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

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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—”