Wet snow is the weather and the title of Part Two: a precipitation between snow and water, yellow and murky, which neither freezes nor runs off, only dirties, and which the underground man chooses as a pretext for recounting the memory that will not leave him.
At the end of Part One, he writes: "Today snow is falling, almost wet, yellow, murky." The snow brings back an old episode to his memory, and he decides: "Then let it be a story apropos of wet snow." The title of Part Two, "Apropos of Wet Snow," is born from this phrase.
Within the memory, the snow accompanies each step: it falls on the coachman and on the mare that coughs, melts under the narrator's necktie on the way to Liza's house, and stretches almost vertically over the empty street after she leaves. It also enters his speech. To frighten Liza, he describes a burial in wet snow, gravediggers cursing and water in the grave, and lets slip, in parentheses, that he never saw such a thing: "I never saw such a thing, and I had never been to Volkovo, I had only heard about it."
The text leaves two readings open: the snow is a banal pretext for beginning to tell a story, or it is the first sign that the memory has more power over him than the argument does.