Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (331 page)
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Authors: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The narrative opens with the 26-year-old Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returning to Russia, after spending several years at a Swiss clinic for treatment of his epilepsy and supposed intellectual deficiencies. On the train journey to Russia, Myshkin meets Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin and is struck by his passionate intensity, particularly in relation to a beautiful woman with whom he is obsessed.
Myshkin's only relation in St. Petersburg is the very distant Lizaveta Prokofyevna Yepanchin. Madame Yepanchin is the wife of General Yepanchin, a wealthy and respected man in his late fifties. The prince makes the acquaintance of the Yepanchins, who have three daughters—Alexandra, Adelaida, and Aglaya, the last being the youngest and the most beautiful.
General Yepanchin has an ambitious and vain assistant named Gavril Ardalionovich Ivolgin (Ganya) whom Myshkin also meets during his visit to the household. Ganya, though actually in love with Aglaya, is trying to marry Anastassya Filippovna Barashkov, an extraordinarily beautiful woman who was once the mistress of the aristocrat Totsky. Totsky has promised Ganya 75,000 rubles if he marries the "fallen" Nastassya Filippovna instead. As Myshkin is so innocent and naïve, Ganya openly discusses the subject of the proposed marriage in front of the Prince. Nastassya Filippovna is in fact the same woman pursued obsessively by Rogozhin, and Ganya asks the Prince whether Rogozhin would marry her. The Prince replies that he might well marry her and then murder her a week later.
Dostoyevsky, close to the time of publication
The house in Florence where Dostoyevsky wrote ‘The Idiot’
THE IDIOT
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
At nine o’clock in the morning, towards the end of November, the Warsaw train was approaching Petersburg at full speed. It was thawing, and so damp and foggy that it was difficult to distinguish anything ten paces from the line to right or left of the carriage windows. Some of the passengers were returning from abroad, but the third-class compartments were most crowded, chiefly with people of humble rank, who had come a shorter distance on business. All of course were tired and shivering, their eyes were heavy after the night’s journey, and all their faces were pale and yellow to match the fog.
In one of the third-class carriages, two passengers had, from early dawn, been sitting facing one another by the window. Both were young men, not very well dressed, and travelling with little luggage; both were of rather striking appearance, and both showed a desire to enter into conversation. If they had both known what was remarkable in one another at that moment, they would have been surprised at the chance which had so strangely brought them opposite one another in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw train. One of them was a short man about twenty-seven, with almost black curly hair and small, grey, fiery eyes. He had a broad and flat nose and high cheek bones. His thin lips were continually curved in an insolent, mocking and even malicious smile. But the high and well-shaped forehead redeemed the ignoble lines of the lower part of the face. What was particularly striking about the young man’s face was its death-like pallor, which gave him a look of exhaustion in spite of his sturdy figure, and at the same time an almost painfully passionate expression, out of keeping with his coarse and insolent smile and the hard and conceited look in his eyes. He was warmly dressed in a full, black, sheepskin-lined overcoat, and had not felt the cold at night, while his shivering neighbour had been exposed to the chill and damp of a Russian November night, for which he was evidently unprepared. He had a fairly thick and full cloak with a big hood, such as is often used in winter by travellers abroad in Switzerland, or the North of Italy, who are not of course proposing such a journey as that from Eydtkuhnen to Petersburg. But what was quite suitable and satisfactory in Italy turned out not quite sufficient for Russia. The owner of the cloak was a young man, also twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, above the average in height, with very fair thick hair, with sunken cheeks and a thin, pointed, almost white beard. His eyes were large, blue and dreamy; there was something gentle, though heavy-looking in their expression, something of that strange look from which some people can recognise at the first glance a victim of epilepsy. Yet the young man’s face was pleasing, thin and clean-cut, though colourless, and at this moment blue with cold. He carried a little bundle tied up in an old faded silk handkerchief, apparently containing all his belongings. He wore thick-soled shoes and gaiters, all in the foreign style. His dark-haired neighbour in the sheepskin observed all this, partly from having nothing to do,
and at last, with an indelicate smile, in which satisfaction at the misfortunes of others is sometimes so unceremoniously and casually expressed, he asked:
“Chilly?”
And he twitched his shoulders.
“Very,” answered his neighbour, with extraordinary readiness, “and to think it’s thawing too. What if it were freezing? I didn’t expect it to be so cold at home. I’ve got out of the way of it.”
“From abroad, eh?”
“Yes, from Switzerland.”
“Phew! You don’t say so!” The dark-haired man whistled and laughed.
They fell into talk. The readiness of the fair young man in the Swiss cloak to answer all his companion’s inquiries was remarkable. He betrayed no suspicion of the extreme impertinence of some of his misplaced and idle questions. He told him he had been a long while, over four years, away from Russia, that he had been sent abroad for his health on account of a strange nervous disease, something of the nature of epilepsy or St. Vitus’s dance, attacks of twitching and trembling. The dark man smiled several times as he listened, and laughed, especially when, in answer to his inquiry, “Well, have they cured you?” his companion answered, “No, they haven’t.”
“Ha! You must have wasted a lot of money over it, and we believe in them over here,” the dark man observed sarcastically.
“Perfectly true!” interposed a badly dressed, heavily built man of about forty, with a red nose and pimpled face, sitting beside them.
He seemed to be some sort of petty official, with the typical failings of his class. “Perfectly true, they only absorb all the resources of Russia for nothing!”
“Oh, you are quite mistaken in my case!” the patient from Switzerland replied in a gentle and conciliatory voice. “I can’t dispute your opinion, of course, because I don’t know all about it, but my doctor shared his last penny with me for the journey here; and he’s been keeping me for nearly two years at his expense.”
“Why, had you no one to pay for you?” asked the dark man.
“No; Mr. Pavlishtchev, who used to pay for me there, died two years ago. I’ve written since to Petersburg, to Madame Epanchin, a distant relation of mine, but I’ve had no answer. So I’ve come. . . .”
“Where are you going then?”
“You mean, where am I going to stay? . . . I really don’t know yet. . . . Somewhere. . . .”
“You’ve not made up your mind yet?” And both his listeners laughed again.
“And I shouldn’t wonder if that bundle is all you’ve got in the world?” queried the dark man.
“I wouldn’t mind betting it is,” chimed in the red-nosed official with a gleeful air, “and that he’s nothing else in the luggage van, though poverty is no vice, one must admit.”
It appeared that this was the case; the fair-haired young man acknowledged it at once with peculiar readiness.
“Your bundle has some value, anyway,” the petty official went on, when they had laughed to their heart’s content (strange to say, the owner of the bundle began to laugh too, looking at them, and that increased their mirth), “and though one may safely bet there is no gold in it, neither French, German, nor Dutch — one may be sure of that, if only from the gaiters you have got on over your foreign shoes — yet if you can add to your bundle a relation such as Madame Epanchin, the general’s lady, the bundle acquires a very different value, that is if Madame Epanchin really is related to you, and you are not labouring under a delusion, a mistake that often happens . . . through excess of imagination.”
“Ah, you’ve guessed right again,” the fair young man assented. “It really is almost a mistake, that’s to say, she is almost no relation; so much so that I really was not at all surprised at getting no answer. It was what I expected.”
“You simply wasted the money for the stamps. H’m! . . . anyway you are straightforward and simple-hearted, and that’s to your credit. H’m! . . . I know General Epanchin, for he is a man every one knows; and I used to know Mr. Pavlishtchev, too, who paid your expenses in Switzerland, that is if it was Nikolay Andreyevitch Pavlishtchev, for there were two of them, cousins. The other lives in the Crimea. The late Nikolay Andreyevitch was a worthy man and well connected, and he’d four thousand serfs in his day. .
“That’s right, Nikolay Andreyevitch was his name.” And as he answered, the young man looked intently and searchingly at the omniscient gentleman.
Such omniscient gentlemen are to be found pretty often in a certain stratum of society. They know everything. All the restless curiosity and faculties of their mind are irresistibly bent in one direction, no doubt from lack of more important ideas and interests in life, as the critic of to-day would explain. But the words, “they know everything,” must be taken in a rather limited sense: in what department so-and-so serves, who are his friends, what his income is, where he was governor, who his wife is and what dowry she brought him, who are his first cousins and who are his second cousins, and everything of that sort. For the most part these omniscient gentlemen are out at elbow, and receive a salary of seventeen roubles a month. The people of whose lives they know every detail would be at a loss to imagine their motives. Yet many of them get positive consolation out of this knowledge, which amounts to a complete science, and derive from it self-respect and their highest spiritual gratification. And indeed it is a fascinating science. I have seen learned men, literary men, poets, politicians, who sought and found in that science their loftiest comfort and their ultimate goal, and have indeed made their career only by means of it.
During this part of the conversation the dark young man had been yawning and looking aimlessly out of the window, impatiently expecting the end of the journey. He was preoccupied, extremely so, in fact, almost agitated. His behaviour indeed was somewhat strange; sometimes he seemed to be listening without hearing, and looking without seeing. He would laugh sometimes not knowing, or forgetting, what he was laughing at.
“Excuse me, whom have I the honour” . . . the pimply gentleman said suddenly, addressing the fair young man with the bundle.