Who They Are
Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky is fifty-five when the novel opens, enormously rich, refined, a great connoisseur of beauty and a partner of General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin in some businesses (chapter IV of Part One). He is the man who made Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova what she is: he took her in as an orphan, changed her education when she was twelve and installed her in a small country house, where he visited her every summer for four years. When the book opens, he wants to marry one of the general's daughters, and the obstacle is her. What Totsky wants is comfort and order; what he fears is neither death nor revenge but indecent scandal; what he knows, and the narrator gives him credit for knowing, is that that woman has no price because she has stopped valuing herself. Where he is mistaken is in thinking that seventy-five thousand rubles and a bought husband can resolve what he himself started. He leaves the scene on the night of the birthday with a collector's remark (chapter XVI of Part One).
Trajectory
His past comes out in full in chapter IV of Part One. Eighteen years earlier, a poor neighbor, the retired officer Barashkov, lost his house and his wife in a fire and died insane a month later; Totsky, out of generosity, took in the two daughters, and the younger one died. Years later he noticed, in the steward's house, a twelve-year-old girl who promised unusual beauty, gave her a Swiss governess and four years of study, and installed her at Otradnoye. When she learned he was going to marry in Petersburg, she appeared alone in the city, now a grown woman, and said what she had come to say:
ну хоть для того, чтобы мне только посмеяться над тобой вволю, потому что теперь и я наконец смеяться хочу, if only so I can laugh at you to my heart's content, because now I, too, finally want to laugh.
Totsky thinks for two weeks and understands whom he is dealing with:
Ничем не дорожа, а пуще всего собой (нужно было очень много ума и проникновения, чтобы догадаться в эту минуту, что она давно уже перестала дорожить собой, и чтоб ему, скептику и светскому цинику, поверить серьезности этого чувства), Настасья Филипповна в состоянии была самое себя погубить, безвозвратно и безобразно, Сибирью и каторгой, лишь бы надругаться над человеком, к которому она питала такое бесчеловечное отвращение, valuing nothing, and least of all herself (it took a great deal of intelligence and insight to guess, at that moment, that she had long since stopped valuing herself, and for him, a skeptic and society cynic, to believe in the seriousness of that feeling), Nastasya Filippovna was capable of ruining herself, irrevocably and hideously, with Siberia and hard labor, provided she could outrage the man for whom she felt such inhuman loathing.
He yields: he gives up the marriage, installs Nastasya Filippovna in Petersburg in luxury and begins to fear her. For five years she accepts the comfort but refuses the suitors he sends her on purpose. When he wants to marry Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, he agrees with the general to marry her off to Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, who, according to Totsky, loves her madly. At their visit, he offers her seventy-five thousand rubles, a sum of which even the general knew nothing; he accuses himself, and she accepts the money, giving it another name:
если она и принимает теперь капитал, то вовсе не как плату за свой девичий позор, в котором она не виновата, а просто как вознаграждение за исковерканную судьбу, if she now accepts the capital, it is by no means as payment for her maidenly disgrace, for which she is not to blame, but simply as compensation for a crippled destiny.
The general considers the matter settled; Totsky does not:
но раз напуганный Тоцкий и теперь не совсем поверил, и долго боялся, нет ли и тут змеи под цветами, but Totsky, once frightened, did not quite believe it even now, and for a long time feared there might be a serpent under the flowers there too.
At the party in chapter XIII of Part One he waits, anxious, for the announcement. The narrator says that the mixture of tastes in Nastasya Filippovna displeased him, and that she kept Fyerdyshchenko at home because he tormented Totsky and Gania. Totsky finds the game of confessions a vanity of a special kind, and in chapter XIV of Part One, when his turn comes, he tells, with his usual dignity, while she fiddles with the lace on her sleeve without looking at him, the story of the camellias: twenty years earlier, out of whim, he reached the old merchant who grew them first and took the camellias that the poor Petya Vorkhovskoy was going to fetch for the lady he loved; Petya fell ill, went to the Caucasus and died in the Crimea. Soon after, Nastasya Filippovna leaves the decision on the marriage to the prince, hears from him that he should not marry her, returns the seventy-five thousand and frees Totsky for nothing, after nine years and three months. He speaks of promises and honor.
In chapter XV of Part One he stays so as not to leave without clearing things up, and hears himself called "monsieur aux camélias" in front of the guests; she tells him that she tormented him for five years without living with him, taking his money. In chapter XVI of Part One, when Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin tells her that she considers herself guilty without being so, Totsky thinks the idiot knows that flattery is the best path. She refuses the prince, saying that ruining a child like that is Totsky's business, since he likes children, and names herself by her relation to him:
Я Тоцкого наложницей была… Князь! тебе теперь надо Аглаю Епанчину, а не Настасью Филипповну [...] Вот так-то вы все: или с бесчестными, или с честными женщинами знаться, — один выбор!, I was Totsky's concubine... Prince! Now what you need is Aglaya Epanchina, not Nastasya Filippovna [...] That's how all of you are: either you keep company with dishonored women or with honorable ones, there is only one choice!
After she leaves with Rogozhin, Totsky sighs: an uncut diamond, all lost.
In chapter I of Part Two, six months later, the planned marriage with the general's eldest daughter comes apart on its own, and he is enchanted by a French marquise. In chapter XI of Part Two his name returns only as a hypothesis: Prince Sch. supposes that Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky may have met Nastasya Filippovna years ago through Totsky.
Themes Embodied
Totsky is the start of the chain of prices that organizes Part One (Money and Wealth). He does not buy Nastasya Filippovna all at once, as Rogozhin tries to: he invests in her, as in an object of taste, with education, a small house and comfort, and when the investment threatens his peace, he tries to resell it with a dowry. The closing phrase, an uncut diamond (chapter XVI of Part One), tells how he saw her from start to finish: a precious stone he never knew how to work. It is the coldest form of Beauty in the novel, beauty as the possession of the one who appreciates it.
The book does not let Totsky be only the outside villain. Through his eyes the reader learns of the contempt Nastasya Filippovna has for herself (chapter IV of Part One), and the narrator grants him the intelligence to see it. The story of the camellias (chapter XIV of Part One) is chosen by him as the worst act precisely because it is not the worst: he steals some flowers from a lovesick young man, when everyone in the room knows he stole a life. She does not look at him while he speaks, and the confession without confession is what entitles her to close the game.
Relationships
- Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, the partner, with whom he arranges the dowry and the marriage of Nastasya Filippovna to Gania (chapter IV of Part One).
- Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, the orphan he educated and made his mistress at Otradnoye, and who later tormented him for five years (chapter IV of Part One, chapter XV of Part One).
- Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, the general's eldest daughter, whom he meant to marry (chapter IV of Part One); the plan comes apart on its own (chapter I of Part Two).
- Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, the fiancé he chooses for Nastasya Filippovna, claiming that he loves her madly (chapter IV of Part One).
- Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the stranger who, at the party, decides for her against his arrangement (chapter XIV of Part One).