Eydkuhnen

Eydkuhnen is the border station on the Warsaw and Petersburg Railway where the train from abroad enters Russian territory, marking the threshold between Europe and Russia for the returning Prince Muishkin and his fellow traveler Parfen Rogojin. It is the first Russian place named in the novel and serves as a symbolic point of transition—from foreign exile to native land, from the past to an uncertain future—that frames the opening conversation between the two protagonists.

Location and Setting

Eydkuhnen is the first station inside the Russian border on the line from Western Europe to St. Petersburg. The train approaching the city at the end of November passes through Eydkuhnen before continuing to the capital. The morning is so damp and misty that day breaks with great difficulty, and passengers can distinguish nothing more than a few yards from the carriage windows. The third-class carriages are filled with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, all weary, with sleepy eyes and shivering expressions, their complexions having taken on the colour of the fog outside.

The Threshold of Return

Eydkuhnen is the point at which Prince Muishkin, returning from Switzerland after four years abroad, physically re-enters Russia. His wide sleeveless mantle with a large cape—the sort of cloak seen upon travellers during the winter months in Switzerland or North Italy—is by no means adapted to the long cold journey through Russia from Eydkuhnen to St. Petersburg. The cold strikes him immediately: when his black-haired neighbour remarks "Cold?" Muishkin replies readily, "Very, and this is a thaw, too. Fancy if it had been a hard frost! I never thought it would be so cold in the old country. I've grown quite out of the way of it." The neighbour whistles and laughs at the answer. Eydkuhnen thus marks the moment when the returning exile first feels the physical shock of his homeland.

The Meeting of Two Destinies

It is on the stretch from Eydkuhnen to St. Petersburg that the two young men who will become central to the novel's tragedy find themselves opposite each other in a third-class carriage. Both are poorly dressed, both have remarkable faces, and both are evidently anxious to start a conversation. If they had known why they were both remarkable persons, they would have wondered at the strange chance which set them down opposite one another in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw Railway Company. The fair-haired traveller in the cloak—Prince Muishkin—reveals that he has been sent abroad for his health, suffering from epilepsy, and that his benefactor Pavlicheff, who supported him in Switzerland, died a couple of years ago. The black-haired traveller—Parfen Rogojin—announces himself as the son of Semen Rogojin, the hereditary honourable citizen who died a month ago leaving two and a half million roubles. Their conversation, which begins at or just after Eydkuhnen, establishes the terms of their relationship: Rogojin's passionate obsession with Nastasia Philipovna, his flight from his father, and his immediate, inexplicable attraction to the prince. "Prince, I don't know why I have taken a fancy to you," Rogojin says as they approach the station. The border crossing at Eydkuhnen is thus the geographical origin of the bond that will end in murder and madness.

Narrative Significance

Eydkuhnen functions as the novel's first spatial marker of the Russia/Europe divide. Muishkin's entire trajectory—from Swiss sanatorium to Russian chaos—begins at this border. The station's name appears only once in the text, but it anchors the opening scene's geography: the train has been travelling from Eydkuhnen to St. Petersburg, and the cold Muishkin complains of is the cold of Russia after the milder climate of Switzerland. The contrast between the inadequate foreign cloak and the Russian winter encapsulates the prince's unfitness for the world he is entering. Eydkuhnen is the point of no return, the place where the journey from abstraction to reality, from cure to crisis, irrevocably begins.