The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “You astonish me,” Mrs. Epanchin went on as before. “Hungry, and some sort of fits! What fits?”

  “Oh, they don’t occur too often, and besides, he’s almost like a child, though he’s cultivated. I’d like to ask you, mesdames,” he again turned to his daughters, “to give him an examination; it would be good, after all, to know what he’s able to do.”

  “An ex-am-i-na-tion?” Mrs. Epanchin drew out and, in deep amazement, again began to roll her eyes from her daughters to her husband and back.

  “Ah, my friend, don’t take it in that sense … however, as you wish; I had in mind to be nice to him and receive him in our house, because it’s almost a good deed.”

  “In our house? From Switzerland?!”

  “Switzerland is no hindrance. But anyhow, I repeat, it’s as you wish. I suggested it, first, because he’s your namesake and maybe even a relation, and second, he doesn’t know where to lay his head. I even thought you might be somewhat interested, because, after all, he’s of the same family.”

  “Of course, maman, if we needn’t stand on ceremony with him; besides, he’s hungry after the journey, why not give him something to eat, if he doesn’t know where to go?” said the eldest daughter, Alexandra.

  “And a perfect child besides, we can play blindman’s buff with him.”

  “Play blindman’s buff? In what sense?”

  “Oh, maman, please stop pretending,” Aglaya interfered vexedly.

  The middle daughter, Adelaida, much given to laughter, could not help herself and burst out laughing.

  “Send for him, papa, maman allows it,” Aglaya decided. The general rang and sent for the prince.

  “But be sure a napkin is tied around his neck when he sits at the table,” Mrs. Epanchin decided. “Send for Fyodor, or let Mavra … so as to stand behind his chair and tend to him while he eats. Is he at least quiet during his fits? Does he gesticulate?”

  “On the contrary, he’s very well brought up and has wonderful manners. A bit too simple at times … But here he is! Allow me to introduce Prince Myshkin, the last of the line, a namesake and maybe even a relation, receive him, be nice to him. They’ll have lunch now, Prince, do them the honor … And I, forgive me, I’m late, I must hurry …”

  “We know where you’re hurrying to,” Mrs. Epanchin said imposingly.

  “I must hurry, I must hurry, my friend, I’m late! Give him your albums,19 mesdames, let him write something for you, he’s a rare calligrapher! A talent! He did such a piece of old handwriting for me: ‘The hegumen Pafnuty here sets his hand to it …’ Well, good-bye.”

  “Pafnuty? Hegumen? Wait, wait, where are you going? What Pafnuty?” Mrs. Epanchin cried with insistent vexation and almost anxiously to her fleeing husband.

  “Yes, yes, my friend, there was such a hegumen in the old days … and I’m off to the count’s, he’s been waiting, waiting a long time, and, above all, it was he who made the appointment … Good-bye, Prince!”

  The general withdrew with quick steps.

  “I know which count that is!” Elizaveta Prokofyevna said sharply and turned her gaze irritably on the prince. “What was it!” she began, trying squeamishly and vexedly to recall. “What was it! Ah, yes. Well, what about this hegumen?”

  “Maman,” Alexandra began, and Aglaya even stamped her little foot.

  “Don’t interrupt me, Alexandra Ivanovna,” Mrs. Epanchin rapped out to her, “I also want to know. Sit down here, Prince, in this chair, facing me—no, here, move closer to the sun, to the light, so that I can see. Well, what about this hegumen?”

  “Hegumen Pafnuty,” the prince replied attentively and seriously.

  “Pafnuty? That’s interesting. Well, who was he?”

  Mrs. Epanchin asked impatiently, quickly, sharply, not taking her eyes off the prince, and when he answered, she nodded her head after each word he said.

  “The hegumen Pafnuty, of the fourteenth century,” the prince began. “He was the head of a hermitage on the Volga, in what is now Kostroma province. He was known for his holy life. He went to the Horde,20 helped to arrange some affairs of that time, and signed his name to a certain document, and I saw a copy of that signature. I liked the handwriting and learned it. Today, when the general wanted to see how I can write, in order to find a post for me, I wrote several phrases in various scripts, and among them ‘The hegumen Pafnuty here sets his hand to it’ in the hegumen Pafnuty’s own handwriting. The general liked it very much, and he remembered it just now.”

  “Aglaya,” said Mrs. Epanchin, “remember: Pafnuty, or better write it down, because I always forget. However, I thought it would be more interesting. Where is this signature?”

  “I think it’s still in the general’s office, on the desk.”

  “Send at once and fetch it.”

  “I could just as well write it again for you, if you like.”

  “Of course, maman,” said Alexandra, “and now we’d better have lunch; we’re hungry.”

  “Well, so,” Mrs. Epanchin decided. “Come, Prince, are you very hungry?”

  “Yes, at the moment I’m very hungry and I thank you very much.”

  “It’s very good that you’re polite, and I note that you’re not at all such an … odd man as we were told. Come. Sit down here, across from me,” she bustled about, getting the prince seated, when they came to the dining room, “I want to look at you. Alexandra, Adelaida, offer the prince something. Isn’t it true that he’s not all that … sick? Maybe the napkin isn’t necessary … Do they tie a napkin around your neck when you eat, Prince?”

  “Before, when I was about seven, I think they did, but now I usually put my napkin on my knees when I eat.”

  “So you should. And your fits?”

  “Fits?” the prince was slightly surprised. “I have fits rather rarely now. Though, I don’t know, they say the climate here will be bad for me.”

  “He speaks well,” Mrs. Epanchin observed, turning to her daughters and continuing to nod her head after each word the prince said. “I didn’t even expect it. So it was all nonsense and lies, as usual. Eat, Prince, and go on with your story: where were you born and brought up? I want to know everything; you interest me exceedingly.”

  The prince thanked her and, eating with great appetite, again began to tell everything he had already told more than once that morning. Mrs. Epanchin was becoming more and more pleased. The girls also listened rather attentively. They discussed families; the prince turned out to know his genealogy rather well, but hard as they searched, they could find almost no connection between him and Mrs. Epanchin. There might have been some distant relation between their grandmothers and grandfathers. Mrs. Epanchin especially liked this dry subject, since she hardly ever had the chance to talk about her genealogy, despite all her wishes, so that she even got up from the table in an excited state of mind.

  “Let’s all go to our gathering room,” she said, “and have coffee served there. We have this common room here,” she said to the prince, leading him out. “It’s simply my small drawing room, where we gather when we’re by ourselves, and each of us does her own thing: Alexandra, this one, my eldest daughter, plays the piano, or reads, or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (and never can finish anything); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I’m also hopeless at handwork: nothing comes out right. Well, here we are; sit down there, Prince, by the fireplace, and tell us something. I want to know how you tell a story. I want to make completely sure, so that when I see old Princess Belokonsky, I can tell her all about you. I want them all to become interested in you, too. Well, speak then.”

  “But, maman, it’s very strange to tell anything that way,” observed Adelaida, who meanwhile had straightened her easel, taken her brushes and palette, and started working on a landscape begun long ago, copied from a print. Alexandra and Aglaya sat down together on a small sofa, folded their arms, and prepared to listen to the conversation. The prince noticed that special attention was turned on him from all sides.
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br />   “I wouldn’t tell anything, if I were ordered to like that,” observed Aglaya.

  “Why? What’s so strange about it? Why shouldn’t he tell a story? He has a tongue. I want to see if he knows how to speak. Well, about anything. Tell me how you liked Switzerland, your first impressions. You’ll see, he’s going to begin now, and begin beautifully.”

  “The impression was a strong one …” the prince began.

  “There,” the impatient Lizaveta Prokofyevna picked up, turning to her daughters, “he’s begun.”

  “Give him a chance to speak at least, maman,” Alexandra stopped her. “This prince may be a great rogue and not an idiot at all,” she whispered to Aglaya.

  “He surely is, I saw it long ago,” answered Aglaya. “And it’s mean of him to play a role. What does he want to gain by it?”

  “The first impression was a very strong one,” the prince repeated. “When they brought me from Russia, through various German towns, I only looked on silently and, I remember, I didn’t even ask about anything. That was after a series of strong and painful fits of my illness, and whenever my illness worsened and I had several fits in a row, I always lapsed into a total stupor, lost my memory completely, and though my mind worked, the logical flow of thought was as if broken. I couldn’t put more than two or three ideas together coherently. So it seems to me. But when the fits subsided, I became healthy and strong again, as I am now. I remember a feeling of unbearable sadness; I even wanted to weep; I was surprised and anxious all the time: it affected me terribly that it was all foreign—that much I understood. The foreign was killing me. I was completely awakened from that darkness, I remember, in the evening, in Basel, as we drove into Switzerland, and what roused me was the braying of an ass in the town market. The ass struck me terribly and for some reason I took an extraordinary liking to it, and at the same time it was as if everything cleared up in my head.”

  “An ass? That’s strange,” observed Mrs. Epanchin. “And yet there’s nothing strange about it, some one of us may yet fall in love with an ass,” she observed, looking wrathfully at the laughing girls. “It has happened in mythology.21 Go on, Prince.”

  “Since then I’ve had a terrible fondness for asses. It’s even some sort of sympathy in me. I began inquiring about them, because I’d never seen them before, and I became convinced at once that they’re most useful animals, hardworking, strong, patient, cheap, enduring; and because of that ass I suddenly took a liking to the whole of Switzerland, so that my former sadness went away entirely.”

  “That’s all very strange, but we can skip the ass; let’s go on to some other subject. Why are you laughing, Aglaya? And you, Adelaida? The prince spoke beautifully about the ass. He saw it himself, and what have you ever seen? You haven’t been abroad.”

  “I’ve seen an ass, maman,” said Adelaida.

  “And I’ve heard one,” Aglaya picked up. The three girls laughed again. The prince laughed with them.

  “That’s very naughty of you,” observed Mrs. Epanchin. “You must forgive them, Prince, they really are kind. I’m eternally scolding them, but I love them. They’re flighty, frivolous, mad.”

  “But why?” the prince laughed. “In their place I wouldn’t have missed the chance either. But all the same I stand up for the ass: an ass is a kind and useful fellow.”

  “And are you kind, Prince? I ask out of curiosity,” Mrs. Epanchin asked.

  They all laughed again.

  “Again that accursed ass turns up! I wasn’t even thinking of it!” Mrs. Epanchin cried. “Please believe me, Prince, I wasn’t …”

  “Hinting? Oh, I believe you, without question!”

  And the prince never stopped laughing.

  “It’s very good that you laugh. I see you’re a most kind young man,” said Mrs. Epanchin.

  “Sometimes I’m not,” replied the prince.

  “And I am kind,” Mrs. Epanchin put in unexpectedly, “I’m always kind, if you wish, and that is my only failing, because one should not always be kind. I’m often very angry, with these ones here, with Ivan Fyodorovich especially, but the trouble is that I’m kindest when I’m angry. Today, before you came, I was angry and pretended I didn’t and couldn’t understand anything. That happens to me—like a child. Aglaya taught me a lesson; I thank you, Aglaya. Anyhow, it’s all nonsense. I’m still not as stupid as I seem and as my daughters would have me appear. I have a strong character and am not very shy. Anyhow, I don’t say it spitefully. Come here, Aglaya, kiss me. Well … enough sentiment,” she observed, when Aglaya kissed her with feeling on the lips and hand. “Go on, Prince. Perhaps you’ll remember something more interesting than the ass.”

  “I still don’t understand how it’s possible to tell things just like that,” Adelaida observed again. “I wouldn’t find anything to say.”

  “But the prince would, because the prince is extremely intelligent and at least ten times more intelligent than you, or maybe twelve times. I hope you’ll feel something after that. Prove it to them, Prince, go on. We can indeed finally get past that ass. Well, so, besides the ass, what did you see abroad?”

  “That was intelligent about the ass, too,” observed Alexandra. “The prince spoke very interestingly about the case of his illness, and how he came to like everything because of one external push. It has always been interesting to me, how people go out of their minds and then recover again. Especially if it happens suddenly.”

  “Isn’t it true? Isn’t it true?” Mrs. Epanchin heaved herself up. “I see you, too, can sometimes be intelligent. Well, enough laughing! You stopped, I believe, at nature in Switzerland, Prince. Well?”

  “We came to Lucerne, and I was taken across the lake. I felt how good it was, but I also felt terribly oppressed,” said the prince.

  “Why?” asked Alexandra.

  “I don’t understand why. I always feel oppressed and uneasy when I look at such nature for the first time—both good and uneasy. Anyhow, that was all while I was still sick.”

  “Ah, no, I’ve always wanted very much to see it,” said Adelaida. “I don’t understand why we never go abroad. For two years I’ve been trying to find a subject for a picture:

  East and South have long since been portrayed …22

  Find me a subject for a picture, Prince.”

  “I don’t understand anything about it. It seems to me you just look and paint.”

  “I don’t know how to look.”

  “Why are you talking in riddles? I don’t understand a thing!” Mrs. Epanchin interrupted. “What do you mean, you don’t know how to look? You have eyes, so look. If you don’t know how to look here, you won’t learn abroad. Better tell us how you looked yourself, Prince.”

  “Yes, that would be better,” Adelaida added. “The prince did learn to look abroad.”

  “I don’t know. My health simply improved there; I don’t know if I learned to look. Anyhow, I was very happy almost the whole time.”

  “Happy! You know how to be happy?” Aglaya cried out. “Then how can you say you didn’t learn to look? You should teach us.”

  “Teach us, please,” Adelaida laughed.

  “I can’t teach you anything,” the prince was laughing, too. “I spent almost all my time abroad living in a Swiss village; occasionally I went somewhere not far away; what can I teach you? At first I was simply not bored; I started to recover quickly; then every day became dear to me, and the dearer as time went on, so that I began to notice it. I went to bed very content, and got up happier still. But why all that—it’s rather hard to say.”

  “So you didn’t want to go anywhere, you had no urge to go anywhere?” asked Alexandra.

  “At first, at the very first, yes, I did have an urge, and I would fall into great restlessness. I kept thinking about how I was going to live; I wanted to test my fate, I became restless especially at certain moments. You know, there are such moments, especially in solitude. We had a waterfall there, not a big one, it fell from high up the mountain in a very th
in thread, almost perpendicular—white, noisy, foamy; it fell from a great height, but it seemed low; it was half a mile away, but it seemed only fifty steps. I liked listening to the noise of it at night; and at those moments I’d sometimes get very restless. Also at noon sometimes, when I’d wander off somewhere into the mountains, stand alone halfway up a mountain, with pines all around, old, big, resinous; up on a cliff there’s an old, ruined medieval castle, our little village is far down, barely visible; the sun is bright, the sky blue, the silence terrible. Then there would come a call to go somewhere, and it always seemed to me that if I walked straight ahead, and kept on for a long, long time, and went beyond that line where sky and earth meet, the whole answer would be there, and at once I’d see a new life, a thousand times stronger and noisier than ours; I kept dreaming of a big city like Naples, where it was all palaces, noise, clatter, life … I dreamed about all kinds of things! And then it seemed to me that in prison, too, you could find an immense life.”

  “That last praiseworthy thought I read in my Reader when I was twelve years old,” said Aglaya.

  “It’s all philosophy,” observed Adelaida. “You’re a philosopher and have come to teach us.”

  “Maybe you’re even right,” the prince smiled, “perhaps I really am a philosopher, and, who knows, maybe I actually do have a thought of teaching … It may be so; truly it may.”

  “And your philosophy is exactly the same as Evlampia Nikolavna’s,” Aglaya picked up again. “She’s an official’s wife, a widow, she calls on us, a sort of sponger. Her whole purpose in life is cheapness; only to live as cheaply as possible; the only thing she talks about is kopecks—and, mind you, she has money, she’s a sly fox. Your immense life in prison is exactly the same, and maybe also your four-year happiness in the village, for which you sold your city of Naples, and not without profit, it seems, though it was only a matter of kopecks.”

  “Concerning life in prison there may be disagreement,” said the prince. “I heard one story from a man who spent twelve years in prison; he was one of the patients being treated by my professor. He had fits, he was sometimes restless, wept, and once even tried to kill himself. His life in prison had been very sad, I assure you, but certainly worth more than a kopeck. And the only acquaintances he had were a spider and a little tree that had grown up under his window … But I’d better tell you about another encounter I had last year with a certain man. Here there was one very strange circumstance—strange because, in fact, such chances very rarely occur. This man had once been led to a scaffold, along with others, and a sentence of death by firing squad was read out to him, for a political crime. After about twenty minutes a pardon was read out to him, and he was given a lesser degree of punishment; nevertheless, for the space between the two sentences, for twenty minutes, or a quarter of an hour at the least, he lived under the certain conviction that in a few minutes he would suddenly die. I wanted terribly much to listen when he sometimes recalled his impressions of it, and several times I began questioning him further. He remembered everything with extraordinary clarity and used to say he would never forget anything from those minutes. About twenty paces from the scaffold, around which people and soldiers were standing, three posts had been dug into the ground, since there were several criminals. The first three were led to the posts, tied to them, dressed in death robes (long white smocks), and had long white caps pulled down over their eyes so that they would not see the guns; then a squad of several soldiers lined up facing each post. My acquaintance was eighth in line, which meant he would go to the posts in the third round. A priest went up to each of them with a cross. Consequently, he had about five minutes left to live, not more. He said those five minutes seemed like an endless time to him, an enormous wealth. It seemed to him that in those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point yet in thinking about his last moment, so that he even made various arrangements: he reckoned up the time for bidding his comrades farewell and allotted two minutes to that, then allotted two more minutes to thinking about himself for the last time, and then to looking around for the last time. He remembered very well that he made precisely those three arrangements, and reckoned them up in precisely that way. He was dying at the age of twenty-seven, healthy and strong; bidding farewell to his comrades, he remembered asking one of them a rather irrelevant question and even being very interested in the answer. Then, after he had bidden his comrades farewell, the two minutes came that he had allotted to thinking about himself. He knew beforehand what he was going to think about: he kept wanting to picture to himself as quickly and vividly as possible how it could be like this: now he exists and lives, and in three minutes there would be something, some person or thing—but who? and where? He wanted to resolve it all in those two minutes! There was a church nearby, and the top of the cathedral with its gilded dome shone in the bright sun. He remembered gazing with terrible fixity at that dome and the rays shining from it: it seemed to him that those rays were his new nature and in three minutes he would somehow merge with them … The ignorance of and loathing for this new thing that would be and would come presently were terrible; yet he said that nothing was more oppressive for him at that moment than the constant thought: ‘What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be mine! Then I’d turn each minute into a whole age, I’d lose nothing, I’d reckon up every minute separately, I’d let nothing be wasted!’ He said that in the end this thought turned into such anger in him that he wished they would hurry up and shoot him.”