Bachmatoff

Bachmatoff is a young man of good family and solid means, a university student who moves in a higher social sphere than his former schoolmate Hippolyte Terentieff. He is described as a good companion, always merry and jolly, sometimes even witty, though not very intellectual; he was always top of the class. Despite his privileged position, he is not haughty: his familiarity is pleasant, audacious but never offensive. For years at school, Hippolyte had turned away from Bachmatoff's attempts at friendship, nursing a sullen enmity toward him as an "aristocrat." Yet when Hippolyte, now dying of consumption, comes to him with a desperate plea, Bachmatoff responds with immediate and effective generosity.

Role in Hippolyte's Narrative

Bachmatoff appears in the story solely through Hippolyte's "Necessary Explanation," the long confession he reads aloud on the prince's verandah. Hippolyte recounts how, after meeting a destitute provincial doctor and his family—the doctor had lost his post through intrigues, spent his last money on futile appeals in Petersburg, and now faced starvation with a newborn child—he decided to seek out Bachmatoff. The two had been enemies at school, but Hippolyte calculated that Bachmatoff's generous nature would not refuse a request from an old adversary. Bachmatoff is initially astonished and not too affable when Hippolyte appears at his door at nine in the evening, but he soon cheers up and bursts out laughing. When Hippolyte explains the doctor's case and mentions that Bachmatoff's uncle, Peter Matveyevitch Bachmatoff, a councillor of state, has the power to resolve it, the young man immediately promises to help. "I'll do it—I'll do it, of course!" he says, and adds, "I shall attack my uncle about it tomorrow morning, and I'm very glad you told me the story." He is amused by the irony of Hippolyte, his former enemy, coming to him for help, and compares it to "Napoleon going to England." True to his word, within a month the doctor is appointed to a new post, with travelling expenses and a loan—likely from Bachmatoff himself—to start life anew. Bachmatoff even gives a farewell champagne dinner for the doctor and his wife before their departure.

Thematic Significance

Bachmatoff's role is small but thematically pivotal. His effortless, cheerful generosity stands in stark contrast to the tortured self-consciousness of Hippolyte, who is consumed by his "last conviction" that life is not worth living for a few remaining weeks. After the dinner, as they walk home across the Nicolai bridge, Bachmatoff speaks of his joy at having done a good action, and Hippolyte launches into a long discourse on the unpredictable, far-reaching effects of individual kindness—citing the example of an old general who visited convicts and whose memory lived on in the hearts of hardened criminals for decades. Bachmatoff, struck by Hippolyte's situation, remarks with reproach, "And to think that you are to be cut off from life!" This moment crystallizes Hippolyte's anguish: the very act of doing good, which he has just facilitated, only sharpens his awareness of the life he is about to lose. Bachmatoff thus serves as a foil—a figure of uncomplicated, effective benevolence whose vitality and future-oriented existence throw into relief Hippolyte's desperate, philosophical struggle with mortality. The prince later recalls Bachmatoff's name when defending the possibility of disinterested kindness, and the episode becomes a key piece of evidence in Hippolyte's tortured meditation on whether a single good deed can justify a life that is about to end.