Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin

Who They Are

Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin, General Ivolgin, is the father of Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, of Varvara Ardalionovna Ivolgina and of Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, husband of Nina Alexandrovna, a retired general of fifty-five or more, fat, in a threadbare frock coat, smelling of vodka and with affected manners (chapter VIII of Part One). Ruined, he sleeps in a cubbyhole next to the kitchen with his youngest son, who keeps watch over him, begs for money at every visit and keeps, according to Gania, a mistress, a captain's widow (chapter XI of Part One). The trait that defines him is lying: he invents an entire past of friendships, duels, bullets in the chest and historic encounters, and he lies above all to himself, to keep the world in which he is still someone. What he wants is respect; what he fears is being seen as he is; what he knows, and the narrator insists on it, is that deep down no one believes him (chapter IV of Part Four). On the night of the prince's birthday, in Part Three, he takes four hundred rubles from Lebedev, and the shame of that theft, which he cannot bring himself to confess, knocks him down: he dies of a second stroke (chapter X of Part Four).

Trajectory

In chapter VIII of Part One he enters the prince's room, newly arrived, and says that he carried him in his arms, that he was in love with the prince's mother, and that he and the prince's father nearly fought a duel, until both were weeping with pistols pressed to their chests. When the prince says that his father died in the hospital, under investigation, the general explains the case as a witness and a member of the commission:

Nina Alexandrovna spares him the word lie: she says he is mistaken, and asks the prince to pay the rent to her and not to her husband. In the same chapter he announces the domestic tragedy, his son's marriage to an ambiguous woman, who will enter that house only by stepping over him.

In chapter IX of Part One he enters, in a frock coat and with a dyed mustache, the room where Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova is, on the day Gania wanted to keep him away from everything. She encourages him, and he blossoms:

The cavalcade is that of The Three Musketeers, and in the middle of it he swaps the name of the prince's father, corrected hours earlier. He tells of the bullets he has carried in his chest since Kars, and of why he broke with General Epanchin: on a train, an English lady threw his cigar out the window, and he threw her little dog after it. Nastasya Filippovna laughs and recalls that she read the very same story in the Indépendance Belge five or six days earlier; he blushes, Kolya clutches his head in his hands, and Gania grabs him by the shoulder. In chapter X of Part One, when Rogozhin raises the bid, the general protests and everyone laughs at him.

In chapter XII of Part One he waits for the prince in a café with billiards, pockets the twenty-five-ruble note he was supposed to change, and turns the invitation to Nastasya Filippovna's party into a father's campaign against her. He orders one bottle after another, talks of the thirteen bullets in his chest and of Pirogov, who supposedly telegraphed Paris for him, and stops at the door of his old friend Sokolovich, where another name is written:

He ends the day at the house of the captain's widow, Marfa Borisovna, who receives him shouting that he is a barbarian and a tyrant and that he has robbed her of everything; he gives her the prince's twenty-five rubles and sleeps on the sofa. Kolya reveals that his father never set foot in Nastasya Filippovna's house and, even so, says that he seems honest at heart and makes him pity him.

In chapter I of Part Two, during the prince's six months' absence, he ends up in debtors' prison, taken there by the captain's widow herself, to whom he had signed promissory notes. In chapter VI of Part Two he is sheltered in the dacha of Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev, with whom he discusses scholarly matters. To strike up a conversation with Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, he says he carried her in his arms, as he says to all young people; Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina calls him a liar, and Aglaya confirms it: in Tver, when she was six years old, he made her a bow and arrow, and the two of them killed a pigeon. The old man, who had forgotten that this time it was true, remembers everything and is moved:

In chapter IV of Part Three he presides over the debate at the prince's birthday party, protests against the cannibal anecdote, and compares Lebedev's sermon with those of a true interpreter of the 73rd Apocalypse whom he says he knew. In chapter IX of Part Three, after the night, he wakes Kolya at six in the morning, still drunk, to warn him that before Fyerdyshchenko one must be careful about what one says. Lebedev, who lost four hundred rubles from the pocket of his frock coat, tells how the general bared his chest in the middle of the street demanding to be searched, and then said that in his youth he had been accused of stealing five hundred thousand rubles, had saved his accuser from a fire and had married Nina Alexandrovna. Lebedev defines him:

In chapter I of Part Four the house is at war because of him: for a week he has been beside himself, went to the Epanchins' house to complain about the family and to ask for a job, and Gania knows the reason: his father stole the four hundred rubles, apparently for the captain's widow. In chapter II of Part Four Hippolyte Terentyev says aloud that a certain Captain Yeropegov, of whom the old man used to speak, may never have existed; Gania confirms it, and the general, who has endured far worse insults, collapses:

He leaves the house with his travel bag carried by Kolya and, from the street, hurls a curse on the house, while Gania closes the window grumbling that he even does that in a theatrical tone. In chapter III of Part Four the narrator goes back: after two days inseparable from Lebedev, drinking and weeping in each other's arms, the two quarrel; Lebedev found the wallet, left it where the general could return it, and it reappeared on the flap of Lebedev's coat. The general approaches the prince, speaks of respect and of rights, weeps, and asks for an hour of conversation the next day, which he calls the hour of destiny. Lebedev, accused of torturing him, replies:

In chapter IV of Part Four, at the appointed hour, he arrives restrained and dignified, and instead of confessing he tells the prince that at ten years old he was a page of Napoleon Bonaparte in Moscow, heard the emperor weeping at night, advised him to go home, and received from him, in his sister's album, the advice never to lie. The prince, to spare him the blush, praises him, and the general goes further; at the door he takes his leave:

The narrator classifies him:

That night the general sends the prince a note breaking with him: he does not accept signs of compassion that humiliate. He goes back to the Epanchins' house, frightens the general's wife with insinuations about Gania, and is thrown out; in the street, with Kolya, he mixes Gogol and Dead Souls, wants the headstone to say that a dead soul lies there, weeps for Nina, whom he calls an angelic soul, blesses his son for respecting a fallen old man, and climbs onto a stranger's porch to whisper a secret in his ear. He says only "the King of Rome" and the name of Maria Petrovna, and falls: it is a stroke.

In chapter VI of Part Four he is in danger, revived but never coming back to his senses, in Nina Alexandrovna's house; Gania does not dare go up to the room, and Lebedev weeps beside him as for a brother and calls him a genius. In chapter VIII of Part Four the prince tells Kolya about his father's theft with all delicacy: perhaps what kills the old man is the horror of his own fault, which not everyone would be capable of. In chapter X of Part Four he dies of a second stroke, about eight days after the first, and Kolya buries him.

Themes Embodied

General Ivolgin is the Truth and Lies of the novel on a domestic scale, and Part Four uses him as a small model of the whole book: an old man who stole, lies so as not to see himself, and collapses at the very moment he was about to confess, treated by the prince with a delicacy that relieves and, at the same time, humiliates. His lies deceive no one and ask nothing; they are the house in which he is still a general, a friend of Epanchin, a page of Napoleon. That is why the offense that knocks him down is not the accusation of theft but the doubt about an invented captain (chapter II of Part Four): denying Yeropegov takes from him the past he built.

The only two truths he tells in the book disarm him more than all his lies. The one about the bow and arrow, which he said out of habit and which by chance was true, makes him weep (chapter VI of Part Two); the one about the theft, which he never manages to say, kills him (chapter IV of Part Four, chapter X of Part Four). The advice never to lie, which he puts in Napoleon's mouth, stands at the centre of the greatest lie he tells: he knows what he should do and can only say it as legend.

He is also the prince's mirror in the way he treats fantasy. The prince accompanies the general before Kulakov's door without contradicting him (chapter XII of Part One) and listens to the page of Napoleon without laughing (chapter IV of Part Four); the pity with which he does so is what the old man cannot bear, and the note breaking off with him says exactly that. Compassion, here, turns into humiliation for the one who receives it, as it had already turned with Hippolyte.

Relationships

• Nina Alexandrovna, the wife, who spares him the word lie (chapter VIII of Part One) and forgives him in silence (chapter III of Part Four).
• Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, the eldest son, who is ashamed of him before Nastasya Filippovna (chapter IX of Part One) and confirms that Yeropegov never existed (chapter II of Part Four).
• Varvara Ardalionovna Ivolgina, the daughter, who wants to spare her mother the news of the theft (chapter I of Part Four).
• Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, the youngest son, who keeps watch over him (chapter VIII of Part One), carries his bag (chapter II of Part Four), hears the secret he never finishes telling (chapter IV of Part Four) and buries him (chapter X of Part Four).
• Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev, the drinking companion, whose four hundred rubles he steals and who loves and tortures him at once (chapter III of Part Four).
• Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the lodger from whom he takes twenty-five rubles (chapter XII of Part One) and with whom he breaks because he cannot bear his pity (chapter IV of Part Four).
• Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, the old friend he claims he was inseparable from (chapter IX of Part One).
• Hippolyte Terentyev, the captain's son, who doubts Captain Yeropegov aloud (chapter II of Part Four).