Summary

Chapter 3: The train has crashed in the vicinity of the settlement of R., near which the Countess P., having gotten away with the murder of her husband some years earlier, has set up a private asylum in which to house other murderesses. Ironically, Countess P. has little sympathy for these women, seeing herself as the instrument of their redemption.

With the help of a French amateur phrenologist, she selects several women from varied Russian prisons whose cranial bumps seem to indicate the possibility of redemption. She had these women build their own prison, a panopticon: a circular series of cells, with a glass-walled room in the center. In this room sat the wardenness, with whom the prisoners exchanged stares day and night. Olga Alexandrovna, who happens to be Little Ivan’s mother, is an inmate of Countess P.’s asylum, having killed her abusive...