Lebedeff's Household and Hidden Motives — The Idiot

In early June Prince Myshkin returns from Moscow to a changed Petersburg and goes straight to Lebedeff's villa. He finds the clerk in shirt-sleeves delivering a tearful courtroom speech to his household while a nephew demands fifteen roubles and accuses the uncle of hypocrisy. Children laugh, a widow nurses an infant, and everyone seems to be performing for the prince's arrival. Lebedeff lies about his own Christian name and claims he did so to humble himself; the nephew exposes the habit instantly. In the garden Myshkin presses for truth: Lebedeff admits Rogojin beat him in Moscow, that Nastasia fled again on the eve of marriage, and that she now insists she is entirely free. Lebedeff describes her as restless, mocking, and violent, yet says she listens to his Apocalypse readings and believes they live in the era of the black horse. The prince rents Lebedeff's Pavlofsk villa, the same summer ground where the Epanchins have gone, and learns Nastasia may be nearby. The chapter maps a schemer's household where religious rhetoric, family chaos, and mercenary gossip overlap, and where every helpful clerk may be selling the same crisis twice.