# Notes from Underground — Character guide

> Key figures in Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

- [The Underground Man](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/narrator.md): He opens his notes by addressing an imagined audience of "gentlemen" he both despises and craves, insisting he is sick, spiteful, and unattractive, yet refusing to be cured. His defining tension is that he is hyper-consc
- [Liza](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/liza.md): She meets the narrator in a house of prostitution and becomes, in his imagination, a project: a "pure soul" he might rescue and thereby prove his own nobility. But his fantasy curdles into rage — he imagines crushing her
- [Apollon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/apollon.md): Apollon works part-time as a tailor but serves the narrator with an insolence so complete it becomes a kind of art, his mouth compressed into a V, his head oiled with sunflower oil, in love with every button on his own c
- [Zverkov](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/zverkov.md): At school Zverkov got the better of the narrator with casual, good-natured jests, and after they parted he rose through the service, cut the narrator in the street, and now commands a farewell dinner in his honor. He is 
- [Simonov](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/simonov.md): Simonov is the practical one, the man who collects seven roubles apiece and books the Hotel de Paris, tolerating the narrator without warmth and without cruelty. After the disastrous dinner, the narrator writes him a let
- [The Officer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/the_officer.md): A burly officer who physically moves the Underground Man aside in a billiard hall.
- [Ferfitchkin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/ferfitchkin.md): A spiteful former schoolmate of the Underground Man at the farewell dinner.
- [Trudolyubov](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/trudolyubov.md): A quiet, strong former schoolmate of the Underground Man at the dinner.
- [Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters/anton_antonitch.md): The Underground Man's former office chief, a mild-mannered bureaucrat.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/notes_from_underground_se/characters