Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina

Who She Is

Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, Liza, is nearly twenty-two when the novel puts her on horseback. She is the only daughter of Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdova, widow of General Drozdov, boarding-school friend and rival of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, and she inherited about two hundred thousand rubles from her father (Part One, Chapter II). She was a pupil of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky from eight to eleven years old, without his being paid, with stories about the origin of the world that she imitated at home (Part One, Chapter II). She rides with Captain of Artillery Mavriky Nikolayevich, about thirty-three, handsome, quiet, and kind, whom the chronicler takes for a relative and who is her fiancé (Part One, Chapter III). She met Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin in Paris, went with him in the summer to Vernex-Montreux, in Switzerland, and broke with him after a quarrel no one explains (Part One, Chapter II). What she wants is a cause for the money and for an energy with no outlet: an annual book classifying press facts, a society with Ivan Shatov (Part One, Chapter IV); later, to live a full hour, and she herself says that she lives it by the calendar, each step calculated (Part Three, Chapter III). What she fears is what she senses in Stavrogin since Switzerland, something terrible, filthy, and bloody and, at the same time, ridiculous (Part Three, Chapter III), and dying (Part Three, Chapter III). What she knows, or suspects, is that there is a connection between Stavrogin and the lame woman, and she cannot ask anyone about it, which is why she demands to see her (Part One, Chapter IV). Where she deceives herself is in taking proof for knowledge: she forces her fiancé to kneel to see how he looks and cannot bear to see it (Part Two, Chapter V), and goes to Skvoreshniki for an hour and accepts from Piotr an explanation, that of the great idea before which the two of them were nothing (Part Three, Chapter III).

Trajectory

In Part One, Chapter III, she recognizes Stepan Trofimovich in the street from afar, after twelve years, and he, who had just been shouting for someone to calm him, hears a voice fresh and cheerful as music. She reproaches him for having missed two weeks of lessons, recalls the Columbus lessons and the lies he told her, which were almost better than the truth; she leans down from the saddle and kisses his forehead. Ten minutes later she is in his room, with a bouquet, looks at the girlhood portrait he keeps under his daggers, and wonders, without being able to explain it, why she feels sad at such moments. She learns that Stepan and Darya are hiding their engagement from a town that already knows, laughs, and asks him to bring Shatov to work with her: she needs an assistant, the sooner the better.

In Part One, Chapter IV, in the large drawing room, while her mother looks for the professor and the little dog Zemirka, she takes Shatov to the sofa and explains the project, in a hurry and without clarity. She says it was Pyotr, in Switzerland, who spoke to her about him and about the printing press, and that Stavrogin also spoke to her a great deal. When she asks about Captain Lebyadkin, who lives in his house, and he says she should choose someone else, she flares up and asks Mavriky Nikolayevich for the letter of the day before, which the chronicler reads aloud: verses and a prose piece by the captain, who calls himself an infusoria before the sun and offers to reveal a great deal through documents. When Shatov leaves, she calls the chronicler back, pale, and takes him in silence to the window: she wants to see the lame woman with her own eyes, and if he does not go tomorrow at three she will go alone, and everyone will know. In the cathedral she follows the governor's wife, runs to her aunt in the porch, and asks to go along by the carriage; in his ear she threatens to run after it and shout.

In Part One, Chapter V, seated in a corner, almost beside Shatov, her eyes move from the lady of the house to the leg and back, with a crooked smile that Varvara Petrovna also sees. She cuts off her mother, who scolds her for the scandal: she went on her own, with leave from Yulia Mikhailovna, because she wanted to know the unfortunate woman's story in order to be useful to her. Since Darya Pavlovna Shatova's entrance she has looked at her with hatred and contempt, and she refuses her mother for the first time on stage, when Varvara Petrovna holds her back to stay a few days. When Stavrogin takes Marya Timofeyevna to the carriage, she follows them with an unmoving gaze to the door, and sits down again with a convulsive movement, as if she had touched a reptile. When the captain cowers before her, she begins to laugh, and the jokes about broken legs and about being led along limping repeat what she saw and did not say; after Shatov's blow, she pulls her mother and Mavriky out of the room, cries out, and falls in a faint on the carpet.

In Part Two, Chapter V, running with the cavalcade of mockers, she is the only one who responds with her body to the insult to the icon of the Nativity, at the gate of the church in the square:

As the purse holds only small coins, she takes off her diamond earrings and asks the monk, without the irony she uses with the group:

Two days later she organizes the outing to the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich, and on the way the group stops at the hotel where a boy killed himself after spending his sister's trousseau money. At the prophet's house, when she has tea served to Mavriky, she orders him to occupy, on his knees, the place of a landowner:

When she sees him on his knees, she turns pale, cries out, and lifts him up with her own hands; at the door, according to rumors the chronicler did not see, she raises her hand against Stavrogin's face. In Part Two, Chapter VI, Mavriky Nikolayevich cedes his bride to Stavrogin and tells him that, if he called her from the altar, she would leave everyone and go, because from constant hatred love and madness shine.

In Part Two, Chapter X, in Yulia Mikhailovna's drawing room, she stares fixedly at Stavrogin from the moment he enters, and in the silence that follows the invitation to open the session she asks aloud and clearly:

He answers that he is the husband of the captain's sister, and she jumps to her feet, makes the movement of running after him, restrains herself, and leaves in silence, followed by Mavriky. In Part Three, Chapter I, she arrives at the matinee with the marshal's wife, dazzling in beauty and joy, which the chronicler, remembering the night before, does not understand. In Part Three, Chapter II, Piotr tells that she jumped from the marshal's carriage into Stavrogin's and left for Skvoreshniki in broad daylight, shouting "spare me, Mavriky," who did not follow her; the servants confirm it and say that Piotr had been prowling the house for days.

In Part Three, Chapter III, at six in the morning, in the large drawing room from which the fire can be seen as if in the palm of the hand, she watches the dying glow with the light dress of the night before, crumpled and put on in a hurry. She tells Stavrogin that she lives by the calendar, that she has lived her hour and that is enough; that the only ideal left to her is that of Moscow, impossible for a married man; she asks whether he paid for hope with his own life or with someone else's. She says that on the day he insulted her in public and she saw him answer like a gentleman, she understood that he was fleeing her because he was married and not out of contempt, and that afterward Piotr explained to her that a great idea shook Stavrogin, before which the two of them were nothing, but that it got in the way; she burned herself on a candle. When he wants to open up to her, she interrupts, frightened, and refuses also to be a nurse:

She opens the door of the oval antechamber, where Stavrogin and Piotr are talking, hears that someone has been killed, and asks whether it was Mavriky. She tells Stavrogin that if he swears before God that he is innocent, she will believe his word as if it were God's, and will follow him to the end of the world like a little dog:

She covers her face and leaves the house. Piotr takes her arm and gives her the choice of waiting for the caleche or following on foot, and she blushes when she understands that Mavriky is waiting for her; she hears from Piotr that the boat was a leaky one, screams that he should not see them, runs off across the field, and falls into a clump of grass. Mavriky arrives weeping and covers her with his greatcoat; she kisses his hand and says that there, before Stavrogin, she was brave, and here she is afraid to die; she wants to see the dead, because for their sake he stopped loving her tonight, and asks him for a slap, to kill her like a dog. From Mavriky she hears that no one is her judge now, least of all he. On the way, Stepan Trofimovich falls to his knees before her and says that one must forgive, and she blesses him with the sign of the cross and tells him to return the umbrella to the boy. She reaches the Lebyadkins' house, opening a path through the crowd like someone who has escaped from a hospital, and the chronicler sees:

They carry her away still alive.

Themes Embodied

Liza is the question of the Meaning of Life posed for a young woman without a cause: she has money, beauty, and an energy that the chronicler describes as a badly named desire for a cause, and what the book offers her is a series of trials: a book, a society, an icon, a fiancé on his knees, an hour of love. Her symbols are the icon and the lamp, the only thing she respects without irony (Part Two, Chapter V), the spider, which she sees in Stavrogin and refuses (Part Three, Chapter III), and the fire at Zarechye, whose embers she watches from Skvoreshniki before she knows what has burned (Part Three, Chapter III).

What distinguishes her from the others the novel surrounds Stavrogin with is that she is the only one who asks him a question that has an answer: whether he is guilty, and before God. Marya Timofeyevna unmasks him without asking, Kirillov measures him without expecting anything, Shatov demands a sentence from him, Piotr offers him a figure. Liza asks for the fact, and it is the exact answer he gives her, to know and not to stop, that makes her leave the house (Part Three, Chapter III). When the crowd kills her, the chronicler sees only someone's hand, and the text leaves it at that.

Divergent Readings

The book leaves open several readings of her. The impetuous curiosity about a possible rival, or the need to see what no one wants to say: this is what pushes her to demand that the chronicler take her to the lame woman (Part One, Chapter IV). The devotion of someone who still believes in an icon, or the challenge to her own group, the people she laughs with all day and who there disgust her: this is what makes her kneel on the dirty pavement (Part Two, Chapter V). A test that turns against the one who sets it, or the horror of discovering that the power she has over Mavriky is greater than the will she had: this is what makes her raise him (Part Two, Chapter V). The question of someone who wants to know the truth, or the challenge of someone who wants to see how far he will go: this is what makes her speak aloud in the drawing room (Part Two, Chapter X). And the image of the spider may be a prediction she made to herself in Switzerland, or a pretext for not hearing what he is trying to tell her (Part Three, Chapter III).

The deepest divergence is over what she knows. In Part Two, Chapter VI, Mavriky Nikolayevich says that she loves and hates him, and that if he called her she would leave everyone; in Part Three, Chapter III, she says she has lived her hour and that is enough. Both things fit the same young woman: the one who, according to Mavriky, loves and hates, and the one who, the next morning, says she has lived her hour and that is enough. What the text does not allow is deciding for her.

Relationships

• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the man she loves and hates, against whom, it is said, she raises her hand, whom she questions in public (Part Two, Chapter X), and from whom she receives the answer that makes her leave (Part Three, Chapter III).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the former teacher, whose forehead she kisses (Part One, Chapter III), and who finds her on the road, on his knees (Part Three, Chapter III).
• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the aunt who takes her home with the lame woman (Part One, Chapter IV), and with whom she stays, against her mother (Part One, Chapter V).
• Ivan Shatov: the collaborator she chooses and who refuses her (Part One, Chapter IV).
• Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina: the woman she demands to see and who follows her with her gaze (Part One, Chapter IV, Part One, Chapter V).
• Darya Pavlovna Shatova: the ward at whom she looks with hatred and contempt on seeing her enter (Part One, Chapter V).
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: who tells her about Shatov and the printing press in Switzerland (Part One, Chapter IV), explains to her Stavrogin's great idea, and catches up with her in the field at Skvoreshniki (Part Three, Chapter III).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the captain whose indecent letters she brings to light (Part Two, Chapter X).
• Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke: the governor's wife, whose permission she takes to go to Varvara Petrovna's house (Part One, Chapter V).