Plastunovs’ Inn is the village lodging where Dmitri’s urgent journey to find Grushenka turns into a night of waiting, watching, and festivity. At the village entrance, its six brightly lit street-facing windows announce that the company he feared might be asleep is still awake. The inn thus becomes a threshold between Dmitri’s anxious pursuit and the noisy reunion that follows: he first sees Grushenka from the shadows, then helps set a revel in motion, in rooms already associated with an earlier night of merrymaking.

Setting and Arrival

As Dmitri approaches the village by carriage, Andrey reports that a number of people have gathered at the inn. The possibility that they might already be in bed sharpens Dmitri’s impatience; he urges the driver onward, eager to arrive before the gathering ends. When Andrey points out the six illuminated windows at the village entrance, Dmitri takes the light as confirmation that Grushenka and the others are still awake. He responds with feverish relief, pressing Andrey to gallop up noisily and let everyone know that he has come.

The inn’s location makes it more than a destination. Standing at the entrance to the village, it is the first visible sign of the social world Dmitri is hurrying to reach. The lit windows answer his fear of arriving too late, while his demand that the bells announce him makes his arrival public before he has even entered the company. His approach therefore joins private urgency to theatrical display: he wants both to reach Grushenka and to be known as the man who has come for her.

The Hidden View

Once inside, Dmitri does not immediately appear before the visitors. Trifon Borissovitch leads him through the passage into a large room adjoining the one where the company is sitting. At Trifon’s direction, the light is taken away, and Dmitri is placed in a dark corner from which he can watch without being seen. The arrangement makes the inn a place of concealment as well as gathering: Dmitri has reached Grushenka, but for a moment he can approach her only as a hidden observer.

From that corner he sees Grushenka sitting sideways to a table in a low chair, holding Alexei Kalganov’s hand while seeming to laugh. Kalganov sits beside her on a sofa, apparently vexed and not looking at her. The glimpse is brief and sharply limited. Dmitri cannot take in the company as a whole; he sees Grushenka, his heart throbs violently, and darkness comes before his eyes. The staged distance between his unseen position and her visible ease turns the inn’s adjoining rooms into a small drama of jealousy and anticipation, without resolving what the gesture between Grushenka and Kalganov means.

Rooms of Revelry

The visitors’ room is part of an inn equipped for lodging as well as entertainment. In the arrangement described during the festivities, one large room is divided by cotton curtains; behind them stands a huge bed with a feather mattress and a pyramid of cotton pillows. The four rooms for visitors also contain beds. Grushenka settles near the door, and Dmitri sets an easy chair for her. This practical detail places the revel within the ordinary spaces of an inn, where sleeping quarters and communal amusement occupy the same premises.

Those rooms also carry a remembered association. Grushenka sits in the same place from which she watched dancing and singing during an earlier gathering there. The repeated setting links the new celebration to a prior one, giving the inn a continuity that belongs not to its architecture alone but to the company’s remembered pleasures. As the feast begins, the room holds both recurrence and change: the familiar place of watching becomes the setting for another night, now shaped by Dmitri’s arrival and the changed relations among those gathered.

From Arrival to Celebration

After the charged first glimpse, the action at the inn expands from private observation into preparation for a public revel. Dmitri calls for cards, and the landlord brings a new, unopened pack. He also reports that the girls are getting ready and that the Jewish musicians with cymbals will probably arrive soon, although the cart carrying provisions has not yet come. Dmitri jumps up from the table and runs into the next room to give orders. The gathering is still being assembled, but music, performers, and supplies are already part of what is expected there.

The chapter that follows is titled “Delirium,” and its opening describes what comes next as an almost orgiastic feast to which all are welcome. In this sequence, the inn’s bright windows, curtained room, beds, card table, and adjoining spaces serve successive purposes: signs of an awake gathering, a vantage for hidden watching, and the setting for an all-night celebration. The location concentrates the movement of the episode. Dmitri arrives fearing that he may have missed Grushenka; he finds her present, watches from darkness, and then becomes an active participant in the arrangements. The inn’s importance lies in this change of access and mood, from anxious pursuit to shared revelry.