Part 2, Chapter 3 — Simonov's flat
He drops in on Simonov and finds two old schoolmates planning a farewell dinner for Zverkov. He invites himself to the dinner against everyone's wishes, including his own.
Summary
The Underground Man, driven by the same restless dissatisfaction that periodically pushes him out of his dreaming and into society, drops in on Simonov — one of the few schoolmates whose address he still knows. Simonov is decent, indifferent, faintly exasperated by him; the Underground Man owes him a small unpaid debt and is therefore awkward as well as unwelcome. He finds Simonov in the middle of a conversation with two other former schoolmates: Ferfichkin, the small malicious one, and Trudolyubov, a tall reserved young army officer.
They are planning a farewell dinner. Zverkov — another schoolmate, an officer in the army — has been posted to a distant province in the Caucasus, and they are organising a send-off at a tavern called the Hôtel de Paris. The Underground Man hears the name Zverkov and the old hatred flares up. Zverkov, all through school, was the boy he despised most precisely because Zverkov did not notice. Handsome, athletic, popular, friendly to him in the way a successful boy is friendly to a poor one — which the Underground Man understood and could not forgive.
Without quite deciding to, the Underground Man asks if he can join the dinner. The other three try, politely, to put him off. He insists. He commits himself further the more they resist; he names a sum he will contribute; he settles the time and the place. By the time he leaves Simonov's flat, he is a member of the dinner party. He goes home and immediately understands what he has done. He cannot afford the seven roubles he has agreed to contribute. He has booked himself, for tomorrow, into an evening that can only end in humiliation. He spends the night going over imagined versions in which he triumphs.
- Part 1, Ch. 1The novel opens with the voice. A forty-year-old retired collegiate assessor, alone in a basement flat in Petersburg, addressing...
- Part 1, Ch. 2He could not even become an insect, he says. The reason is that consciousness past a certain degree is itself an illness — a real...
- Part 1, Ch. 3Two types of human being. The "direct" man — the bull — charges at the wrong done to him until a wall stops him. The man of acute...
- Part 1, Ch. 4An imagined reader laughs at him. Next he will be finding enjoyment in toothache! He answers seriously: yes, even in toothache...
- Part 1, Ch. 5A single long paragraph. Yes, he says, a man can take pleasure in his own degradation; he has done it for years, and is not, here...
- Part 1, Ch. 6If only he had done nothing simply out of laziness! "Sluggard" would have been a calling, a quality, a positive trait — something...
- Part 1, Ch. 7Who first announced, the Underground Man asks, that man does nasty things only because he doesn't know his own interests? The...
- Part 1, Ch. 8Science, his reader says, will eventually prove that free will is an illusion — that desire follows from antecedent causes the way...
- Part 1, Ch. 9The ant has finished his anthill, and that is why he is still an ant. Man — mercifully — prefers the process of building to the...
- Part 1, Ch. 10You believe in a Crystal Palace, he tells the reader — a palace at which one cannot put out one's tongue or make a long nose on...
- Part 1, Ch. 11Better to do nothing! Long live underground! He cries the conclusion — and, in the same chapter, takes it back. He does not...
- Part 2, Ch. 1Sixteen years earlier. The Underground Man is twenty-four, gloomy, ill-regulated, already as solitary as a savage. He hates the...
- Part 2, Ch. 2One night in a billiard room a tall officer in uniform brushes the Underground Man aside without noticing him. The Underground Man...
- Part 2, Ch. 3He drops in on Simonov to find two more schoolmates — Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov — planning a farewell dinner for Zverkov, a...
- Part 2, Ch. 4He arrives at the Hôtel de Paris an hour early; he has misread the time. The others appear at six, friendly to Zverkov and...
- Part 2, Ch. 5He runs out of the tavern. "So this is it, this is it at last — contact with real life," he mutters at himself, half-mocking, half...
- Part 2, Ch. 6Upstairs with Liza. He sleeps, wakes in the dark to a wheezing clock striking two, begins to talk. A long speech — half borrowed...
- Part 2, Ch. 7He walks home with her address in his pocket. By morning the sincere speech of the night before has become a trap. He has invited...
- Part 2, Ch. 8The long war with Apollon over a few rubles in unpaid wages reaches its loudest point. The Underground Man, in his dressing gown...
- Part 2, Ch. 9She comes in. He turns on her. The speech in the brothel was a lie, he tells her; he was amusing himself with her tears; she was a...
- Part 2, Ch. 10As she leaves he presses a crumpled five-rouble note into her hand, "from spite," to convert what she has just done into a...