Shestilavochnaya

Shestilavochnaya is a street in St. Petersburg that appears in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot as the setting for a pivotal nocturnal episode in the life of the consumptive youth Hippolyte Terentieff. The street, whose name means 'Six-Storey' in Russian, is the site where Hippolyte, during a brief period of improved health in March, witnesses a seemingly trivial incident that becomes a seed for his nihilistic 'last conviction' and his determination to end his own life. The episode transforms an ordinary urban thoroughfare into a stage for a chance encounter that crystallizes Hippolyte's despair about poverty, human suffering, and the impossibility of meaningful action within a foreshortened existence.

The Nocturnal Encounter

One evening in March, Hippolyte, who had been feeling temporarily better and had begun to go out at dusk, was walking along Shestilavochnaya when a man passed him carrying a paper parcel. The man, dressed in a shabby summer dust-coat too light for the season, was about ten yards ahead when something fell from his pocket. Hippolyte hurried forward to pick it up, just beating an old man in a long kaftan who also rushed for it. The object was a large, old-fashioned pocketbook, stuffed full but, as Hippolyte immediately guessed, containing nothing of monetary value. The owner, some forty yards ahead, soon disappeared into the crowd. Hippolyte ran after him, calling out, but the man turned into the gate of a large house built in small tenements, a building containing perhaps a hundred separate lodgings. The gateway was so dark that Hippolyte could see nothing, but he heard a man mounting a staircase above him and rushed up after him, reaching the fifth storey just as a door opened and shut.

The Tenement Interior

After ringing the bell, Hippolyte was admitted by an old peasant woman who was lighting a samovar in a tiny kitchen. She led him through a low, scarcely furnished room where a man named Terentich lay drunk on a large bed hung with curtains, a half-bottle of vodka and a candle-end on the table. Hippolyte then entered an even smaller room, so cramped he could scarcely turn around. A narrow single bed occupied most of the space, alongside three common chairs and a wretched kitchen-table before a small sofa. On the bed, a baby of scarcely three weeks old was whining, while a pale, weak-looking woman dressed the child, apparently the mother, who had not yet recovered from childbirth. A little girl of about three lay on the sofa, covered with an old dress-coat. At the table stood a man in his shirt sleeves, unpacking a blue paper parcel containing bread and sausages. From under the bed protruded an open portmanteau full of bundles of rags. The confusion and untidiness were indescribable, and Hippolyte immediately recognized that the man and woman were respectable people brought to such a pitch of poverty that they had taken a sort of bitter satisfaction in the squalor.

The Pocketbook's Return and Its Aftermath

The man, a provincial doctor who had lost his post and come to Petersburg to appeal to higher authorities, had spent five months being driven from office to office, had exhausted his funds, pawned his wife's last rags, and had just received a final refusal to his petition. When he saw his pocketbook in Hippolyte's hand, he was overcome with terror and then gratitude. Hippolyte, exhausted from his run up the stairs, suffered a violent fit of coughing. The doctor, who was himself a medical man, insisted he sit down. Hippolyte, taking down the man's name and details, promised to intercede with a friend whose uncle was a councillor of state who could influence the matter. The episode ended successfully: a month later, the doctor was appointed to another post, with travelling expenses paid and help to start life anew. Hippolyte's friend Bachmatoff, who had helped arrange this, gave a farewell champagne dinner. But for Hippolyte, the encounter on Shestilavochnaya had a far more profound effect. The sight of the desperate family, the doctor's rage and shame, and the bitter satisfaction they seemed to take in their degradation, all fed into his growing conviction that life was not worth living. That evening and night, he later wrote, were the first seeds of his 'last conviction,' which he seized upon greedily, drinking in its different aspects until a dreadful terror came over him. The street, with its dark gateway and crowded tenements, thus becomes the physical locus where Hippolyte's abstract despair about his own impending death from consumption is concretely linked to the grinding poverty and humiliation of others, forging the resolve that will culminate in his failed suicide attempt at Pavlofsk.