Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky

Who They Are

Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky is a distant relative of Prince Sch., an aide-de-camp of twenty-eight, rich, witty and of good family, who enters the Epanchins' house through the hand of Adelaida's fiancé and becomes a regular visitor after seeing Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina (chapter I of Part Two). He appears on stage in chapter VII of Part Two, when he arrives on the terrace of the Pavlovsk dacha alongside General Epanchin. He is the only character in the novel who analyzes others with distance and clarity, rather than living them from within as Myshkin, Rogozhin or Hippolyte do. He is the lucid interlocutor of The Idiot: the diagnosis of Russian liberalism that he sets out in chapter I of Part Three is the most direct piece of social criticism in the book, and it is he who, in the Conclusion (chapter XII of Part Four), takes on the task of looking after the prince and explaining to the others what happened to him, after the prince's reason has already given way for good. What he wants is to understand, and to have Aglaya, who refuses him (chapter III of Part Three); what he fears is ridicule and the scandal that Nastasya Filippovna stirs up around him; where he is mistaken is in measuring the prince only by the ruler of the world.

Trajectory

In chapter I of Part Two the narrator presents him through what is said of him: rich, brilliant, with a reputation for a few conquests. In chapter VII of Part Two he arrives in civilian clothes, after asking to leave the service, in the middle of the ballad of the poor knight, and, among those who notice what Aglaya did with the shield, he is the only one who makes a point of showing that he noticed:

When he asks Aglaya whether the poor knight has come back, she looks at him as if she does not understand. In chapter IX of Part Two, faced with the Burdovsky affair, he recalls, laughing, the lawyer who defended a man who had killed six out of poverty, asking who, in his place, would not have thought the same; in chapter X of Part Two he sums up the group's theory as the triumph of right before anyone knows in what right consists, from which one jumps to the right of force, that of tigers and crocodiles.

Before he holds forth on politics, he had already entered the plot through an obscure episode: at the end of chapter X of Part Two, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, from a calash, shouts at him, addressing him as "you," that he should not fear Kupfer's promissory notes, because Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin bought them for thirty, at her insistence. He says she is a madwoman and that he does not know what promissory notes she means. In chapter XI of Part Two Prince Sch. guarantees that a man so rich cannot have promissory notes with a moneylender or address her as "you," and General Epanchin swears it is slander; Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, on the contrary, thinks the story may be true, because Radomsky's affairs are in some disorder. The bond never quite gets explained.

At the meeting at the Epanchins' house that opens Part Three, in chapter I of Part Three, Evgeny Pavlovich holds forth about the Russian liberal before everyone, before the prince joins the conversation:

The remark is no salon digression: it is the only time in the novel when someone generalizes from politics to national character with this analytical coolness, without the religious passion that takes hold of Myshkin when he speaks of Russia and the Russian Christ at the meeting in chapter VII of Part Four, or of Shatov, later, in Demons.

In the same chapter he confesses that he invented for the prince the next question, whether the distortion of ideas in the case of the young man who killed six is a particular or a general case, and receives a serious answer that disconcerts him:

He looks at the prince without a smile for the first time and returns the question: why did he not see the same distortion in the Burdovsky case? When he mocks Hippolyte Terentyev and says he already forgives him everything, the prince reverses the position:

In chapter II of Part Three the prince tells him, in a strange state, that he considers him the noblest of men. At the Vauxhall, Nastasya Filippovna pretends only then to notice him, addresses him as "you," like an intimate, and announces to everyone that his uncle, Kapiton Alekseyevich, shot himself that morning, leaving a hole of three hundred and fifty thousand rubles in the treasury, insinuating that the nephew left the service in time because he knew; the officer friend who proposes the whip gets a cane blow across the face. In chapter III of Part Three General Epanchin confirms to the prince that the uncle did shoot himself, tells him that Evgeny Pavlovich had asked for Aglaya a month earlier and been refused, and that the daughter explained the scandal with a laugh: the madwoman wants to chase off the suitor so as to marry her to the prince.

In chapter IV of Part Three he appears, to the prince's astonishment, at the birthday party: he has settled matters with the officer, is travelling in the morning because of his uncle's death, and wants a frank conversation first, because he came to seek the friendship of a man who does not lie, and perhaps also to pry something out of him. In the debate on the star Wormwood he tosses out a paradox for sport:

The phrase lands on someone who has resolved to kill himself at sunrise, and Evgeny Pavlovich, who does not take his eyes off Hippolyte the whole night, tells the prince that the young man has bad intentions. In chapter V of Part Three he asks, together with the prince, that Hippolyte not read the Explanation. In chapter VII of Part Three, after the shot without a cap, he doubts the forgetting, postpones the conversation with the prince, advises him to expel the young man and calls him a home-made Lacenaire, capable of killing ten people for fun; he notes, on leaving, that Hippolyte bequeathed the confession to Aglaya. In chapter VIII of Part Three Aglaya wants to know everything about the shot, above all what he said, and she tells the prince that she refused him because she does not want to be married off every minute.

In Part Four he is the name that irritates Aglaya: in chapter VI of Part Four she leaves the room when the prince says he would like to see him again, and at the solemn gathering she talks with him and with Prince N. while the prince watches her (chapter VII of Part Four). It is this same skeptical, not naive, gaze that he applies to the announced marriage between Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna. In chapter IX of Part Four, when the Epanchins leave for Kolmino and everyone who belonged to the household turns their back on the prince, he is the only one who visits him, and he confronts the prince with an almost clinical analysis of how the involvement of the two of them arose: a young man arriving from Switzerland with a thirst for his homeland who, on a day of thaw, heard the story of an offended woman and wanted to proclaim a generous idea:

He accuses him of having humiliated a pure girl before her rival and asks where the prince's Christian heart was; he hears that the prince marries because the other would die, and that he is afraid of her face; and he concludes that Myshkin perhaps never loved either woman:

This is the counterpoint the novel needs: where Myshkin treats every other person's fantasy (that of General Ivolgin, that of Nastasya Filippovna) with a delicacy that feeds it rather than dismantling it, Evgeny Pavlovich is the only one who points out, without cruelty but without sparing, that what began with a lie had to end with a lie (chapter IX of Part Four).

After Nastasya Filippovna's death and Myshkin's final collapse, in chapter XII of Part Four, it is Evgeny Pavlovich, sought out by Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, who secures the prince's return to Schneider's sanatorium in Switzerland, and who visits him every few months. He calls himself a superfluous man in Russia, lives in Europe and, after each visit, writes to Kolya and to Vera Lebedeva, with whom he corresponds in a growing friendship that the narrator cannot explain. In one of these letters, from Paris, he tells of Aglaya's fate:

The novel thus ends with the cool reason of Evgeny Pavlovich beside the Russian grief of Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina before the unrecognizable prince. They are the last two voices of the book, one that explains and one that suffers, and the last line, against Europe and fantasy, is hers and is said to him. Neither of them resolves the question the novel leaves open about whether Myshkin's kindness, given without calculation, was worth it.

Themes Embodied

Evgeny Pavlovich embodies Truth and Lies seen from the side of intelligence: he does not lie, as Lebedev or General Ivolgin do, nor does he tell the truth without measure, as the prince does; he tells the truth with irony, so that no one knows whether he believes what he says (chapter I of Part Three). That is why he seeks out the prince: he is the only one he cannot read, a man who answers seriously a question asked for sport. The friendship he asks for in chapter IV of Part Three, because the prince does not lie, is that of someone who knows his own truth always comes with a qualification.

His measure is that of the world, and by it the diagnosis of chapter IX of Part Four is exact: the prince does not love as a man, and he humiliated Aglaya. What the measure does not capture is what the narrator himself records in chapter X of Part Four, that the prince loves Nastasya Filippovna the way one looks after a sick child. Evgeny Pavlovich leaves the conversation wondering, amused, how one can love two women with two different loves, and the question, which he asks as a joke, is the one the book asks in earnest.

Divergent Readings

The text supports two readings of him. In one, he is the man of the world who gets everything right and understands nothing: liberalism, the Burdovsky case, Hippolyte, the marriage, all diagnosed exactly, without his noticing what the prince sees. In the other, he is the only character who learns anything from the prince: he starts by mocking him (chapter VII of Part Two), seeks his friendship (chapter IV of Part Three), is the only one who does not turn his back on him (chapter IX of Part Four), and ends as his guardian, visiting a man who no longer recognizes him (chapter XII of Part Four). The narrator agrees with the diagnosis of chapter IX of Part Four and, at the same time, does not know how to explain his friendship with Kolya and Vera, which is the part of him that the diagnosis does not cover.

Relationships

• Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin: he analyzes him from outside, with a skepticism that never became contempt (chapter I of Part Three, chapter IX of Part Four), and looks after him when no one else can (chapter XII of Part Four).
• Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova: accuses him in public of a shady bond with Rogozhin (chapter X of Part Two) and of his uncle's suicide (chapter II of Part Three), never fully explained.
• Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina: the relative of Prince Sch., her sister's fiancé, asks for her hand and is refused (chapter III of Part Three); it is he who, by letter, tells of her fate (chapter XII of Part Four).
• Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina: in the Conclusion, his letters and her grief close the novel side by side (chapter XII of Part Four).
• Hippolyte Terentyev: whom he mocks (chapter I of Part Three) and distrusts, and whom he calls a home-made Lacenaire (chapter VII of Part Three).
• Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin: who seeks him out after the night at Rogozhin's house and with whom he begins to correspond (chapter XII of Part Four).