The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

You may think that’s silly, ludicrous even, but with a little imagination even an idea like that can flash into your mind. Just think: if there was torture, for instance; there’d be suffering and wounds, bodily agony, all of which would distract you from the mental suffering, you would only have the torment of your physical injuries right up to the point of death. After all, the greatest, the most intense pain lies not so much in injuries perhaps, so much as the fact that you know for certain that in an hour’s time, then in ten minutes, then thirty seconds, then now, at this moment, the soul will take wing from the body and you will cease to be a man, and that this is certain to happen; the main thing is that it’s certain. You put your head under the blade and you hear it sliding towards you, it’s that quarter of a second which is the most terrible of all.

Fetch a soldier and stand him right in front of a cannon during a battle and fire at him, he’ll go on hoping; but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier and he’ll go off his head or burst into tears. Who can say that human nature can bear a thing like that without going mad? Why this disgusting, pointless, unnecessary mockery? Perhaps there exists a man who has had his sentence read out to him and been allowed to suffer before being told: “Be off, you’ve been pardoned.” That man could tell you perhaps. Christ himself spoke of such agony and terror. No, a man should not be treated so!’ The

The most hateful and despicable thing about money is that it even gives you talents. That’s the way it will be till the end of the world.

I’ve long since looked on it as the action of another man, owing to the passage of time and changes in my own nature, I still regret what I did.

He pondered, among other things, the fact that there was a stage in his epileptic condition just before the fit itself (if it occurred during waking hours) when all of a sudden, amid the sadness, spiritual darkness, and oppression, there were moments when his brain seemed to flare up momentarily and all his vital forces tense themselves at once in an extraordinary surge. The sensation of being alive and self-aware increased almost tenfold in those lightning-quick moments. His mind and heart were bathed in an extraordinary illumination. All his agitation, all his doubts and anxieties, seemed to be instantly reconciled and resolved into a lofty serenity, filled with pure, harmonious gladness and hope, filled too with the consciousness of the ultimate cause of all things. But these moments, these flashes, were merely the prelude to that final second (never more than a second) which marked the onset of the actual fit. That second was, of course, unendurable. Reflecting on that moment afterwards when he had recovered, he often used to tell himself that all these gleams and lightning-flashes of heightened self-awareness, and hence also of ‘higher existence’, were nothing more than the illness itself, violating the normal state of things as it did, and thus it was not a higher mode of existence at all—on the contrary, it should be regarded as the lowest. And yet he arrived at length at a paradoxical conclusion: ‘What if it is the illness then?’ he decided finally. ‘What does it m...

His mind and memory clung to every external object and gave him pleasure:

‘No, better if he’s happy and has a comfortable life, and no originality’, is what every mother thinks as she rocks her infant.

Why not just stop at sixty, keeping the secret till his dying breath? Why not simply swear off the monks and live in penance as a hermit? Why not, indeed, become a monk himself? Therein lies the solution! There must have been something stronger than the stake, the fire, even the habit of twenty years! There must have been an idea more powerful than any disaster, famine, torture, plague, leprosy, and all that hell which mankind could not have borne without that one binding idea which directed men’s minds and fertilized the springs of life! Show me anything resembling that power in our age of depravity and railways … I meant to say our age of steamships and railways, but I say: depravity and railways, because I’m drunk but I tell the truth! Show me a force which binds today’s humanity together with half the power it possessed in those centuries. And now dare to tell me that the springs of life have not been weakened and tainted under this “star”, this net which ensnares the people. And don’t try to browbeat me with your prosperity, your riches, the rarity of famine and the speed of communications! The riches are greater but the force is less; there is no more a binding principle; everything has grown soft, everything and everyone grown flabby! We’ve all grown flabby, all, all of us! … But that’s enough, that’s not the point now; the point now, most worthy Prince, is shouldn’t we be seeing about the refreshments prepared for the guests?’

What matters is life, life alone, the continuous and infinite process of discovering it, not the discovery itself!

every ‘tiny fly’ buzzing near him in the hot sunlight was a participant in that chorus: it knew its place, loved it, and was happy; every blade of grass grew and was happy! Everything had its own path and everything knew its own path, and went forth with a song and returned with a song; he alone knew nothing and comprehended nothing, not people, not sounds, he was alien to everything, an outcast.

In actual fact there is nothing more annoying than to be, say, rich, of good family, presentable appearance, reasonably well educated, quite bright, even kind-hearted, and at the same time to possess no talent at all, no outstanding quality, no bee in your bonnet even, not a single idea of your own, to be positively ‘the same as everybody else’.

a decent education, but not knowing how to apply it; intelligence, but no ideas of one’s own; a heart, but lacking generosity, and so on and so forth in every respect.

It was odd: one moment he was sharply observant, the next he would become incredibly absent-minded.