Nastasya Filippovna's Name Day (Part One)

At the end of November, in a thaw, at about nine in the morning, the Warsaw train was rushing at full speed toward Petersburg. It was so damp and foggy that the light could barely break through; from the carriage windows one could hardly make out anything beyond a few paces from the line.

In a third-class carriage two passengers sat facing each other by the window. Both were young; both were lightly dressed. One was short, about twenty-seven, with curly, almost black hair and small, grey, fiery eyes; his face was pale, with high cheekbones, and his lips were fixed in an insolent, mocking, almost malicious smile. He wore a warm, sheepskin-lined coat. The other was a little over twenty-six, rather tall, with thick fair hair, sunken cheeks and a thin, almost white beard. His eyes were large and blue and had a look of quiet heaviness — that strange look by which some people can tell at first sight that a man is subject to epilepsy. He wore a sleeveless cloak with an enormous hood, of the kind one sees on travellers in Switzerland in winter, and held a little bundle tied up in an old silk handkerchief, which seemed to be all his luggage. He was shivering.

They began to talk. The fair young man answered every question with remarkable readiness: he was Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, the last of an old family; he had been ill from childhood with a nervous disease — something like fits — and almost an idiot, and had been sent abroad four years before by a benefactor, Pavlishchev, now dead, to be treated by a doctor in the Swiss mountains, Professor Schneider. He had no money and no relations but a distant kinswoman, Madame Epanchina, the wife of a general, whom he meant to call on.

The dark young man laughed at him. His name was Parfyon Rogozhin. His father, a rich merchant, had just died, and he was coming home to inherit a fortune. He told the prince, with a kind of fierce joy, why his father had beaten him and why he had run away: a month ago he had seen, in a carriage on the Nevsky Prospect, a woman — Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova — and had lost his head; he had taken ten thousand roubles of his father's money and bought her a pair of diamond earrings, and his father had shut him up and beaten him. Now he was free and rich. A seedy clerk who had joined their conversation, Lebedev, who knew everything about everyone, told them who Nastasya Filippovna was: the kept woman of a rich man, Totsky.

At the station, Rogozhin said to Myshkin: "Prince, I don't know why I have taken a fancy to you. Come and see me. We'll take off that cloak of yours and dress you in the finest fur coat. You'll have money. And we'll go to Nastasya Filippovna's together."

At General Epanchin's, the prince sat in the hall with the footman and talked to him, as an equal, about executions in France; he had once seen a man guillotined at Lyons. "The worst pain is not in the wounds," he said, "but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this very instant, your soul will leave your body, and you will no longer be a man, and that this is certain — certain. To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by sentence is far more terrible than murder by brigands."

General Epanchin received him coldly, then kindly, and found that the prince had a beautiful handwriting and might be useful as a clerk. Then he took him to his wife and three daughters. Lizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina was an eccentric, impulsive, warm-hearted woman, and she liked the prince at once, because he was simple. Her daughters were beautiful: Alexandra, the eldest, calm and kind; Adelaida, who painted; and Aglaya, the youngest, twenty, the most beautiful and the proudest, the spoiled darling of the whole family.

The prince talked to them about Switzerland. He told them about a man who had been condemned to death and had stood on the scaffold, with five minutes to live, and had divided the five minutes up: two to take leave of his comrades, two to think of himself, one to look at the world for the last time. Before him was a church, with a gilded dome glittering in the sun, and he could not take his eyes off the rays; it seemed to him that they were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one with them. "What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life — what eternity! And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!" And then he was reprieved. "And did he live like that afterwards?" asked Adelaida. "No. He told me himself — I asked him — he lived quite differently, and lost many, many minutes."

He told them too about Marie, a poor consumptive girl in the Swiss village where he lived, who had been seduced and abandoned by a travelling salesman and was despised and stoned by the whole village, and even by the children; and how he had kissed her, and given her money, and had told the children about her, until they understood and came to love her and brought her food and sat with her till she died. "I have spent my whole time with children," he said. "Through children the soul is healed."

Then the girls teased him and asked him to read their faces. He looked at each and told them what he saw: Alexandra had a lovely, kind face, but perhaps a secret sorrow; Adelaida a happy one; Lizaveta Prokofyevna was a perfect child in everything, everything, good and bad. When it came to Aglaya, he looked at her a long time and would not speak. "You are extraordinarily beautiful," he said at last. "One is afraid to look at you. Beauty is a riddle." Aglaya flushed and laughed. It was Ganya, too, who that afternoon asked the prince to carry a secret note to Aglaya, in which he begged her for one word that would make him break with Nastasya Filippovna; and Aglaya read it in the prince's presence and sent it back with contempt, and gave the prince her friendship instead.

He was then shown a photograph that had been sent that morning to the general's secretary, Gavril Ardalionovich Ivolgin — Ganya — a handsome, ambitious young man of twenty-eight. It was the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna. The prince looked at it a long time. It was the face of a woman of extraordinary beauty, dark, proud, and full of suffering. "It's a proud face, terribly proud," he said. "But I wonder whether she is kind. Ah, if only she were good! All would be saved."

Her story was this. Totsky, a rich, refined, sensual man, had taken her into his care when she was a little orphan girl, the daughter of a poor neighbour, and had brought her up and educated her on one of his estates, and when she grew up he had made her his mistress. For years she lived there as he wished. Then, when he decided to marry, she suddenly appeared in Petersburg, transformed — cold, mocking, terrible — and laughed in his face, and told him she would ruin any marriage he tried to make. Now, to be free of her, Totsky had arranged to marry her off to Ganya, with a dowry of seventy-five thousand roubles; and Ganya, who did not love her, and who was half in love with Aglaya, had agreed, for the money. She had promised to give her answer that evening, at her name-day party.

In the flat there was also a lodger, Ferdyshchenko, who called himself a buffoon and was proud of it; and Ganya's young brother Kolya, a boy of fifteen, who adored the prince at first sight; and Varya's suitor Ptitsyn, a quiet, sensible moneylender. General Ivolgin, lying gloriously, took the prince by the arm and promised to introduce him to Nastasya Filippovna, whom he claimed to know well; but he led the prince instead, by way of a tavern, to the lodging of a captain's widow to whom he owed money; and it was Kolya who at last showed the prince the way.

Myshkin took a room in Ganya's family's flat. Ganya's mother and sister Varya were bitterly opposed to the marriage; his father, General Ivolgin, a ruined, drunken old man, told endless stories that were all lies — that he had been Napoleon's page in 1812, among others. That afternoon Nastasya Filippovna herself arrived at the flat, unannounced, and mocked them all. Then Rogozhin came, drunk, with a crowd of companions, and offered to buy her from Ganya for a hundred thousand roubles. Varya, beside herself, spat in her brother's face; and Ganya raised his hand to strike his sister. The prince caught his arm. "That's enough." "Are you always going to stand in my way?" cried Ganya, and slapped the prince in the face.

The prince turned pale. He looked Ganya in the eye with a strange reproach, and his lips trembled. "Never mind me," he said; "but I won't let you strike her." And then, turning away and hiding his face, he said: "Oh, how ashamed you will be of what you've done!" Nastasya Filippovna, who had been laughing, looked at him. "Where have I seen your face?" she said. And as she went out, she came back and kissed Ganya's mother's hand. "He's right," she whispered. "I'm not like that."

The prince went alone, in the end, to Nastasya Filippovna's flat that evening, with no invitation and in his old clothes. Kolya had told him the way. He had the feeling, as he climbed the stairs, that he was going to save her, and that he had no idea how.

That evening was her name-day party. The guests were Totsky, General Epanchin, Ganya, a clownish, spiteful man called Ferdyshchenko, and others; the prince came uninvited. They played a game Ferdyshchenko proposed: each guest must tell the worst thing he had ever done. Ferdyshchenko confessed a theft for which a servant girl had been blamed; the general told an ugly story about an old woman; Totsky told an elegant one about a camellia. Nastasya Filippovna grew more and more restless. Then she turned to the prince. "Shall I marry Ganya or not? I'll do as you say."

"No — don't marry him," said the prince.

"Then I won't." She gave Totsky back his pearls. Then the prince, quietly, before everyone, said that he would marry her himself. "I am nothing, but you have suffered, and come out of such a hell pure. I will respect you all my life." And at that moment it was discovered, from a letter he had in his pocket, that he had inherited a large fortune from an aunt in Moscow. She laughed and cried. "A prince! He wants to marry me!"

Then Rogozhin burst in, with his crowd and his hundred thousand roubles wrapped in newspaper. Nastasya Filippovna took the packet. "No, I won't ruin a child like you," she said to the prince. "That's more Totsky's line." She turned to Ganya. "Look here, Ganya, I'm going to throw this into the fire. If you pull it out with your bare hands, it's yours — all of it." And she threw the packet into the fire.

Everyone screamed. Ganya, white, his teeth clenched, stood staring at the burning packet, and did not move. He would not take it. Then he turned to go, and fell down in a faint. Nastasya Filippovna pulled the packet out with the tongs. It was only charred on the outside. She laid it beside Ganya. "It's his. It's all his! Tell him when he comes to." And she went out with Rogozhin into the night, to his troikas, shouting: "Goodbye, prince! For the first time I have seen a man!"

The prince ran after her, took a cab, and followed her troikas to Ekaterinhof.