Curious Familial Relationships

[Gladys]

Having finished ‘The Insulted and Injured’ and pondered for a week, I sense I’m missing something vital.

Towards the end of the novel, unexpected relationships are unveiled. Ivan Petrovitch had unwittingly been guardian to the legitimate daughter of Prince Valkovsky. If Alyosha and Nellie are brother and sister, how is this thunderbolt important to the plot?

Except for Prince Valkovsky, most of the characters have been insulted and injured. In particular, old grandfather Smith and Nikolay Sergeyitch have been grievously so, as have their daughters, Nellie’s mother and Natasha.

Ultimately, the wicked Prince Valkovsky triumphs: he remarries well, his troublesome first wife and daughter are dead, he has outwitted his detective, Masloboev, and his puppet son will marry the rich Katya. Aside from the prince himself, all are probably worse off. Has evil simply triumphed over good?

[Gladys]

Has evil simply triumphed over good?

I awoke, for no good reason, at 5:00 am the morning after my first post. In a second or two, the thought flitted through my brain: father/daughter, God the father/son, The Parable of the Prodigal Son, The Prodigal Daughter. (Incidentally, I can recall grasping ‘The Idiot’ at the same early hour, almost a year ago.)

Dostoevsky works wondrous magic: there are three prodigal daughters:

• Nikolay Sergeyitch and daughter Natasha correspond closely to the divine father and the repentant son of the parable.
  
  
• Grandfather Smith and Nellie’s mother aspire to the parable’s dispensation of grace, but tragically, both fall short in the end. Smith, in particular, is very human.
  
  
• Prince Valkovsky and his legitimate daughter, Nellie, represent a travesty of the parable. Here, the father abandons his daughter. Since the prince as father and husband is the devil incarnate, Nellie is right to disobey her mother’s last wish, even at the cost of death.

As in the parable (Luke 15:11-32), the younger daughter [Natasha] steals her share of the ruined inheritance while her father [Nikolay Sergeyitch] is still living, and leaving home she ‘wastes her substance with riotous living’. Eventually struggling to make ends meet, she comes to her senses, and decides to return home and throw herself on her father's mercy. But as she returns home, her father greets her with open arms, and hardly gives her a chance to express repentance: he kills ‘a fatted calf’ saying, “My daughter was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”.

Wow!

[bazarov]

I awoke, for no good reason, at 5:00 am the morning after my first post. In a second or two, the thought flitted through my brain

That's a great feeling.
Sorry, I read it long ago, so I can't recall it.

[Ingi]

I finished reading Insulted and injured today. It was interesting, I read it 2 days, but doesn't occupy me as Idiot and Crime and punishment did. I see the plot touching, but I can't see anything behind it.

[Gladys]

I see the plot touching, but I can't see anything behind it.

Apart from the very early The Double: A Petersburg Poem of 1846, I have yet to read a Dostoevsky without a great deal behind it.