Saint Petersburg is the Underground Man’s adopted home and the setting of his solitary existence. Though he acknowledges the city’s harsh climate and cost, he refuses to leave; its importance lies less in civic description than in the way his insistence on staying turns residence into a sign of his withdrawal and defiance.

Residence and Circumstances

After receiving six thousand roubles from a distant relation, the Underground Man retires from government service and settles in a poor room on the outskirts of Petersburg. He had lived in the same corner before, but now, with the inheritance and retirement, he has settled there in a more deliberate sense. His circumstances remain modest: the room is wretched, and he is told that living in Petersburg is expensive for someone with limited means.

The city’s conditions are presented through his practical situation rather than through a broad portrait of its streets or institutions. He knows the warnings about the climate and expense, and claims to understand them better than the advisers who offer them. Yet that knowledge does not lead him to relocate.

Refusal to Leave

The Underground Man emphatically declares that he is staying in Petersburg and will not go away. His resolve is immediately undercut by his own suggestion that it makes no difference whether he leaves or remains. The contradiction preserves both his defiance and his evasion: he insists on a choice, then denies that the choice matters.

Petersburg thus becomes the fixed setting for a life that the narrator describes as withdrawn and isolated. At twenty-four, he recalls that he made no friends, avoided conversation, and buried himself further in solitude. The city is not shown as the cause of that condition; rather, his small room at its outskirts gives his chosen retreat a concrete location.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The book’s framing note presents the diary and its author as imaginary, while arguing that a person of this kind could—and must—exist in the society that produced him. It identifies him as representative of a living generation. Saint Petersburg consequently functions as more than a biographical backdrop: it anchors the imagined speaker’s social existence while keeping him at the edge of the city’s life.

The narrator also places himself within Russian social and literary debates. He describes himself as cleverer than those around him, an advantage that he experiences as humiliating, and contrasts Russian character-types with foreign romantics. He admits that he despised his official work but did not openly condemn it because he held the position and drew a salary from it. Against this background, his decision to remain in Petersburg after leaving service holds together dependence and rejection: he withdraws from institutional work without departing the city in which his isolated life continues.