Ekaterinhof

Ekaterinhof is a suburban park and pleasure ground on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, a place associated with popular entertainment, drinking, and the kind of rowdy, semi-public revelry that the respectable society of Pavlofsk and the capital officially disdains. In the novel, it functions as a geographical and moral counterpoint to the decorous summer colony of Pavlofsk, a space where the characters' most uncontrolled impulses spill into the open.

The Orgy and Nastasia's Disappearance

On the night of her birthday, after she has thrown the packet of one hundred thousand roubles into the fire and then fished it out, Nastasia Philipovna leaves her flat with Rogojin and his gang. The destination she names is Ekaterinhof. Lebedeff, standing nearby, is the one who first speaks the name aloud: "To Ekaterinhof," he replies when Nastasia asks where Rogojin means to take her. The prince, rushing downstairs after the departing party, takes the first sledge he can find and gives the driver the same order — to Ekaterinhof — in pursuit of the troikas. The orgy that follows at Ekaterinhof is never described directly in the narrative, but its aftermath is decisive: within a week, the entire Rogojin troop, with Rogojin himself at their head, departs for Moscow, and it becomes known that after this "dreadful orgy" Nastasia Philipovna has entirely disappeared, later traced to Moscow. Ekaterinhof thus marks the point at which Nastasia's public self-destruction gives way to her fugitive existence, shuttling between Rogojin and the prince.

Rogojin's Surveillance and the Prince's Anxiety

Months later, after the prince has returned to St. Petersburg and moved to Pavlofsk, Ekaterinhof reappears as a site of Rogojin's obsessive watching. The prince, wandering through the city in a state of nervous exhaustion and approaching epileptic seizure, finds himself drawn toward the Petersburg Side and the house where Nastasia is staying. On the way, he passes a cutler's shop and stares at a knife in the window — a moment that foreshadows the weapon Rogojin will later use. The narrative notes that the prince's "demon" whispers to him that Rogojin has been spying on him all morning, and that when Rogojin discovers the prince has not gone to Pavlofsk, he will surely go to that house on the Petersburg Side and watch for him there. The prince's walk is aimless in its surface geography but driven by a terrible inner logic: he is circling the places where Rogojin might be, and Ekaterinhof — though not named in this sequence — belongs to the same mental map of threat and pursuit. The green bench in the Pavlofsk park where Aglaya later arranges her rendezvous with the prince stands in implicit contrast to Ekaterinhof: one is a place of controlled, daylight assignation; the other, of nocturnal chaos and flight.

Narrative Significance

Ekaterinhof never appears as a described setting; it exists only as a destination spoken aloud, a name that carries the weight of everything the novel refuses to show. It is the offstage space where Nastasia's last bid for freedom through scandal plays out, and where Rogojin's possession of her is consolidated in the eyes of the public. The prince's pursuit of the troikas to Ekaterinhof is his first failed attempt to hold onto her, and the pattern repeats: she vanishes, he follows, and the gap between them widens. The name Ekaterinhof thus becomes a shorthand for the chaotic, unredeemed social world that the prince cannot save Nastasia from, and that finally swallows her.