Volkovo Cemetery enters the narrative not through a visit but through an exchange about what lies beneath a grave. The Underground Man says that the cemetery is waterlogged and that burials there take place in water; he then acknowledges that he has never been there and knows the claim only from stories. The place thus becomes both a concrete setting in the conversation and a measure of the narrator’s unreliable performance of authority.

The Cemetery as Described

In response to a question about whether a person minds how they die, the Underground Man abruptly claims that a grave at Volkovo Cemetery cannot be dry: there must be water at its bottom, he says, because the ground is a marsh. He presents this account as something confirmed by his own repeated observation, asserting that he has seen it many times. The cemetery is consequently pictured as waterlogged, with burials taking place in water rather than in dry earth.

Hearsay and Self-Contradiction

The apparent certainty collapses almost at once. The Underground Man admits that he has never seen the condition he described, has never been to Volkovo Cemetery, and has only heard stories about it. His claim to personal experience is therefore not simply mistaken; it is directly contradicted by his own clarification. The exchange makes the cemetery an example of how he adopts the posture of a witness even when his knowledge is secondhand.

Narrative Significance

The cemetery’s role is limited but pointed: it supplies the subject of a claim whose force depends on the speaker’s confidence, while the confession that follows exposes the gap between that confidence and the facts he possesses. The shift from supposed repeated observation to admitted hearsay also fits the diary’s broader presentation of a speaker who introduces himself as a representative of a living generation while exposing his own contradictions. Here, a place he has never visited becomes material for his argument—and for the reader’s scrutiny of how he tells it.