Madame Epanchin's mind reels at the mysteries, and the complications and implications of all her worries thus she races to Lebedyev's villa and drags Myshkin to the Epanchin family table. Alexandra, she fears, is developing into an old maid, and Aglaia, like her mother, is "eccentric, mad, and spiteful." Adelaida, at least, will soon be married and settled.īesides the matter of her daughters, Madame Epanchin frets over Prince Myshkin's return and the fact that she has received an anonymous letter stating that Nastasya Filippovna is corresponding with Aglaia. They are not married, they have "new" ideas, they even cut their hair. Her daughters, she fears, are becoming eccentric perhaps even nihilistic.
They are not "exceptional" to excess.Īt this moment, Lizaveta Prokofyevna is distraught. This discussion, we see, prefaces a comment by the author concerning the Epanchin family: "they always seemed to be doing something exceptional." In spite of their doing something exceptional, however, it should be noted that they remain respectable and enjoy the esteem of their neighbors. Inventors and geniuses are always initially labeled fools, he says, and mothers rock their babies to sleep with the hope that they will "be happy and live in comfort without originality." The highest pinnacle a mother's son can reach is the rank of general and that rank, Dostoevsky regrets, is characterized by a total lack of originality. Originality, on the other hand, he says, has been condemned no businessman is characterized by it. He launches an attack on this sort of people and on the kind of mind that reveres them. Dostoevsky begins this section with a discussion on practical people.
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