The Idiot: Newly Translated and Annotated (Alma Classics Evergreens)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

the essence of a religious experience is not to be conveyed by any arguments, nor misdemeanours, nor crimes, nor atheist doctrines. There’s something short of the mark there always, and will continue to be so till the end of time. There’s something there that will for ever confound the atheists, and will for ever continue to be short of the mark. But the main thing is that it all manifests itself most clearly and most directly in the Russian heart, and that is the sum total of all my observations! It’s one of my primary convictions, formed on this our Russian soil. There remains much to be accomplished, Parfyon! There remains much to be challenged in our Mother Russia, believe me!

what could be better – an aristocrat, a millionaire and an idiot to boot, all qualities in one! Such husbands, to coin a phrase, do not grow on trees!…”

“This really is intolerable!” Lebedev’s nephew suddenly declared loudly and with a show of impatience. “Why do we need this long-drawn-out opera?”

respect!… Why did you come here with your heads up in the air as if to say, ‘Stay back, we’re coming! Our might is right, and you lot pipe down! We’ll rake in all the honours, no matter if we don’t deserve them; as for you, we’ll treat you like dirt!’ They want to know the truth, they want to stand on their rights, but have themselves like a pack of infidels savaged the Prince in the article. ‘We don’t ask, we demand, and don’t you expect any gratitude from us, because it’s your own conscience you want to salve!’ A fine set of morals!

I challenge the lot of you, all you atheists: how are you going to save the world and lead the way to a better life – you, men of science, industry, trade associations, working wages and all the rest of it? How? By way of supplying credit? What is credit? Where will credit lead you?”

“Credit can at least bring about universal solidarity and a balance of interests,” Ptitsyn observed. “And that is all, all it can do! Its only moral basis is the satisfaction of personal egoism and material need. Universal freedom, universal happiness – out of necessity! Do I, if I may be so bold as to ask, understand you correctly, my kind sir?” “But surely the universal need to live, eat and drink in the face of a firm scientific conviction that it will not be satisfied other than by universal solidarity and balance of interests is, to my mind, a sufficiently powerful argument to serve as a point of departure and a source of life for future generations,” Ganya declared with passionate conviction. “Need to eat and drink, in other words, merely instinct of self-preservation—” “Well, isn’t instinct of self-preservation by itself not enough? Surely instinct of self-preservation is a fundamental law of nature—” “Who told you that?” Yevgeny Pavlovich suddenly called out. “Law – that’s true enough, but fundamental only in as much as the law of destruction, or say, self-destruction is fundamental. Do you really imagine that the basic law of nature is founded on self-preservation alone?”

The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has as equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us. You laugh! You don’t believe in the Devil? Refusal to believe in the Devil is a French idea, a frivolous one. Have you any idea who the Devil is? Do you know what his name is? And without even knowing his name, you laugh at his image like Voltaire did, at his hooves, his tail and his horns, which are of your own invention. For the Prince of Darkness is a mighty awesome spirit, devoid of horns and hooves which you yourselves have attributed to him. But he’s beside the point for the present!…”

When you sow your seed, when you perform your beneficence, your act of charity, in whatever shape or form, you surrender some part of your personality and absorb a part of another; you commune with another being. There need be only some other, some further token of your consideration for you to be rewarded with knowledge, with the most unexpected revelation. You’ll inevitably begin to regard your good deeds as a science, which will take over your life and lend it purpose. Furthermore, all your ideas, all the seeds you have implanted, no doubt long forgotten by your good self, will germinate and grow. Whoever benefited from you, will pass the benefit on to others. And how can you tell what your part will be in the future resolution of men’s destinies? If, however, knowledge and a lifetime’s effort will eventually elevate you to that state where you’ll be capable of sowing some huge seed, bequeath the world some unique idea, then…

But curiously enough, when one regards the corpse of this ravaged man, one can’t avoid asking a startling question. If all his pupils – the principal future disciples of his; if all the women who had followed him and stood by the cross; if all who believed in him and adored him – beheld such a corpse (and such it must necessarily have been), how could they possibly, looking at such a corpse, believe that this martyr would rise from the dead? Here one cannot help but wonder that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature so powerful, how may they be overcome? How may they be overcome now if they hadn’t been overcome even by him who during his lifetime had commanded nature and it had obeyed him, who had said, ‘Talitha cumi’* – and straightway the damsel arose, ‘Lazarus, come forth’* – and he that was dead came forth, alive? At the sight of this picture nature appears as a huge, implacable and mute monster, or, more accurately, much more accurately, and strange as it may sound, as some enormous machine of the very latest construction, which had grabbed, crushed and devoured – mindlessly and brutally – an exquisite and priceless Being, a Being which of itself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws put together, and of the whole world, which had probably been created for naught other than the advent of this Being! This picture appears to represent the idea of that dark, menacing, mindlessly timeless force which holds sway over everything and pervades us insidiously....

I agree that ‘dog eat dog’ is the order of the world and it could not possibly have been arranged in any other way; I’d even agree to admit that I haven’t got the faintest clue what this arrangement is all about; but if there’s one thing I do know for certain, it is this: Once I’d been given to understand that ‘I am’, what concern is it of mine that there are mistakes in the way the world has been arranged, and that there’s no other way in which it can be kept going? Who will sit in judgement over me after that and for what? Please yourselves, but all this is hard to understand and unfair. “That said, I have never – and this despite my best endeavours – been able to imagine that there’s no future life and no providence. The likelihood is that both exist, but that we simply haven’t got a clue what future life is all about or what the laws are that govern it. Now, if this is so difficult and goes way beyond all understanding, how can I possibly be held responsible for not having grasped the incomprehensible? True, they will say – and of course the Prince amongst them – that that’s precisely where humility comes in, that I must submit without

questioning, out of piety alone, and that I shall be rewarded in heaven for my submissiveness. We do providence an injustice when, frustrated at our inability to comprehend it, we ascribe to it our own responses. But there again, if it is beyond comprehension, then, I repeat, it is difficult to feel any responsibility for that which is not given man to understand. And if that is so, how can I be judged for my inability to comprehend the will and the laws of providence? No, let’s just leave religion out of it.

what is a novelist to do with ordinary people, people who are completely featureless, and how to make them the least bit interesting to readers? One cannot possibly avoid them altogether in a story, because ordinary people form an essential and vital link in the chain of life’s events; were we to miss them out, this would be at the expense of verisimilitude. To pack novels with types alone or even simply for interest’s sake with strange and unusual people, would be to violate reality, and, come to that, would be uninteresting. To our mind, one ought to identify interesting and instructive types even amongst colourless people. However, when for instance the very essence of some ordinary people is contained in their very constant and immutable ordinariness, or, what is even better, when despite the extraordinary effort of these personages to break out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, they nevertheless end up being inevitably and necessarily the archetypes of routine, such people then even acquire some kind of typicality, exemplifying an ordinariness, which under no circumstances wishes to remain what it is, and, come what may, strives to become original and independent without having the least grounds for this.

The allure of good manners, lack of inhibition and apparent goodwill were almost intoxicating. It never even entered his head that all these charming good manners and this graciousness, these clever remarks and the dignified, self-possessed bearing, were merely a well-rehearsed front. Looked at more closely, the majority of the guests were, never mind their imposing exterior, rather vacuous people, who in their self-delusion did not realize that much of what was positive about them was a mere veneer which they had inherited unconsciously, by proxy. It is this that the Prince, under the charming delusion of his first impression, refused even to countenance. He was bowled over, for instance, by the fact that that old man, that venerable dignitary, who in years could well have passed for his grandfather, was ready to stop in mid-flow merely to hear him out, young and inexperienced as he was, and not merely to hear him out, but to give due weight to his opinion, to respond to him warmly, with such sincere concern, never mind that they were total strangers and had met for the very first time. Perhaps it was precisely this refined cordiality which had such a radical effect on the Prince’s sensitive nature. Perhaps he was already too much predisposed towards, indeed beguiled into, forming a favourable impression.

“Unchristian, that’s one!” the Prince again began in extreme agitation and inappropriately stridently. “That’s one. Two, Roman Catholicism is even worse than atheism, that’s my opinion anyway! Yes, my opinion! Atheism merely propounds naught, but Catholicism goes further. It presents a distorted Christ, whom it has itself traduced and denigrated, an Antichrist! Catholicism propounds an Antichrist, I swear to you, I guarantee! That is my personal and long-standing conviction, and it has cost me no end of suffering… Roman Catholicism believes that without a worldwide temporal power, the Church will not survive on this earth, and it proclaims, ‘Non possumus!’* To my mind Roman Catholicism is not even a faith, but simply the continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and everything about Catholicism, including faith itself, is subordinate to this idea. The Pope has appropriated a piece of land, mounted a temporal throne and taken up the sword. Since then everything has been developing as expected, only that to the sword has been added falsehood, prevarication, treachery, bigotry, superstition and evildoing. The churchmen have played fast and loose with the most sacred, virtuous, decent and impassioned feelings of the populace… everything but everything has been exchanged for pieces of silver, for worthless temporal power. And is that not in the spirit of Antichrist?! Did it not pave the way to atheism? Atheism originated there and then, in direct line of descent from Roman Cath...

as counterbalance to Catholicism in the moral sense, as a substitute for the vanished moral authority of religion, purposing to quench the spiritual thirst of the yearning mankind and to save it – not in Christ, but also by way of brute force! This too is liberty by way of brute force; harmony by way of the sword and of blood! ‘Do not presume to put your faith in God, do not presume to acquire property, do not presume to have a mind of your own, fraternité ou la mort* at the cost of two million heads!’ It is said, you will know them by their ways and their doings!* And do not think you will come out of it all safe and sound. We must put up a fight, soonest, soonest! In defiance of the West, our Christ must shine forth, whom we have safeguarded and whom they never even knew! We must not fall slavishly into the Jesuit trap but hold up our Russian civilization to them, we must take a defiant stand, and stop all talk of their message being elegantly delivered as someone had remarked just now—” “With respect though, I beg your pardon,” Ivan Petrovich interposed, looking around in alarm, “all your observations are of course commendable and nothing but patriotic, but it is all so wildly exaggerated and… best left well alone—”

Yevgeny Pavlovich had always had the gift of the gab; now he positively excelled himself. “Everything from the very start,” he announced, “was grounded on falsehood. That which starts on a false footing ends on a false footing. That is a law of nature. I hate it, it even incenses me, when… well, someone – calls you an idiot. You are too intelligent to be called so, but at the same time, you must agree, you are sufficiently out of the ordinary not to be like other people. I have come to the conclusion that the root cause of all that has occurred stems, first, from your so-to-speak congenital inexperience (note, Prince, this word ‘congenital’), then from your extraordinary ingenuousness; further, from your phenomenal lack of a sense of proportion (something you owned up to yourself several times, Prince); and, finally from a massive onrush of ephemeral ideological convictions which, given your extraordinary sense of fairness, you have to this day been mistaking as genuine, natural and relevant! You must agree, Prince, that right from the start your relationship with Nastasya Filippovna was tinged with (for want of a better expression) some half-baked notions of democracy, that is to say, you were beguiled (to put it at its bluntest) by the ‘woman question’. You see, I know full well the whole of that appallingly scandalous scene at Nastasya Filippovna’s when Rogozhin brought his money. If you wish, I can analyse you in every particular and hold up the mirror to you to show j...

Poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna was dying to get back to Russia and, according to Yevgeny Pavlovich, gave vent to bitter and prejudiced criticism of all that was foreign. “They can’t even be trusted to bake a decent loaf of bread here, they can’t. Come winter and they freeze like mice in a cellar,” she said. “At least I’ve had a good cry the good old Russian way over this here poor devil,” she added, bursting with emotion as she pointed towards the Prince, who did not recognize her at all. “We got carried away all right, time we came to our senses. All of it, all these foreign countries, the whole of this Western Europe of yours, is just a mirage, and all of us here abroad amount to no more than a mirage either… mark my words, you’ll see for yourselves!” she concluded almost in a temper as she bade farewell to Yevgeny Pavlovich.

Dostoevsky’s final version of the character presents us with a question. As in the case of Hamlet, whose sanity is in doubt, so in the case of Myshkin. Is he mentally challenged, or not? Is he an idiot, or is he not? At times he does not appear at all as idiotic as he is made out to be. Some totally impartial and highly knowledgeable characters in the novel vouch for his unquestionable and exemplary good sense. In fact, in the end they pronounce him more level-headed than many another character who claims to be the very paragon of normality. But we soon conclude that Dostoevsky’s world is so bizarre and convoluted that nothing can be taken for granted, least of all sanity and good sense.

Nastasya Filippovna is the very opposite of Desdemona, who is all feminine sweetness, submission and charm, yearning and desperately eager to quell her dear husband. And Othello will have none of it. Rogozhin is ready to spend all night on his knees, hoping his “queen” would let him kiss the hem of her dress. She makes light even of that, and instead of soothing her man, she provokes him. For her, comedy is tragedy that happens to others. She is in the Carmen mould. She makes Rogozhin dance to her tune, and in between the reels she is happy to make a fool of him, cast him aside and openly fall into his rival’s, Myshkin’s, arms. Not for fun, but in a mixture of fun and desperation. The two wildly contrasting men in her life are her undoing. This is the flip side of humour; its injurious, hurtful, demonic side, which to a man of Rogozhin’s dull, morose disposition, is like a red rag to a bull. It suddenly gets out of hand, overbalances into horribly unpleasant seriousness and comes crashing down about everyone’s ears. La commedia è finita! Ridi, Pagliaccio! But did the sweet-tongued, docile, angelic Desdemona fare any better? There is but one story in the world, told in a thousand different ways!