person
Alexander (Sasha) Uskov
Sasha
also: Саша Усков, Саша, Alexandre, Sasha Uskov, Sasha
A twenty-five-year-old member of an old aristocratic family who discounted a forged promissory note at a banking house; while his uncles debate behind closed doors whether to pay the note and save the family honor or hand him over to the authorities, he feels only weary indifference, and after being forgiven extorts a hundred rubles from his uncle to go celebrate, recognizing only then that he truly is a criminal.
Reading notes
- A Problem §3 discounted a forged promissory note
A promissory note (вексель) discounted "at a banking house" means Sasha sold the note to the bank for cash up front, at less than its face value, with the understanding that whoever's signature backed it would repay the full amount at maturity; here the backing signature -- the colonel's -- was forged, so when the note came due and went unredeemed, the forgery became a matter for the family (or the courts) rather than an ordinary unpaid debt.
- A Problem §9 expelled from the fifth class of the gymnasium
The gymnasium was the classical secondary school preparing pupils for university; its eight classes were roughly equivalent to secondary and pre-university education. Expulsion partway through, from the fifth class, marked a young man as having failed to complete a proper education -- a genteel family's shorthand for a wasted, undisciplined youth, which Ivan Markovich cites here as a mitigating circumstance.
- A Problem §18 Criminal -- a fearful word
The section opens Sasha's long internal self-justification (through section 21), in which he draws a series of self-serving distinctions -- debt is not crime, forging a relative's signature is merely an "accepted maneuver" among young men of his circle -- that the story's final line will collapse in a single sentence.
- A Problem §50 the rights of youth
Sasha echoes, almost verbatim, Ivan Markovich's own defense of him from the family council (section 9: "youth has its rights") -- but where his uncle meant it as an appeal for compassion, Sasha now uses the phrase to excuse his immediate return to the very dissipation that caused the crisis.