Fedka

Who He Is

Fedka Katorzhny, Fyodor Fyodorovich by baptism and the Convict by nickname, is a former household servant of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, handed over for conscription fifteen years earlier and later sentenced to hard labor, from which he fled to town (ch. I, Part Two). He is the novel's hired killer, but the book almost never shows him killing. It shows him waiting on a bridge, doing sums, heating the samovar in Alexei Kirillov's kitchen, and collecting what he was promised. He speaks with the affected deference of merchants and with the devout idiom of people who have memorized the phrases of the liturgy, and he rarely says the verb that defines him. The trait that makes him central is that he is the hand everyone needs and no one wants to have sent.

Trajectory

He is introduced by Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, in ch. I, Part Two, in a tone of curiosity: the former servant of his father, escaped from Siberia, ready for anything, for money and for convictions as well. Hours later, in ch. II, Part Two, he slips under the umbrella of Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin in the middle of the floating bridge, and already knows who he is. He says he has been waiting there for four nights, that Pyotr promises him a merchant's passport but he does not trust him, and that he comes on his own initiative, asking three rubles for tea. He says of Pyotr what the chronicler will later gather as the most exact definition of him: Pyotr treats each person as what he has already decided the other is, and invents the man in order to live with him (ch. VI, Part Two). As for Stavrogin, he says Pyotr is one thing and that he himself, perhaps, is another. Stavrogin refuses the money, tells him not to look for him again, and threatens to hand him over to the police. Fedka replies that he will wait for him on the way back.

On the way back, in the same place, Stavrogin knocks him down with pent-up rage and lets him go. Fedka pulls out a short cobbler's knife, puts it away as soon as the other man orders, and follows a step behind, with the respect of someone who has been unjustly insulted. He says he robbed a church in the district, went in to pray, killed the guard in the struggle over the bag, and that it brought him twelve rubles. Stavrogin tells him to kill more and rob more, and Fedka says Pyotr tells him the same thing. He says he saw the captain's door open and the money falling from the drunk man's pockets, and when asked whether he went in, he says maybe, that no one knows. When Stavrogin throws the banknotes into the mud one by one, he crawls after them. What he says in this scene, to the man who listens, is a request for permission in the form of arithmetic:

Stavrogin tells Darya Pavlovna Shatova, in ch. III, Part Two, that a little devil proposed to him that he kill Ignat Lebyadkin and Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina for fifteen hundred rubles, and that he gave him all the money from his wallet, so that the man now believes he has received the signal. The crime the town attributes to him months later, the desecration of the Nativity icon at the church gate, appears in ch. V, Part Two:

In ch. VI, Part Two, Kirillov tells Pyotr that he is lodging him in his wing, that the old woman is in the hospital, that he read him the Apocalypse at night over tea, that the man is already a Christian, and that, for the rest, he slaughters. In ch. VIII, Part Two, Fedka appears at the doorway of the room, without a cap, as if he were at home, smiling, brought by Kirillov, while Stavrogin tells Pyotr that his price is also fifteen hundred. In ch. X, Part Two, the chronicler admits that he and others may have spoken earlier with some of the workers, and that two men from the Chpigulin factory will be at his side at the fire.

At the matinee in ch. I, Part Three, the seminarist who interrupts Stepan's speech demands from him the name of the convict:

In ch. II, Part Three, the chronicler states that Fedka took part in the fire of Zarechye without a doubt. In ch. III, Part Three, Pyotr, in telling Stavrogin and Liza that the Lebyadkins' deaths were only a robbery, points at him and at the imbecile who showed the money. In ch. IV, Part Three, in Kirillov's kitchen, Pyotr demands to know why he did not wait where he was told. The convict demands the money he was promised for innocent blood, which Pyotr swore in Stavrogin's name, and protests at being sent to Petersburg. In demanding it, he tells Pyotr what he thinks of him:

Pyotr pulls out the revolver, Fedka knocks him down with punches to the face, and runs off with his bundle. The next morning, Liputin learns that the convict was found dead, with his head split open, seven versts from town, and that the police suspect the worker Fomka. He recalls that the night before, Pyotr had said it was the last time Fedka would drink vodka. When Stepan Trofimovich flees along the road, in ch. VII, Part Three, Fedka is one of the figures he most fears meeting. If he sees him, he thinks, Fedka will tell the truth and take the forty-ruble purse, and he will kill him just the same.

Themes Embodied

Fedka is the point where the chain of Guilt shows itself whole and catches no one. Stepan lost him at cards or sold him as a recruit, depending on who tells it. Pyotr hired him without saying for what. Stavrogin gave him the money that he read as an advance. Liputin was supposed to have sent away the people who were killed, and the captain flaunted the money. The book makes each of these threads a reason for no one to answer alone, and that is what Stavrogin tells Liza the morning after the crimes, without declaring himself innocent or guilty of any sort:

The scene of the money in the mud supports two readings. In the first, Stavrogin throws the money out of contempt for a beggar, and it is Fedka who turns the contempt into a contract. In the second, it is an accepted payment, made with the irony of someone who knows what he is buying. Stavrogin himself leaves both open when he tells Darya that the man is now certain he has received the advance, and it is as payment, he says, that Fedka reads it. That he never says "kill" in the two meetings, and speaks only of sums, is what makes the request work without being made.

The convict is also the only one who speaks of God aloud in these scenes of calculation, and the text admits both hypotheses. The town attributes to him the icon of the Nativity that Liza kneels in the mud to venerate (The icon and the lamp). He himself says he went into a church in the district to pray and killed the guard there, and he hears the Apocalypse from Kirillov at night. When it comes time to collect, he accuses Pyotr of having stopped believing in the Creator because of his debauchery, and he justifies himself with the legend of the merchant who stole the Mother of God's pearl and then gave it back. It may be the faith of a murderer who finds Pyotr's atheism worse than his own trade, or the idiom of a man who knows which words to use to collect a debt from someone who talks about ideas. The divergence is left undecided, and the novel treats it as part of the same portrait.

Divergent Readings

The book offers two versions of who killed the Lebyadkins, and neither is refuted. In Pyotr's, which he repeats to Liza, to Stavrogin, and to the quintet, Fedka acted alone, for robbery, in the middle of the fire (ch. III, Part Three, ch. IV, Part Three). In Fedka's, in ch. IV, Part Three, there was a promise of money for innocent blood, sworn by Pyotr in Stavrogin's name, and the trip to Petersburg is a way of setting him aside.

Whoever prefers Pyotr's version reads the crime as the opportunism of a convict who overheard a hint and seized his chance, and the text gives them reasons, since Pyotr says Fedka heard from Kirillov a hint of Stavrogin's. Whoever prefers Fedka's reads the crime as a commissioned job, unpaid, and the text gives them reasons as well, since Pyotr is quick to say it was chance. What the text does not do is narrate the murder, and the absence of a scene is what keeps both versions alive.

Relationships

• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the employer who promises him a passport and money (ch. II, Part Two), who dismisses him and is knocked down by him (ch. IV, Part Three).
• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the man he waits for on the bridge, and to whom he gives the deference of someone waiting for a sign (ch. II, Part Two).
• Alexei Kirillov: the host who reads him the Apocalypse and fries him meat and potatoes (ch. VI, Part Two, ch. IV, Part Three).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the former master who, according to the seminarist, lost him at cards, and whom he fears on the road (ch. I, Part Three, ch. VII, Part Three).
• Ignat Lebyadkin and Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina: the victims attributed to him (ch. II, Part Three).
• Liputin: the one who remembers Pyotr's prophecy about vodka when the convict is found dead (ch. IV, Part Three).