What It Is
A bundle of one hundred thousand rubles, wrapped in newspaper, which Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin gathered one afternoon from moneylenders, and which Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova tosses into the fireplace on her birthday night, offering it to Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin if he takes it out of the fire with his bare hands. Ganya does not; she takes it out with the tongs and gives it to him anyway, with the outer paper burnt and the money inside intact. The bundle is the last bid of an auction that began in the morning, with eighteen thousand on a little table in the Ivolgins' house, and the fire scene has two sequels: the half-burnt package that Ganya returns, and the candle with which Aglaya later asks him to burn his finger.
Where It Appears
In ch. X of Part One, in the Ivolgins' house, Rogozhin, who had come to buy Ganya, ends up offering money to her.
Настасья Филипповна! — вскричал он, глядя на нее, как полоумный, робея и вдруг ободряясь до дерзости: — вот восемнадцать тысяч! — и он шаркнул пред ней на столик пачку в белой бумаге, обернутую накрест шнурками. — вот! И… и еще будет!, Nastasya Filippovna! he cried, looking at her like a madman, timid and suddenly emboldened to insolence: here are eighteen thousand! (and he slid in front of her onto the little table a bundle wrapped in white paper and tied crosswise with cords) Here! And... and there will be more!
In ch. XIV of Part One, before the next bid, Nastasya Filippovna gives back what was given her: Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky may keep his seventy-five thousand, and the general may take the pearls back to his wife.
In ch. XV of Part One, Rogozhin comes in with his gang, sets the bundle wrapped in the Stock Exchange Gazette on the table, and waits like a man awaiting sentence, and she tells everyone how he haggled over her.
Во сто тысяч меня оценил! [...] Да неужто ты меня в свою семью ввести хотел? Меня-то, Рогожинскую!, He valued me at a hundred thousand! [...] Did you really want to bring me into your family? Me, Rogozhin's woman!
In ch. XVI of Part One, before leaving with Rogozhin, she wants to see Ganya's soul one last time.
Видишь ты эту пачку, в ней сто тысяч! [...] Как только огонь обхватит ее всю, — полезай в камин, но только без перчаток, с голыми руками [...] Вытащишь — твоя, все сто тысяч твои!, Do you see this bundle? There are a hundred thousand in it! [...] As soon as the fire takes hold of all of it, climb into the fireplace, but without gloves, with bare hands [...] Pull it out and it's yours, all hundred thousand are yours!
Still in ch. XVI of Part One, Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev crawls on his knees begging to go into the fire for the sake of his children, and Ganya stands with his arms folded, watching the fireplace, tries to leave, and faints. She takes the bundle out with the tongs and draws her conclusion.
а не пошел-таки, выдержал! Значит, самолюбия еще больше, чем жажды денег., and he didn't go, he held out! So he has more self-love than thirst for money.
In ch. I of Part Two, we are told that the same night Ganya waited for Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin to return from Yekaterinhof, set the half-burnt package before him, asked him to give it back to Nastasya Filippovna, and cried for two hours beside him; they parted as friends.
In ch. VIII of Part Three, on the green bench, Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina tells the prince, to test him, that she loves Ganya and that Ganya held his finger over a candle to prove his love; when the prince doubts it, she laughs like a child and confesses the lie.
In ch. I of Part Four, the narrator returns to the money: Ganya, defeated, did in fact take to the prince the money the madwoman had flung at him, regretted the return a thousand times, and never stopped taking pride in it; and in those days he began to hate the prince for looking at him with too much compassion.
In ch. IX of Part Four, sheltering at Ganya's mother's house after the meeting with Nastasya Filippovna, we are told (the narrator warns that these are rumors, and not all of them exact) that Aglaya heard him speak of love and asked whether, as proof, he would burn his finger in the candle at that very moment, and that, at his astonishment, she laughed and went upstairs.
What It Means
The fire puts to the test what money buys. Nastasya Filippovna uses it to measure Ganya by the price he accepted, that of marrying her for seventy-five thousand, and discovers something else: a man who does not bend even before a hundred thousand. Money buys no one that night, and the one who burns it is the woman everyone was buying. The candle in Part Three and Part Four reproduces the scene on a smaller scale: Aglaya invents it and then, according to the rumors, proposes the same trial by fire to Ganya, and he, once again, does not do it.
Ganya wins the test and loses by it. In ch. XVI of Part One he does not stretch out his hand, and Nastasya Filippovna rewards him; in ch. I of Part Two he gives the reward back, and in ch. I of Part Four the narrator tells that he regretted the return a thousand times and never stopped boasting of it. The fire does not decide whether what weighs on him is pride or money: it shows that the two weigh almost the same, and that he will spend the whole book between one and the other. When Aglaya, in ch. IX of Part Four, asks, according to the rumors, for his finger over the candle, she asks for the gesture he did not make before the fireplace, and his astonishment is the same answer.
Relationships
- Default themes: Money and wealth.
- Themes in the novel: Money and wealth.
- Characters: Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina.
- Related symbols: the knife, whose first form, the razor from the newspaper, Nastasya Filippovna throws at Ganya on the same night as the bundle.