Before the Underground Man can leave, however, Liza blushes and
runs off to get something that she wants to show him. She returns
joyfully with a love letter that she has received from a medical
student whom she met at a dance. The student, who does not know
she is a prostitute, professes his love in the letter with genuine emotion
and respect. The Underground Man realizes that the letter is Liza’s
greatest treasure: she wants to show him that she has known honest,
sincere love, and that she is not simply a degraded prostitute.
The Underground Man leaves without saying anything, and walks home
exhausted and perplexed. However, the “nasty truth” is starting
to become clear.
Analysis: Chapters VI–VII
The Underground Man’s speeches in these chapters provide
another example of his inability to communicate—or to even conceive
of any emotion other than bitterness—without using literature as
a reference. Liza is quite right to say that the Underground Man’s
speech sounds as though it comes from a book. After his initial
attempts to make casual conversation fail, the Underground Man falls
back upon a popular nineteenth-century literary convention—the idea
of the redeemed prostitute. Scenes in which a noble, almost fatherly male
figure convinces a young, beautiful prostitute of the error of her
ways abound in European writing. Indeed, the epigraph to “Apropos
of the Wet Snow” is a selection from the Russian liberal poet Nikolai
Nekrasov, written from the perspective of a man who has rescued
a prostitute’s “fallen soul” from “error’s darkness” with “a word
both sure and ardent.” In the poem, the prostitute eventually becomes
the man’s wife. The scene in Notes from Underground draws
much of its language and imagery from this tradition, and it is
almost certainly a parody of a very similar scene in Chernyshevsky’s
novel What Is to Be Done?
Interestingly, the Underground Man does not, for once,
recognize the literary tradition behind his mission. He feels that
he is manipulating Liza with his sentimental language, and he both enjoys
and feels ashamed of the feeling of power this manipulation gives
him. He does not, however, appear to recognize the sources of his
story as readily as he recognizes other literary influences to which
he refers early in the novel. Instead, the Underground Man tells
us in retrospect, he genuinely felt the things he was saying, even as
he was aware that he was manipulating Liza. He feels for Liza and longs
for genuine human contact, but his speech has little to do with his
personal experience. He says that he loves children, but if so,
he only loves them in theory. He has probably never witnessed a domestic
scene like the one he describes, nor has he known anyone outside
of novels in any kind of satisfying romantic relationship.
When the Underground Man describes the lonely life that
he believes Liza will lead and her solitary death, he could be describing his
own life. He has fewer friends than Liza does, and we sense that it
is likely no one will ever mourn his death, not even in a tavern
over a few beers. It is telling, too, that his initial description
of the prostitute’s death involves a coffin being removed from a
basement. A more accurate translation for the title of Notes
from Underground might be “Memoirs from a Cellar.”
The Underground Man may not be consciously aware of the
similarities between the marginalized life of a prostitute and his
own alienation from the world, but these similarities may account
for his intense desire to prove that he is morally and intellectually
superior to Liza. However, the greatest difference between them
is that the Underground Man, however much he occasionally waxes
sentimental, cannot cope with displays of genuine emotion. As he
has suggested before, he has little or no experience with “real
life,” and his confrontations with it send him running back to the
underground for safety. After delivering his long and impassioned
speech, delighted that his words seemed to be affecting Liza, the
Underground Man is horrified by her passionate sobbing. He has some contempt
for Liza’s love letter, yet he pities her for the fact that she feels
she needs to prove to him that she is worthy of noble love. The Underground
Man’s contempt could easily be read as jealousy—there is no one
to love him, and he has no treasured tokens to prove that he is
lovable at all.
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