The chronicler

Who He Is

The chronicler is Anton Lavrentyev G-v, a young civil servant whom Liputin presents as classically educated, with connections in the highest society, and who claims to be himself a friend and confidant of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (ch. III, Part One, ch. IV, Part One). He is the novel's narrator, and he opens the chronicle by apologizing for the clumsiness of starting from afar: the portrait of the professor will serve as an introduction, and the story proper is left for later (ch. I, Part One). He speaks almost always in a "we," that of the town, and it is through this "we" that the professor is seen (ch. I, Part One). He is neither omniscient nor hidden. He appears as a character, serves as a messenger, is ridiculed by Karmazinov in the street, is afraid of Liputin, accompanies Shatov to the Lebyadkins' house, and at the matinee is one of the twelve young men with ribbons in the organization (ch. III, Part One, ch. IV, Part One, ch. I, Part Three). He writes after the disaster, when the town already blames everything on the International, and so he distrusts the ready-made explanation (ch. I, Part Three). What he wants is to tell what happened, and he says he does not want to sin by pointing at the guilty (ch. II, Part Three). What he fears is Liputin, and the ridicule the writer makes him suffer in the street (ch. III, Part One). What he knows comes largely secondhand: from Stepan himself, from Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke, from the inquiry, from Liamchin, and from documents he copies (ch. X, Part Two, ch. VIII, Part Three). Where he is wrong is in judging by habits. In ch. II, Part Three, seeing that his friend shows his usual firmness, he concludes that Stepan will do nothing tragic, and the outcome makes him admit that he was mistaken.

Trajectory

In ch. I, Part One, the chronicler presents himself through what he says of Stepan Trofimovich, and the first sentence of the portrait already works in irony:

He now discovers, to his surprise, that the professor was never exiled or under surveillance, and he recounts the professor's career like someone dismantling a pose. He swears to respect him, and compares him to Gulliver. He takes part in the evenings of the circle, where Shatov explodes, and he is the confidant to whom Stepan, two weeks after returning from Berlin, confesses under the strictest secrecy the terrible news that he is a mere hanger-on in the house. The point at which he reconstructs from others' memory is visible:

In ch. II, Part One, when he first sees Nikolai Stavrogin, he expects a rag reeking of vodka and finds the most elegant gentleman he has ever seen. He describes the face by excess:

At the end of the chapter he sees the professor come undone: he drinks more, cries more, circles the windows, and after much talk he looks at himself for a long time in the mirror and says he is a fallen man. In ch. III, Part One he lives with him through the week of the engagement, younger and indignant, and guesses the worry his friend does not confess. He meets Karmazinov in the street and nearly runs to find a cab. He bends down to pick up the purse the writer drops, and it is the writer who picks it up. Five minutes later he decides to laugh at the scene and tell it. He is in the room when Liputin enters with Kirillov and pours out the news, among it the question Varvara Petrovna asked about the son's sanity. He walks his friend to the street, where he hears the whisper about other people's sins, confronts the whisperer in indignation, and hears Liza's fresh voice. That night, at Alexei Kirillov's house, he is the one who hears the thesis that God is the pain of the fear of death, and he thinks the man is mad. The captain Lebyadkin seizes him by the chest at the gate.

In ch. IV, Part One, it is the chronicler who accompanies Ivan Shatov to the house of Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina for the first visit. He notes that Shatov's leaving, just when printing is mentioned, can only mean that something has already happened. Liza calls him back and asks him to take Shatov to the lame woman. He promises, moved by a pity he does not understand, and is hurt by her allusion to having noticed his feelings. That night, at Shatov's house, he is the only one who hears Russian atheism described as the lackey of thought, and he sees Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina for the first time. On Sunday he waits with Stepan in the drawing room of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina and goes back an hour in time to tell what happened in the cathedral.

In ch. V, Part One, in the drawing room, he notices everything that goes on around him: Liza's glance, the crooked smile, the captain who appears in tails, Pyotr's entrance, which seems to him to be already speaking from the next room, and Stavrogin's, whom he sees for the second time in four years:

When Shatov strikes, the chronicler explains who the man receiving the blow is, and measures his rage:

He says he still hears the thud of Liza's nape against the rug.

In ch. IV, Part Two, at Stepan's silent invitation, he stays in the room while Pyotr humiliates him, and from there he guesses the young man's plan: to drive the old man to despair and to an open scandal, and to strike the governor. In ch. V, Part Two, he is called by Liza to the excursion to the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich. At the hotel he describes the young man who killed himself, with his forehead smooth and his face like marble. He notes, only from rumor, that Liza raised her hand against Stavrogin at the door, and that Stavrogin came back pale. In ch. IX, Part Two, he goes with Stepan to the governor, sees in him a little boy awaiting the rod, and sees the maid Nastasya climb onto a chair to light the lamp. In ch. X, Part Two, he reconstructs Lembke's night from what Yulia Mikhailovna told him, refutes the rumors that circulated after the workers' morning, and proposes an explanation for the rest. It is he who says that a subscription was taken up in town for a destitute woman in an almshouse who never existed, and that he gave twenty kopecks. He includes in the chronicle, word for word, the document "From Stavrogin," correcting only the spelling, and observes that the author, after all, is not a man of letters ("With Tikhon").

In ch. I, Part Three, explaining the mood of the day of the matinee, he says that in a time of transition the rabble rises in every society, and he declares that he does not know exactly what the troubled time consisted of:

In the room, with the organizer's ribbon on his shoulder, he sees the audience hostile to Karmazinov, and he formulates the rule that explains it:

He puts the ribbon in his pocket and slips out the back, straight to his friend's house. In ch. II, Part Three, he runs to Stepan, who does not receive him. He goes to Yulia Mikhailovna, loses patience, and shouts at Pyotr, the scoundrel, that it was he who arranged everything. He roams the town without finding support, and goes to the ball, which still seems to him the worst part of the chronicle, a nightmare, and then to the fire that rises in Zarechye. He describes the unconfessed pleasure of watching a great fire at night:

He sees Lembke on the remains of a fence, and keeps in memory a curly-haired locksmith who shouted to the neighbors, though he does not want to point him out. In ch. III, Part Three, he arrives at the Lebyadkins' house at the moment when the crowd, tired of hearing how it had been advantageous for Stavrogin to slit the woman's throat, listens in silence. He sees Liza making her way through like someone who has escaped from a hospital:

At the inquiry he declares that it was the chance act of drunken people, and he still thinks so today.

In the following chapters he writes what no one present could have seen. In ch. IV, Part Three, he writes what went on among the five, and with Pyotr at Erkel's house, and his certainty that the denunciation against Shatov was Pyotr's invention:

In ch. VI, Part Three, he suspects, without proof, that Pyotr received a warning from Petersburg that day. In ch. VII, Part Three, he explains why Stepan Trofimovich leaves on foot, and recounts Sofya Matveyevna's days at his side, with what he learned later. In ch. VIII, Part Three, he gathers, in facts, Liamchin's confession, the arrests, Pyotr's fate, and Stavrogin's letter to Darya, which he transcribes without correcting the stylistic errors of a Russian nobleman who did not learn his own language well. He also gathers the hanging.

Themes Embodied

The chronicler is Truth and Lies given form. The one who tells is a resident of the town, not an omniscient narrator, and so the novel gives us of what happens only what the town knew, saw, supposed, or invented. The "we" in which he speaks belongs to Individual and Society, and the chronicle shows the town that sustains it: the town that believes the diagnosis, the rumor, and the International, and that the chronicler himself seems to share, as far as one can tell. His symbol is the epigraph that opens the book, which only Stepan Trofimovich's mouth, and not his, comes to explain (The pigs and the epigraph).

What the chronicler has of his own is the gap between what he saw and what he writes. He saw Shatov's blow, Stavrogin's face, and the thud of Liza's nape. What Pyotr thought at the station, what Liamchin told the investigator, and what the five felt on hearing the denunciation he did not see, and he writes it all the same, in the phrasing of one who learned it later. The choice to put a small, implicated character in the narrator's place makes each scene a version, and the reader works among them.

Divergent Readings

There are two readings of the narrator, and the novel supports both with the same firmness. One takes him for an honest witness, of contained irony, who neither condemns nor is an accomplice, who corrects himself when he notices he was wrong, as with Stepan before the departure (ch. II, Part Three), and who shows feelings of his own, such as the pity for Liza that he does not understand (ch. IV, Part One). The other takes him for a voice that lies little by little. He reconstructs scenes from others' memories, gives the same phrase of Varvara Petrovna twice with small differences, and the deviation lets us see the hand that writes (ch. I, Part One). The text does not decide between the two.

The objection that the narrator knows too much and sees too little has an answer in the book itself, which makes him declare when he did not see, when he learned later, and when he suspects. He calls rumor what he heard about the hand Liza raised, suspicion the warning from Petersburg, and conjecture the rest (ch. V, Part Two, ch. VI, Part Three, ch. II, Part Three). The question of why Dostoevsky needs the narrator to be a resident of the town is left open.

Relationships

• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the friend he accompanies through almost every scene, who confesses to him what he thought (ch. I, Part One, ch. IX, Part Two, ch. X, Part Two), and whose departure on foot he suspects only late (ch. II, Part Three).
• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the man he describes, who seems to him unmasked (ch. V, Part One), and whose document he includes in the chronicle ("With Tikhon").
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the young man he sees already speaking from the next room, and to whom he shouts, in the heat, that it was he who was the scoundrel (ch. V, Part One, ch. II, Part Three).
• Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina: the young woman for whom he feels a pity he does not understand, and whom he sees fall (ch. IV, Part One, ch. III, Part Three).
• Ivan Shatov: the companion of two visits, whom he accompanies to the Lebyadkins' house (ch. IV, Part One).
• Alexei Kirillov: the one who receives him at night and tells him he resembles his older brother, who died (ch. III, Part One).
• Liputin: the acquaintance he fears (ch. III, Part One).
• Karmazinov: the writer whom, out of reverence, he nearly serves in the street (ch. III, Part One).
• Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke: the source of part of what he tells about the governor (ch. X, Part Two).
• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the lady in whose drawing room he waits for Sunday (ch. IV, Part One).
• Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina: the woman he sees for the first time at the Lebyadkins' house, brought there by Shatov (ch. IV, Part One).