The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  “I notice, however” (she wrote in another letter), “that I am uniting him with you, and have not yet asked whether you love him. He loved you after seeing you only once. He remembered you as ‘light’; those were his own words, I heard them from him. But even without words I understood that you were his light. I lived by him for a whole month, and here I understood that you love him as well; you and he are one for me.”

  “How is it” (she also wrote) “that I walked past you yesterday, and you seemed to blush? It cannot be, I must have imagined it. Even if they bring you to the filthiest den and show you naked vice, you should not blush; you cannot possibly be indignant over an offense. You may hate all those who are mean and base, but not for your own sake, but for others, for those who are offended. No one can offend you. You know, it seems to me that you should even love me. You are the same for me as for him: a bright spirit; an angel cannot hate, and cannot not love. Can one love everyone, all people, all one’s neighbors? I have often asked myself that question. Of course not, and it is even unnatural. In an abstract love for mankind, one almost always loves oneself. It is impossible for us, but you are another matter: how could there be anyone you do not love, when you cannot compare yourself with anyone and when you are above any offense, above any personal indignation? You alone can love without egoism, you alone can love not for yourself but for the one you love. Oh, how bitter it would be for me to learn that you feel shame or wrath because of me! That would be the ruin of you: you would at once become equal to me …

  “Yesterday, after meeting you, I came home and thought up a painting. Artists all paint Christ according to the Gospel stories; I would paint him differently: I would portray him alone—the disciples did sometimes leave him alone. I would leave only a small child with him. The child would be playing beside him, perhaps telling him something in his child’s language. Christ had been listening to him, but now he has become pensive; his hand has inadvertently, forgetfully, remained on the child’s blond head. He gazes into the distance, at the horizon; a thought as great as the whole world reposes in his eyes; his face is sad. The child has fallen silent, leaning his elbow on his knees, and, his cheek resting on his hand, has raised his little head and pensively, as children sometimes become pensive, gazes intently at him. The sun is setting … That is my painting! You are innocent, and all your perfection is in your innocence. Oh, remember only that! What do you care about my passion for you? You are mine now, I shall be near you all my life … I shall die soon.”

  Finally, in the very last letter there was:

  “For God’s sake, do not think anything about me; do not think, also, that I humiliate myself by writing to you like this or that I am one of those who take pleasure in humiliating themselves, even though it is only out of pride. No, I have my own consolations; but it is hard for me to explain that to you. It would be hard for me to say it clearly even to myself, though it torments me. But I know that I cannot humiliate myself even in a fit of pride. Nor am I capable of self-humiliation out of purity of heart. And that means I do not humiliate myself at all.

  “Why do I want to unite the two of you: for your sake or for my own? For my own, naturally, then everything will be resolved for me, I told myself that long ago … I have heard that your sister Adelaida once said of my portrait that one could overturn the world with such beauty. But I have renounced the world; do you find it funny to hear that from me, meeting me in lace and diamonds, with drunkards and scoundrels? Pay no attention to that, I almost do not exist now and I know it; God knows what lives in me in place of me. I read that every day in two terrible eyes that constantly look at me, even when they are not before me. Those eyes are silent now (they are always silent), but I know their secret. His house is gloomy, dreary, and there is a secret in it. I am sure that hidden in a drawer he has a razor, wound in silk, like the one that Moscow murderer had; that one also lived in the same house with his mother and also tied silk around his razor in order to cut a certain throat. All the while I was in their house, it seemed to me that somewhere, under the floorboards, maybe even hidden by his father, there was a dead man wrapped in oilcloth, like the one in Moscow, and surrounded in the same way by bottles of Zhdanov liquid,30 I could even show you the corner. He is always silent; but I know he loves me so much that by now he cannot help hating me. Your wedding and my wedding will come together: that is how he and I have decided it. I have no secrets from him. I could kill him out of fear … But he will kill me first … he laughed just now and says I’m raving. He knows I’m writing to you.”

  And there was much, much more of the same sort of raving in these letters. One of them, the second, was on two sheets of stationery, of large format, in small handwriting.

  The prince finally left the somber park, in which he had wandered for a long time, as he had the day before. The bright, transparent night seemed brighter than usual to him. “Can it be so early?” he thought. (He had forgotten to take his watch.) Music reached him from somewhere far away. “In the vauxhall, it must be,” he thought again, “of course, they didn’t go there today.” Realizing that, he saw that he was standing right by their dacha; he simply knew he would have to end up there, finally, and with a sinking heart he went onto the terrace. No one met him, the terrace was deserted. He waited a while and then opened the door to the drawing room. “They never close this door,” flashed in him, but the drawing room, too, was deserted; it was almost totally dark. He stood perplexed in the middle of the room. Suddenly the door opened and Alexandra Ivanovna came in carrying a candle. Seeing the prince, she was surprised and stopped in front of him as if questioningly. It was obvious that she was only passing through the room, from one door to the other, not thinking at all of finding anyone there.

  “How did you end up here?” she said at last.

  “I … came by …”

  “Maman isn’t feeling well, and neither is Aglaya. Adelaida’s going to bed, and so am I. We spent the whole evening sitting at home alone. Papa and the prince are in Petersburg.”

  “I’ve come … I’ve come to you … now …”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “N-no …”

  “Half-past twelve. We always go to bed at one.”

  “Ah, I thought it was … half-past nine.”

  “Never mind!” she laughed. “But why didn’t you come earlier? Maybe we were expecting you.”

  “I … thought …” he babbled, going out.

  “Good-bye! Tomorrow I’ll make everybody laugh.”

  He went down the road that skirted the park to his dacha. His heart was pounding, his thoughts were confused, and everything around him seemed like a dream. And suddenly, just as earlier, both times when he was awakened by the same vision, so the same vision again appeared before him. The same woman came out of the park and stood before him, as if she had been waiting for him there. He shuddered and stopped; she seized his hand and pressed it hard. “No, this is not a vision!”

  And so she finally stood before him face to face, for the first time since their parting; she was saying something to him, but he looked at her silently; his heart overflowed and was wrung with pain. Oh, never afterwards could he forget this meeting with her, and he always remembered it with the same pain. She went down on her knees before him right there in the street, as if beside herself; he stepped back in fear, but she tried to catch his hand in order to kiss it, and, just as earlier in his dream, tears glistened now on her long lashes.

  “Get up, get up!” he said in a frightened whisper, trying to raise her. “Get up quickly!”

  “Are you happy? Are you?” she kept asking. “Tell me just one word, are you happy now? Today, right now? With her? What did she say?”

  She would not get up, she did not listen to him; she asked hurriedly and was in a hurry to speak, as though she were being pursued.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow, as you told me to. I won’t … I’m seeing you for the last time, the last! Now it really is the last time!”

&nb
sp; “Calm yourself, get up!” he said in despair.

  She peered at him greedily, clutching his hands.

  “Farewell!” she said at last, stood up, and quickly walked away from him, almost ran. The prince saw that Rogozhin was suddenly beside her, took her arm, and led her away.

  “Wait, Prince,” cried Rogozhin, “in five minutes I’ll come back for a bit.”

  In five minutes he indeed came back; the prince was waiting for him in the same place.

  “I put her in the carriage,” he said. “It’s been waiting there on the corner since ten o’clock. She just knew you’d spend the whole evening with the other one. I told her exactly what you wrote me today. She won’t write to the other one anymore; she promised; and she’ll leave here tomorrow, as you wished. She wanted to see you one last time, even though you refused; we waited here in this place for you to go back—over there, on that bench.”

  “She brought you along herself?”

  “And what of it?” Rogozhin grinned. “I saw what I knew. You read her letters, eh?”

  “But can you really have read them?” asked the prince, astounded by the thought.

  “What else; she showed me each letter herself. Remember about the razor? Heh, heh!”

  “She’s insane!” cried the prince, wringing his hands.

  “Who knows, maybe she’s not,” Rogozhin said softly, as if to himself.

  The prince did not answer.

  “Well, good-bye,” said Rogozhin, “I’m leaving tomorrow, too; don’t think ill of me! And how come, brother,” he added, turning quickly, “how come you didn’t say anything in answer to her? ‘Are you happy or not?’ ”

  “No, no, no!” the prince exclaimed with boundless sorrow.

  “As if you’d say ‘yes!’ ” Rogozhin laughed spitefully and walked off without looking back.

  * Good luck.

  † Rascal or good-for-nothing.

  ‡ After me the great flood.

  § Extremes meet.

  ‖ O, may they behold your sacred beauty / So many friends deaf to my farewells! / May they die full of days, may their death be wept, / May a friend close their eyes!

  PART FOUR

  I

  ABOUT A WEEK went by after the two persons of our story met on the green bench. One bright morning, around half-past ten, Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, having gone out to visit some of her acquaintances, returned home in great and rueful pensiveness.

  There are people of whom it is difficult to say anything that would present them at once and fully, in their most typical and characteristic aspect; these are those people who are usually called “ordinary” people, the “majority,” and who indeed make up the vast majority in any society. Writers in their novels and stories for the most part try to take social types and present them graphically and artistically—types which in their full state are met with extremely rarely in reality and which are nonetheless almost more real than reality itself. Podkolesin1 in his typical aspect may well be an exaggeration, but he is by no means an impossibility. What a host of intelligent people, having learned about Podkolesin from Gogol, at once began to find that dozens and hundreds of their good acquaintances and friends were terribly like Podkolesin. They knew before Gogol that these friends were like Podkolesin, they simply did not know yet precisely what their name was. In reality it is terribly rare that bridegrooms jump out of windows before their weddings, because, to say nothing else, it is even inconvenient; nonetheless, how many bridegrooms, even worthy and intelligent people, in the depths of their conscience, have been ready before marriage to acknowledge themselves as Podkolesins. Nor does every husband cry at each step: “Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin!”*2 But, God, how many millions and billions of times have the husbands of the whole world repeated this heartfelt cry after their honeymoon, and, who knows, maybe even the day after the wedding.

  And so, without going into more serious explanations, we shall say only that in reality the typicality of persons is watered down, as it were, and all these Georges Dandins and Podkolesins really exist, scurry and run around in front of us daily, but as if in a somewhat diluted state. Having mentioned, finally, for the sake of the complete truth, that the full Georges Dandin, as Molière created him, may also be met with in reality, though rarely, we shall therewith end our discourse, which is beginning to resemble a critical article in some journal. Nonetheless, a question remains before us all the same: what is a novelist to do with ordinary, completely “usual” people, and how can he present them to the reader so as to make them at least somewhat interesting? To bypass them altogether in a story is quite impossible, because ordinary people are constantly and for the most part the necessary links in the chain of everyday events; in bypassing them we would thus violate plausibility. To fill novels with nothing but types or even simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and nonexistent people, would be implausible—and perhaps uninteresting as well. In our opinion, the writer should try to seek out interesting and instructive nuances even among ordinary people. And when, for instance, the very essence of certain ordinary people consists precisely in their permanent and unchanging ordinariness, or, better still, when, despite all the extreme efforts of these people to get out of the rut of the usual and the routine, they end up all the same by remaining unchangingly and eternally in one and the same routine, then such people even acquire a kind of typicality—as that ordinariness which refuses to remain what it is and wants at all costs to become original and independent, but has not the slightest means of achieving independence.

  To this category of “usual” or “ordinary” people belong certain persons of our story, who till now (I admit it) have been little explained to the reader. Such, namely, are Varvara Ardalionovna Ptitsyn, her husband, Mr. Ptitsyn, and Gavrila Ardalionovich, her brother.

  Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly “like everybody else.” There is wealth, but not a Rothschild’s; an honorable family, but which has never distinguished itself in any way; a decent appearance, but very little expression; a proper education, but without knowing what to apply it to; there is intelligence, but with no ideas of one’s own; there is a heart, but with no magnanimity, etc., etc., in all respects. There are a great many such people in the world and even far more than it seems; they are divided, as all people are, into two main categories: one limited, the other “much cleverer.” The first are happier. For the limited “usual” man, for instance, there is nothing easier than to imagine himself an unusual and original man and to revel in it without any hesitation. As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own “convictions.” As soon as a man feels in his heart just a drop of some sort of generally human and kindly feeling for something or other, he immediately becomes convinced that no one else feels as he does, that he is in the forefront of general development. As soon as a man takes some thought or other at its word or reads a little page of something without beginning or end, he believes at once that these are “his own thoughts” and were conceived in his own brain. The impudence of naïvety, if one may put it so, goes so far in such cases as to be astonishing; all this is incredible, but one meets with it constantly. This impudence of naïvety, this stupid man’s unquestioningness of himself and his talent, is excellently portrayed by Gogol in the astonishing type of Lieutenant Pirogov.3 Pirogov never even doubts that he is a genius, even higher than any genius; he is so far from doubting it that he never even asks himself about it; anyhow, questions do not exist for him. The great writer was finally forced to give him a whipping, for the satisfaction of his reader’s offended moral sense, but, seeing that the great man merely shook himself and, to fortify himself
after his ordeal, ate a puff pastry, he spread his arms in amazement and thus left his readers. I have always regretted that Gogol bestowed such low rank on the great Pirogov, because Pirogov is so given to self-satisfaction that there would be nothing easier for him than to imagine himself, while his epaulettes grow thicker and more braided as the years pass and “according to his rank,” as being, for instance, a great commander; not even to imagine it, but simply to have no doubt of it: he has been made a general, why not a commander? And how many of them later cause a terrible fiasco on the battlefield? And how many Pirogovs have there been among our writers, scholars, propagandists? I say “have there been,” but, of course, there still are …

  One character figuring in our story, Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of people who are “much cleverer,” though he was all infected, from head to foot, with the desire to be original. But this category, as we have already noted above, is much more unhappy than the first. The thing is that a clever “usual” man, even if he imagines himself momentarily (or perhaps throughout his life) to be a man of genius and originality, nevertheless preserves in his heart a little worm of doubt, which drives him so far that the clever man sometimes ends up in complete despair; if he submits, then he is already completely poisoned by vanity turned in upon itself. However, we have in any case chosen an extreme instance: in the great majority of this clever category of people, things generally do not go so tragically; the liver gives out more or less towards the end of his days, and that’s all. But still, before reconciling and submitting, these people sometimes spend an extremely long time acting up, from their youth till the age of submission, and all out of a desire to be original. One even comes upon strange cases: some honest man, out of a desire to be original, is even ready to commit a base deed; it can even happen that one of these unhappy persons is not only honest but even kind, the providence of his family, who by his labor supports and provides not only for his own but even for others—and what then? All his life he is unable to be at peace! For him, the thought that he has fulfilled his human obligations so well brings neither peace nor comfort; on the contrary, that is even what irritates him: “This,” he says, “is what I’ve blown my whole life for, this is what has bound me hand and foot, this is what has kept me from discovering gunpowder! If it hadn’t been for that, I’d certainly have discovered either gunpowder or America—I don’t know what for sure, but I’d certainly have discovered it!” What is most characteristic in these gentlemen is that all their lives they are indeed unable to find out for sure what precisely they need so much to discover and what precisely they have been preparing all their lives to discover: gunpowder or America? But of suffering, of longing for discovery, they truly have enough of a share in them for a Columbus or a Galileo.