The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The stairs which the prince ran up from under the gateway led to the corridors of the first and second floors, on which the hotel rooms were located. This stairway, as in all houses built long ago, was of stone, dark, narrow, and winding around a thick stone pillar. On the first landing, this pillar turned out to have a depression in it, like a niche, no more than one pace wide and a half-pace deep. There was, however, room enough for a man. Having run up to the landing, the prince, despite the darkness, made out at once that a man was for some reason hiding there, in that niche. The prince suddenly wanted to walk past and not look to the right. He had already gone one step, but could not help himself and turned.

  Today’s two eyes, the same ones, suddenly met his gaze. The man hiding in the niche also had time to take one step out of it. For a second the two stood face to face, almost touching. Suddenly the prince seized him by the shoulders and turned back to the stairs, closer to the light: he wanted to see the face more clearly.

  Rogozhin’s eyes flashed and a furious smile distorted his face. His right hand rose, and something gleamed in it; the prince did not even think of stopping him. He remembered only that he seemed to have cried out:

  “Parfyon, I don’t believe it!…”

  Then suddenly it was as if something opened up before him: an extraordinary inner light illumined his soul. This moment lasted perhaps half a second; but he nevertheless remembered clearly and consciously the beginning, the very first sound of his terrible scream, which burst from his breast of itself and which no force would have enabled him to stop. Then his consciousness instantly went out, and there was total darkness.

  He had had a fit of epilepsy, which had left him very long ago. It is known that these fits, falling fits properly speaking, come instantaneously. In these moments the face, especially the eyes, suddenly become extremely distorted. Convulsions and spasms seize the whole body and all the features of the face. A dreadful, unimaginable scream, unlike anything, bursts from the breast; everything human suddenly disappears, as it were, in this scream, and it is quite impossible, or at least very difficult, for the observer to imagine and allow that this is the man himself screaming. It may even seem as if someone else were screaming from inside the man. At least many people have explained their impression that way, and there are many whom the sight of a man in a falling fit fills with a decided and unbearable terror, which even has something mystical in it. It must be supposed that this impression of unexpected terror, in conjunction with all the other dreadful impressions of that moment, suddenly made Rogozhin freeze on the spot and thereby saved the prince from the inevitable blow of the knife that was already coming down on him. Then, before he had time to realize that this was a fit, and seeing the prince recoil from him and suddenly fall backwards, right down the stairs, striking the back of his head hard against the stone step, Rogozhin rushed headlong down the stairs, skirted the fallen man, and, nearly beside himself, ran out of the hotel.

  With convulsions, thrashing, and spasms, the sick man’s body went down the steps, no more than fifteen in number, to the foot of the stairway. Very soon, in no more than five minutes, the fallen man was noticed, and a crowd gathered. A whole pool of blood by his head caused perplexity: had the man hurt himself, or “had there been foul play?” Soon, however, some of them recognized it as the falling sickness; one of the hotel servants identified the prince as a new guest. The commotion was finally resolved quite happily, owing to a happy circumstance.

  Kolya Ivolgin, who had promised to be at the Scales by four o’clock and had gone to Pavlovsk instead, had declined to “dine” with Mrs. Epanchin, owing to a certain unexpected consideration, and had returned to Petersburg and hastened to the Scales, where he arrived at around seven o’clock in the evening. Learning from the message left for him that the prince was in town, he rushed to him at the address given in the message. Informed at the hotel that the prince had gone out, he went downstairs to the buffet room and began to wait, drinking tea and listening to the barrel organ. Happening to hear that someone had had a fit, he ran to the place, following a correct premonition, and recognized the prince. All necessary measures were taken at once. The prince was transported to his room; though he came to his senses, it took him a rather long time to fully recover consciousness. The doctor called in to examine his injured head gave him a lotion and announced that the bruises were not dangerous in the least. When, an hour later, the prince began to understand his surroundings well enough, Kolya brought him in a carriage from the hotel to Lebedev’s. Lebedev received the sick man with extraordinary warmth and many bows. For his sake he also hastened the move to the dacha: three days later they were all in Pavlovsk.

  VI

  LEBEDEV’S DACHA was not large, but it was comfortable and even beautiful. The part meant to be rented out had been specially decorated. On the terrace,26 a rather spacious one, between the street entrance and the rooms inside, stood several bitter orange, lemon, and jasmine trees in big green wooden tubs, which amounted, by Lebedev’s reckoning, to a most enchanting look. He had acquired some of these trees along with the dacha, and he was so charmed by the effect they produced on the terrace that he decided, when the chance came, to complete the set by purchasing more of the same trees in tubs at an auction. When all the trees were finally transported to the dacha and put in place, Lebedev several times that day ran down the steps of the terrace to the street and admired his domain from there, each time mentally increasing the sum he proposed to ask from his future tenant. Weakened, anguished, and physically shattered, the prince liked the dacha very much. Incidentally, on the day of the move to Pavlovsk, that is, on the third day after his fit, the prince already had the outward look of an almost healthy man, though he felt that he had still not recovered inwardly. He was glad of everyone he saw around him during those three days, glad of Kolya, who hardly ever left his side, glad of Lebedev’s whole family (minus the nephew, who had disappeared somewhere), glad of Lebedev himself; he was even pleased to receive General Ivolgin, who had visited him still in the city. On the day of the move, which took place in the evening, quite a few guests gathered around him on the terrace: first came Ganya, whom the prince barely recognized—he had changed so much and grown so thin in all that time. Then Varya and Ptitsyn appeared, who also had a dacha in Pavlovsk. As for General Ivolgin, he was at Lebedev’s almost uninterruptedly, and had probably even moved along with him. Lebedev tried to keep him away from the prince and near himself; he treated him in a comradely way; evidently they had long been acquainted. The prince noticed that during those three days they sometimes got into long conversations with each other, often shouted and argued, it seemed, even about learned subjects, which evidently gave Lebedev pleasure. One might even have thought that he needed the general. Yet with regard to the prince, he took the same precautions with his own family as with the general, once they had moved to the dacha: he allowed no one to go near the prince, under the pretext of not disturbing him, stamped his feet, ran in pursuit of his daughters, not excepting Vera and the baby, at the first suspicion that they had gone out to the terrace where the prince was, despite all the prince’s requests not to chase anyone away.

  “First, there won’t be any respectfulness if I spoil them like that; and second, it’s even improper for them …” he finally explained, to the prince’s direct question.

  “But why?” the prince exhorted him. “You really torment me by all this watching and guarding. I’m bored being alone, I’ve told you several times, and you weary me still more with all this ceaseless arm-waving and tiptoeing about.”

  The prince was hinting at the fact that Lebedev, though he chased everyone in the house away from him, under the guise of preserving the peace necessary for the sick man, kept going into the prince’s room himself almost every moment during all those three days, and each time would first open the door, put his head in, look around the room as if making sure that he was there, that he had not escaped, and only then, on tiptoe, with slow and stealthy steps, would
approach his armchair, so that on occasion he unintentionally frightened his tenant. He ceaselessly inquired whether he needed anything, and when the prince finally began asking to be left alone, Lebedev would turn obediently and silently, make his way on tiptoe back to the door, waving his arms all the while, as if to let him know that it was just so, that he would not say a word, and that here he was going out, and he would not come back, and yet, in ten minutes or at the most a quarter of an hour, he would come back. Kolya, who had free access to the prince, thereby provoked the deepest distress and even wounded indignation in Lebedev. Kolya noticed that Lebedev spent as much as half an hour by the door, eavesdropping on what he and the prince were talking about, of which he naturally informed the prince.

  “It’s as if you’ve appropriated me, the way you keep me under lock and key,” the prince protested. “At least at the dacha, I want it to be otherwise, and rest assured that I will receive whomever I like and go wherever I like.”

  “Without the slightest doubt,” Lebedev waved his arms.

  The prince looked him up and down intently.

  “And tell me, Lukyan Timofeevich, that little cupboard of yours, which you had hanging over the head of your bed, did you bring it here?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Can you have left it there?”

  “It was impossible to take it without tearing it from the wall … It’s firmly, firmly attached.”

  “Perhaps there’s one like it here?”

  “Even better, even better, that’s why I bought this dacha.”

  “Ahh. And who was it you wouldn’t let see me? An hour ago?”

  “That … that was the general, sir. I actually did prevent him, and he’s not fitting for you. I deeply respect the man, Prince; he … he’s a great man, sir; you don’t believe me? Well, you’ll see, but all the same … it would be better, illustrious Prince, if you didn’t receive him.”

  “But why so, may I ask? And why are you standing on tiptoe now, Lebedev, and always approaching me as if you’re about to whisper some secret in my ear?”

  “I’m mean, mean, I feel it,” Lebedev answered unexpectedly, beating his breast with feeling. “But won’t the general be too hospitable for you, sir?”

  “Be too hospitable?”

  “Hospitable, sir. First of all, he’s already planning to live in my house; that’s all right, sir, but he’s enthusiastic, wants straight off to be like family. We’ve tried several times to figure out our relation, it turns out we’re in-laws. You also turn out to be his nephew twice removed on his wife’s side, he explained it to me yesterday. If you’re his nephew, it means, illustrious Prince, that you and I are related. Never mind that, sir, it’s a small weakness, but then he assured me that every day of his life, from when he became a lieutenant through the eleventh of June last year, he had never had less than two hundred persons sitting at his table. It finally went so far that they never got up, so that they had dinner, and supper, and tea fifteen hours a day for thirty years, without the slightest break, with barely time to change the tablecloth. One gets up and leaves, another comes, and on feast days and imperial birthdays the number of guests rose to three hundred. And on the millennium of Russia,27 he counted seven hundred people. It’s awful, sir; such stories—it’s a very bad sign, sir; to receive such hospitable people is even frightening, and I thought: won’t such a man be too hospitable for you and me?”

  “But you seem to be on very good terms with him.”

  “In a brotherly way, and I take it as a joke; let us be in-laws: the more’s the honor for me. Even through two hundred persons and the millennium of Russia, I can discern a very remarkable man in him. I’m speaking sincerely, sir. You mentioned secrets just now, Prince—that is, that I supposedly approach you as though I want to tell you a secret—and, as if on purpose, there is a secret: a certain person has sent a message that she wishes very much to have a secret meeting with you.”

  “Why secret? On no account. I’ll visit her myself, maybe today.”

  “On no account, no, on no account,” Lebedev waved, “and she’s not afraid of what you think. Incidentally: the monster comes regularly every day to inquire after your health, do you know that?”

  “You call him monster a bit too often, it makes me very suspicious.”

  “You cannot have any suspicions, not any,” Lebedev hastened to defer. “I only wanted to explain that the certain person is not afraid of him, but of something quite different, quite different.”

  “But of what? Tell me quickly,” the prince pressed him impatiently, looking at Lebedev’s mysterious grimacing.

  “That’s the secret.”

  And Lebedev grinned.

  “Whose secret?”

  “Yours. You yourself forbade me, illustrious Prince, to speak in your presence …” Lebedev murmured and, delighted to have brought his listener’s curiosity to the point of morbid impatience, he suddenly concluded: “She’s afraid of Aglaya Ivanovna.”

  The prince winced and was silent for a moment.

  “By God, Lebedev, I’ll leave your dacha,” he said suddenly. “Where are Gavrila Ardalionovich and the Ptitsyns? With you? You’ve lured them to you as well.”

  “They’re coming, sir, they’re coming. And even the general is coming after them. I’ll open all the doors and call all my daughters, everybody, now, right now,” Lebedev whispered fearfully, waving his arms and dashing from one door to the other.

  At that moment Kolya appeared on the terrace, coming in from the street, and announced that visitors, Lizaveta Prokofyevna and her three daughters, were following him.

  “Am I or am I not to admit the Ptitsyns and Gavrila Ardalionovich? Am I or am I not to admit the general?” Lebedev jumped, struck by the news.

  “But why not? All of them, anyone who likes! I assure you, Lebedev, that you’ve misunderstood something about my relations from the very beginning; you’re in some sort of ceaseless error. I don’t have the slightest reason to sneak or hide from anyone,” the prince laughed.

  Looking at him, Lebedev felt it his duty to laugh, too. Despite his extreme agitation, Lebedev evidently was also extremely pleased.

  The news reported by Kolya was correct; he had arrived only a few steps ahead of the Epanchins in order to announce them, and thus visitors suddenly appeared on both sides, the Epanchins from the terrace, and the Ptitsyns, Ganya, and General Ivolgin from inside.

  The Epanchins had learned of the prince’s illness and of his being in Pavlovsk only just then, from Kolya, until when Mrs. Epanchin had been in painful perplexity. Two days ago the general had conveyed the prince’s visiting card to his family; this card had awakened an absolute certainty in Lizaveta Prokofyevna that the prince himself would immediately follow the card to Pavlovsk in order to see them. In vain had the girls assured her that a man who had not written for half a year might not be in such a hurry, and that he might have much to do in Petersburg without them—who knew about his affairs? These observations decidedly angered Mrs. Epanchin, and she was ready to bet that the prince would come the very next day at least, though “that will already be much too late.” The next day she waited the whole morning; waited till dinner, till evening, and, when it was quite dark, Lizaveta Prokofyevna became angry at everything and quarreled with everyone, naturally without mentioning the prince as the motive of the quarrel. Nor was any word of him mentioned for the whole third day. When Aglaya inadvertently let slip over dinner that maman was angry because the prince had not come, to which the general observed at once that “he was not to blame for that”—Lizaveta Prokofyevna got up and wrathfully left the table. Finally, towards evening, Kolya appeared with all the news and descriptions of all the prince’s adventures he knew about. As a result, Lizaveta Prokofyevna was triumphant, but Kolya caught it badly anyway: “He usually spends whole days flitting about here and there’s no getting rid of him, but now he might at least have let us know, if it didn’t occur to him to come by.” Kolya was about to get angry at the phrase “
no getting rid of him,” but he put it off to another time, and if the phrase itself had not been so offensive, he might have forgiven it altogether: so pleased he was by Lizaveta Prokofyevna’s worry and anxiety at the news of the prince’s illness. She insisted for some time on the need to send a messenger at once to Petersburg, to get hold of some eminent medical celebrity and rush him here on the first train. But the daughters talked her out of it; they did not want to lag behind their mama, however, when she instantly made ready to go and visit the sick man.

  “He’s on his deathbed,” Lizaveta Prokofyevna said, bustling about, “and we are not going to stand on any ceremony! Is he a friend of our house or not?”

  “Still, you should look before you leap,” Aglaya observed.

  “Don’t go, then, it will even be better: Evgeny Pavlych will come and there will be no one to receive him.”

  After these words Aglaya naturally set out at once after them all, as she had intended to do in any event. Prince Shch., who was sitting with Adelaida, at her request immediately agreed to accompany the ladies. Still earlier, at the beginning of his acquaintance with the Epanchins, he had been extremely interested when he heard about the prince from them. It turned out that he was acquainted with him, that they had become acquainted not long ago and had lived together for a couple of weeks in the same little town. That was about three months ago. Prince Shch. had even told them a good deal about the prince and generally spoke of him with great sympathy, so that now it was with genuine pleasure that he went to visit his old acquaintance. General Ivan Fyodorovich was not at home at the time. Evgeny Pavlovich also had not arrived yet.