Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina

Who They Are

Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, the general's wife, is the wife of General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin and the last princess of the old, faded Myshkin family, an origin she prizes and before which her husband, who married her young without beauty or dowry, respects and fears her (chapter II of Part One). She is the distant relative to whom Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin wrote from Switzerland without reply, and the first person in Petersburg to take him in. The mother of three daughters in no hurry to marry, Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina and Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, she lives by outbursts: she speaks before she thinks, regrets it in the same breath and has, in her husband's words, a great rage every three years (chapter IX of Part Two). What she wants across the whole book are two things that cannot go together, to keep the prince close and to keep him away from her youngest daughter; what she fears is ridicule, the family being talked about, her daughters turning nihilists (chapter I of Part Three). She reads people by their hearts and distrusts that reading when it contradicts what the world would say. The novel's last line is hers (chapter XII of Part Four).

Trajectory

In chapter V of Part One the general introduces the prince to his wife as a poor idiot, almost a beggar, to distract her from the pearls he bought for Nastasya Filippovna. She has a napkin tied around the visitor's neck, sees that he eats and talks well, declares that there is nothing strange about him and demands that he tell her things, because she wants to see how he speaks. When he says he woke up in Switzerland to the braying of a donkey, she tries to defend him from the daughters who laugh and ends up making the joke worse:

In chapter VI of Part One the prince reads the faces in the house and says of her that she is a complete child, in everything, for good and for bad. In chapter VII of Part One she is delighted, because his character is the same as hers; she looks with contempt at the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, asks Gania whether he is going to marry (he lies that he is not) and bids the prince farewell, saying that God brought him to Petersburg for her.

In chapter I of Part Two, after the night of the birthday, no one in the house mentions the prince for a month, and she declares that she was mistaken about him and that her whole life has been one long error about people; two letters from the old Princess Belokonskaya, who receives him in Moscow, change the mood of the house, and Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, Kolya, wins her over by not flattering her.

In chapter VI of Part Two she goes with her daughters and Prince Sch. to Lebedev's dacha, expecting to find the prince on his deathbed, and is annoyed to see him smiling and well dressed. She calls the general Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin a liar, since he says he carried Aglaya in his arms, and when her daughter confirms the story of the bow and arrow in Tver, she sends the old man off to cry in a corner and soon calls him back kindly. In chapter VII of Part Two she is charmed by the ballad of the poor knight without noticing the swapped letters, kisses Aglaya and tells her quietly that, if she read it in earnest, she pities her, and if she read it as mockery, she does not approve; then, out of accumulated anger and curiosity, she pushes the prince to settle in public the matter of Pavlishchev's son. In chapter VIII of Part Two she has Kolya read aloud the weekly's article against the prince. In chapter IX of Part Two she explodes against her husband, against the prince, who asks forgiveness of those who insulted him, and against the young men, who refuse gratitude yet live on it:

In chapter X of Part Two Hippolyte Terentyev weeps like a child in the armchair, and she presses his head against her chest:

At the end of the same chapter, when the woman in the calash shouts to Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky that Rogozhin bought his promissory notes, she stares at him for two seconds and goes home without a word.

In chapter XII of Part Two she enters the prince's terrace alone, warns him that she has not come to ask forgiveness, questions him about the Easter note, makes him swear that he has not married Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, and says that Aglaya will not be his while she is alive. In the same breath she tells him why she had been waiting for him:

Reading the note in which Aglaya forbids the visit, she understands the opposite, a daughter offended because he did not come, and drags him by the hand to the dacha.

In chapter I of Part Three the narrator shows what drives her: she blames herself for her own temper, weeps at night for her eldest daughter still unmarried, has in Aglaya both her torment and her idol, and an anonymous letter about letters exchanged between Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya makes her seat the prince at the family table to pry her daughter's secrets out of him without asking. There and then she defends him against Radomsky, reporting that the leader of the young men, Burdovsky, wrote to the prince asking forgiveness. In chapter II of Part Three, after the scandal at the Vauxhall, she gets the family up and almost runs away. In chapter VIII of Part Three she appears on the green bench at the height of the quarrel and hears from her daughter that she is going to marry Gania; in chapter IX of Part Three she takes the prince home, already regretting her interrogation, and, faced with his exact answer, takes her leave with respect.

In Part Four the question she cannot put into words is whether the prince is good or good for nothing. In chapter V of Part Four she rushes to Petersburg to consult Belokonskaya, Aglaya's godmother, and reads in the hedgehog that her daughter sends the prince a coded telegram. In chapter VII of Part Four, when the Chinese vase falls, she says that a clay pot is not worth the fright; by the end of her speech she is the first to understand what is going to happen, and that same night she swears that, as long as she lives, he will not be Aglaya's husband; the next morning, when her daughter says she never considered him a fiancé, she turns on her and says she would have shown the guests out and kept him for herself. In chapter VIII of Part Four she decides to visit him, because he is ill and is no stranger, and promises him friendship as before, at least hers, words that sound like a farewell. In chapter XII of Part Four, at the Schneider house, she weeps with all her heart before the prince, who no longer recognizes her, and takes leave of Radomsky almost in anger:

Themes Embodied

Yelizaveta Prokofyevna is, among the Epanchins, the only one who measures the prince by his heart and by the world at once, and her file is the story of that inner fight. The more her heart asks what he lacks (chapter V of Part Four), the harder she attacks him, and the family learns to read this: the more she resists, the more she agrees. It is the domestic form of Compassion and Charity in the novel, a compassion that does not confess itself and only appears by surprise, in a tear (chapter X of Part Two), in calling back the old liar (chapter VI of Part Two), in weeping in the Russian manner before the prince destroyed (chapter XII of Part Four).

The prince calls her a child on the first day (chapter VI of Part One) and she recognizes in him her own character (chapter VII of Part One); months later she asks him for friendship as one would a brother (chapter XII of Part Two), the same word with which he signed his note to Aglaya. The two speak without calculation and are ashamed afterward of having spoken. The difference is that she has a family, a position and a daughter to protect, so every impulse of hers is followed by a step back; he has none of that, and does not step back. This is what makes her last line, against fantasy, so bitter: the one who says it is the person in the book who has been most carried away by him.

Divergent Readings

The text supports two readings of her anger. In one, it is the fear of ridicule and the zeal of a respected household: she runs to Belokonskaya, fears society, and wants to know whether her fiancé fits the measure of her world (chapter I of Part Three, chapter V of Part Four). In the other, it is the form taken by a true intuition that she cannot sustain against the world: she is the one who punishes Burdovsky's young men for their exact contradiction (chapter IX of Part Two), who takes in Hippolyte against his irony (chapter X of Part Two) and who, after the fit, would tell everyone to leave so that she could stay with him (chapter VII of Part Four).

The closing line, against Europe and fantasy (chapter XII of Part Four), also allows two readings: the good sense of someone who has seen the disaster of illusions, the daughter married to a false count and the prince sent back to Switzerland, or the bitterness of a mother who has no one to blame and blames the whole foreign world.

Relationships

• Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, the husband, who respects and fears her (chapter II of Part One) and hides from her the pearls he bought for Nastasya Filippovna (chapter V of Part One).
• Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, the eldest daughter, for whom she weeps at night for being still unmarried (chapter I of Part Three).
• Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina, the middle daughter, engaged to Prince Sch. (chapter I of Part Two).
• Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, the youngest daughter, her torment and her idol (chapter I of Part Three), whom she wants far from the prince and who ends up lost to a false count (chapter XII of Part Four).
• Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the distant relative she takes in on the first day (chapter VII of Part One), to whom she asks friendship as to a brother (chapter XII of Part Two) and for whom she weeps at the end (chapter XII of Part Four).
• Hippolyte Terentyev, who weeps in her lap and asks her to save his younger brothers (chapter X of Part Two).
• Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, the daughter's suitor, whom she stares at without a word after the shout from the calash (chapter X of Part Two) and to whom she speaks the book's last line (chapter XII of Part Four).