What It Is
The pin with which the grandmother, who is blind, fastens Nastenka's dress to her own, to watch over her without seeing her, after a prank the granddaughter does not tell. The penalty, according to the grandmother, is for life, unless the granddaughter becomes better, and it has lasted two years when the story begins. The object is small, comic and precise: it is the concrete form of Nastenka's imprisoned life, and the exact opposite of the Dreamer's free life.
Where It Appears
On the Second Night, Nastenka mentions it in passing, laughing, and the Dreamer replies that he is a type; later, she says that she understood his speech because she lived the same, pinned to her grandmother's dress.
In Nastenka's story, Second Night, she tells how the punishment began:
взяла булавку и пришпилила мое платье к своему, да тут и сказала, что так мы будем всю жизнь сидеть, если, разумеется, я не сделаюсь лучше, she took a pin and fastened my dress to hers, and right then said that this is how we would sit our whole lives, unless, of course, I became better.
She also tells of the exchange with Fyokla, the deaf maid, who unfastened the pin and ran off, and of the morning when, forgetting she was pinned, she jumped up in front of the lodger and dragged her grandmother's armchair. From then on she unfastened the pin in secret at every noise at the entrance. On the night she climbs to the lodger's room, the pin enters the same speech as love:
сказала, что не могу жить у бабушки, что убегу от нее, что не хочу, чтоб меня булавкой пришпиливали, и что я, как он хочет, поеду с ним в Москву, потому что без него жить не могу. И стыд, и любовь, и гордость — все разом говорило во мне, и я чуть не в судорогах упала на постель. Я так боялась отказа!, I said that I could not live with my grandmother, that I would run away from her, that I did not want to be pinned with a pin, and that, if he wished it, I would go with him to Moscow, because I could not live without him. Shame, love and pride all spoke in me at once, and I nearly fell onto the bed in convulsions. I was so afraid of a refusal!
On the Fourth Night, she wonders whether her love for the lodger did not begin because she lived under her grandmother's watch:
может быть, и вся любовь моя была обман чувств, воображения, может быть, началась она шалостью, пустяками, оттого, что я была под надзором у бабушки?, perhaps my whole love was an illusion of the senses and of the imagination, perhaps it began as mischief, as trifles, because I was under my grandmother's watch?
What It Means
The pin is the eye the grandmother does not have: she fastens because she cannot see. For Nastenka it is the image of her solitude, which is the opposite of the Dreamer's: he lives with no one, she lives attached to someone. The two dream for the same reason, the lack of a life of their own, and the pin shows that this lack can come as much from excess company as from its absence.
The object organizes the whole love story. It is because of it that the lodger sees Nastenka's shame in Nastenka's story, Second Night, and withdraws with delicacy, which is the first gesture of his that she tells of; it is against it that she rebels on the night of the bundle; and it is because of it that she explains, on the Fourth Night, that her love may have been an illusion. The pin is the possible cause of love and the proof that it was also flight, and the text does not separate the two things.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Solitude and isolation, Love.
- Themes of the work: Solitude and isolation, Love.
- Characters: Nastenka, the grandmother, the lodger, the Dreamer.
- Neighboring symbols: the spiderweb and the room, because the Dreamer's room is the other form of prison in the book.