Notes from Underground

In the morning I roused myself early, I jumped out of bed in agitation, as if all this was going to start happening right away. But then I did believe that some radical break in my life was coming and could not fail to come that very day. It may have been lack of habit or something, but all my life, when faced with any external event, be it ever so small, I always thought that right then some radical break in my life was going to come. Nevertheless, I went to work as usual, but slipped away two hours early to go home and get ready. The main thing, I thought, is that I mustn't be the first to arrive, or they'll think I'm all too delighted. But there were thousands of such main things, and they all agitated me to the point of impotence. I polished my boots a second time with my own hands; for the life of him Apollon would not have polished them twice in one day, finding it inordinate. I polished them, therefore, having stolen the brushes from the entryway so that he would not somehow notice and afterwards begin to despise me. Then I carefully inspected my clothes and found that everything was old, shabby, worn out. I had indeed become too slovenly. My uniform was perhaps in good condition, but I really couldn't go to di

"riffraff" that I was by no means the coward I made myself out to be. More than that: in the strongest paroxysm of cowardly fever, I dreamed of getting the best of them, wi

At last my wretched little wall clock hissed five. I grabbed my hat and, trying not to glance at Apollon - who since morning had been waiting to receive his wages from me, but in his pride refused to speak first - slipped past him out the door, and in a coach hired for the purpose with my last fifty kopecks, drove up like a grand gentleman to the Hotel de Paris.

IV

I had already known the evening before that I would be the first to arrive. But primacy was no longer the point. Not only were none of them there, but I even had difficulty finding our room. The table was not quite laid yet. What did it mean? After much questioning, I finally got out of the waiters that the di

Zverkov came at the head of them, obviously the leader. Both he and they were laughing; but on seeing me Zverkov assumed a dignified air, approached unhurriedly, bending slightly, as if coquettishly, at the waist, and gave me his hand benignly, but not very, with a certain cautious, almost senatorial politeness, as if by offering me his hand he were protecting himself from something. I had been imagining, on the contrary, that as soon as he walked in he would start laughing his former laugh, shrill, punctuated by little shrieks, and from the first there would be his flat jokes and witticisms. I had been preparing myself for them since the previous evening, but I by no means expected such down-the-nose, such excellential benignity. So he now fully considered himself immeasurably superior to me in all respects? If he simply wanted to offend me with this senatorial air, it was not so bad, I thought; I'd be able to get back at him somehow. But what if indeed, without any wish to offend me, the little idea had seriously crept into his sheep's noddle that he was immeasurably superior to me, and could look at me in no other way than patronizingly? The supposition alone left me breathless.

"I learned with surprise of your wish to participate with us," he began, lisping and simpering and drawing the words out, something that had never happened with him before. "We somehow keep missing each other. You shy away from us.

More's the pity. We're not so terrible as you think. Well, sir, in any case I'm gla-a-ad to rene-e-ew…"

And he casually turned to place his hat on the windowsill.

"Have you been waiting long?" asked Trudolyubov.

"I arrived at exactly five o'clock, as I was appointed yesterday," I answered loudly and with an irritation that promised an imminent explosion.

"Didn't you inform him that the time had been changed?" Trudolyubov turned to Simonov.

"I didn't. I forgot," the latter answered, but without any repentance, and, not even apologizing to me, went to make arrangements for the hors d'oeuvres.

"So you've been here for an hour already, ah, poor fellow!" Zverkov exclaimed derisively, because according to his notions it must indeed have been terribly fu