The Moment of Truth Arrives — Notes from Underground

The chapter opens on the exact scene he had imagined in a fit of depression, and it is worse. He stands before Liza crushed, crestfallen, revoltingly confused, trying to wrap himself in the skirts of his ragged dressing-gown. After standing over them for a couple of minutes, Apollon withdraws. She is overwhelmed with confusion too, more than he expected, and it makes it worse, because she ought to have tried not to notice. Instead she gazes at him open-eyed, naïvely expectant. That naïveté drives him to fury. He dimly feels he should make her pay dearly for all this.

He stammers an opener: "You have found me in a strange position, Liza. No, no, don't imagine anything, I am not ashamed of my poverty. On the contrary, I look with pride on my poverty. I am poor but honourable...." Then: "Would you like tea?"

He leaps up, runs to Apollon, and flings down the seven roubles, the same money that had been in his clenched fist through the entire confrontation. He whispers in feverish haste: here are your wages, but you must come to my rescue; bring tea and rusks from the restaurant; you don't know what this woman is, this is everything. He stands before Apollon with arms crossed à la Napoléon while Apollon sits without speaking, without putting down his needle, without the slightest attention, then deliberately threads the needle, deliberately counts the money, asks over his shoulder "Shall I get a whole portion?" and deliberately walks out. On the way back to Liza: shouldn't he just run away in his dressing-gown, no matter where, and let happen what would?

He sits back down. Silence. Then he suddenly strikes the table so the ink spurts from the inkstand: "I will kill him! kill him!", fully understanding, in the same moment, how stupid it is to be in such a frenzy. And then he bursts into tears. A hysterical attack. He is ashamed in the midst of sobs; he cannot restrain them. He mutters for water in a faint voice, inwardly conscious that he could have got on perfectly well without water and without muttering, he is, what is called, putting it on, to save appearances, though the attack itself is genuine.

Apollon brings the tea. The commonplace, prosaic tea strikes him as horribly undignified and paltry after all that has happened. He blushes crimson. He asks Liza if she despises him. She doesn't know what to answer. He tells her angrily to drink her tea. A horrible spite surges up, he believes he could have killed her. "She is the cause of it all." He purposely refrains from speaking for five more minutes to embarrass her further, fully conscious of the disgusting meanness of his spiteful stupidity and yet unable to restrain himself.

She finally speaks, to break the silence: "I want to... get away... from there altogether." This is the worst thing she could have said, at the worst moment, to the worst man. His heart positively aches with pity for her tactless straightforwardness, and then something hideous stifles all compassion at once. Another five minutes pass.

She says timidly, barely audibly: "Perhaps I am in your way." As soon as he sees the first impulse of wounded dignity, he trembles with spite and bursts out. Everything at once, without logical connection, gasping for breath. She came because of his sentimental talk. She is soft as butter, longing for fine sentiments again. Well then: he was laughing at her then. He is laughing at her now. He had been insulted at the dinner, came to thrash one of them, an officer, didn't find him, needed to avenge the insult on someone. She turned up. He vented his spleen on her. "I had been humiliated, so I wanted to humiliate; I had been treated like a rag, so I wanted to show my power. That's what it was."

He keeps going. Save her? Perhaps he is worse than she is. Power was what he wanted. Sport was what he wanted. He wanted to wring out her tears, her humiliation, her hysteria, that was what he wanted. He gives you my words, only likes playing with words, only dreaming, but what he really wants is for everyone to go to hell. He wants peace. The world may go to pot so long as he always gets his tea. He is a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard. He has been shuddering for three days at the thought of her coming. And what worried him most: that he had posed as such a hero to her, and now she would see him in a wretched torn dressing-gown. He is ashamed of his poverty more than anything, more afraid of it than of being found out as a thief, "because I am as vain as though I had been skinned and the very air blowing on me hurt." She must know that he will never forgive her for finding him like this, for the tears he shed before her like some silly woman put to shame, and for what he is confessing now. She must answer for it all, because he is the nastiest, stupidest, absurdest and most envious of all the worms on earth.

And then a strange thing happens. Liza understood far more than he imagined. "She understood from all this what a woman understands first of all, if she feels genuine love, that is, that I was myself unhappy." The frightened and wounded expression was followed by sorrowful perplexity. When he called himself a scoundrel and his tears flowed (the tirade was accompanied throughout by tears), her whole face worked convulsively. When he finished she took no notice of his "why don't you go away?", she realised only that it must have been very bitter for him to say all this. She leapt up from her chair with an irresistible impulse, held out her hands, yearning towards him, still timid, not daring to stir. At that point there was a revulsion in his heart too. She rushed to him, threw her arms around him, and burst into tears. He sobbed as he never had before.

"They won't let me... I can't be good!" He managed to articulate this, then went to the sofa and fell on it face downwards, sobbing for a quarter of an hour in genuine hysterics. She put her arms around him and stayed motionless.

But, and here he writes "the loathsome truth", lying face downward on the sofa with his face in the leather pillow, he begins by degrees to be aware of an involuntary, irresistible feeling: it would be awkward now to raise his head and look Liza straight in the face. He is ashamed. And the thought comes into his overwrought brain that their parts are now completely changed, she is now the heroine, while he is the crushed and humiliated creature as she had been before him four days ago. "My God! Surely I was not envious of her then."

He cannot decide, to this day. He cannot get on without domineering and tyrannising over someone. There is no explaining it by reasoning.

He raises his head, he had to, sooner or later. And it is precisely because he is ashamed to look at her that another feeling is suddenly kindled and flares up: mastery and possession. His eyes gleam with passion. He grips her hands tightly. "How I hated her and how I was drawn to her at that minute! The one feeling intensified the other. It was almost like an act of vengeance."