Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin

Who They Are

Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin is the general in whose house Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin knocks on the morning of his arrival. He is fifty-six, the son of a soldier and uneducated, made his fortune with houses, an estate and shares in companies, and cultivates the image of a man who knows his place and carries out other people's ideas (chapter II of Part One). He married young Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, the last princess of the Myshkins, whom he respects and fears, and has three daughters whom, on principle, he does not hurry to marry, letting his growing fortune and position work for them (chapter IV of Part One). He is a partner of Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky in some businesses and employs Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin in a company. What he wants is for things to be arranged quietly: Totsky's marriage to one of his daughters, Gania's marriage to Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova and, beneath it all, the favor of that same woman, for whom he is preparing a gift of very costly pearls (chapter IV of Part One). What he fears is his wife, the scandal and, later, Nastasya Filippovna herself, with a fear he cannot explain even to himself (chapter XI of Part Two). Where he is mistaken is in thinking that an arrangement can look clean when everyone knows what is being bought in it.

Trajectory

In chapter III of Part One he receives the prince with curiosity and suspicion, supposes that he has some aim and warns that he has little time; the visitor's smile, free of rancor, makes him change his tone, and when he offers to wait, if time allows, he hears the answer of someone with no commitments at all:

In the same chapter, in front of the prince, he tells Gania that Nastasya Filippovna will give her final word on the marriage that night, grows irritated at the young man's hesitation and demands enthusiasm, because he wants him to accept gladly; he promises the prince a copyist's post at thirty-five rubles a month, advances him twenty-five and recommends him as a lodger to Gania's mother. The portrait and the story of the train disturb him: Rogozhin brings a million and a passion.

In chapter IV of Part One the narrator tells of the plan he worked out with Totsky: to marry Nastasya Filippovna to Gania. The two of them go to see her (and there Totsky offers seventy-five thousand rubles, of which even the general knew nothing), Totsky accuses himself and the general speaks like a father; when she accepts calmly, he is satisfied and considers the matter settled, unlike his partner:

Then rumors of the pearls spread and reach the general's wife, so he dreads the family lunch; the prince's arrival seems to him sent by God. In chapter V of Part One he introduces the visitor to his wife as a poor idiot, almost a beggar, to distract her, and runs off to see the count, and she knows perfectly well which count he is going to see.

At the party in chapter XIII of Part One the pearls are received coldly. In the confession game of chapter XIV of Part One he tells, as the worst act of his life, the morning when, as an ensign, he went back to insult an old widow of eighty over a bowl, without knowing she was dying while he shouted:

And, in the same speech, he confesses and absolves himself:

He also says that for fifteen years he has been supporting two old women in an almshouse, and Nastasya Filippovna regrets that he has a good heart, because she wanted a true baseness. When she leaves the prince to decide on the marriage, he asks, indignant, what this prince is after all, and hears that he can take the pearls to his wife. In chapter XV of Part One he stays out of chivalry and whispers whether she has not gone mad in the medical sense; in chapter XVI of Part One he mutters "Sodom," tries to hold the prince back on the stairs and goes home with the pearls, lamenting the lost woman and calculating that the prince now needs another bride.

In chapter I of Part Two he tells the family what he had looked into: the inheritance is smaller than rumored, and the prince paid almost all of the dead merchant's creditors, even those without papers. At the end of chapter VI of Part Two he reaches Lebedev's terrace just as Aglaya begins the ballad of the poor knight, bringing Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, and in chapter VII of Part Two he understands only that verses were being recited. In chapter IX of Part Two his wife explodes, and the rage, which he says comes once every three years, falls on him first; in chapter X of Part Two he rebukes Hippolyte Terentyev, reminding him that the general's wife took him in out of pity for an invalid, and proposes a nurse. In chapter XI of Part Two, on the train, he asks the prince not to visit them for some time, swears that Radomsky's promissory notes are slander, suspects that Nastasya Filippovna is taking revenge on him for an old affair, and confesses a fear without object, like a bat in the air.

In chapter III of Part Three he arrives from Petersburg after the Vauxhall scandal, talks in secret with Prince Sch. and takes the prince with him; on the way he speaks in jerks: that he does not understand his wife's hysteria, that Nastasya Filippovna is not mad but cunning, that Radomsky's uncle really did shoot himself, that Radomsky had asked for Aglaya's hand a month earlier and been refused, and that his daughter laughed, saying the madwoman had got it into her head to marry her to the prince. He ends by asking the prince not to take offense, because Aglaya laughs at him like a child.

In chapter V of Part Four he thinks, with ellipses, that the prince's name would prop up a declining family name, and he reads the hedgehog Aglaya sends the prince as a hedgehog and nothing more, a sign of friendship and reconciliation; the narrator says he was right. After the public proposal, he stays alone with the prince and asks him whether he really loves his daughter. In chapter VI of Part Four he and his wife, unable to decide alone whether there is something odd about the marriage, set a meeting to present the groom to the old Belokonskaya; in chapter VII of Part Four he introduces the prince to Ivan Petrovich and, when the speech about Catholicism begins to alarm the room, already moves to take him away from there, before the Chinese vase falls. In chapter X of Part Four he is one of those whom Lebedev seeks out, with a jurist and a doctor, to place the prince under guardianship, and the two-hour conversation ends with no guardianship at all. In chapter XII of Part Four he is the only member of the family who does not go to Switzerland: he stays in Petersburg.

Themes Embodied

The general is the man of arrangements, and Part One uses him to show how money circulates without ever being named (Money and Wealth). He helps Totsky marry a woman, dowered by his partner, to the young man who works for him, buys pearls for her behind his wife's back, and treats Gania's marriage as a business matter in front of a stranger (chapter III of Part One); what he demands is not the young man's decision but his enthusiasm, so that the deal looks like a feeling. When Nastasya Filippovna gives everything back (chapter XIV of Part One), the one who loses is not him but the design he had drawn.

The widow's confession (chapter XIV of Part One) is the scene in which he is more than the arrangement. The detail of the flies and the setting sun comes from true memory, and the guilt is real, so much so that for fifteen years he has been paying off a debt to two old women to calm himself; but the same speech softens the guilt through coincidence. It is the portrait of a man who has a conscience and does not let it cost him much, and Nastasya Filippovna hits the mark when she regrets his good heart: the good heart is what keeps him from reaching baseness, and also from a full confession.

Relationships

• Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina, the wife, whom he respects and fears (chapter II of Part One), and from whom he hides the pearls (chapter V of Part One).
• Aleksandra Ivanovna Epanchina, the eldest daughter, whom the arrangement with Totsky destined for the partner (chapter IV of Part One).
• Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina, the middle daughter, engaged to Prince Sch. (chapter I of Part Two).
• Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, the youngest daughter, the beauty of the house, whom he asks the prince whether he really loves (chapter V of Part Four).
• Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, the partner with whom he arranges the marriage of Nastasya Filippovna to Gania (chapter IV of Part One).
• Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, the young man who works for him in a company, whom he pushes toward the marriage and from whom he demands enthusiasm (chapter III of Part One).
• Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, to whom he brings the pearls she returns on the night of her birthday (chapter XIV of Part One).
• Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the poor relation to whom he promises a job (chapter III of Part One) and whom he later accepts as his daughter's fiancé.
• Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin, who says he was his inseparable friend, like the musketeers, before a quarrel over a lapdog (chapter IX of Part One).