Part 2, Chapter 6 — the speech in the brothel

The longest chapter in Part 2. It opens in darkness — somewhere behind a screen a clock began wheezing as though someone were strangling it; after an unnaturally prolonged wheezing there followed a shrill, nasty chime. It struck two. The Underground Man wakes in a small room he barely remembers entering, in a bed beside a young woman he barely remembers meeting. The dinner is far away; the candle is going out. He lies there in the half-light. He does not want to leave. He does not want to stay.

He begins to talk. He is twenty-four; she is twenty; she is from Riga; she has been working at the brothel a few months; her mother does not know where she is. The Underground Man, recovering his voice, begins to deliver — at first awkwardly, then with growing fluency — a long speech about her situation. He describes, with cruel and specific tenderness, the way her life will go from here. He tells her about the wife and family she might have had. He describes the way women in her position grow ill, are turned out, die in poor rooms a few years from now. He half-quotes Nekrasov; he half-invents.

Liza listens. The narration cuts in occasionally with the Underground Man's retrospective awareness that he was working himself up — carried away, in part, by his own skill. But the speech is not, in its content, untrue. He is saying things to her that no one else has ever said. She begins to cry. He keeps going. By the end she is weeping in earnest; something has cracked open. As he prepares to leave, she insists on giving him her address. She writes it on a scrap of paper. He kisses her hand and walks down the stairs into the wet snow.