The Margin

Place

Irkutsk

Irkutsk is the Siberian city where Prohorovna's son Vasenka has gone in commissariat service. To his anxious mother, it is less a mapped city than a far-off silence: he wrote twice from there, then stopped writing for a year. The name makes distance, uncertainty, and maternal fear concrete in the line of women seeking Father Zossima's counsel.

IV-I. Father Ferapont

By chapter 25, Vasenka's letter from Irkutsk has arrived, answering the fear that brought Prohorovna to the elder.

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The Margin

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Irkutsk