Madame Hohlakov and Lise: mother and daughter in crisis

Madame Hohlakov and Lise: mother and daughter in crisis is a relationship marked by alarm, misinterpretation, and sudden reversals of intimacy. When Madame Hohlakov asks Alyosha to discover what is troubling Lise, she describes a daughter whose distress emerges in repeated fits and contradictory acts, while her own attempt to interpret those signs leaves her dependent on an intermediary.

A Mother Seeking an Explanation

Madame Hohlakov’s account begins with Ivan’s visits. He had come to see her twice since returning from Moscow: first as a friend, and later when Katerina was at the house. On another visit, six days before the conversation with Alyosha, Ivan stayed for five minutes and left. Madame Hohlakov did not learn of it until three days later, from Glafira, and the delay came as a shock. Lise explained that Ivan had thought her mother asleep and had come to ask after Lise’s health. The same visit could therefore appear to Madame Hohlakov as a troubling arrival concealed from her, while Lise offered an ordinary explanation for it.

The mother’s concern is not limited to the visits. She says Lise had a fit four days earlier, after Alyosha had last seen her and departed: Lise screamed and shrieked in what Madame Hohlakov calls hysterics. Another fit followed the next day, then another on the third, and another the day before their conversation. Madame Hohlakov recounts this sequence as accumulating evidence of a crisis, but she cannot explain what lies behind it. Her own question about why she never has hysterics briefly turns attention from Lise’s suffering to the mother’s bewilderment at the different forms their distress takes.

Lise’s Contradictory Signals

During one fit, Lise declared that she hated Ivan and insisted that he should never be allowed into the house. Madame Hohlakov had already wanted to refuse to see him because of his unusual visits without her knowledge, and intended to ask him to explain himself. The mother’s suspicions and Lise’s demand thus converge around Ivan, but the account does not establish that they share the same understanding of his conduct or of Lise’s response to it.

The next morning brought a sharper reversal. Lise flew into a passion with Yulia and slapped her in the face. An hour later, she was hugging Yulia’s feet and kissing them. The rapid change from violence to abasement makes the household’s ordinary relationships suddenly difficult to read: the same young woman who has struck a servant turns to an extreme display of tenderness. Madame Hohlakov describes both acts as signs that something is badly wrong, without claiming to know what has produced them.

Lise then refused to come to her mother and sent word that she would never visit her again. When Madame Hohlakov dragged herself downstairs to see her, Lise rushed to kiss her; while kissing her, she pushed her out of the room without saying a word. The encounter offers closeness and exclusion at once. Madame Hohlakov is physically received with a kiss, yet denied the explanation she has come to seek.

Alyosha as Intermediary

Unable to find out what has happened from Lise herself, Madame Hohlakov asks Alyosha to go to her daughter and learn everything from her. She says she rests all her hopes on him and that her whole life is in his hands, language that conveys both her desperation and the degree to which she invests him with the power to reach Lise. The request turns a strained mother-daughter exchange into a triangular one: Alyosha is asked to cross the distance that Lise’s silence has opened between them.

Madame Hohlakov’s plea does not resolve the crisis; it defines its immediate shape. She can report dates, visitors, fits, a slap, an embrace, and a kiss that becomes expulsion, but she cannot make those events yield a stable account of Lise’s feelings. The relationship is therefore presented through a mother’s anxious narration and her appeal for help, while Lise’s own explanation remains out of reach in this exchange. The alternation between rejection and affection is not smoothed into a single motive: it is the very pattern that makes Madame Hohlakov fear for her daughter and ask Alyosha to intervene.