The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  In any case, when, after many hours, the door opened and people came in, they found the murderer totally unconscious and delirious. The prince was sitting motionless on the bed beside him, and each time the sick man had a burst of shouting or raving, he quietly hastened to pass his trembling hand over his hair and cheeks, as if caressing and soothing him. But he no longer understood anything of what they asked him about, and did not recognize the people who came in and surrounded him. And if Schneider himself had come now from Switzerland to have a look at his former pupil and patient, he, too, recalling the state the prince had sometimes been in during the first year of his treatment in Switzerland, would have waved his hand now and said, as he did then: “An idiot!”

  XII

  Conclusion

  THE TEACHER’S WIDOW, having galloped to Pavlovsk, went straight to Darya Alexeevna, who had been upset since the previous day, and, having told her all she knew, frightened her definitively. The two ladies immediately decided to get in touch with Lebedev, who was also worried in his quality as his tenant’s friend and in his quality as owner of the apartment. Vera Lebedev told them everything she knew. On Lebedev’s advice, they decided that all three of them should go to Petersburg so as to forestall the more quickly “what might very well happen.” And so it came about that the next morning, at about eleven o’clock, Rogozhin’s apartment was opened in the presence of the police, Lebedev, the ladies, and Rogozhin’s brother, Semyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, who was quartered in the wing. What contributed most to the success of the affair was the evidence of the caretaker, who had seen Parfyon Semyonovich and his guest going in from the porch and as if on the quiet. After this evidence they did not hesitate to break down the door, which did not open to their ringing.

  Rogozhin survived two months of brain fever and, when he recovered—the investigation and the trial. He gave direct, precise, and perfectly satisfactory evidence about everything, as a result of which the prince was eliminated from the case at the very beginning. Rogozhin was taciturn during his trial. He did not contradict his adroit and eloquent lawyer, who proved clearly and logically that the crime he had committed was the consequence of the brain fever, which had set in long before the crime as a result of the defendant’s distress. But he did not add anything of his own in confirmation of this opinion and, as before, clearly and precisely, confirmed and recalled all the minutest circumstances of the event that had taken place. He was sentenced, with allowance for mitigating circumstances, to Siberia, to hard labor, for fifteen years, and heard out his sentence sternly, silently, and “pensively.” All his enormous fortune, except for a certain, comparatively speaking, rather small portion spent on the initial carousing, went to his brother, Semyon Semyonovich, to the great pleasure of the latter. Old Mrs. Rogozhin goes on living in this world and seems to recall her favorite son Parfyon occasionally, but not very clearly: God spared her mind and heart all awareness of the horror that had visited her sad house.

  Lebedev, Keller, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and many other characters of our story are living as before, have changed little, and we have almost nothing to tell about them. Ippolit died in terrible anxiety and slightly sooner than he expected, two weeks after Nastasya Filippovna’s death. Kolya was profoundly struck by what had happened; he became definitively close to his mother. Nina Alexandrovna fears for him, because he is too thoughtful for his years; a good human being will perhaps come out of him. Incidentally, partly through his efforts, the further fate of the prince has been arranged: among all the people he had come to know recently, he had long singled out Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky; he was the first to go to him and tell him all the details he knew about what had happened and about the prince’s present situation. He was not mistaken: Evgeny Pavlovich took the warmest interest in the fate of the unfortunate “idiot,” and as a result of his efforts and concern, the prince ended up abroad again, in Schneider’s Swiss institution. Evgeny Pavlovich himself, who has gone abroad, intends to stay in Europe for a very long time, and candidly calls himself “a completely superfluous man in Russia,” visits his sick friend at Schneider’s rather often, at least once every few months; but Schneider frowns and shakes his head more and more; he hints at a total derangement of the mental organs; he does not yet speak positively of incurability, but he allows himself the saddest hints. Evgeny Pavlovich takes it very much to heart, and he does have a heart, as he has already proved by the fact that he receives letters from Kolya and even sometimes answers those letters. But besides that, yet another strange feature of his character has become known; and as it is a good feature, we shall hasten to mark it: after each visit to Schneider’s institution, Evgeny Pavlovich, besides writing to Kolya, sends yet another letter to a certain person in Petersburg, with a most detailed and sympathetic account of the state of the prince’s illness at the present moment. Apart from the most respectful expressions of devotion, there have begun to appear in these letters (and that more and more often) certain candid accounts of his views, ideas, feelings—in short, something resembling friendly and intimate feelings have begun to appear. This person who is in correspondence (though still rather rarely) with Evgeny Pavlovich, and who has merited his attention and respect to such a degree, is Vera Lebedev. We have been quite unable to find out exactly how such relations could have been established; they were established, of course, on the occasion of the same story with the prince, when Vera Lebedev was so grief-stricken that she even became ill, but under what circumstances the acquaintance and friendship came about, we do not know. We have made reference to these letters mainly for the reason that some of them contain information about the Epanchin family and, above all, about Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin. Evgeny Pavlovich, in a rather incoherent letter from Paris, told of her that, after a brief and extraordinary attachment to some émigré, a Polish count, she had suddenly married him, against the will of her parents, who, if they did finally give their consent, did so only because the affair threatened to turn into an extraordinary scandal. Then, after an almost six-month silence, Evgeny Pavlovich informed his correspondent, again in a long and detailed letter, that during his last visit to Professor Schneider in Switzerland, he had met all the Epanchins there (except, of course, Ivan Fyodorovich, who, on account of business, stays in Petersburg) and Prince Shch. The meeting was strange: they all greeted Evgeny Pavlovich with some sort of rapture; Adelaida and Alexandra even decided for some reason that they were grateful to him for his “angelic care of the unfortunate prince.” Lizaveta Prokofyevna, seeing the prince in his sick and humiliated condition, wept with all her heart. Apparently everything was forgiven him. Prince Shch. voiced several happy and intelligent truths on the occasion. It seemed to Evgeny Pavlovich that he and Adelaida had not yet become completely close with each other; but the future seemed to promise a completely willing and heartfelt submission of the ardent Adelaida to the intelligence and experience of Prince Shch. Besides, the lessons endured by the family had affected her terribly and, above all, the last incident with Aglaya and the émigré count. Everything that had made the family tremble as they gave Aglaya up to this count, everything had come true within half a year, with the addition of such surprises as they had never even thought of. It turned out that this count was not even a count, and if he was actually an émigré, he had some obscure and ambiguous story. He had captivated Aglaya with the extraordinary nobility of his soul, tormented by sufferings over his fatherland, and had captivated her to such an extent that, even before marrying him, she had become a member of some foreign committee for the restoration of Poland and on top of that had ended up in the Catholic confessional of some famous padre, who had taken possession of her mind to the point of frenzy. The count’s colossal fortune, of which he had presented nearly irrefutable information to Lizaveta Prokofyevna and Prince Shch., had turned out to be completely nonexistent. What’s more, some six years after the marriage, the count and his friend, the famous confessor, had managed to bring about a complete quarrel between Aglaya and her family, so that they had no
t seen her for several months already … In short, there was a lot to tell, but Lizaveta Prokofyevna, her daughters, and even Prince Shch. had been so struck by all this “terror” that they were even afraid to mention certain things in conversation with Evgeny Pavlovich, though they knew that even without that, he was well acquainted with the story of Aglaya Ivanovna’s latest passions. Poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna wanted to be in Russia and, as Evgeny Pavlovich testified, she bitterly and unfairly criticized everything abroad: “They can’t bake good bread anywhere, in the winter they freeze like mice in the cellar,” she said. “But here at least I’ve had a good Russian cry over this poor man,” she added, pointing with emotion to the prince, who did not recognize her at all. “Enough of these passions, it’s time to serve reason. And all this, and all these foreign lands, and all this Europe of yours, it’s all one big fantasy, and all of us abroad are one big fantasy … remember my words, you’ll see for yourself!” she concluded all but wrathfully, parting from Evgeny Pavlovich.

  * You asked for it, Georges Dandin!

  † There’s a sprightly lad! Who is your father?

  ‡The son of a boyar and of a brave man to boot! I like the boyars. Do you like me, little boy?

  § Lion’s advice.

  ‖ Bah! He’s becoming superstitious!

  aThe king of Rome.

  b A little girl, then.

  cNever tell a lie. Napoleon, your sincere friend.

  d It is my fault, it is my fault.

  e We cannot!

  f Brotherhood or death.

  g It’s very curious, and very serious!

  h Let him speak.

  i Really?

  NOTES

  For many details in the following notes we are indebted to the commentaries in volume 9 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition (Leningrad, 1974).

  PART ONE

  1. Eydkuhnen is a railway station on the border between Prussia and what was then Russian-occupied Poland.

  2. Popular names for various gold coins: “napoleondors” (Napoléons d’or) were French coins equal to twenty francs; “friedrichsdors” were Prussian coins equal to five silver thalers; “Dutch yellow boys” (arapchiki) were Russian coins, the so-called Dutch chervonets, resembling the Dutch ducat, minted in Petersburg.

  3. Before the emancipation of 1861, Russian estates were evaluated by the number of adult male serfs (“souls”) living on them; they were bound to the land and thus were the property of the landowner.

  4. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826) wrote a monumental twelve-volume History of the Russian State, the first eight volumes of which were published in 1818, and the remaining four later, the last (reaching the year 1612) appearing posthumously. There is indeed a Myshkin mentioned in the History; however, he was not a prince but an architect, who, in 1472, together with a certain Krivtsov, was entrusted by Filipp, the first metropolitan of Moscow, with the construction of a new stone cathedral in Moscow, the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God; after two years of work, when the vaults were nearly completed, the cathedral collapsed, owing to poor-quality mortar and architectural misjudgment. With Lebedev’s strange insistence here, Dostoevsky may have wanted to point readers to that fact.

  5. In Russian, the German word Junker, meaning “young lord,” referred to a lower officer’s rank open only to the nobility.

  6. The title of “hereditary honorary citizen” was awarded to merchants or other persons not of noble rank for services to the city or the state.

  7. A hymn on the words “memory eternal” comes at the end of the Orthodox funeral and memorial services; the prayer is for the person to remain eternally in God’s memory.

  8. Menaions (Greek for “monthly readings”) were collections of old Russian spiritual literature, the materials organized day by day and month by month; they contained saints’ lives, homilies, explanations of the various feasts, and were often the only reading matter of the uneducated classes.

  9. A holy fool (a “fool for God” or “fool in Christ”—yurodivy in Russian) might be a harmless village idiot; but there are also saintly persons or ascetics whose saintliness expresses itself as “folly.”

  10. The Bolshoi (i.e. “Big”) Theater in Petersburg, not to be confused with the still-extant Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, stood on Theatralnaya Square from 1783 until 1892, when it was demolished and replaced by the Petersburg Conservatory. The French Theater was a French-language company that performed in the Mikhailovsky Theater (now the Maly, or “Small,” Opera Theater). Incidentally, through this company, news from Paris reached Petersburg extraordinarily quickly.

  11. A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee. The practice was obviously open to abuse, and tax farmers could become very rich, though never quite respectable. The practice was abolished by the reforms of the emperor Alexander II in the 1860s.

  12. These words were the motto on the coat of arms of Count A. A. Arakcheev (1769–1834), minister of the interior under the emperors Paul I and Alexander I; they were paraphrased by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) in his epigram “On Arakcheev.”

  13. Open courts and trial by jury were first introduced in Russia by the judicial reforms of Alexander II in 1864 and remained controversial for a long time afterwards.

  14. The prince’s assertion is not quite accurate. In Russia, capital punishment was abolished in 1753–54 under the empress Elizaveta Petrovna (1709–62), but reintroduced by Catherine II (1729–96) as punishment for state, military, and certain other crimes. In the 1860s, owing to the rise of anarchist and terrorist movements, it was resorted to rather frequently. The commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition suggests that Dostoevsky may have introduced the phrase as a blind to keep the censors from interfering with the prince’s later discussion.

  15. On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky himself, along with a number of “co-conspirators” from the radical Petrashevsky circle, was subjected to precisely such a mock execution and last-minute reprieve; he “tells us something” about it in more than one of his later works. The prince’s account of the experience of “a certain man” in part one, chapter five, reproduces the actual episode in detail. Dostoevsky also draws here and later from The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death, by Victor Hugo (1802–85), which he considered a masterpiece.

  16. In 1840–41, the historian and archeologist M. P. Pogodin (1800–75) published an album of Samples of Old Slavonic-Russian Calligraphy, containing lithographic reproductions of forty-four samples of handwriting from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, among them the signature of Pafnuty, a fourteenth-century monk, founder of the Avraamy Monastery, of which he was the hegumen (abbot).

  17. Words engraved on a medal awarded by the emperor Nicholas I to Count P. A. Kleinmiechel in 1838, after the reconstruction of the Winter Palace under his supervision.

  18. A paraphrase of Romeo and Juliet, III, ii, 73: “O serpent heart, hid with a flow’ring face!” which Dostoevsky knew from the translation published by M. N. Katkov in 1841 (he quotes the same line in his Novel in Nine Letters written in 1847).

  19. It was a custom among young ladies in the nineteenth century to keep personal albums in which friends and visitors would be asked to write witty or sentimental lines or verses; vers d’album (“album verse”) reached its high point in the verses of the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98).

  20. The Mongol empire, known as the Golden Horde, dominated southern Russia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. To “go to the Horde” meant to petition the Mongol rulers on behalf of the subject Russian people.

  21. It happens to a rich Corinthian noblewoman in The Transformations of Lucius, otherwise known as The Golden Ass, by the Latin writer Apuleius (second century A.D.), and to Titania, the queen of the fairies, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—neither case quite belongs to “mythology.”

  22. An imprecise quotation from the poem “The Journalist, the
Reader, and the Writer” (1840), by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41).

  23. Quietism was a form of religious mysticism going back to the writings of the Spanish monk Miguel de Molinos (1628–96), consisting of passive contemplation and a withdrawal from experiences of the senses; but Aglaya refers more simply to the prince’s meekness and passivity.

  24. Dostoevsky is probably thinking of “The Beheading of John the Baptist” (1514), by the Swiss painter Hans Fries (c. 1460–1520), in the Basel museum, which portrays the face of St. John just as the sword is swung over him.

  25. What Dostoevsky refers to as a “cross with four points” is the standard Roman Catholic and Protestant cross with one crossbar; in part two, mention will be made of the “eight-pointed cross” of Byzantine and Russian tradition, which has three crossbars (and thus eight “points” or tips).

  26. Dostoevsky saw a copy of The Madonna with the Family of the Burgomeister Jacob Meyer (1525–26), by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), in the Dresden Gallery. The original is in the museum of Darmstadt.

  27. In a ukase of April 2, 1837, the emperor Nicholas I forbade the wearing of both moustaches and beards by civil service employees (military officers were allowed moustaches only).

  28. An allusion to act IV, scene iii, of the play Cabal and Love (1784), by the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), in which Ferdinand, suspecting Louisa of unfaithfulness, challenges his rival to a duel “across a handkerchief.”

  29. The German title Kammerjunker (“gentleman of the bedchamber”) was adopted by the Russian imperial court; it was a high distinction for a young man.