Who They Are
Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina is the eldest daughter of General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin and of Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, sister of Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina and of Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina. She is twenty-five when the novel begins and is a musician (chapter II of Part One). She is the daughter the family, out of good sense, destines for Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, who is fifty-five: Aglaya, the most beautiful, does not suit him, and Aleksandra, sensible and affable, may accept (chapter IV of Part One). She is the calmest of the three and the one who draws conclusions aloud; what the book shows of her is little, and almost always through the eyes of others, but the prince, on the first day, reads in her face a sadness that no one in the house has named.
Trajectory
In chapter V of Part One, when the prince begins to tell about his life in Switzerland, she whispers to Aglaya that he may be a rogue and not an idiot. After the story of the condemned man who is pardoned, which sees time as infinite wealth only when it is ending, she is the one who draws the moral and asks what the man would have done with the life given back to him:
Что если бы не умирать! Что если бы воротить жизнь, — какая бесконечность! И всё это было бы мое! Я бы тогда каждую минуту в целый век обратил, ничего бы не потерял, каждую бы минуту счетом отсчитывал, уж ничего бы даром не истратил!, What if I did not have to die! What if life could be given back, what an infinity! And all of it would be mine! Then I would turn every minute into a whole century, lose nothing, count out every minute, and never spend a single one in vain!
In the same chapter, after the description of the condemned man's last day, she comments that this is not like the quietism of which Aglaya accused the prince. In chapter VI of Part One he keeps his promise to say what he sees in faces, and says of her:
У вас, Александра Ивановна, лицо тоже прекрасное и очень милое, но, может быть, у вас есть какая-нибудь тайная грусть; душа у вас, без сомнения, добрейшая, но вы не веселы. У вас какой-то особенный оттенок в лице, похоже как у Гольбейновой Мадонны в Дрездене, Your face too, Aleksandra Ivanovna, is beautiful and very sweet, but perhaps you have some secret sadness; your soul is, without doubt, the kindest, but you are not cheerful. There is a particular shade in your face, something like Holbein's Madonna in Dresden.
In chapter I of Part Two, six months later, the planned marriage with Totsky comes apart on its own, and he is enchanted by a French marquise. In chapter I of Part Three the narrator says that her mother cries at night for her, still unmarried at twenty-five; the same night, at the table, it is Aleksandra who accuses Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky of slander when he says that the Russian liberal denies Russia itself. In chapter III of Part Three, after the Vauxhall scandal, her mother and the two elder daughters conclude that Radomsky has ties with Nastasya Filippovna. In chapter X of Part Three, at midnight, she is the only one the prince finds awake at the dacha: she tells him it is half past midnight and that they may have been waiting for him. In chapter V of Part Four, when the family does not know whether Aglaya's fiancé is good or good for nothing, it is she who says that the prince was never a fool. In chapter XII of Part Four, at the Schneider house, she thanks Radomsky, together with Adelaida, for the care of the prince.
Themes Embodied
Aleksandra is the place where the novel shows marriage as an arrangement without scandal: she is the daughter who would accept Totsky out of good sense, and the prince, unaware of the arrangement, sees in her a secret sadness (chapter VI of Part One). The comparison with Holbein's Madonna, the same painter as the dead Christ in Rogozhin's house, gives her the only form of Beauty in the book that is neither force nor enigma: the sad beauty of someone who is not cheerful and does not say why.
Divergent Readings
The text leaves two readings of her. In one, she is the sensible, pale sister who speaks little and confirms what the others think. In the other, she is the most attentive of the household: she is the one who suspects the rogue before anyone else, who undoes the accusation of quietism (chapter V of Part One) and who says, when no one else does, that the prince was never a fool (chapter V of Part Four).
Relationships
- Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, the mother, who cries for her at night for still being unmarried (chapter I of Part Three).
- Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, the father, who destines her to his partner (chapter IV of Part One).
- Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, the suitor of fifty-five (chapter IV of Part One, chapter I of Part Two).
- Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, who reads the sadness on her face (chapter VI of Part One).
- Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina and Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, her sisters.