Andrei Antonovich von Lembke

Who He Is

Andrei Antonovich von Lembke is the governor of the province, of German descent, a pupil of an elite school for sons of well-connected families, and the husband of Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke. He replaces the soft Ivan Ossipovich, removed from office, and his arrival changes the way the town treats Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina (chapter II of Part One). The chronicler presents him as a playful, weak man, who spent his time gluing together paper theaters, trains, and churches and was pulled out of this repose by his wife's ambition, which took his paper works away, let him write a novel in secret, and tries to make him the administrator of her plans to govern the province (chapter IV of Part Two). He wants order, respect, and not to look foolish; what worries him, in the summer when cholera arrives, the cattle die, and the fires keep happening, is that someone is provoking them, and a new generation that he does not understand. The trait that defines him is that of a man who presided over calm and, when it ends, shouts orders he did not know he was going to give.

Trajectory

In chapter IV of Part Two, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who has treated him without respect since he arrived, sleeps on the sofa in his study and takes the manuscript of the novel the governor had read to him, "losing" it afterward. Lembke, hurt, shows him the collection of proclamations he has gathered since 1859, in the hope of disarming him with liberalism; Pyotr says that one line of them is worth more than the whole chancellery, and, when Lembke observes that there is a call there to destroy churches and that it is too soon, corners him:

Lembke replies that he and the revolutionaries need one another, like the liberals and conservatives in England, and that governing is making institutions exist or not according to the wind of the government. Pyotr asks whether he would not need two sentries at his door.

In chapter VI of Part Two, the party is set and Lembke grows gloomier by the day, with cholera arriving, the cattle dying, the summer's fires, and the rumor that someone is provoking them. A sub-lieutenant of the district bit the commander's shoulder and had proclamations in his pockets; the manager of the Shpigulins' factory handed the police packets of the same sheets. Pyotr appears and, feigning friendship, returns the novel with a frank critique, asks him to spare Ivan Shatov, to whom he attributes the poem Svetlaya lichnost and a note to the engineer Alexei Kirillov, says that the movement fits into seven people, and asks for six days of quiet and secrecy before his wife. Lembke begins by demanding respect, is disarmed by successive maneuvers, and hears that Pyotr has come to ask for the salvation of a fool, nearly mad, in the name of the governor's humanity. When he asks who is directing all this, he hears:

As Pyotr leaves, Lembke shows him an anonymous letter received the day before, from a desperate man who offers a denunciation in exchange for pardon and a pension, and begs him, in panic, not to show it to Yulia. Pyotr leaves convinced that he has calmed him for six days and is mistaken, because he invented him as a simpleton from the start: the governor feels there is something disconnected in what he heard and does not understand the new generation. The official Blum, a distant relative whom his wife never accepted, insists on a sudden search, early in the morning, at the house of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Lembke refuses, thinks of the mockery and of Yulia; when he hears his wife's voice in the next room, he shouts to Blum to do what he likes, afterward, and Blum takes it as authorization.

In chapter X of Part Two, the chronicler goes back to the previous night to give the cause before the effect. At three in the morning Lembke wakes his wife for the ultimatum: two centers of power, his and that of her boudoir, cannot exist; married life was her proving to him at every hour that he was null and him proving to her that he was not; he is jealous of Pyotr; he will not allow God to be denied. She laughs a long laugh like a Parisian actress, and he, fist raised, does not strike: he flees to his study, covers himself with the sheet, and spends two hours without sleeping, recalling senseless things. He wakes late, runs to his wife's room, which she has left, opens Voltaire's Candide at random, and reads that all goes for the best in the best of all possible worlds; he spits and leaves. In sight of Skvoreshniki he orders the carriage back, gets down at the edge of the field and stays looking at little yellow flowers, until the commissioner Flibusterov announces the riot. In the square he sees the firm crowd, the chain of policemen, the impotent police chief, and the general expectation turned on him, and the blood rises to his heart:

According to the chronicler, the order came out unexpected even to him. It repeats a historical gesture:

Lembke still shouts Buccaneers, in a broken voice, not knowing what he will do and knowing that he will do something. The workers advance three paces and all speak at once, of payments at forty and of the manager, and he, with the flowers still in his hand, does not understand them; he sees among the workers Pyotr, inciting them, whom no one else saw, and gives the second order:

The rods appear so quickly that the police chief must have had them ready; the chronicler assures us that only two or three men, at most, were punished. Stepan, who escaped the chronicler and ended up at the center of the event, blocks the governor's path in the reception room and says he has come to defend his rights, because he was searched in the morning. Lembke takes him for a petitioner, suddenly understands who he is, and then, transfigured, tells Blum that he only does foolish things and apologizes to Stepan: a mistake, a misunderstanding. Stepan tells the anecdote of the man who, in the theater, slapped someone he should not have and, seeing the mistake, said the same thing and was amazed that the offended man still shouted. Lembke smiles crookedly and, instead of defending himself, asks for compassion:

Yulia arrives with the whole party and passes her husband as if he did not exist, without a word or a glance. Lembke, who had been in the room from before without anyone noticing, advances on Stepan, squeezes his hand, and declares that this is enough: the buccaneers of our time have been identified, measures have been taken. On leaving, he trips on the carpet, nearly falls, looks at the spot and says to change it. Yulia follows, and the room whispers that he is deranged, or subject to fits.

In chapter I of Part Three, at the matinée, he looks healthy: the night before his wife entered his study and stayed until well after midnight, and he came out forgiven and consoled. He looks over the room with the dangerous smile of the day before and an expression already half comic, that of someone offering himself as a sacrifice to his wife's lofty ends. When Stepan loses control, Yulia pulls him from the armchair. In chapter II of Part Three, at the ball, he looks worse than in the morning, with moments of sudden severity; when Lyamshin falls head over heels in the quadrille of literature and the room laughs, he orders him seized and those who laugh expelled, and, on hearing from a corner the cry of Buccaneers, turns pale as if he suddenly understood and remembered. When they shout that Zarechye is in flames, he orders that no one leave, and then:

He leaves the party in the police chief's carriage, on the way to the fire, gesticulating and shouting ideas impossible to carry out. In Zarechye the chronicler finds him on the remains of a fence, hatless, giving orders no one obeys before a crowd that listens to him with curiosity and does not touch him. He shouts that it is all arson, that it is nihilism, that the tears of the homeless will dry but the town will burn:

Soon afterward he throws himself at an eighty-year-old woman who went back to the fire to take the feather quilt from the window and, when he pulls her, a board loosened from the roof knocks him down by the neck. The chronicler writes that Andrei Antonovich's career, at least in the town, ends there. After that the book does not show him on the scene again.

Themes Embodied

Lembke is the authority that exists only as long as it convinces, and the novel shows him losing conviction on three sides at once, his wife's, the workers', and Pyotr's. In the theme Individual and Society, he carries the question of what sustains an order when there is no longer anyone to heed it: an old man's fear, a governor's pride, a drawing room's flattery. The formula of his tolerance, that government and revolutionaries need each other, as in England, leaves him defenseless before whoever uses it against him.

The chronicler puts the early morning before the morning to give the cause before the effect: Lembke does not lose control before the workers, he arrives in the square without it, and what knocks him down is his wife's laughter, not the factory. Two readings: the collapse had been coming for days, or the square was where that collapse found a pretext. In either, the cry of on your knees and the order of the rods ask of the people the recognition that his home denied him.

What Pyotr invented was a simpleton Lembke, and the narrator says it as his mistake: the governor feels there is something disconnected in what he heard, and this suspicion, which Pyotr does not count on, reappears at the ball, when the cry of Buccaneers makes him turn pale as if he suddenly understood and remembered. The line about the fire in minds and not on roofs describes what the night showed, and the one who says it is a man in collapse who minutes before saw conspiracy in everything. Both things fit at the same time: the lucidity of a sentence and a man's incapacity to act according to it.

Relationships

• Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke: the wife who pulls him out of repose, whose laughter knocks him down in the early morning (chapter X of Part Two) and who, at the ball, does not let go of him (chapter II of Part Three).
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the young man to whom he hands the collection of proclamations and from whom he receives the small, controllable conspiracy (chapter IV of Part Two, chapter VI of Part Two), and whom he believes he sees among the workers (chapter X of Part Two).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the victim of the search he authorized without meaning to, and to whom he apologizes in the reception room (chapter VI of Part Two, chapter X of Part Two).
• Karmazinov: the writer who is in the governor's wife's drawing room when he says to change it (chapter X of Part Two).
• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the lady of the town whose dealings with the new governor change (chapter II of Part One).