What It Is
Wet snow is the weather of Part Two and gives it its name. Halfway between snow and water, yellow and murky, it is the precipitation that the underground man sees falling at the end of Part One and that decides what he is going to tell: an old memory that grips him and that he resolves to put on paper as a narrative about it. Within the memory, the snow accompanies each step of the Liza episode and mingles, in his speech, with mud, the funeral, and the grave.
Where It Appears
In chapter XI of Part One it provides the trigger and the title.
Нынче идет снег, почти мокрый, желтый, мутный. [...] Итак, пусть это будет повесть по поводу мокрого снега., Today snow is falling, almost wet, yellow, murky. [...] So then let it be a narrative apropos of wet snow.
In chapter III of Part Two, on the day of the dinner, the narrator looks out the window at the murky haze of the thick falling snow and asks that the day pass quickly. In chapter V of Part Two it falls on the hired coachman and on the coughing mare, warm and wet; the deserted lamps blink in the mist like torches at a funeral, and the snow melts under the narrator's cravat, which he does not cover.
In chapter VI of Part Two he uses it against Liza. He describes to her a burial in wet snow, gravediggers cursing, water in the grave, and the text adds, in parentheses, the confession that he never saw it and had only heard it told:
Ни одного разу я не видал, да и на Волковом никогда не был, а только слышал, как рассказывали, I never once saw such a thing, and I was never at Volkovo, I had only heard it told.
In chapter VII of Part Two the sermon returns to the burial: the grave with mud and wet snow, the coffin lowered to the mumbling of the gravediggers, the wet blue clay, and the phrase that erases her name from the face of the earth.
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!
On leaving, despite the wet snow that keeps falling in flakes, he walks back, exhausted. In chapter X of Part Two, after Liza goes away, the snow falls almost vertically, spreads a cushion over the sidewalk and the deserted street, and he, at the corner, looks at the murky mist and asks himself what he should rush to do.
What It Means
Wet snow is neither one thing nor the other: it does not freeze, it does not drain away, it dirties. It serves as the weather for an episode without resolution, in which nothing manages to take hold. The narrator links it to burial twice, in the sleigh scene and in the grave he describes to Liza, so that the weather of the street enters the sermon: the grave with water that he says he saw is made of the time he is in. Two readings: the pretext is banal, a snow that brings back the memory, and the title is only an opening remark; or the snow is the state of the whole episode, the thaw that never reaches the concrete.
There is also the contrast with the epigraph from Nekrasov, which opens chapter I of Part Two and returns in chapter IX of Part Two: the poem speaks of the burning word that tears a fallen woman from vice, and the narrative that the underground man tells, apropos of the snow, is that of someone who tries the burning word and ends up in wet snow. The irony lies in the title putting the banality of the weather in place of the ardor of the verse.
Relationships
- Themes: Suffering, Love.
- Characters: the underground man, Liza.