The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “What do you think yourself?” the prince asked back, looking sadly at Rogozhin.

  “As if I think!” escaped him. He was going to add something, but kept silent in inconsolable anguish.

  The prince stood up and was again about to leave.

  “All the same I won’t hinder you,” he said quietly, almost pensively, as if responding to some inner, hidden thought of his own.

  “You know what I’ll tell you?” Rogozhin suddenly became animated and his eyes flashed. “How can you give her up to me like that? I don’t understand. Have you stopped loving her altogether? Before you were in anguish anyway; I could see that. So why have you come galloping here headlong? Out of pity?” (And his face twisted in spiteful mockery.) “Heh, heh!”

  “Do you think I’m deceiving you?” asked the prince.

  “No, I believe you, only I don’t understand any of it. The surest thing of all is that your pity is maybe still worse than my love!”

  Something spiteful lit up in his face, wanting to speak itself out at once.

  “Well, your love is indistinguishable from spite,” smiled the prince, “and when it passes, there may be still worse trouble. This I tell you, brother Parfyon …”

  “That I’ll put a knife in her?”

  The prince gave a start.

  “You’ll hate her very much for this present love, for all this torment that you’re suffering now. For me the strangest thing is how she could again decide to marry you. When I heard it yesterday—I could scarcely believe it, and it pained me so. She has already renounced you twice and run away from the altar, which means she has a foreboding!… What does she want with you now? Can it be your money? That’s nonsense. And you must have spent quite a bit of it by now. Can it be only to have a husband? She could find someone besides you. Anyone would be better than you, because you may put a knife in her, and maybe she knows that only too well now. Because you love her so much? True, that could be … I’ve heard there are women who seek precisely that kind of love … only …”

  The prince paused and pondered.

  “Why did you smile again at my father’s portrait?” asked Rogozhin, who was observing very closely every change, every fleeting expression of his face.

  “Why did I smile? It occurred to me that, if it hadn’t been for this calamity, if this love hadn’t befallen you, you might have become exactly like your father, and in a very short time at that. Lodged silently alone in this house with your obedient and uncomplaining wife, speaking rarely and sternly, trusting no one, and having no need at all for that, but only making money silently and sullenly. At most you’d occasionally praise some old books or get interested in the two-fingered sign of the cross,18 and that probably only in old age …”

  “Go on, jeer. And she said exactly the same thing not long ago, when she was looking at that portrait! Funny how the two of you agree in everything now …”

  “So she’s already been at your place?” the prince asked with curiosity.

  “She has. She looked at the portrait for a long time, asked questions about the deceased. ‘You’d be exactly like that,’ she smiled at me in the end. ‘You have strong passions, Parfyon Semyonovich, such passions as would have sent you flying to Siberia, to hard labor, if you weren’t also intelligent, because you are very intelligent,’ she said (that’s what she said, can you believe it? First time I heard such a thing from her!). ‘You’d soon drop all this mischief you do now. And since you’re a completely uneducated man, you’d start saving money, and you’d sit like your father in this house with his castrates; perhaps you’d adopt their beliefs in the end, and you’d love your money so much that you’d save up not two but ten million, and you’d starve to death on your moneybags, because you’re passionate in everything, you carry everything to the point of passion.’ That’s just how she talked, in almost exactly those words. She’d never spoken with me like that before! Because she always talks about trifles with me, or makes fun of me; and this time, too, she began laughingly, but then turned so grim; she went around looking the whole house over, and seemed to be frightened by something. ‘I’ll change it all,’ I say, ‘and do it up, or maybe I’ll buy another house for the wedding.’ ‘No, no,’ she says, ‘don’t change anything here, we’ll live in it as it is. When I’m your wife,’ she says, ‘I want to live near your mother.’ I took her to see my mother—she was respectful to her, like her own daughter. Even before, already two years ago, my mother didn’t seem quite right in the head (she’s sick), but since my father’s death she’s become like a total infant, doesn’t talk, doesn’t walk, just sits there and bows to whoever she sees; seems like if you didn’t feed her, she wouldn’t realize it for three days. I took my mother’s right hand, put her fingers together: ‘Bless us, mother,’ I say, ‘this woman is going to marry me.’ Then she kissed my mother’s hand with feeling: ‘Your mother,’ she says, ‘must have borne a lot of grief.’ She saw this book on the table: ‘Ah, so you’ve started reading Russian History?’ (And she herself told me once in Moscow: ‘You ought to edify yourself at least somehow, at least read Solovyov’s Russian History, you don’t know anything at all.’) ‘That’s good,’ she said, ‘that’s what you ought to do, start reading. I’ll make a little list for you of which books you should read first; want me to, or not?’ And never, never before did she talk to me like that, so that she even surprised me; for the first time I breathed like a living person.”

  “I’m very glad of it, Parfyon,” the prince said with sincere feeling, “very glad. Who knows, maybe God will make things right for you together.”

  “That will never be!” Rogozhin cried hotly.

  “Listen, Parfyon, if you love her so much, how can you not want to deserve her respect? And if you do want to, how can you have no hope? I just said it was a strange riddle for me why she’s marrying you. But though I can’t answer it, all the same I don’t doubt that there’s certainly a sufficient, rational reason for it. She’s convinced of your love; but she’s surely convinced that there are virtues in you as well. It cannot be otherwise! What you just said confirms it. You say yourself that she found it possible to speak to you in a language quite different from her former treatment and way of speaking. You’re suspicious and jealous, and so you’ve exaggerated everything bad you’ve noticed. Of course, she doesn’t think as badly of you as you say. Otherwise it would mean that she was consciously throwing herself into the water or onto the knife by marrying you. Is that possible? Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?”

  Parfyon heard out the prince’s ardent words with a bitter smile. His conviction, it seems, was already firmly established.

  “How heavily you’re looking at me now, Parfyon!” escaped the prince with a heavy feeling.

  “Into the water or onto the knife!” the other said at last. “Heh! But that’s why she’s marrying me, because she probably expects to get the knife from me! But can it be, Prince, that you still haven’t grasped what the whole thing is about?”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Well, maybe he really doesn’t understand, heh, heh! They do say you’re a bit … like that! She loves somebody else—understand? Just the way I love her now, she now loves somebody else. And do you know who that somebody else is? It’s you! What, didn’t you know?”

  “Me!”

  “You. She fell in love with you then, ever since that time, that birthday party. Only she thinks it’s impossible for her to marry you, because she’d supposedly disgrace you and ruin your whole life. ‘I’m you-know-what,’ she says. To this day she maintains it herself. She says it all right in my face. She’s afraid to ruin and disgrace you, but me she can marry, meaning it doesn’t matter—that’s how she considers me, note that as well!”

  “But why, then, did she run away from you to me, and … from me …”

  “And from you to me! Heh! All sorts of things suddenly come into her head! She’s all like in a fever now. One day she shouts to me: ‘I’ll
marry you like drowning myself. Be quick with the wedding!’ She hurries herself, fixes the date, and when the time is near—she gets frightened, or has other ideas—God knows, but you’ve seen her: she cries, laughs, thrashes around feverishly. What’s so strange that she ran away from you, too? She ran away from you then, because she suddenly realized how much she loves you. It was beyond her to be with you. You just said I sought her out then in Moscow; that’s not so—she came running to me herself: ‘Fix the day,’ she says, ‘I’m ready! Pour the champagne! We’ll go to the gypsies!’ she shouts!… If it wasn’t for me, she’d have drowned herself long ago; it’s right what I’m saying. The reason she doesn’t do it is maybe because I’m even scarier than the water. So she wants to marry me out of spite … If she does it, believe me, she’ll be doing it out of spite.”

  “But how can you … how can you!…” the prince cried and did not finish. He looked at Rogozhin with horror.

  “Why don’t you finish?” the other added with a grin. “But if you like, I’ll tell you how you’re reasoning at this very moment: ‘So how can she be with him now? How can she be allowed to do it?’ I know what you think …”

  “I didn’t come for that, Parfyon, I’m telling you, that’s not what I had in mind …”

  “Maybe it wasn’t for that and that wasn’t on your mind, only now it’s certainly become that, heh, heh! Well, enough! Why are you all overturned like that? You mean you really didn’t know? You amaze me!”

  “This is all jealousy, Parfyon, it’s all illness, you exaggerate it beyond all measure …” the prince murmured in great agitation. “What’s the matter?”

  “Let it alone,” Parfyon said and quickly snatched from the prince’s hand the little knife he had picked up from the table, next to the book, and put it back where it had been.

  “It’s as if I knew, when I was coming to Petersburg, as if I had a foreboding …” the prince went on. “I didn’t want to come here! I wanted to forget everything here, to tear it out of my heart! Well, good-bye … But what’s the matter?”

  As he was talking, the prince had again absentmindedly picked up the same knife from the table, and again Rogozhin had taken it from him and dropped it on the table. It was a knife of a rather simple form, with a staghorn handle, not a folding one, with a blade six inches long and of a corresponding width.

  Seeing that the prince paid particular attention to the fact that this knife had twice been snatched away from him, Rogozhin seized it in angry vexation, put it in the book, and flung the book onto the other table.

  “Do you cut the pages with it?” asked the prince, but somehow absentmindedly, still as if under the pressure of a deep pensiveness.

  “Yes, the pages …”

  “Isn’t it a garden knife?”

  “Yes, it is. Can’t you cut pages with a garden knife?”

  “But it’s … brand-new.”

  “Well, what if it is new? So now I can’t buy a new knife?” Rogozhin, who was getting more and more vexed with every word, finally cried out in a sort of frenzy.

  The prince gave a start and gazed intently at Rogozhin.

  “Look at us!” he suddenly laughed, recovering himself completely. “Forgive me, brother, when my head’s as heavy as it is now, and this illness … I’ve become quite absentminded and ridiculous. This is not at all what I wanted to ask about … I don’t remember what it was. Good-bye …”

  “Not that way,” said Rogozhin.

  “I forget!”

  “This way, this way, come on, I’ll show you.”

  IV

  THEY WENT THROUGH the same rooms the prince had already passed through; Rogozhin walked a little ahead, the prince followed. They came to a big reception room. Here there were several paintings on the walls, all portraits of bishops or landscapes in which nothing could be made out. Over the door to the next room hung a painting rather strange in form, around six feet wide and no more than ten inches high. It portrayed the Savior just taken down from the cross. The prince glanced fleetingly at it, as if recalling something, not stopping, however, wanting to go on through the door. He felt very oppressed and wanted to be out of this house quickly. But Rogozhin suddenly stopped in front of the painting.

  “All these paintings here,” he said, “my deceased father bought at auctions for a rouble or two. He liked that. One man who’s a connoisseur looked at them all: trash, he said, but that one—the painting over the door, also bought for two roubles—he said, isn’t trash. In my father’s time somebody showed up offering three hundred and fifty roubles for it, and Savelyev, Ivan Dmitrich, a merchant, a great amateur, went up to four hundred, and last week he offered my brother Semyon Semyonych as much as five hundred. I kept it for myself.”

  “Yes, it’s … it’s a copy from Hans Holbein,” said the prince, having managed to take a look at the painting, “and, though I’m no great expert, it seems to be an excellent copy. I saw the painting abroad and cannot forget it.19 But … what’s the matter …”

  Rogozhin suddenly abandoned the painting and went further on his way. Of course, absentmindedness and the special, strangely irritated mood that had appeared so unexpectedly in Rogozhin might have explained this abruptness; but even so the prince thought it somehow odd that a conversation not initiated by him should be so suddenly broken off, and that Rogozhin did not even answer him.

  “But I’ve long wanted to ask you something, Lev Nikolaich: do you believe in God or not?” Rogozhin suddenly began speaking again, after going several steps.