The Insulted and the Injured by Fyodor Dostoevski

First published:Unizhennye i oskorblyonnye, 1861 (Injury and Insult, 1887; better known as The Insulted and the Injured)

Type of work: Romantic realism

Time of work: The mid-nineteenth century

Locale: St. Petersburg

Principal Characters:

• Ivan Petrovitch, the narrator, a brilliant but penniless author in whom everyone confides, in love with Natasha
• Natasha Nikolaevna Ichmenyev, a beautiful and passionate young woman, in love with Alyosha
• Nikolai Sergeyitch Ichmenyev, Natasha’s father, who disowns her when she goes to live with Alyosha
• Alyosha Pyotrovitch Valkovsky, a naive and weak-willed young aristocrat
• Pyotr Alexandrovitch Valkovsky, Alyosha’s father, a fortune-hunting prince who is scheming for Alyosha to marry Katerina
• Katerina Fyodorovna Filimonov, an idealistic young heiress who eventually marries Alyosha
• Elena (Nellie) Smith, a little girl whom Ivan rescues from destitution

The Novel

The Insulted and the Injured unfolds the emotional tragedy of a young woman who abandons her family and her good name for the sake of a grand passion. The story is related in a flashback as a chain of events that began in St. Petersburg a year before the book opens. The narrator is a penniless young author, Ivan Petrovitch, who becomes the confidant of all the other characters and is therefore able to explain their thoughts and motivations.

Ivan has been hailed as a genius, but his self-denying concern for everyone else’s problems prevents him from finishing his second novel, the proceeds from which would help him pay off his creditors. Orphaned in childhood, he has been brought up by Nikolai Sergeyitch Ichmenyev, a once-wealthy landowner now in reduced circumstances, and his wife, Anna Andreyevna Ichmenova. Ivan is in love with their daughter, Natasha Nikolaevna Ichmenyev. Natasha at first returns his feelings but soon confesses that she has fallen passionately in love with Alyosha Pyotrovitch Valkovsky, the weak-willed, naive son of Prince Pyotr Alexandrovitch Valkovsky.

The Ichmenyevs are devastated when Natasha leaves home to live with Alyosha. They feel not only dishonored but also humiliated, for the Prince, who was once Nikolai’s patron, has become his bitter enemy, and the two men are locked in conflict in a lawsuit. Nikolai disowns Natasha. The Prince is also opposed to Alyosha’s liaison with Natasha; he forbids their marriage and cuts off his son’s allowance. The Prince is scheming to have Alyosha marry a wealthy heiress, Katerina Fyodorovna Filimonov, and contrives to bring him constantly in contact with her.

Throughout the novel, Alyosha, an innocent victim of his father’s machinations, is torn between his fascination with Katerina’s youth and idealism and his love for Natasha. As he spends more of his time away from her, Natasha becomes sick with anxiety, and Ivan supports and comforts her.

Ivan also spends much time consoling the Ichmenyevs, especially when Nikolai loses his lawsuit and becomes almost insane with despair. Ivan has acquired a further responsibility by rescuing a young, destitute girl, Elena Smith, from the clutches of a brutal procuress, Madame Bubnov. Elena, who insists on being called “Nellie,” is an epileptic and is suffering from a high fever as a result of her experiences.

While Ivan is nursing her back to health in his dingy lodgings, she reveals, in several poignant passages, that her mother, like Natasha, had sacrificed everything for love. The lover, unnamed until the final chapter, had abandoned Nellie’s mother and tricked her out of her family fortune. In addition, Nellie’s grandfather had cursed his daughter and refused to help her. The mother and child had survived by begging in the streets of St. Petersburg until the mother died of tuberculosis, nearly a month before Ivan’s intervention. When Ivan leaves Nellie for a time to comfort Natasha, who is distraught because Alyosha has been spending several days in Katerina’s company, Nellie reacts sullenly to his attentions to Natasha.

One evening, the Prince pays a surprise visit to Natasha and Alyosha, with Ivan present. The Prince tells them that he has changed his mind and is now eager for them to marry, and he restores Alyosha’s allowance. Alyosha is delighted, but Natasha is suspicious. At a subsequent meeting, she accuses the Prince of pretending to consent to the marriage in order to play on Alyosha’s indecisiveness, making him yearn for the freedom to visit Katerina at will.

The Prince is furious; he invites Ivan to have supper with him and taunts him by describing at length his philosophy of self-interest and by pouring scorn on those whose sense of honor has placed them in his power. He unfolds further plans to humiliate Nikolai and to engineer Natasha’s complete downfall. Later, the Prince visits Natasha and insults her by offering to “place” her in society as mistress to an elderly aristocrat. When Ivan arrives at her apartment, the Prince has left, and Natasha, knowing that she has lost Alyosha to Katerina and deeply humiliated by the Prince’s proposition, is completely distracted.

Ivan rushes back to his lodgings and persuades Nellie to go with him to the Ichmenyevs and tell them her story. As the frightened child pours out the tragic tale, Anna is reduced to tears and Nikolai, resistant at first, becomes filled with remorse for his harshness toward Natasha. He is about to go to his daughter when she bursts in and begs his forgiveness. Nellie remains in the household, much loved by everyone but in failing health. Ivan learns, through an intermediary, that the man who wronged Nellie’s mother was, in fact, Prince Valkovsky, and that Nellie, as the Prince’s daughter, has a claim to all of his wealth. The child dies before there is a chance of restitution, however, and the Prince remains secure. As the novel closes, Ivan and Natasha talk nostalgically together of their lost chance of happiness.

The Characters

Most of the novel’s characters are ruled by a conventional morality and a fierce sense of pride. Nikolai Ichmenyev is implacable in his adherence to high moral principle. Even Nellie, who has experienced the depths of degradation, proudly upholds her mother’s dictum that it is nobler to beg from strangers than to be beholden to acquaintances. When Natasha, like Nellie’s mother earlier, attempts to break with convention, the consequences are disastrous. Her intelligence and honesty are no match for the Prince’s philosophy of pure self-interest.

Alyosha’s naive, butterfly personality and his eagerness to please make him the perfect instrument for his father’s schemes. His breathless actions and his excited, ingenuous explanations to Natasha about the time he spends with Katerina are like those of an engaging young child. The rivalry of two intelligent women for the love of so weak a character would have stretched credulity to the breaking point if he had not been so persuasively drawn.

Fyodor Dostoevski works diligently to make Natasha’s relationship with Alyosha convincing. For example, Natasha attempts to analyze the quality of her love. “People say about him,” she tells Ivan, “that he has no will and that he’s not very clever. And that’s what I loved in him, more than anything else.” Nevertheless, she wonders if she would have loved him less if he had been “like other men.”

Alyosha’s behavior as a childlike adult contrasts with Nellie’s as a “real” child growing into adulthood. Her willfulness and her pride, her sudden changes of mood, and her developing sexual feelings (which she cannot wholly understand) are observed with great insight and tenderness. In addition, Dostoevski’s own experiences as an epileptic appear in his descriptions of her illness.

Ivan’s character—modest and conscientious and deeply sensitive to the suffering of others—emerges as much from other people’s reactions to him as from his comments as he tells his story. In addition, the novel’s tragic mood is intensified by his foreboding that he has not much longer to live. His self-sacrificing love for Natasha is paralleled by her belief that Alyosha would be happier with the youthful and idealistic Katerina. Both these beliefs are proved false. Toward the end of the novel, Natasha learns that Alyosha has not found fulfillment with Katerina, and finally, she asks Ivan, “Why did I destroy your happiness?”

The Prince’s dark spirit hangs over the novel like a malevolent cloud. The suddenness of his appearance at Natasha’s apartment adds great dramatic force to their confrontation, while his theory of egotism, expounded to Ivan in forthright and often crude terms, is the key to the whole novel. “All is for me,” he tells Ivan, “the whole world is created for me. [I] have long since freed myself from all shackles. I only recognise obligations when I have something to gain by them. You, of course, can’t look at things like that, your legs are in fetters.”

In addition to the major characters, Dostoevski peoples the novel with a host of vividly drawn minor characters. Madame Bubnov, for example, stands in contrast to the Prince, whose eloquent self-justification is countered by her unthinking and more physical exploitation of other people’s weaknesses in the lower depths of St. Petersburg.

Critical Context

Dostoevski’s early involvement with a group of Utopian socialists came to an abrupt end in 1849, when he was arrested for expressing anticzarist ideas, sentenced to death, and reprieved at the scaffold. Instead of death, he suffered ten years of banishment, imprisonment, and enforced military service before returning to the world of literature. The Insulted and the Injured was his second novel after his return. It is a transitional novel, indicating Dostoevski’s rejection of his earlier idealism—personified to some extent by Ivan—but not yet achieving the refined and complex psychological studies of the self-willed man which characterize much of his mature work.

As well as tracing Nikolai Gogol’s influence on The Insulted and the Injured, critics have sometimes described the novel as Dickensian, pointing to the grim realism of its description of the St. Petersburg underworld, its ebullient characterizations, and its emotional tone. Neither Natasha nor Katerina, however, has the sentimentality and archness associated with Charles Dickens’ female characters, and the novel’s heightened romantic emotionalism is used to convey a pessimistic (non-Dickensian) assessment of human motivation.

Bibliography

Fanger, Donald. Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol, 1967.

Jones, John. Dostoevsky, 1985.

Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, 1966. Translated by A. Minihan.

Wasiolek, Edward. Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, 1964.

Woodhouse, C.M. Dostoevsky, 1974.