The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Is this possible?” Ippolit looked at him in decided astonishment. “Gentlemen!” he cried, again growing feverishly animated, “a stupid episode, in which I was unable to behave myself. There will be no further interruptions of the reading. Whoever wants to listen, can listen …”

  He hurriedly gulped some water from a glass, hurriedly leaned his elbow on the table, in order to shield himself from others’ eyes, and stubbornly went on with his reading. The shame, however, soon left him …

  The idea (he went on reading) that it was not worth living for a few weeks began to take possession of me in a real sense about a month ago, I think, when I still had four weeks left to live, but it overcame me completely only three days ago, when I returned from that evening in Pavlovsk. The first moment of my being fully, directly pervaded by this thought occurred on the prince’s terrace, precisely at the moment when I had decided to make a last test of life, wanted to see people and trees (I said so myself), became excited, insisted on Burdovsky’s—“my neighbor’s”—rights, and dreamed that they would all suddenly splay their arms wide and take me into their embrace, and ask my forgiveness for something, and I theirs; in short, I ended up as a giftless fool. And it was during those hours that “the ultimate conviction” flared up in me. I am astonished now at how I could have lived for a whole six months without this “conviction”! I knew positively that I had consumption and it was incurable; I did not deceive myself and understood the matter clearly. But the more clearly I understood it, the more convulsively I wanted to live; I clung to life and wanted to live whatever the cost. I agree that I could have become angry then at the dark and blank fate which had decreed that I be squashed like a fly, and, of course, without knowing why; but why did I not end just with anger? Why did I actually begin to live, knowing that it was no longer possible for me to begin; why did I try, knowing that there was no longer anything to try? And meanwhile I could not even read through a book and gave up reading; why read, why learn for six months? This thought made me drop a book more than once.

  Yes, that wall of Meyer’s can tell a lot! I have written a lot on it! There is not a spot on that dirty wall that I have not learned by heart. That cursed wall! But all the same it is dearer to me than all of Pavlovsk’s trees, that is, it should be dearer, if it were not all the same to me now.

  I recall now with what greedy interest I began to follow their life; there was no such interest before. Sometimes, when I was so ill that I could not leave the room, I waited for Kolya with impatience and abuse. I went so much into all the little details, was so interested in every sort of rumor, that it seemed I turned into a gossip. I could not understand, for instance, how it was that these people, having so much life, were not able to become rich (however, I don’t understand it now either). I knew one poor fellow of whom I was told later that he starved to death, and, I remember, that made me furious: if it had been possible to revive the poor fellow, I think I would have executed him. Sometimes I felt better for whole weeks and was able to go out in the street; but the street finally began to produce such bitterness in me that I would spend whole days inside on purpose, though I could have gone out like everybody else. I could not bear those scurrying, bustling, eternally worried, gloomy, and anxious people who shuttled around me on the sidewalks. Why their eternal sorrow, their eternal anxiety and bustle; their eternal gloomy spite (for they are spiteful, spiteful, spiteful)? Whose fault is it that they are unhappy and do not know how to live, though they have sixty years of life ahead of them? Why did Zarnitsyn allow himself to die, having sixty years ahead of him? And each of them displays his tatters, his hardworking hands, gets angry and cries: “We work like oxen, we toil, we are hungry as dogs, and poor! The others do not work, do not toil, yet they are rich!” (The eternal refrain!) Alongside them some luckless runt “of the gentlefolk” runs and bustles about from morning till night—Ivan Fomich Surikov, he lives over us, in our house—eternally with holes in his elbows, with torn-off buttons, running errands for various people, delivering messages, and that from morning till night. Go and start a conversation with him: “Poor, destitute, and wretched, the wife died, there was no money for medicine, and in the winter the baby froze to death; the older daughter has become a kept woman …” he’s eternally whimpering, eternally complaining! Oh, never, never have I felt any pity for these fools, not now, not before—I say it with pride! Why isn’t he a Rothschild himself? Whose fault is it that he has no millions, as Rothschild has, that he has no mountain of gold imperials and napoleondors,14 a mountain as high as the ice mountains for sliding during carnival week with all its booths! If he’s alive, everything is in his power! Whose fault is it that he doesn’t understand that?

  Oh, now it’s all one to me, now I have no time to be angry, but then, then, I repeat, I literally chewed my pillow at night and tore my blanket with rage. Oh, how I dreamed then, how I wished, how I purposely wished, that I, eighteen years old, barely clothed, barely covered, could suddenly be thrown out in the street and left completely alone, with no lodgings, no work, no crust of bread, no relations, not a single acquaintance in the enormous city, hungry, beaten (so much the better!), but healthy, and then I’d show them …

  Show them what?

  Oh, can you possibly suppose that I do not know how I have humiliated myself as it is with my “Explanation”! Well, who is not going to consider me a runt who knows nothing of life, forgetting that I am no longer eighteen years old; forgetting that to live as I have lived for these six months means to live till you’re gray-haired! But let them laugh and say that it is all tall tales. I did really tell myself tall tales. I filled whole nights with them; I remember them all now.

  But do I really have to tell them again now—now, when the time for tall tales is past for me as well? And to whom! For I delighted in them then, when I saw clearly that I was forbidden even to study Greek grammar, as I once conceived of doing: “I won’t get as far as the syntax before I die”—I thought at the first page and threw the book under the table. It is still lying there; I forbade Matryona to pick it up.

  Let him into whose hands my “Explanation” falls and who has enough patience to read it, consider me a crazy person or even a schoolboy, or most likely of all, a man condemned to death, to whom it naturally seemed that all people except himself value their life too little, are accustomed to spending it too cheaply, too lazily, use it much too shamelessly, and are therefore unworthy of it one and all! And what then? I declare that my reader will be mistaken, and that my conviction is completely independent of my death sentence. Ask them, only ask them one and all, what they understand by happiness? Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew in their despair almost turned the ship back to Europe, right around! The New World is not the point here, it can just as well perish. Columbus died having seen very little of it and in fact not knowing what he had discovered. The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself! But why talk! I suspect that everything I am saying now sounds so much like the most common phrases that I will probably be taken for a student in the lowest grade presenting his essay on “the sunrise,” or they will say that I may have wanted to speak something out, but despite all my wishes I was unable to … “develop.” But, nevertheless, I will add that in any ingenious or new human thought, or even simply in any serious human thought born in someone’s head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people, though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever; you will die with it, not having conveyed to anyone what is perhaps most important in your idea. But if I also fail now to convey all that has been tormenting me for these six mo
nths, people will at least understand that, having reached my present “ultimate conviction,” I may have paid too dearly for it; it is this that I have considered it necessary, for my own purposes, to set forth in my “Explanation.”

  However, I continue.

  VI

  I DO NOT WANT to lie: reality kept catching me on its hook for these six months, and I sometimes got so carried away that I forgot about my sentence or, better, did not want to think about it and even started doing things. Incidentally, about my situation then. When I became very ill about eight months ago, I broke off all my former relations and dropped all my former comrades. As I had always been a rather sullen man, my comrades easily forgot me; of course, they would have forgotten me even without this circumstance. My situation at home, that is, “in the family,” was also solitary. Some five months before, I had locked myself in once and for all and separated myself completely from the family rooms. I was always obeyed, and no one dared to enter my room except at a certain hour to tidy up and bring me my dinner. My mother trembled before my orders and did not even dare to whimper in my presence, when I occasionally decided to let her in. She constantly beat the children on my account, for fear they would make noise and bother me; I often complained about their shouting; I can imagine how they must love me now! I think I also tormented “faithful Kolya,” as I called him, quite a bit. Lately he has tormented me as well: all that is quite natural, people are created to torment each other. But I noticed that he put up with my irritability as if he had promised himself beforehand to spare the sick man. Naturally, that irritated me; but it seems he had decided to imitate the prince in his “Christian humility,” which was slightly ridiculous. He is a young and ardent boy and, of course, imitates everybody; but it sometimes seems to me that it is time he lived by his own reason. I love him very much. I also tormented Surikov, who lived over us and ran around from morning till night on other people’s errands; I was constantly proving to him that he himself was to blame for his poverty, so that he finally got frightened and stopped coming to see me. He is a very humble man, the humblest of beings (NB. They say that humility is an awesome force; I must ask the prince about that, it’s his expression); but when, in the month of March, I went up to his place, to see how, in his words, they had “frozen” the baby, and unintentionally smiled over his infant’s body, because I again began explaining to Surikov that “he himself was to blame,” the runt’s lips suddenly trembled and, seizing me by the shoulder with one hand, he showed me the door with the other, and softly, that is, almost in a whisper, said to me: “Go, sir!” I went out, and I liked it very much, liked it right then, even at the very moment when he was leading me out; but for a long time afterwards, in my memory, his words made the painful impression of a sort of strange, contemptuous pity for him, which I did not want to feel at all. Even at the moment of such an insult (I do feel that I insulted him, though I had no intention of doing so), even at such a moment the man could not get angry! His lips quivered then not at all out of anger, I will swear to that: he seized me by the arm and uttered his splendid “Go, sir!” decidedly without being angry. There was dignity, even a great deal of it, even quite unsuited to him (so that, in truth, it was quite comical), but there was no anger. Maybe he simply began suddenly to despise me. Two or three times after that, when I met him on the stairs, he suddenly started taking his hat off to me, something he never did before, but he no longer stopped as before, but ran past me in embarrassment. If he despised me, he did it in his own way: he “humbly despised” me. But maybe he took his hat off simply out of fear of me, as his creditor’s son, because he was constantly in debt to my mother and was never able to get out of it. And that is even the most likely thing of all. I wanted to have a talk with him, and I know for certain that in ten minutes he would have started asking my forgiveness; but I reasoned that it was better not to touch him.

  At that same time, that is, around the time when Surikov “froze” his baby, around the middle of March, I felt much better for some reason, and that lasted for about two weeks. I started going out, most often at twilight. I loved the March twilight, when it turned frosty and the gaslights were lit; I sometimes walked far. Once, in Shestilavochnaya Street, someone of the “gentlefolk” sort overtook me in the dark; I did not make him out very well; he was carrying something wrapped in paper and was dressed in a short and ugly coat—too light for the season. When he came to a streetlight, some ten steps ahead of me, I noticed that something fell out of his pocket. I hastened to pick it up—just in time, because someone in a long kaftan had already rushed for it, but, seeing the object in my hands, did not argue, took a fleeting glance at my hands, and slipped past. The object was a big morocco wallet of old-fashioned design and tightly stuffed; but for some reason I guessed at first glance that there was anything you like in it, except money. The passerby who had lost it was already some forty steps ahead of me and soon dropped from sight in the crowd. I ran and started shouting to him; but as I could only shout “Hey!” he did not turn around. Suddenly he darted to the left into the gateway of some house. When I ran into this gateway, where it was very dark, there was no one there. The house was enormously big, one of those huge things entrepreneurs build to make into little apartments; some of these buildings have as many as a hundred apartments in them. When I ran through the gateway, I thought I saw a man walking in the far right-hand corner of the enormous courtyard, though I could barely make out anything in the darkness. I ran to that corner and saw the entrance to a stairway; the stairway was narrow, extremely dirty, and quite unlighted; but I could hear a man running up the stairs above me, and I raced after him, hoping that while the door was being opened for him, I could catch up with him. And so it happened. The flights were very short, and there was no end of them, so that I was terribly out of breath; a door opened and closed again on the fifth floor, I guessed that from three flights down. Before I ran up, caught my breath on the landing, and found the doorbell, several minutes passed. The door was finally opened for me by a woman who was lighting a samovar in a tiny kitchen; she listened silently to my questions, understood nothing, of course, and silently opened for me the door to the next room, also small, terribly low, with vile necessary furniture and a huge, wide bed under a canopy, on which lay “Terentyich” (as the woman called to him), drunk, as it seemed to me. On the table stood an iron night-light with a candle burning down in it and a nearly empty bottle. Terentyich grunted something to me lying down and waved towards the next door, while the woman left, so that nothing remained for me but to open that door. I did so and went into the next room.

  This room was still smaller and narrower than the previous one, so that I did not even know where to turn in it; a narrow single bed in the corner took up terribly much space; the rest of the furniture consisted of three simple chairs heaped with all sorts of rags and a very simple wooden kitchen table in front of an old oilcloth sofa, so that it was almost impossible to pass between the table and the bed. The same iron night-light with a tallow candle as in the other room burned on the table, and on the bed squealed a tiny baby, maybe only three weeks old, judging by its cry; it was being “changed,” that is, put into a clean diaper, by a sick and pale woman, young-seeming, in extreme négligé, and perhaps just beginning to get up after her confinement; but the baby would not be quiet and cried in anticipation of the lean breast. On the sofa another child slept, a three-year-old girl, covered, it seemed, with a tailcoat. By the table stood a gentleman in a very shabby frock coat (he had already taken his coat off and it was lying on the bed), unwrapping the blue paper in which about two pounds of wheat bread and two small sausages were wrapped. On the table, besides that, there was a teapot with tea and some scattered pieces of black bread. An unlocked suitcase showed from under the bed, and two bundles with some rags stuck out.

  In short, there was terrible disorder. It seemed to me, at first glance, that both of them—the gentleman and the lady—were decent people, but reduced by poverty to that humiliating stat
e in which disorder finally overcomes every attempt to struggle with it and even reduces people to the bitter necessity of finding in this disorder, as it increases daily, some bitter and, as it were, vengeful sense of pleasure.

  When I came in, this gentleman, who had come in just before me and was unwrapping his provisions, was talking rapidly and heatedly with his wife; she, though she had not yet finished swaddling the baby, had already begun to whimper; the news must have been bad, as usual. The face of this gentleman, who was about twenty-eight by the look of it, swarthy and dry, framed in black side-whiskers, with his chin shaved till it gleamed, struck me as rather respectable and even agreeable; it was sullen, with a sullen gaze, but with some morbid tinge of a pride that was all too easily irritated. When I came in, a strange scene took place.

  There are people who take extreme pleasure in their irritable touchiness, and especially when it reaches (which always happens very quickly) the ultimate limit in them; in that instant it even seems they would rather be offended than not offended. Afterwards these irritable people always suffer terrible remorse, if they are intelligent, naturally, and able to realize that they had become ten times angrier than they should have. For some time this gentleman looked at me in amazement, and his wife in fright, as if it were dreadfully outlandish that anyone should come into their room; but suddenly he fell upon me almost in a rage; I had not yet managed to mumble even a couple of words, but he, especially seeing that I was decently dressed, must have considered himself dreadfully offended that I dared to look so unceremoniously into his corner and see all his hideous situation, which he was so ashamed of himself. Of course, he was glad of the chance to vent his anger for all his misfortunes at least on someone. There was a moment when I even thought he would start fighting; he grew pale, like a woman in hysterics, and frightened his wife terribly.