unattractive, the narrator says he is not being treated out of anger, then immediately denies that he is spiteful and defines himself by what he has not managed to be: neither wicked, nor good, nor a hero, nor an insect. He presents himself as a collegiate assessor who inherited six thousand rubles and retired on the spot (ch. I). He explains that he did not manage even to be an insect because he has too much consciousness, which he calls a disease, and that the pleasure came from seeing his own humiliation with clarity, returning at night to his corner after ugly acts (ch. II). He sets the man of action, who yields to the stone wall and is reassured, against the man of hypertrophied consciousness, who considers himself a mouse and slips into the underground; the wall is mathematics, and he neither breaks it with his forehead nor makes peace with it (ch. III). He compares his anger to the moaning of someone with a toothache, which brings a pleasure and a message: if I do not sleep, neither do you (ch. IV). He says he invented offenses and loves out of boredom, and that consciousness undoes every revenge, because each cause drags behind it another, earlier one; the man of action takes the proximate cause for the first and acts, while he stays in inertia (ch. V). He dreams of being a respectable idler, with a title, a career and a toast to the beautiful and the sublime, a reverie he himself will call golden dreams (ch. VI). He attacks the idea that it would be enough to show man his advantage to make him good: there are millions of facts to the contrary, and the statisticians' list leaves out the most advantageous advantage, independent will, whatever it costs (ch. VII). He answers the interlocutor who declares free will dissected by science: if there is a formula for willing, man will be an organ pin, and for that reason he will commit an absurd act only to prove that he is a man and not a piano key (ch. VIII). He says that man perhaps loves building the edifice but not living in it, that twice two is four is no longer life but the beginning of death, and that suffering, which does not fit in the crystal palace, is the sole cause of consciousness (ch. IX). He refuses the crystal edifice in which one cannot stick out one's tongue on the sly, would accept the chicken coop against the rain but would not call it a palace, and asks to be shown something better; this is the chapter that, according to Dostoevsky's letter to his brother, the censors cut (ch. X). He concludes that the best course is conscious inertia, then takes back what he said, admits that he invented the accuser's lines and explains that he writes for himself, to rid himself of a memory; the trigger is the wet snow falling that day, and from it the Second Part is born (ch. XI).
Part Two: Apropos of Wet Snow
At twenty-four, alone and ashamed, the narrator enters a billiard room hoping to be thrown out the window, and is only moved out of the way by an officer who does not see him. He spends years hating him, sells the raccoon collar of his overcoat to buy a beaver one, borrows the rest from the section chief Setochkin, and after several withdrawals bumps into the officer on Nevsky with his eyes shut and goes home avenged, singing Italian arias (ch. I). Between one spell of excess and another, he takes refuge for three months in dreams of heroism, hero or mud, with no middle ground; when he can no longer bear the solitude, he visits Setochkin and then, one Thursday, his former schoolmate Simonov, knowing he is unwanted (ch. II). At Simonov's he finds Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov, who treat him like the most common of flies while they arrange Zverkov's farewell dinner; he invites himself abruptly, they do not want him, and he knows he will go on purpose, the more discourteously he goes. On the eve he recalls school and the only friend he ever had, and sets off for dinner without looking at Apollon, the servant, who is waiting for his wages (ch. III). He arrives at five, the dinner was at six and no one told him; Zverkov treats him with condescension, he humiliates himself in a clumsy toast, challenges Ferfichkin to a duel that provokes roars of laughter, and spends three hours walking from table to stove; he asks everyone's pardon, hears from Zverkov that he can never offend him, wrangles six rubles out of Simonov, and decides to slap Zverkov (ch. IV). In a sledge, under the wet snow, he rehearses the slap, the duel and the final pardon, and weeps, knowing the script comes from Silvio and from Masquerade; he knocks at the door of a dressmaker's shop that serves as a brothel, finds the room empty, his colleagues having already left, and feels relief. Liza enters, still nameless, and he is pleased to seem repulsive to her (ch. V). He wakes beside her at two in the morning, asks her name, and learns that she is twenty, from Riga, and has been there two weeks; he tells her about graves full of water that he claims to have seen and never saw, paints the future that awaits her and, describing a marriage for love, hears that he talks as if from a book (ch. VI). Wounded, he answers with the longest sermon in the part: the path from house to house down to a cellar, death from consumption, the grave in mud and the name that vanishes from the face of the earth; he knows he speaks in a bookish way and counts on it. Liza weeps face down on the pillow; he gives her his address, and as he reaches the door she proudly shows him a letter from a medical student; he reads it, says nothing, and leaves (ch. VII). The next morning he tries to forget her, pays his debt to Simonov with money from Setochkin and a gentleman's letter, and spends days dreading that she will come; he quarrels with Apollon, whose wages he withholds just to prove he can, to the point of sending for the police inspector against himself, and it is then that Liza enters and the clock strikes seven (ch. VIII). In his dressing gown, ashamed, he sends Apollon for tea, weeps with rage and, when Liza makes as if to leave, shouts at her that she laughed at him the other night, that he went to her house to hit a colleague and that she was only someone on whom to vent; Liza understands he is unhappy and embraces him, and he, lifting his head, feels a desire to dominate her, almost a revenge (ch. IX). Once the embrace is over, he wants the girl gone; when she leaves, he puts a banknote into her hand, out of spite, and she leaves it on the table; he runs after her through the snowy street, stops at the corner and comes back, and never sees her again. He closes by saying that he carried to the extreme what readers do not carry even halfway, and the editor adds that the memoirs of the paradoxicalist do not end there, but that here one may stop (ch. X).