TMoP - Chapter Three - Pavel

[Richard Ryan]

"During the night a dream comes to him.  He is swimming underwater.  The light is blue and dim.  He banks and glides easily, gracefully; his hat seems to have gone, but in his black suit he feels like a turtle, a great old turtle...."

"Pavel is lying on his back.  His eyes are closed.  His hair, wafted by the current, is as soft as a baby's...."


In the third chapter of TMoP we find Dostoevsky's quest - if that's the right word for it - to learn the truth about his dead stepson intensifying; after a dinner with Anna and Matryona that is laced with erotic undercurrents (the interplay between sex and death is one of the book's ongoing themes), D. has a dream in which, transformed into a giant turtle, he finds Pavel's body resting at the bottom of a weed clogged lake.  The encounter, with its dimensions of magical metamorphosis,  brings Pavel vividly before us for the first time, without resolving any of the mystery surrounding his death, or in any way clarifying its circumstances.  It also allows us to witness D. trying to dream Pavel back to life, and to sense that the father is, perhaps without fully realizing it, beginning to deploy his considerable creative and imaginative powers in his efforts to understand Pavel's death.
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