The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

was short and abominably dressed, and stood and stared in her face and never said a word, because I was shy, like an ass!

"But, look here, are you a great hand with the ladies? Let's know that first?" asked Rogojin. "Oh no, oh no! said the prince; "I couldn't, you know—my illness—I hardly ever saw a soul."

in fact, he enjoyed the reputation of being a well-to-do man of busy habits, many ties, and affluent means.

As to age, General Epanchin was in the very prime of life; that is, about fifty-five years of age,—the flowering time of existence, when real enjoyment of life begins.

The general never regretted his early marriage, or regarded it as a foolish youthful escapade; and he so respected and feared his wife that he was very near loving her.

In a word, the world spoke well of the girls; but they were not without their enemies, and occasionally people talked with horror of the number of books they had read.

@maggie we wish this were true of us, no?

the fact is, my circumstances are not particularly rosy at this moment."

Who knows? Perhaps he too was a man of imagination and with some capacity for thought.

but could not remember much about this time of his life. His fits were so frequent then, that they made almost an idiot of him (the prince used the expression "idiot" himself).

My mother is always crying, of course, and my sister sulks.

But at times he would pluck up his courage and be full of hope and good spirits again, acting, in fact, as weak men do act in such circumstances.

Mrs. Epanchin was in the habit of holding herself very straight, and staring before her, without speaking, in moments of excitement.

but you must excuse me. I'm in a hurry, I must be off—" "We all know where you must be off to!" said Mrs. Epanchin, in a meaning voice.

"Oh, yes—I know what count you're going to see!" remarked his wife in a cutting manner,

He doesn't seem so very ill, does he? I don't think he requires a napkin under his chin, after all; are you accustomed to having one on, prince?" "Formerly, when I was seven years old or so. I believe I wore one; but now I usually hold my napkin on my knee when I eat."

"Let's all go to my boudoir," she said, "and they shall bring some coffee in there. That's the room where we all assemble and busy ourselves as we like best," she explained. "Alexandra, my eldest, here, plays the piano, or reads or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (but never finishes any); and Aglaya sits and does nothing.

This was after a long series of fits. I always used to fall into a sort of torpid condition after such a series, and lost my memory almost entirely; and though I was not altogether without reason at such times, yet I had no logical power of thought. This would continue for three or four days, and then I would recover myself again. I remember my melancholy was intolerable; I felt inclined to cry; I sat and wondered and wondered uncomfortably; the consciousness that everything was strange weighed terribly upon me; I could understand that it was all foreign and strange.

"Now let's leave the donkey and go on to other matters.

"You must forgive them, prince; they are good girls. I am very fond of them, though I often have to be scolding them; they are all as silly and mad as march hares."

But I stick up for the donkey, all the same; he's a patient, good-natured fellow."

and seriously, let's drop the donkey now—what else did you see abroad, besides the donkey?"

I felt how lovely it was, but the loveliness weighed upon me somehow or other, and made me feel melancholy." "Why?" asked Alexandra. "I don't know; I always feel like that when I look at the beauties of nature for the first time;

"But I don't know how to see!" "Nonsense, what rubbish you talk!" the mother struck in. "Not know how to see! Open your eyes and look! If you can't see here, you won't see abroad either.

He was one of the persons under treatment with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy, then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide.

"You are not angry with me?" he asked suddenly, and with a kind of nervous hurry, although he looked them straight in the face. "Why should we be angry?" they cried. "Only because I seem to be giving you a lecture, all the time!" At this they laughed heartily. "Please don't be angry with me," continued the prince. "I know very well that I have seen less of life than other people, and have less knowledge of it. I must appear to speak strangely sometimes..." He said the last words nervously.

The prince talks well, though he is not amusing. He began all right, but now he seems sad."

I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters.

'You have the form and face of an adult' he said, 'but as regards soul, and character, and perhaps even intelligence, you are a child in the completest sense of the word, and always will be, if you live to be sixty.'

I am often called an idiot, and at one time I certainly was so ill that I was nearly as bad as an idiot; but I am not an idiot now. How can I possibly be so when I know myself that I am considered one?

A fool with a heart and no brains is just as unhappy as a fool with brains and no heart. I am one and you are the other, and therefore both of us suffer, both of us are unhappy."

"Why are you so unhappy, mother?" asked Adelaida, who alone of all the company seemed to have preserved her good temper and spirits up to now. "In the first place, because of my carefully brought-up daughters," said Mrs. Epanchin, cuttingly; "and as that is the best reason I can give you we need not bother about any other at present.

but his soul is such a wretched thing.

I see that you are quite an ordinary man, not original in the least degree, but rather weak."

One of the vilest and most hateful things connected with money is that it can buy even talent; and will do so as long as the world lasts.

"Are you not ashamed? Are you not ashamed? You barbarian! You tyrant! You have robbed me of all I possessed—you have sucked my bones to the marrow. How long shall I be your victim? Shameless, dishonourable man!"

We are for ever present at an orgy of scandalous revelations.

You see, excellency, all the world is witty and clever except myself. I am neither. As a kind of compensation I am allowed to tell the truth, for it is a well-known fact that only stupid people tell 'the truth. Added to this, I am a spiteful man, just because I am not clever. If I am offended or injured I bear it quite patiently until the man injuring me meets with some misfortune. Then I remember, and take my revenge.

"H'm! and instead of a bad action, your excellency has detailed one of your noblest deeds," said Ferdishenko. "Ferdishenko is 'done.'"

"The prince! What on earth has the prince got to do with it? Who the deuce is the prince?"

There were but two ladies present; one of whom was the lively actress, who was not easily frightened, and the other the silent German beauty who, it turned out, did not understand a word of Russian, and seemed to be as stupid as she was lovely.

Rogojin, you are a little too late. Away with your paper parcel! I'm going to marry the prince; I'm richer than you are now."

"He may be an idiot, but he knows that flattery is the best road to success here."

but be it what it might, there it undoubtedly was.

Why are you laughing? You believe nothing, atheist! And your story was not even correct!

someone make this my posthumous voicemail please

I thought it was a hallucination. I often have hallucinations nowadays. I feel just as I did five years ago when my fits were about to come on."

I was surprised, for she is a vindictive, resentful woman—but then I thought that perhaps she despised me too much to feel any resentment against me. And that's the truth.

@ nan

hour later, she came to me again, looking melancholy. 'I will marry you, Parfen Semeonovitch,' she says, not because I'm frightened of you, but because it's all the same to me how I ruin myself. And how can I do it better?

He felt in a very curious condition today, a condition similar to that which had preceded his fits in bygone years. He remembered that at such times he had been particularly absentminded, and could not discriminate between objects and persons unless he concentrated special attention upon them.

He remembered that during his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigour and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever; these moments were but presentiments, as it were, of the one final second (it was never more than a second) in which the fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible.

When his attack was over, and the prince reflected on his symptoms, he used to say to himself: "These moments, short as they are, when I feel such extreme consciousness of myself, and consequently more of life than at other times, are due only to the disease—to the sudden rupture of normal conditions. Therefore they are not really a higher kind of life, but a lower."