Notes from the Underground (AmazonClassics Edition) characters

Also known as the Underground Man

Appears from the start

The unnamed narrator, a retired civil servant living alone in St. Petersburg. He presents himself as ill, spiteful, acutely self-conscious, and unable to act with conviction. His arguments against rational accounts of human behavior gradually give way to memories that show how pride and humiliation have isolated him from other people.

First appears in chapter 12

An army officer whose casual physical removal of the narrator from his path becomes a lasting insult in the narrator's mind. The narrator spends years imagining revenge before arranging a public collision that the officer scarcely notices.

First appears in chapter 14

A former schoolmate of the narrator who hosts a gathering to arrange a farewell dinner for Zverkov. The narrator is not close to him, yet invites himself to the dinner and later seeks him out while desperate for companionship and recognition.

First appears in chapter 14

A former schoolmate leaving St. Petersburg for a provincial military posting. Confident, sociable, and accustomed to admiration, he becomes the guest of honor at a dinner where the narrator's envy and old resentment turn into an open quarrel.

First appears in chapter 14

One of the narrator's former schoolmates and a guest at Zverkov's farewell dinner. He treats the narrator with direct hostility and participates in the group's contemptuous dismissal of his attempts to provoke them.

First appears in chapter 14

A former schoolmate attending Zverkov's farewell dinner. He is conventional and self-satisfied, joining the other men in regarding the narrator as an unwelcome intruder.

First appears in chapter 17

A young woman the narrator meets in a brothel after the farewell dinner. She listens seriously when he describes the loneliness and degradation he believes await her, and she accepts his address in the hope that his concern is genuine.

First appears in chapter 19

The narrator's elderly servant, whose composed silence and insistence on receiving his wages intensify his employer's sense of powerlessness. The narrator tries to force him into submission through petty delays, but Apollon's calm resistance outlasts the performance.