Liza Visits the Underground Man and Leaves is the decisive encounter in which the Underground Man’s claim to rescue Liza collapses into a confession of manipulation. Her arrival finds him in the aftermath of a humiliating confrontation with Apollon; rather than sustain the role of her protector, he lashes out, admits that his earlier sermon was bound up with a desire for power, and exposes how readily shame becomes spite. Liza answers his cruelty with compassion, but even their moment of mutual grief turns, for him, toward mastery. He gives her money as an insult, discovers that she has returned it, and runs after her only to turn back. They never meet again.

Arrival and Immediate Crisis

Liza enters while the Underground Man is still reacting to his encounter with Apollon. He has just seized Apollon by the shoulder and ordered him away, feeling on the verge of striking him. He does not notice the passage door opening until a figure comes in and stops to stare at them. Recognizing the witness, he rushes into his room in shame, clutching his hair and standing with his head against the wall. The interruption makes his private humiliation visible just as Liza arrives to see him.

Two minutes later Apollon announces that a woman is asking for him. He lets Liza in but stays to watch them with sardonic attention. The Underground Man’s first response is not welcome but a desperate order for Apollon to leave. This opening places Liza’s visit inside the very power struggle that has already unsettled him: he wants to control how he appears, yet another person has seen him at his least composed.

The Confession Behind the Sermon

After Liza has been with him for some time, the Underground Man abruptly strikes the table with his fist and cries that he will kill Apollon. Liza starts at the outburst. He then turns on her with questions about why she has come, insisting that she answer. He tells her that she returned because his sentimental speech had made her long for fine sentiments again, and says that he had laughed at her then and is laughing at her now.

He explains the purpose his earlier appeal had concealed. At the farewell dinner, he had been insulted by the men who arrived before him; intending to thrash one of them, an officer, he failed to find him. He needed someone else on whom to avenge the insult, and Liza was there. The rescue rhetoric is thus recast as an instrument of retaliation: his attempt to influence her was entangled with his need to recover a sense of power after being humiliated himself.

He sharpens the admission by acknowledging that he had wanted power and sport, and had wanted to wring tears and humiliation from her. He says he could not sustain this performance, and recalls that he was frightened and gave her his address in a moment of folly. The address that made the present visit possible therefore belongs, in his own account, not to a settled offer of help but to an unstable mixture of domination, fear, and impulse.

Liza’s Compassion and His Reversal

Liza listens with her lips parted and eyes wide, visibly shaken by the cynicism of what he says. The Underground Man expects an answer to his attack, but she does not respond in the way he anticipates. As he finishes, she recognizes how bitter it must have been for him to say these things. She feels herself far beneath him and cannot summon anger or resentment; instead, she rises, hesitantly reaches out, and then rushes to embrace him, bursting into tears. He, too, sobs as he has never sobbed before.

The embrace briefly interrupts the hostility between them. Yet the Underground Man describes a rapid change in his own feeling: ashamed to meet her eyes, he becomes conscious of a new sense of mastery and possession. He grips her hands tightly and says that hatred and attraction intensified one another, making his response almost an act of vengeance. Liza initially looks amazed and frightened, then embraces him warmly. Her compassionate gesture and his renewed desire for control occupy the same moment; the apparent reconciliation does not resolve the inequality that has shaped his treatment of her.

The Note, the Pursuit, and the Ending

When Liza comes from behind the screen and moves toward the door, the Underground Man forces a spiteful grin and turns away from her gaze. She says goodbye. He runs up, opens her hand, places money in it, closes it, and hurries to the other corner of the room. He later rejects the excuse that he acted accidentally or without knowing what he was doing: he says that he put the money in her hand from spite. The note is not offered as simple assistance; in his account, the gesture is another attempt to wound her.

After Liza leaves, he sees the crumpled blue five-ruble note on the table beside the chair where she sat. She has thrown back the same note he put in her hand. The returned money overturns his assumption that she would accept his degrading gesture, and he recognizes that he had been too egotistical to imagine her refusal. He dresses in haste and runs into the street after her, but almost at once the pursuit gives way to retreat: he is already asking himself whether he will turn back halfway.

He never meets Liza again and hears nothing of her. Looking back on the episode, he remembers enduring profound suffering and remorse, yet he remains conscious of the likelihood that he would turn back even as he ran out. He also says that, for a long time, he remained pleased with the phrase about the benefit of resentment and hatred, despite nearly falling ill from misery. The ending preserves both sides of his response: the note and Liza’s refusal confront him with the harm he has done, but remorse does not dislodge his attachment to resentment.