Notes from Underground — who's who

The narrator of both parts. Forty years old in Part 1, twenty-four in Part 2. A retired collegiate assessor living alone on six thousand roubles inherited from a distant relative. Educated, well-read, contemptuous of almost everyone he describes. Unable to act cleanly on any of his impulses because he is too aware of all of them at once. Spite, for him, is not an emotion but a category of choice — the form free will takes when consciousness has hollowed out every other ground for action. Dostoevsky's first full-length self-portrait of the type that recurs in every later novel — Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov are all extensions of the figure first drawn here.

The Underground Man's manservant — older than him, more dignified than him, and deeply contemptuous of him. Performs his duties on his own schedule with the manner of a man doing his master a personal favour. The Underground Man owes him several rubles in unpaid wages and the long, petty war over the wages is the novel's running dark comedy. Liza walks into the flat on the day this war is loudest. Apollon is the one person in the book the Underground Man cannot frighten or impress.

Twenty years old, from Riga, working at a Petersburg brothel a few months when the Underground Man meets her there after Zverkov's dinner. Quiet, watchful, not yet hardened by the work. Believes the Underground Man's sentimental speech about the life she could still leave; comes to his flat three days later carrying his address on a scrap of paper. Sees through his subsequent cruelty; embraces him. Walks out after he sleeps with her and presses a five-rouble note into her hand. Throws the note onto the table on her way out. The Underground Man runs after her in the snow and does not find her. He never sees her again. She is the moral center of the book and the only person in it who does anything clean.

The honoree of the farewell dinner in Part 2. A former schoolmate of the Underground Man's — handsome, confident, well-liked, pleased with his own life in a way the Underground Man is not. Lisps a little. Speaks down to the Underground Man at the dinner without quite meaning to be cruel, which is itself the cruelty. The dinner he is the centre of is the social humiliation around which Part 2 turns; the brothel that follows is where his evening ends and the Underground Man's begins.

Another former schoolmate, the one organising the Zverkov dinner. Decent, indifferent, faintly exasperated by the Underground Man, who owes him a small unpaid debt and has dropped in unannounced. Bullies into letting him attend the dinner; lends him a further six roubles to follow the party afterwards to the brothel without making an issue of the previous loan. Not actively unkind. Active unkindness would be easier for the Underground Man to bear; the indifference is what he cannot get a grip on.

A "Russianized German," small, quick to mock, with the face of a monkey by the Underground Man's own description, a sensitive feeling of personal honour combined (the Underground Man insists) with the heart of a wretched little coward. A bitter enemy from the lower forms at school. Provokes the Underground Man at the dinner; the Underground Man challenges him to a duel that will not happen. Ferfichkin is the type the Underground Man cannot stop responding to and cannot stop hating himself for responding to.

A tall, distant, well-bred young officer and a distant relative of Zverkov's. At the dinner he tries, briefly, to be polite to the Underground Man and then, like the others, gives up and lets the silence stand. Mostly silent through the long evening. Represents, like Simonov, the ordinary social world that the Underground Man cannot enter and cannot ignore — a register of competent, undramatic life that Part 2 is at pains to make legible from the outside before showing how it looks to the man who cannot live in it.

Tall, healthy, in the uniform of an officer of the line. Brushes the Underground Man aside in a billiard room one night without registering that he has done so. The Underground Man spends the next two years plotting an elaborate retaliation — borrowing money for a respectable overcoat and beaver collar, learning the officer's habits, finally engineering a head-on collision on the Nevsky in which the Underground Man does not yield. The officer does not notice. The two years of preparation are one of the novel's first long demonstrations that the Underground Man's enemies live entirely in his head.

The Underground Man's superior at the office and his only standing social connection. Plays cards on Tuesday evenings with a small circle of relatives and minor officials. The Underground Man visits him every few months when the dreaming has become unbearable, sits silently for an hour, and goes home. Anton Antonovitch is decent, dull, and entirely uninterested in the Underground Man's inner life. He lends him fifteen roubles when asked. He is the one ordinary tie the Underground Man has not yet succeeded in destroying.

Not a person. The image, drawn from the iron-and-glass building erected in London for the 1851 Great Exhibition and adopted by Nikolai Chernyshevsky in his 1863 utopian novel What Is to Be Done?, of a future society arranged so completely around rational self-interest that human misery has been argued away. Part 1 of the novel is the long demolition of this image. The Underground Man does not believe a palace can be built that he could not, on principle, want to smash from the inside.