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

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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...