Who They Are
Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina is the middle daughter of General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin and of Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, sister of Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina and of Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina. She is twenty-three when the novel begins and is a painter (chapter II of Part One). For two years she has been looking for a subject for a painting, and it is through that request that she enters the book: she asks the prince for a subject on the first day (chapter V of Part One), and the whole family, months later, looks for a face for her for the poor knight (chapter VI of Part Two). She is the only one of the three who marries without drama: Prince Sch., a serious man of thirty-five, asks for her hand during Myshkin's absence (chapter I of Part Two), and through him Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky enters the house. She is the sister with the happy face, and the book uses her as a calm counterpoint to Aglaya's storm.
Trajectory
In chapter V of Part One, when the prince says he saw an execution in Lyon, she asks him to give her the subject she is looking for, and he proposes the face of a condemned man one minute before the guillotine. She asked for a painting subject, and he gives her the inner life of the condemned man, street by street, to the end:
Крест и голова, вот картина, The cross and the head, that is the painting.
Then she asks him to tell how he was in love. In chapter VI of Part One the prince says she has a happy face, a good sister's face. In chapter VII of Part One, before the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, it is she who says that such a beauty is strength, that with it one can turn the world around.
In chapter I of Part Two, during the prince's six months' absence, Prince Sch. asks for her hand, and through him Radomsky starts visiting the house. In chapter VI of Part Two Prince Sch. tells the origin of the joke about the poor knight: a month earlier, while looking for a subject for a painting for Adelaida, everyone had come across the poem of a knight who never raised his visor, and they found no face for him. In chapter X of Part Two, after Hippolyte's outburst, when the mother thanks the prince sarcastically for the pleasant evening, it is Adelaida who holds out her hand to him. In chapter XI of Part Two she and her fiancé visit him in secret from the family, talk of an old tree she wants to draw and, as they leave, ask who the woman in the calash was. In chapter I of Part Three the narrator says that her engagement gave her mother a month of peace; in chapter II of Part Three, after Aglaya's outburst swearing she will never marry the prince, Adelaida kisses him on the forehead. In chapter XII of Part Four, at the Schneider house, she thanks Radomsky, together with Aleksandra, for the care of the prince.
Themes Embodied
Adelaida is Beauty seen by the one who paints it. She looks for the subject and not the face, and the prince gives her a face that cannot be painted, that of a man in his last minute (chapter V of Part One); before Nastasya Filippovna's portrait it is she who says that such beauty is strength (chapter VII of Part One), the phrase the whole book puts to the test; and the poor knight, born as the subject of a painting of hers, ends without a face (chapter VI of Part Two). The sister who looks for subjects is surrounded by the gravest themes of the novel and treats them as pictures, and the book does not judge her for it.
Divergent Readings
The text leaves two readings of her. In one, she is the happy and slightly distracted sister, who marries at the right time and leaves the story. In the other, she is the most generous of the three toward the prince when he is alone: she holds out her hand to him when his mother humiliates him (chapter X of Part Two), visits him in secret (chapter XI of Part Two) and kisses him on the forehead when Aglaya renounces him before everyone (chapter II of Part Three).
Relationships
- Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, the mother, to whom her engagement gives a month of peace (chapter I of Part Three).
- Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, the father.
- Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, who gives her the subject of the condemned man (chapter V of Part One) and whom she visits in secret (chapter XI of Part Two).
- Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina and Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, her sisters.
- Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, the relative of her fiancé, who enters the house through him (chapter I of Part Two).