Netochka Nezvanova: How Dostoevsky Writes Childhood

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoiler note: This essay discusses the childhood episodes and final confrontation in the surviving, unfinished text of Netochka Nezvanova.

Early in Netochka Nezvanova, the narrator interrupts a childhood quarrel to change what she calls one of the people in it. Yefimov, the impoverished violinist married to her mother, has been her stepfather throughout the opening chapter. Now she will call him her father, she explains, because she learned only much later that they were unrelated. We keep the knowledge that the child lacks while adopting the name through which she loved him.

This small adjustment follows an extraordinary delay. Before Netochka lets us enter her remembered childhood, she gives us Yefimov’s history, learned afterward from his musician friend B. We have already heard about the neglect, drinking, and grandiose hopes that will shape the household. Dostoevsky then asks us to accompany a girl for whom the same man is the household’s chief sufferer, deserving almost unlimited care. Knowing why her explanation is wrong makes it painful to live through how thoroughly it satisfies her.

Before the child remembers

The opening biography supplies more than a verdict against Yefimov. B. remembers a man whose musical perception could exceed his practical accomplishments: someone capable of saying things about music that astonished a more disciplined performer, while neglecting the work needed to realize his ambitions. B. credits his own progress partly to his friend’s advice. His testimony carries affection alongside exasperation, and the later Netochka has chosen to transmit both.

Yefimov possesses enough insight to imagine artistic greatness and enough vanity to treat the imagination as an achievement already his. B.’s account also complicates his claim that marriage has silenced him. Asked to play, he demonstrates progress made during the very period in which he boasts of having abandoned his instrument. He can work; he can also turn a dependent family into the explanation of why he cannot.

Before the child starts interpreting their life, we hear her mother’s labor described. She cooks for customers, washes linen, and remakes clothes; Yefimov takes money that she needs to feed the household. B.’s plain objection puts support and grievance beside each other:

“She is keeping you, and what are you doing?”

The question will remain available to us when Netochka begins to pity him. Dostoevsky gives the reader a sequence of causes that her younger self has yet to assemble. Her mother’s anger can therefore reach us in two ways at once: as the frightening event the child encounters, and as the exhausted response of someone whose circumstances we have already been shown.

Netochka’s later voice is responsible for this arrangement. She announces where the biography came from, then returns to memories that it cannot simply replace. B. has supplied testimony about Yefimov; he cannot supply the girl’s experience of being held by him. As the narrative passes from his account into hers, we begin to feel the girl’s affection for him while remembering whose labor keeps him alive.

A pain she keeps to herself

In the quarrel that prompts the change from “stepfather” to “father,” Netochka rushes to protect him. After her mother leaves, he kisses her and takes her on his knee. She remembers it as perhaps the first caress she had received from either parent. Affection and explanation develop together: defending him has brought tenderness, and his tenderness helps persuade her that he needs defending.

The later narrator searches for the beginning of this conviction through questions. Who taught her that he was a victim? How could she have understood his failures? The questions interrupt the apparent fluency of recollection. A remembered feeling can remain vivid while the process that formed it is still obscure to the person telling the story.

The episode of the broken cup puts her body at odds with her devotion. Sent out for yeast, Netochka falls, spills it, and hurts her arm. She meets her father outside a brilliantly lit house and asks him to protect her from her mother’s anger. He tries to show her something in its windows, lifting her by the bruised arm. The pain prevents her from seeing, but she suppresses a cry because she fears hurting his feelings. Asked what she can see, she answers that she sees red curtains, doing her best to please him.

Her answer supplies the scene with its beautiful object while the narration retains the pain behind it. We receive the sight as something she struggles to offer her father. The gesture he intends as comfort hurts her, and her first concern is to protect that comfort from the evidence of her own body. When she finally goes home, the mother she has dreaded scarcely scolds her. Neither event can dislodge the explanation through which she has approached them.

By the following morning, the red curtains have become the beginning of a future. Netochka knows that her mother works and her father does not; she has heard that he is an artist and that his fortunes will revive after her mother dies. She joins these observations into a plan in which father and daughter will leave the garret for the splendid house. Her reasoning converts a wish voiced by him into a destination imagined by her. When her mother tells her to leave the window, the order seems to confirm that Mother opposes their happiness.

The older voice allows this inference to unfold through its steps. Work, money, genius, death, the lit windows: the child is gathering particulars with desperate attention. Later Netochka can identify the dreadful error joining them, yet she continues to speak from within the urgency that made a supposition necessary. In Constance Garnett’s translation, the adult qualifies the child’s understanding within the same sentence:

“Of course, I understood it without grasping cause or effect”

The clause preserves her understanding of the misery around her while specifying what that understanding lacked. Through it, we can feel how much a child has perceived before she possesses an explanation that does justice to the people she sees.

Reading the whole letter

The surviving novel moves through other households and attachments before Netochka comes to live with Alexandra Mihalovna, a woman who loves her as a daughter. Alexandra’s marriage to Pyotr Alexandrovitch is troubled in ways that Netochka senses long before she understands them. Here Dostoevsky changes the reader’s access to the family’s past: Netochka discovers a farewell letter hidden in a volume of Walter Scott, identifies Alexandra as its recipient, and reproduces it for us.

The letter’s writer describes their love, their separation, and the humiliating disparity he feels between himself and Alexandra. His view of her husband is admiring; he thinks Pyotr will protect her. The document opens a history while leaving motives and consequences to be interpreted. Netochka reads it repeatedly and responds with powerful sympathy, still struggling to piece together what it tells her.

By giving us the entire letter first, Dostoevsky lets us test Pyotr’s accusation against words he has barely read. Pyotr catches Netochka holding it, makes out its first lines, and treats it as a letter addressed to her by a lover. He announces that “the fact speaks for itself.” We have already read enough to hear the missing context in that declaration.

He has handled the letter, can describe where he found it, and can point to her distress. Each detail is real; together, under his interpretation, they indict the wrong woman. The reader occupies a position comparable to the one created by Yefimov’s opening biography: we know something that a person directing the scene either lacks or refuses to consider. We have to wait for Pyotr to read what we already know.

Alexandra’s defense brings another demand into the scene before the factual dispute is settled. Netochka, overwhelmed, has answered yes to the accusation; the narration tells us that she is trying to end their agony. Alexandra considers the possibility of an inexperienced girl receiving a love letter and asks what could justify treating her so cruelly. She asks for Netochka’s hand and insists that Netochka’s expulsion would mean her own departure too.

Her response interrupts the expectation that the scene must wait for complete information before anyone can act decently. She is mistaken about whose love the letter records, yet she can see the cruelty of the interrogation. The scene separates two claims that Pyotr treats as one: knowing what happened and having the right to humiliate someone over it.

How far her judgment reaches

Only afterward, alone with Pyotr, does Netochka hand over the letter. He turns to the fourth page and reads the signature. The visible change in his face follows the reading that the earlier accusation had dispensed with. The same paper now confronts him with another history.

Netochka accuses him of preserving his superiority over Alexandra, keeping her trapped in a sense of guilt. Her speech has a force the frightened child could scarcely have imagined: she can name an injustice and direct her anger toward the person she believes responsible. Yet within the accusation she says both that she cannot see clearly into his soul and that she sees through him. The desire to comprehend another person completely survives inside the newly articulate judgment.

The narration lets us hear that friction without canceling what the scene has established. Her protest against Pyotr’s conduct has ample grounds; her words also press beyond the motives she can fully explain. Retrospection has given her sources, comparisons, and a language for wrongs she once misread. It has preserved an awareness of how feeling can outrun what she knows.

The unfinished text stops shortly after this encounter. Pyotr’s secretary, Ovrov, asks to speak to her; she puts him off, and describes his smile as ambiguous before allowing that she may have imagined it. We cannot turn that hesitation into the conclusion of a completed life. It leaves us with a narrator capable of exposing a destructive explanation and still examining her own last impression. The girl who once kept silent about her pain can now challenge the man who torments her benefactress. Her later voice preserves that courage alongside the possibility of misreading the next face she sees.

Sources

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova, translated by Constance Garnett, in The Friend of the Family (Heinemann; volume first published 1920). Chapters I–II and VII, especially printed pp. 215, 222, 227–233, 326–330, 345–358. Quotations and English phrasing follow Garnett; the digitized copy is a later reprint.