Notes From Underground (Canons) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Author:Fyodor Dostoyevsky [Dostoyevsky, Fyodor]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780857861283
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2012-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

IV

I had known even the day before that I would be the first to arrive. But being first wasn’t the point.

Not only was no one there but I barely managed to find our room. The table wasn’t even fully laid. What did it mean? After many inquiries I finally got it out of a servant that the dinner was ordered for six o’clock and not for five. This was confirmed at the buffet, too. I was ashamed to have to ask. It was still only twenty-five minutes past five. If they had changed the hour then they should have notified me of it, at any rate; there was the municipal post for that, and they shouldn’t have subjected me to such shame and . . . well, in front of the servants, at least. I sat down; the servant started to lay the table; the whole thing seemed somehow even more offensive in his presence. Towards six o’clock, they brought in candles, in addition to the lamps already burning in the room. The servant hadn’t thought, however, to bring them in straight away when I arrived. In the next room two gloomy guests were dining at different tables, in silence, looking angry. There was a lot of noise coming from a distant room, shouting even, the laughter of a whole band of people and some filthy yelps in French: it was a dinner with ladies. In a word, it was nauseating. Rarely have I spent more foul moments, and such was it that when they all appeared together at exactly six o’clock, I was at first so overjoyed to see them it was as though they were some kind of liberators, and I almost forgot that I was supposed to look offended.

Zverkov walked in before the rest, evidently being the leader. He was laughing and so were the rest of them; but upon seeing me, Zverkov assumed a dignified air, approached me unhurriedly, slightly bending at the waist, as though he was flirting, and then offered me his hand, somewhat but not very affectionately, with a sort of caution, and almost with the politeness of a general, as though, in offering his hand, he were guarding himself from something. I had pictured, to the contrary, that as soon as he entered he would start laughing with his old laugh, thinly and yelpingly, and with his first word the feeble jokes and witticisms would begin. I had been preparing for them ever since the evening before but I could never have ever expected such condescending, such senior-ranking endearment. So, therefore, now he considered himself to be immeasurably above me in every respect? If he had just wanted to offend me with this general-like behaviour then it wouldn’t have mattered, I thought to myself, I would have got him back somehow. But what if, in actual fact, without any desire to offend, the serious little idea had crawled into that muttonhead that he was immeasurably above me and could not look upon me in any way other than patronisingly? I was already starting to gasp from this supposition alone.

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