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“He considered that the ample lessons he had received from bitter experience entitled him to call them whatever he liked, but without this ‘lower race’ he could not have existed a single day.”
The “lower race” that Dmitri is referring to is women. Dmitri resents his wife so much and has had so many disastrous affairs that he has been poisoned against womankind in general. This line is an essential component to Dmitri’s characterization because it reveals his deeply misogynistic tendencies. This is an important aspect of the narrative; it depicts Dmitri as a morally gray character instead of simply characterizing him as a lonely man who is worthy of our uncompromising pity.
“He led a double life — one in public, in the sight of all whom it concerned, full of conventional truth and conventional deception, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which flowed in secret. And, owing to some strange, possibly quite accidental chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret, while everything that was false in him, everything that composed the husk in which he hid himself and the truth which was in him — his work at the bank, discussions at the club, his ‘lower race,’ his attendance at anniversary celebrations with his wife — was on the surface.”
Dmitri has this thought after he and Anna have decided to renew their affair. He feels that he is living a double life which has caused him to become increasingly paranoid. He no longer has a sense of what is authentic or not and he believes that every person in his life is concealing their truest selves because he is. As is often the case with Chekhov, his diction is revealing. Suspicious words such as “deception,” “secret,” “false,” and “hid” litter this passage, generating a paranoid tone that matches Dmitri’s obsession with concealment.
