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

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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....