Notes from Underground — chapter by chapter
All 21 chapters — eleven in the underground, ten in the wet snow.
The book has two unequal parts. Part 1, "Underground" — eleven chapters — is the monologue: the Underground Man at forty, addressing the reader, making and unmaking his arguments about consciousness, free will, and the Crystal Palace. Part 2, "Apropos of the Wet Snow" — ten chapters — is the memoir of his twenties: the officer he plotted against for two years, the school dinner he forced his way into, the prostitute Liza he met that night and ruined the next afternoon. The Part 2 memoir is what the Part 1 argument is the residue of.
Part 1 · Underground
Eleven chapters of monologue. The Crystal Palace, the spite, the hyperconscious self.
Part 1, Ch. 1
The novel opens with the voice. A forty-year-old retired collegiate assessor, alone in a basement flat in Petersburg, addressing the reader directly. "I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think there's something wrong with my liver." Within a page he has retracted half of what he said. The voice is the book, and the form of the book is the form of the man — a sequence of claims he cannot finish making, in a corner he cannot leave.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 2
He could not even become an insect, he says. The reason is that consciousness past a certain degree is itself an illness — a real, full-blown illness, not a metaphor. Half of what an ordinary man has would be enough; he has more, and the surplus has destroyed him. Every refinement of feeling is doubled by its opposite; he is most ashamed of himself precisely when he is most aware of what he should be. The chapter is the philosophical seed of the rest of Part 1.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 3
Two 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 consciousness sees the wall first, reasons himself out of charging, and sits down in front of it. The Underground Man envies the bull spectacularly, "to the last drop of his bile," and despises him at the same time. He cannot become him. The two species are incompatible, and the rest of the book is the consequence of the incompatibility.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 4
An imagined reader laughs at him. Next he will be finding enjoyment in toothache! He answers seriously: yes, even in toothache there is enjoyment, and he had a toothache for a whole month and knows. The moans of the sufferer are not candid moans; they are malignant ones, performed. The pleasure is in the performance, and in the family in the next room being driven to fury by the sound he refuses to stop making. The chapter is a miniature of every later catastrophe in the book.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 5
A 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, speaking from sentimental remorse. As a child he could never bring himself to ask forgiveness, not from inability but from being too capable of the performance. He used to engineer trouble in cases where he was not even to blame, just for the texture of feeling guilty. The vanity is the cleanest thing about him, and the chapter offers it without apology.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 6
If only he had done nothing simply out of laziness! "Sluggard" would have been a calling, a quality, a positive trait — something to say about him in a single word. He would have grown a comfortable belly and a treble chin and a ruby nose, and walked the streets of Petersburg a recognisable type, pointed to as a real and solid asset. He cannot even manage that. The affliction is precisely that no single word will hold him; the consciousness has hollowed every label out.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 7
Who first announced, the Underground Man asks, that man does nasty things only because he doesn't know his own interests? The chapter is the demolition of that idea — the most fashionable belief in Russia in 1864, gospel in the radical circles around Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. Man, the Underground Man insists, will choose against his interest on purpose, to prove that he is not a piano key whose notes can be predicted by any formula. The Crystal Palace is a mistake.
Appears: The Underground Man · The Crystal Palace
Part 1, Ch. 8
Science, his reader says, will eventually prove that free will is an illusion — that desire follows from antecedent causes the way a piano key sounds when a hand strikes it. Maybe so, the Underground Man answers. But the moment that proof is in, man will go mad on purpose — smash up the formula, ruin himself, choose pain over comfort — just to show he is not a piano key whose notes can be played by a hand outside him.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 9
The ant has finished his anthill, and that is why he is still an ant. Man — mercifully — prefers the process of building to the building finished. The chess player loves the game, not the result. Perhaps the only goal mankind is striving toward, the Underground Man writes, is the process of striving itself: that is, life, and not the goal. Two times two equals four, he says, is "the beginning of death." The unfinishedness is the whole point.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 1, Ch. 10
You 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 the sly. That is exactly why he is afraid of it. He would rather have a hen-house, and rain, and the right to disrespect both than a palace whose perfection is beyond reproach. The objection is not to the construction. The objection is to a perfection that forecloses the freedom to disrespect it.
Appears: The Underground Man · The Crystal Palace
Part 1, Ch. 11
Better to do nothing! Long live underground! He cries the conclusion — and, in the same chapter, takes it back. He does not believe a word of what he has just written. He does believe it, perhaps. He is lying like a cobbler. The voice cannot stop because it cannot trust any version of itself. The chapter ends with a transition: there is one episode, sixteen years ago, that the wet snow has put him in mind of, and Part 2 will be the memoir of it.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 2 · Apropos of the Wet Snow
Ten chapters of memoir. The officer, the dinner, the brothel, Liza, the morning after.
Part 2, Ch. 1
Sixteen years earlier. The Underground Man is twenty-four, gloomy, ill-regulated, already as solitary as a savage. He hates the men in his office and is afraid of them. The dreaming has begun — long fantasies of glory and noble action that allow him to avoid the actual life going on around him. The chapter is the prologue to the rest of Part 2: the materials of which the catastrophes about to happen — the officer, the dinner, Liza — are made.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 2, Ch. 2
One night in a billiard room a tall officer in uniform brushes the Underground Man aside without noticing him. The Underground Man spends the next two years plotting revenge — borrowing money for a respectable overcoat with a beaver collar, learning the officer's habits, finally engineering a head-on collision on the Nevsky in which he refuses to step aside. The officer doesn't notice the collision either. The two years of preparation, like every retaliation in the book, are entirely interior.
Appears: The Underground Man · The officer · Anton Antonovitch
Part 2, Ch. 3
He drops in on Simonov to find two more schoolmates — Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov — planning a farewell dinner for Zverkov, a former classmate the Underground Man cannot stand. The others don't want him at the dinner. He insists on coming, and the more they resist the more committed he becomes. They agree, grudgingly. He has just booked his own humiliation for tomorrow night, and at his own door, on the way home, he begins to understand what he has done.
Appears: The Underground Man · Simonov · Ferfichkin · Trudolyubov · Zverkov
Part 2, Ch. 4
He arrives at the Hôtel de Paris an hour early; he has misread the time. The others appear at six, friendly to Zverkov and indifferent to him. He drinks too much. He delivers a sneering speech that nobody answers. He challenges Ferfichkin to a duel; Ferfichkin laughs. He paces around the table while the others ignore him. Eventually they decide to go on to a brothel. He borrows six roubles from Simonov and follows them out into the wet snow.
Appears: The Underground Man · Zverkov · Simonov · Ferfichkin · Trudolyubov
Part 2, Ch. 5
He 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 in earnest. He flags a sledge, hands the driver the six roubles he just borrowed, rides through falling snow toward a brothel he isn't sure how to find. Now everything is lost, he tells himself. The performance and the panic are both real, and the chapter ends with a young woman watching him in a doorway.
Appears: The Underground Man
Part 2, Ch. 6
Upstairs with Liza. He sleeps, wakes in the dark to a wheezing clock striking two, begins to talk. A long speech — half borrowed from sentimental novels, half terribly sincere — about the family she has lost, the life she is in, the way she will end if she stays. She listens. She begins to cry. She believes him. As he leaves at dawn she gives him her address on a scrap of paper. He kisses her hand and walks home in the wet snow.
Appears: The Underground Man · Liza
Part 2, Ch. 7
He walks home with her address in his pocket. By morning the sincere speech of the night before has become a trap. He has invited a young woman into his actual flat, his actual servant, his actual money problems, his actual dressing gown. He spends three days in his rooms unable to decide whether to dread her arrival or her not arriving more, running through speeches he will give her if she comes and speeches he will give himself if she does not.
Appears: The Underground Man · Apollon
Part 2, Ch. 8
The long war with Apollon over a few rubles in unpaid wages reaches its loudest point. The Underground Man, in his dressing gown, screams at his elderly servant in the parlour. Apollon, immobile, will not respond. The shouting is at its peak when the bell rings. He goes to the door without thinking, with the dressing gown half-tied. Liza is standing on the landing, in a plain dress and shawl. She has caught him at the worst possible moment of his actual life.
Appears: The Underground Man · Apollon · Anton Antonovitch · Liza
Part 2, Ch. 9
She 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 fool to believe him; he had been performing moral superiority for himself with her as the audience. He keeps at it for pages. Liza sees through him and crosses the room to embrace him. He cannot bear the kindness. He sleeps with her instead — to corrupt what she has just done into a thing he can manage.
Appears: The Underground Man · Liza · Apollon
Part 2, Ch. 10
As she leaves he presses a crumpled five-rouble note into her hand, "from spite," to convert what she has just done into a transaction he can survive. She throws the note onto the table on her way out. He runs after her into the wet snow, calls her name on the stairs, runs to the crossroads two hundred paces away, stops. He never sees her again. The Underground Man tries to stop writing. The editor's bracketed note closes the book on his behalf.
Appears: The Underground Man · Liza · Apollon
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