The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “Well, as you wish. I’ll ask. You won’t come out the loser.”

  They were both leaving the garden.

  “I could … I could … if you like, I could tell you something quite interesting, most esteemed Prince, concerning the same matter,” Lebedev muttered, joyfully twining himself about at the prince’s side.

  The prince stopped.

  “Darya Alexeevna also has a little dacha in Pavlovsk, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “And a certain person is friends with her and apparently intends to visit her often in Pavlovsk. With a purpose.”

  “Well?”

  “Aglaya Ivanovna …”

  “Ah, enough, Lebedev!” the prince interrupted with some unpleasant feeling, as if he had been touched on his sore spot. “It’s all … not like that. Better tell me, when are you moving? The sooner the better for me, because I’m staying in a hotel …”

  While talking, they left the garden and, without going inside, crossed the courtyard and reached the gate.

  “It would be best,” Lebedev finally decided, “if you moved here straight from the hotel today, and the day after tomorrow we can all go to Pavlovsk together.”

  “I’ll have to see,” the prince said pensively and went out of the gate.

  Lebedev followed him with his eyes. He was struck by the prince’s sudden absentmindedness. He had even forgotten to say “good-bye” as he left, had not even nodded his head, which was incompatible with what Lebedev knew of the prince’s courtesy and attentiveness.

  III

  IT WAS GETTING towards noon. The prince knew that of all the Epanchins the only one he might find in town now was the general, because of his official duties, and that, too, was unlikely. It occurred to him that the general would perhaps just take him and drive straight to Pavlovsk, and he wanted very much to make one visit before that. At the risk of coming late to the Epanchins’ and delaying his trip to Pavlovsk till tomorrow, the prince decided to go and look for the house he had wanted so much to call at.

  This visit, however, was risky for him in a certain sense. He debated and hesitated. He knew that the house was on Gorokhovaya Street, near Sadovaya, and decided to go there, hoping that before he reached the place he would finally manage to make up his mind.

  As he neared the intersection of Gorokhovaya and Sadovaya, he himself was surprised at his extraordinary agitation; he had never expected that his heart could pound so painfully. One house, probably because of its peculiar physiognomy, began to attract his attention from far away, and the prince later recalled saying to himself: “That’s probably the very house.” He approached with extraordinary curiosity to verify his guess; he felt that for some reason it would be particularly unpleasant if he had guessed right. The house was big, grim, three-storied, without any architecture, of a dirty green color. Some, though very few, houses of this sort, built at the end of the last century, have survived precisely on these Petersburg streets (where everything changes so quickly) almost without change. They are sturdily built, with thick walls and extremely few windows; the ground-floor windows sometimes have grilles. Most often there is a moneychanger’s shop downstairs. The castrate14 who sits in the shop rents an apartment upstairs. Both outside and inside, everything is somehow inhospitable and dry, everything seems to hide and conceal itself, and why it should seem so simply from the physiognomy of the house—would be hard to explain. Architectural combinations of lines, of course, have their own secret. These houses are inhabited almost exclusively by commercial folk. Going up to the gates and looking at the inscription, the prince read: “House of the Hereditary Honorary Citizen Rogozhin.”

  No longer hesitant, he opened the glass door, which slammed noisily behind him, and started up the front stairway to the second floor. The stairway was dark, made of stone, crudely constructed, and its walls were painted red. He knew that Rogozhin with his mother and brother occupied the entire second floor of this dreary house. The servant who opened the door for the prince led him without announcing him and led him a long way; they passed through one reception hall with faux-marbre walls, an oak parquet floor, and furniture from the twenties, crude and heavy, passed through some tiny rooms, turning and zigzagging, going up two or three steps and then down the same number, and finally knocked at some door. The door was opened by Parfyon Semyonych himself; seeing the prince, he went pale and froze on the spot, so that for some time he looked like a stone idol, staring with fixed and frightened eyes and twisting his mouth into a sort of smile perplexed in the highest degree—as if he found something impossible and almost miraculous in the prince’s visit. The prince, though he had expected something of the sort, was even surprised.

  “Parfyon, perhaps I’ve come at the wrong time. I’ll go, then,” he finally said in embarrassment.

  “The right time! The right time!” Parfyon finally recollected himself. “Please come in.”

  They addressed each other as familiars. In Moscow they had often happened to spend long hours together, and there had even been several moments during their meetings that had left an all too memorable imprint on both their hearts. Now it was over three months since they had seen each other.

  The paleness and, as it were, the quick, fleeting spasm still had not left Rogozhin’s face. Though he had invited his guest in, his extraordinary embarrassment persisted. As he was showing the prince to a chair and seating him at the table, the prince chanced to turn to him and stopped under the impression of his extremely strange and heavy gaze. It was as if something pierced the prince and as if at the same time he remembered something—recent, heavy, gloomy. Not sitting down and standing motionless, he looked for some time straight into Rogozhin’s eyes; they seemed to flash more intensely in the first moment. Finally Rogozhin smiled, but with some embarrassment and as if at a loss.

  “Why are you staring like that?” he muttered. “Sit down!”

  The prince sat down.

  “Parfyon,” he said, “tell me straight out, did you know I would come to Petersburg today, or not?”

  “That you would come, I did think, and as you see I wasn’t mistaken,” the man said, smiling caustically, “but how should I know you’d come today?”

  The harsh abruptness and strange irritation of the question contained in the answer struck the prince still more.

  “But even if you had known I’d come today, why get so irritated?” the prince said softly in embarrassment.

  “But why do you ask?”

  “This morning, as I was getting off the train, I saw a pair of eyes looking at me exactly the way you were just looking at me from behind.”

  “Aha! Whose eyes were they?” Rogozhin muttered suspiciously. It seemed to the prince that he gave a start.

  “I don’t know, in the crowd—it even seems to me that I imagined it; I’ve somehow begun to imagine things all the time. You know, brother Parfyon, I feel almost the way I did five years ago, when I was still having my fits.”

  “So, maybe you did imagine it, I don’t know …” Parfyon went on muttering.

  The affectionate smile on his face did not suit it at that moment, as if something had been broken in this smile and, try as he might, Parfyon was unable to glue it back together.

  “So you’re going abroad again, are you?” he asked and suddenly added: “And do you remember us on the train, in the autumn, coming from Pskov, me here, and you … in a cloak, remember, and those gaiters?”

  And Rogozhin suddenly laughed, this time with a sort of overt malice and as if delighted that he had managed to express it at least in some way.

  “You’ve settled here for good?” the prince asked, looking around the study.

  “Yes, I’m at home here. Where else should I be?”

  “We haven’t seen each other for a long time. I’ve heard such things about you, it’s as if it were not you.”

  “People say all kinds of things,” Rogozhin observed drily.

  “You’ve scattered your whole company, though; you sit here
in the parental house, doing no mischief. So, that’s good. Is it your house or all the family’s?”

  “The house is my mother’s. She lives there down the corridor.”

  “And where does your brother live?”

  “Brother Semyon Semyonych is in the wing.”

  “Does he have a family?”

  “He’s a widower. Why do you ask?”

  The prince looked at him and did not answer; he suddenly became pensive and seemed not to hear the question. Rogozhin did not insist and waited. Silence fell.

  “I recognized your house just now from a hundred paces away, as I was approaching,” said the prince.

  “Why so?”

  “I have no idea. Your house has the physiognomy of your whole family and of your whole Rogozhin life, but ask me why I think that—and I can’t explain it. Nonsense, of course. I’m even afraid of how much it disturbs me. It never occurred to me before that this would be the sort of house you lived in, but when I saw it, I thought at once: ‘Yes, that’s exactly the kind of house he had to have!’ ”

  “See!” Rogozhin smiled vaguely, not quite understanding the prince’s unclear thought. “This house was built by my grandfather,” he observed. “Castrates used to live here, the Khludiakovs, they rent from us even now.”

  “So gloomy. You sit in such gloom,” said the prince, looking around the study.

  It was a big room, high, darkish, cluttered with all sorts of furniture—mostly big desks, bureaus, bookcases in which ledgers and papers were kept. A wide red morocco couch apparently served Rogozhin as a bed. On the table at which Rogozhin had seated him, the prince noticed two or three books; one of them, Solovyov’s History,15 was open and had a bookmark in it. On the walls, in dull gilt frames, hung several oil paintings, dark, sooty, on which it was hard to make anything out. One full-length portrait drew the prince’s attention: it depicted a man of about fifty, in a frock coat of German cut but with long skirts, with two medals on his neck, a very sparse and short, grayish beard, a wrinkled and yellow face, and a suspicious, secretive, and somewhat doleful gaze.

  “That wouldn’t be your father?” asked the prince.

  “The man himself,” Rogozhin replied with an unpleasant smile, as if readying himself for some immediate, unceremonious joke about his deceased parent.

  “He wasn’t an Old Believer, was he?”16

  “No, he went to church, but it’s true he used to say the old belief was more correct. He also had great respect for the castrates. This was his study. Why did you ask about the old belief?”

  “Will you celebrate the wedding here?”

  “Y-yes, here,” replied Rogozhin, almost starting at the sudden question.

  “Soon?”

  “You know yourself it doesn’t depend on me!”

  “Parfyon, I’m not your enemy and have no intention of hindering you in anything. I repeat it to you now just as I told it to you once before, in a moment almost like this. When your wedding was under way in Moscow, I didn’t hinder you, you know that. The first time it was she who came rushing to me, almost from the foot of the altar, begging me to ‘save’ her from you. I’m repeating her own words. Then she ran away from me, too, and you found her again and led her to the altar, and now they say she ran away from you again and came here. Is that true? Lebedev informed me and that’s why I came. And that you’ve made it up again here, I learned for the first time only yesterday on the train, from one of your former friends, Zalyozhev, if you want to know. I had a purpose in coming here: I wanted finally to persuade her to go abroad, to restore her health; she’s very upset in body and in soul, in her head especially, and, in my opinion, she has great need to be cared for. I didn’t want to go abroad with her myself, but I had a view to arranging it without myself. I’m telling you the real truth. If it’s completely true that things have been made up again between you, I won’t even allow her a glimpse of me, and I’ll never come to see you either. You know I’m not deceiving you, because I’ve always been candid with you. I’ve never concealed my thoughts about it from you, and I’ve always said that marrying you means inevitable ruin for her. It also means ruin for you … perhaps even more than for her. If you parted again, I would be very glad; but I have no intention of intruding or interfering with you. So be at peace and don’t suspect me. And you know for yourself whether I was ever your real rival, even when she ran away from you to me. You’re laughing now—I know at what. Yes, we lived separately there, and in different towns, and you know it all for certain. I explained to you before that I love her ‘not with love, but with pity.’ I think I defined it precisely. You told me then that you understood these words of mine; is it true? did you understand? See how hatefully you look at me! I’ve come to bring you peace, because you, too, are dear to me. I love you very much, Parfyon. And now I’ll go and never come again. Farewell.”

  The prince stood up.

  “Stay with me a little,” Parfyon said quietly, without getting up from his place and leaning his head on his right hand, “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

  The prince sat down. They both fell silent again.

  “When you’re not in front of me, I immediately feel spite for you, Lev Nikolaevich. In these three months that I haven’t seen you, I’ve felt spiteful towards you every minute, by God. So that I could have up and poisoned you with something! That’s how it is. Now you haven’t sat with me a quarter of an hour, and all my spite is gone, and I love you again like before. Stay with me a little …”

  “When I’m with you, you trust me, and when I’m gone, you immediately stop trusting me and suspect me again. You’re like your father!” the prince said with a friendly smile, trying to conceal his emotion.

  “I trust your voice when I’m with you. I know we’ll never be equals, you and me …”

  “Why did you add that? And now you’re irritated again,” said the prince, marveling at Rogozhin.

  “But here, brother, nobody’s asking our opinion,” the other replied, “it got decided without us. And we love differently, too, I mean there’s difference in everything,” he went on quietly, after a pause. “You say you love her with pity. I’ve got no such pity for her in me. And she hates me more than anything. I dream about her every night now: that she’s laughing at me with another man. So it is, brother. She’s going to marry me, and yet she forgets even to think about me, as if she’s changing a shoe. Believe it or not, I haven’t seen her for five days, because I don’t dare go to her. She’ll ask, ‘To what do I owe the honor?’ She’s disgraced me enough …”

  “Disgraced you? How so?”

  “As if he doesn’t know! She ran away with you ‘from the foot of the altar,’ you just said it yourself.”

  “But you don’t believe that she …”

  “Didn’t she disgrace me in Moscow, with that officer, that Zemtiuzhnikov? I know for sure she did, and that’s after she set the date for the wedding herself.”

  “It can’t be!” cried the prince.

  “I know for sure,” Rogozhin said with conviction. “What, she’s not like that, or something? There’s no point, brother, in saying she’s not like that. It’s pure nonsense. With you she wouldn’t be like that, and might be horrified at such a thing herself, but with me that’s just what she’s like. So it is. She looks at me like the worst scum. The thing with Keller, that officer, the one who boxes, I know for sure, she made it up just to laugh at me … But you don’t know yet what she pulled on me in Moscow! And the money, the money I spent …”

  “But … how can you marry her now!… How will it be afterwards?” the prince asked in horror.

  Rogozhin gave the prince a heavy and terrible look and made no reply.

  “For five days now I haven’t gone to her,” he went on, after a moment’s silence. “I keep being afraid she’ll drive me away. ‘I’m still my own mistress,’ she says, ‘if I like, I’ll drive you away for good and go abroad’ (it was she who told me she’d go abroad,” he observed as if in parenthesis
and looked somehow peculiarly into the prince’s eyes); “sometimes, it’s true, she’s just scaring me, she keeps laughing at me for some reason. But at other times she really scowls, pouts, doesn’t say a word; and that’s what I’m afraid of. The other day I thought: I shouldn’t come empty-handed—but I just made her laugh and then she even got angry. She gave her maid Katka such a shawl of mine that, even if she lived in luxury before, she maybe never saw the like. And I can’t make a peep about the time of the wedding. What kind of bridegroom am I, if I’m afraid even to come for a visit? So I sit here, and when I can’t stand it any longer, I go on the sly and slink past her house or hide around the corner. The other day I stood watch by her gates almost till daylight—I imagined something then. And she must have spied me through the window: ‘What would you do to me,’ she says, ‘if you saw me deceive you?’ I couldn’t stand it and said, ‘You know what.’ ”

  “What does she know?”

  “How should I know!” Rogozhin laughed spitefully. “In Moscow then I couldn’t catch her with anybody, though I tried a long time. I confronted her once and said: ‘You promised to marry me, you’re entering an honest family, and do you know what you are now? Here’s what you are!’ ”

  “You said it to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “ ‘I might not even take you as my lackey now,’ she says, ‘much less be your wife.’ ‘And I,’ I say, ‘am not leaving like that, once and for all.’ ‘And I,’ she says, ‘will now call Keller and tell him to throw you out the gate.’ I fell on her and beat her black and blue.”

  “It can’t be!” cried the price.

  “I tell you: it happened,” Rogozhin confirmed quietly, but with flashing eyes. “For exactly a day and a half I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t leave her room, stood on my knees before her: ‘I’ll die,’ I said, ‘but I won’t leave until you forgive me, and if you order me taken away, I’ll drown myself; because what will I be now without you?’ She was like a crazy woman all that day, she wept, she wanted to stab me with a knife, she abused me. She called Zalyozhev, Keller, Zemtiuzhnikov, and everybody, pointed at me, disgraced me. ‘Gentlemen, let’s all go to the theater tonight, let him stay here, since he doesn’t want to leave, I’m not tied to him. And you, Parfyon Semyonovich, will be served tea here without me, you must have gotten hungry today.’ She came back from the theater alone: ‘They’re little cowards and scoundrels,’ she says, ‘they’re afraid of you, and they try to frighten me: he won’t leave you like that, he may put a knife in you. But I’m going to my bedroom and I won’t lock the door: that’s how afraid of you I am! So that you know it and see it! Did you have tea?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘and I won’t.’ ‘You had the honor of being offered, but this doesn’t suit you at all.’ And she did what she said, she didn’t lock her bedroom. In the morning she came out—laughing. ‘Have you gone crazy, or what?’ she says. ‘You’ll starve to death like this.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to forgive you, and I won’t marry you, you’ve been told. Did you really spend the whole night sitting in that chair, you didn’t sleep?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘I didn’t sleep.’ ‘Such a clever one! And you won’t have tea and won’t eat dinner again?’ ‘I told you I won’t—forgive me!’ ‘This really doesn’t suit you,’ she says, ‘if only you knew, it’s like a saddle on a cow. You’re not trying to frighten me, are you? A lot I care if you go hungry; I’m not afraid!’ She got angry, but not for long; she began nagging me again. And I marveled at her then, that she felt no spite towards me. Because she does remember evil, with others she remembers evil a long time! Then it occurred to me that she considered me so low that she couldn’t even be very angry with me. And that’s the truth. ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘what the pope of Rome is?’ ‘I’ve heard of him,’ I say. ‘Parfyon Semyonych,’ she says, ‘you never studied world history.’ ‘I never studied anything,’ I say. ‘Here, then,’ she says, ‘I’ll give you something to read: there was this one pope who got angry with some emperor, and this emperor spent three days without eating or drinking, barefoot, on his knees, in front of his palace, until the pope forgave him; what do you think this emperor thought to himself for those three days, standing on his knees, and what kind of vows did he make?… Wait,’ she says, ‘I’ll read it to you myself!’ She jumped up, brought a book: ‘It’s poetry,’ she says, and begins reading verses to me about this emperor swearing to take revenge on this pope during those three days.17 ‘Can it be,’ she says, ‘that you don’t like it, Parfyon Semyonych?’ ‘That’s all true,’ I say, ‘what you read.’ ‘Aha, you yourself say it’s true, that means you, too, may be making vows that “if she marries me, then I’ll remember everything she’s done, then I’ll have fun at her expense!” ’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘maybe that’s what I’m thinking.’ ‘How is it you don’t know?’ ‘I just don’t,’ I say, ‘that’s not what I’m thinking about now.’ ‘And what are you thinking about now?’ ‘About how you get up from your place, go past me, and I look at you and watch you; your dress rustles, and my heart sinks, and if you leave the room, I remember every little word you’ve said, and in what voice, and what it was; and this whole night I wasn’t thinking about anything, but I kept listening to how you breathed in your sleep, and how you stirred a couple of times …’ ‘And perhaps,’ she laughed, ‘you don’t think about or remember how you beat me?’ ‘And maybe I do,’ I say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘But what if I don’t forgive you and don’t marry you?’ ‘I told you, I’ll drown myself.’ ‘Perhaps you’ll still kill me before that …’ She said it and fell to thinking. Then she got angry and left. An hour later she comes out to me so gloomy. ‘I’ll marry you, Parfyon Semyonovich,’ she says, ‘and not because I’m afraid of you, but because I’ll perish all the same. And which way is better, eh? Sit down,’ she says, ‘dinner will be served now. And if I marry you,’ she added, ‘I’ll be your faithful wife, don’t doubt it and don’t worry.’ She was silent a minute, then said: ‘You’re not a lackey after all. Before I used to think you were as complete a lackey as they come.’ Then she set a date for the wedding, and a week later she ran away from me here to Lebedev. When I arrived, she said: ‘I don’t reject you altogether; I only want to wait a little more, as long as I like, because I’m still my own mistress. You wait, too, if you want.’ That’s how we are now … What do you think of all that, Lev Nikolaevich?”