The Idiot

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The Idiot

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

with an Introduction by Richard Pevear

Copyright © 2001

ISBN: 1857152549

CONTENTS

Introduction xi

Select Bibliography xxiv

Chronology xxvi

Translators' Notes xxxii

THE IDIOT

Part One 3

Part Two 177

Part Three 323

Part Four 459

Notes 617

INTRODUCTION

On a house near the Pitti Palace in Florence there is a plaque that reads: "In this neighborhood between 1868 and 1869 F. M. Dostoevsky completed his novel The Idiot." It is strange to think of this most Russian of writers working on this most Russian of novels while living in the city of Dante. In fact the author's absence from Russia can be felt in the book, if we compare it with his preceding novel, Crime and Punishment (1866), which is so saturated in place, in the streets, buildings, squares, and bridges of Petersburg, that the city becomes a living participant in events. Place has little importance in The Idiot. Petersburg and the residential suburb of Pavlovsk, where most of the action occurs, are barely described. There is little sense of a surrounding world or a wider human community. Russia is present in the novel not as a place but as a question - the essence of Russia, the role of Russia and the "Russian Christ" in Europe and in the world. It was precisely during the four years he spent abroad, from 1867 to 1871, that Dostoevsky brooded most intensely on the fate of Russia, as the exiled Dante brooded on the fate of Florence.

But it would be a mistake to think that this lack of an objective "world" makes The Idiot an abstract ideological treatise. On the contrary, it is perhaps the most physical and even physiological of Dostoevsky's novels. Its events seem to take place internally, not in a spiritual inwardness but within the body, within a body, rendered more by sensation than by depiction. With Crime and Punishment, as the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff wrote recently,* Dostoevsky buried the descriptive novel; in The Idiot he arrived at a new form, expressive of "the inobjective body," which overcomes the dualities of interior and exterior, subjective and objective, physical and psychological. It is given in certain modes of

*In L'Expression du corps chez Dostoevsky ("The Expression of the Body in Dostoevsky"), Paris, 2000.

experience: sickness, for instance, is as much subjective as objective; so is violence, and so is life with others, the "invasive" presence of the other (hence the privileged place Dostoevsky gives to doorways and thresholds, to sudden entrances and unexpected meetings). And so, finally, are words spoken and heard, written and read aloud. Dostoevsky concentrates on these modes of experience in The Idiot to the exclusion of almost all else. The novel, broadly speaking, is an exploration of what it means to be flesh.

The idea of the "Russian Christ" is important in The Idiot (and was certainly important to his creator, who repeated Myshkin's words on the subject almost verbatim nine years later in his Diary of a Writer), but a much stronger presence in the novel is the painting that Dostoevsky significantly calls "The Dead Christ" (the actual title is Christ's Body in the Tomb), a work by Hans Holbein the Younger that hangs in the museum of Basel. Dostoevsky places a copy of the painting in the house of the young merchant millionaire Rogozhin. It is discussed twice in the novel, the second time at length and in a key passage. The shape of the painting is unusual: the narrator describes it as being "around six feet wide and no more than ten inches high." It is, in other words, totally lacking in vertical dimension.

Dostoevsky first read about Holbein's painting in Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler (1801), an account of the young author's travels in Europe, modeled on Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey. In a letter written from Basel, Karamzin mentions that he has been to the picture gallery there and "looked with great attention and pleasure at the paintings of the illustrious Holbein, a native of Basel and friend of Erasmus." Of this painting in particular (giving it yet another title) he observes: "In 'Christ Taken Down from the Cross' one doesn't see anything of God. As a dead man he is portrayed quite naturally. According to legend, Holbein painted it from a drowned Jew." That is all. But these few words must have made a strong impression on Dostoevsky. In August 1867, on their way from Baden-Baden to Geneva, he and his young wife made a special stop in Basel to see the painting.

Dostoevsky's wife, Anna Grigorievna, wrote an account of their visit to the museum in her memoirs, published forty years later:

'On the way to Geneva we stopped for a day in Basel, with the purpose of seeing a painting in the museum there that my husband had heard about from someone.

This painting, from the brush of Hans Holbein, portrays Jesus Christ, who has suffered inhuman torture, has been taken down from the cross and given over to corruption. His swollen face is covered with bloody wounds, and he looks terrible. The painting made an overwhelming impression on my husband, and he stood before it as if dumbstruck.. .

When I returned some fifteen or twenty minutes later, I found my husband still standing in front of the painting as if riveted to it. There was in his agitated face that expression as of fright which I had seen more than once in the first moments of an epileptic fit. I quietly took him under the arm, brought him to another room, and sat him down on a bench, expecting a fit to come at any moment. Fortunately that did not happen.'

In a stenographic diary kept at the time of the visit itself, she noted: "generally, it looked so much like an actual dead man that I really think I wouldn't dare stay in the same room with it. But F. admired this painting. Wishing to have a closer look at it, he stood on a chair, and I was very afraid he'd be asked to pay a fine, because here one gets fined for everything."

Each of the three main male characters of the novel — the saintly "idiot" Myshkin, the passionate, earthbound Rogozhin, and the consumptive nihilist Ippolit - defines himself in relation to this painting. The question it poses hangs over the whole novel: what if Christ was only a man? What if he suffered, died, and was left a bruised, lifeless corpse, as Holbein shows him? It is, in other words, the question of the Resurrection. Dostoevsky, who was very careful about the names he gave his characters, calls the heroine of The Idiot Nastasya, a shortened form of Anastasia: anastasis is "resurrection" in Greek. Her last name, Barashkov, comes from the Russian word for "lamb."

The name of the novel's hero, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, is also worth considering. It draws a pointed and

oddly insistent comment from the clerk Lebedev on its first mention at the start of the novel: "the name's historical, it can and should be found in Karamzin's History." Karamzin's History of the Russian State was one of the most popular books of nineteenth-century Russia. In his Diary of a Writer (1873), Dostoevsky recalls: "I was only ten when I already knew virtually all the principal episodes of Russian history - from Karamzin whom, in the evenings, father used to read aloud to us." He could assume a similar knowledge among his contemporaries. But, as the literary scholar Tatiana Kasatkina pointed out in a recent lecture,* later commentators on The Idiot have generally failed to follow Lebedev's suggestion. Looking in Karamzin's History, we do indeed find the name Myshkin; it belonged not to a prince but to an architect. In 1471 Metropolitan Filipp of Moscow decided to build a new stone Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and Myshkin was one of the two architects called in to build it. It was to be modeled on the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, the biggest in Russia. The architects went to Vladimir, took measurements, and promised to build an even bigger cathedral in Moscow. By 1474 the walls had reached vault level when the addition of a monumental stairway caused the entire structure to collapse. Dostoevsky twice wrote the words "Prince-Christ" in his notebooks for The Idiot. Readers have taken this to be an equation and, like Romano Guardini in Der Mensch und der Glaube (Man and Faith, subtitled "a study of religious existence in Dostoevsky's major novels"), have seen Prince Myshkin as a "symbol of Christ" or, in Tatiana Kasatkina's words, as a man upon whom "the radiance of Christ somehow rests," one who is "meant to stand for, or in some way even replace, the person of Christ for us." Karamzin's account of the architect Myshkin suggests a more ambiguous reading — as indeed does the prince's name itself, which is compounded of "lion" (lev) and "mouse" (mysh).

Dostoevsky began work on The Idiot in September 1867, a month after his visit to the Basel museum, but it was some time before he finally grasped the nature of his hero. His first

*Delivered at Chernogolovka, near Moscow, on May 15, 2000.

notes show the "idiot" as a proud and violently passionate man, a villain, even an Iago, who is to undergo a complete regeneration and "finish in a divine way." After working out a number of plans, he ended his notebook on November 30 with a final resolve: "Detailed arrangement of the plan and begin work in the evening." Four days later he threw everything out and started again. A new conception of the hero had come to him. He was to be a pure and innocent man from the beginning, a saintly stranger coming from elsewhere, and the drama would lie not in his own inner struggle but in his confrontation with people ("Now I am going to be with people," Myshkin thinks to himself on the train back to Russia) and in the effect of his innocence and purity on others. Instead of going on from the situation of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, as Dostoevsky's early sketches suggested, he leaped to his diametrical opposite.

Dostoevsky described this new conception in a letter to his friend the poet Apollon Maikov: "For a long time now I've been tormented by a certain idea, but I've been afraid to make a novel out of it, because the thought is too difficult, and I'm not ready for it, though it's a thoroughly tempting thought and I love it. The idea is - to portray a perfectly beautiful man. Nothing, in my opinion, can be more difficult than that, especially in our time." He discussed the same idea in a letter written the next day (January 13, 1868) to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova. It is important enough to be quoted at length:

'The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There is nothing more difficult in the world and especially now. All writers, not only ours, but even all European writers, who have merely attempted to portray the positively beautiful, have always given up. Because the task is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but this ideal, whether ours or that of civilized Europe, is still far from being worked out. There is only one perfectly beautiful person -Christ - so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful person is, of course, already an infinite miracle. (That is the sense of the whole Gospel of John: it finds the whole miracle in the incarnation alone, in the manifestation of the beautiful alone.) But I've gone on too long. I will only mention that of beautiful persons in Christian literature, the most fully realized is Don Quixote; but he is beautiful solely because he is at the same time ridiculous. Dickens's

Pickwick (an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote, but an immense one all the same) is also ridiculous and succeeds only because of that. Compassion is shown for the beautiful that is ridiculed and does not know its own worth - and so sympathy appears in the readers. This arousing of compassion is the secret of humor. Jean Valjean is also a strong attempt, but he arouses sympathy by his terrible misfortune and society's injustice towards him. I have nothing like that, decidedly nothing, and that's why I'm terribly afraid it will be a positive failure.'

At that time he had written only the first seven chapters of part one. They were produced in a single burst of inspiration and sent to his publisher, Mikhail Katkov, who included them in the January 1868 issue of The Russian Messenger. The remaining nine chapters of the first part were finished by the end of February. But Dostoevsky was uncertain about what would follow, and he continued in that uncertainty all the while he was writing the novel. Only as he worked on the fourth and last part did he recognize the inevitability of the final catastrophe. And yet he could write to Sofya Ivanova in November 1868: "this fourth part and its conclusion is the most important thing in my novel, i.e., the novel was almost written and conceived for the novel's denouement."

This novel, which was to be filled with light, which was to portray the positively beautiful, ends in deeper darkness than any of Dostoevsky's other works. What happened here? Some remarks from another letter to Maikov may begin to suggest an answer. Speaking of his own poetic process, he says: "in my head and in my soul many artistic conceptions flash and make themselves felt. But they only flash; and what's needed is a full embodiment, which always comes about unexpectedly and suddenly, but it is impossible to calculate precisely when it will come about; then, once you have received the full image in your heart, you can set about its artistic realization." Dostoevsky's work was always "experimental" in the sense that, between the conception and the full embodiment, he allowed his material the greatest freedom to reveal itself "unexpectedly and suddenly." Despite his passionate convictions, he never imposed an ideological resolution on his work; he was never formulaic. But it is the special nature of The Idiot that the full

image revealed itself as if with great reluctance and only towards the end of its artistic realization. René Girard was right to say that the failure of the initial idea is the triumph of another more profound idea, and that this prolonged uncertainty gives the novel "an existential density that few works have."* Much of Dostoevsky's distinctive quality as a writer lies in this living relation to his own characters.

Part one of The Idiot introduces most of the characters of the novel - the three central figures, Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Nastasya Filippovna; the three families of the Epanchins, the Ivolgins, and the Lebedevs - and entangles them in various complex relations. Riddles and enigmas appear from the start, surrounded by rumors, gossip, attempted explanations, analyses by different characters (reasonable but usually wrong). The narrator himself is not always sure of what has happened or is going to happen. When he finished the first part, Dostoevsky still thought that the prince could go on to redeem Nastasya Filippovna and even to "regenerate" the dark Rogozhin. He wrote to Sofya Ivanova: "The first part is essentially only an introduction. One thing is necessary: to arouse a certain curiosity about what will follow ... In the second part everything must be definitively established (but will still be far from explained)." But the second part was slow to come; it was finished only five months later, in July; and in it we immediately sense a change of tone and coloration. It begins under the image of Holbein's "Dead Christ," which appears here for the first time, and of Rogozhin's gloomy, labyrinthine house, a house associated with the castrates and old Russian sectarianism. The prince's humility and compassion acquire a strange ambiguity, and before long, the epilepsy for which he had been treated in Switzerland returns with a violent attack that throws him headlong down the stairs.

Critics have found this shift abrupt and puzzling. But there are hints of it even in the first part, not only in the name Myshkin, which "can and should be found in Karamzin," but in the prince's repeated accounts of executions he has

*Dostoevsky, du double à l'unité, Paris, 1963 (in English, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground, New York, 1997).

witnessed or heard about, and above all in the story of his life in Switzerland, the befriending of the village children, and the death of poor Marie. This story, with its Edenic overtones, has deception at its center, and the deceiver is the prince himself, as he admits without quite recognizing. It is a first variation on one of the central themes of the novel: the difference between love and pity. The relation of the first part to the rest of the novel is one of question and answer, and the question was posed first of all for Dostoevsky himself, who did not know the answer when he started. It is essentially the same question implied in Holbein's painting: what if Christ were not the incarnate God but, in this case, simply a "positively beautiful man," a "moral genius," as a number of nineteenth-century biographers of Jesus chose to portray him, and as Leo Tolstoy was about to proclaim - "a Christ more romantic than Christian," in René Girard's words, sublime and ideal, but with no power to redeem fallen mankind? The prince cannot tell Nastasya Filippovna that her sins are forgiven. What he tells her is that she is pure, that she is not guilty of anything. These apparently innocent words, coming at the end of part one, unleash all that follows in the novel.

The Idiot is constructed as a series of outspoken conversations and exposures, beginning with the very first scene of the novel, the meeting of the prince with Rogozhin and Lebedev on the train to Petersburg, and continuing virtually unbroken till the final scene. The prince, being unguarded and guileless, blurts out things about himself that anyone else would conceal. This is such a winning quality in him that it even wins over the brutish Rogozhin. It also wins over, one after another, the whole procession of people he meets on his arrival in the city, from General Epanchin's valet to the general's private secretary, Ganya Ivolgin, to the general himself, his wife and daughters, to the whole of Ganya Ivolgin's family, and finally to the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. He readily speaks of his illness and "idiocy," tells how he was awakened from mental darkness by the braying of an ass (at which the Epanchin girls make inevitable jokes), reveals his odd obsession with executions and the condemned man's last moments, and when one of the girls asks him to tell about when he was in love, he tells them at

length about his "happiness" in Switzerland. His first words to Nastasya Filippovna, when he comes uninvited to her birthday party, are: "Everything in you is perfection." And his naive directness prompts a similar directness in others, who speak themselves out to him, seek his advice, look for some saving word from him.

But this general outspokenness can also turn scandalous. Ganya Ivolgin repeatedly denounces the prince to his face and once even slaps him. At Nastasya Filippovna's party, a parlor game is played in which each guest (the ladies are excused) must tell the worst thing he has done in his life. On the prince's terrace in Pavlovsk, surrounded by almost the entire cast of characters, a vicious newspaper lampoon about the prince himself is read aloud. And on the same terrace Ippolit reads his "Necessary Explanation," which, among other things, is a direct attack on the prince for his "Christian" humility and meekness.

As one reads, however, and even rather early on, one becomes aware that, together with this outspokenness, there is a great reticence in The Idiot. For all its surprising frankness, there is much that goes unsaid, and what goes unsaid is most important. Olga Meerson has written a witty and penetrating study of this question,* showing how what is normally taboo in society is easily violated in Dostoevsky's work, but as a way of pointing to the greater significance of what his characters pass over in silence. This is a poetics of opening, but hardly of openness.

An ironic variation on the influence of the unsaid is the famous phrase "Beauty will save the world." These words are often attributed to Dostoevsky himself and have been made much of by commentators, but in fact he never said them. Both Ippolit and Aglaya Epanchin refer them to Prince Myshkin, but we never actually hear him say them either. The one time the prince comments on beauty is when he is giving his observations about the faces of Mrs. Epanchin and her daughters. He says nothing of the youngest, Aglaya. The

* Dostoevsky's Taboos, published (in English) in Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden-Munich, 1998.

mother asks why, and he demurs: "I can't say anything now. I'll say it later." When she presses him, he admits that she is "an extraordinary beauty," adding: "Beauty is difficult to judge; I'm not prepared yet. Beauty is a riddle." This is the prince's first real moment of reticence in the novel. By the end he will have moved from naïve candor to an anguished silence in the face of the unspeakable.

Everything is a riddle in The Idiot, everything is two-sided, ambiguous. The structure of reality is double: there is the social world of Petersburg and Pavlovsk, and within it a world infinitely higher and lower, both personal and archetypal. Olga Meerson says in the conclusion of her book:

Dostoevsky . . . uses the language of social interactions for non-social purposes. Rather than depicting society, he borrows the sign system of literature - anthropological and fictional - that depicts society, in order to depict and address human conscience, conscious, unconscious, subconscious. Signs of verbal social decorum are transformed by having gained a new function; they no longer apply to the actual social decorum. The latter is constantly and scandalously violated in Dostoevsky precisely by those characters who are exceptionally sensitive to the new, meta-social functions of these signals of decorum.

The social world is relative, ambivalent, comic, "carnivalized," as the critic Mikhail Bakhtin preferred to say - a world in which a polite drawing room turns into a public square. The meta-social world is located in the deepest layers of consciousness, of memory, internal in each of us and at the same time transcending each of us. In this world, characters acquire the qualities of folk-tale heroes and villains, of figures in a mystery play, of angels and demons. There is a captive princess, there is a prince who is called upon to save her, and there is a dark force that threatens them both. The heavenly emissary must deliver the world's soul from bondage, Andromeda from her chains; if he betrays his calling, disaster will follow.

As if to underscore the distance between social realism and his own "realism of a higher sort," Dostoevsky refers to two other stories of fallen women: La Dame aux camélias by Dumas fils, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which the prince finds in Nastasya Filippovna's rooms near the end of the novel.

Nastasya Filippovna will hardly efface herself like Dumas's heroine; that sentimental resolution suits the taste (and the hopes) of her mediocre seducer, the "bouquet man" Totsky, whom she calls a monsieur aux camélias. Nor will she take her own life in despair, like Emma Bovary. Her fate is enacted in a different realm. The parallels serve to mark the difference. But, owing to the chasteness of his art (as opposed to its obvious scandalousness), Dostoevsky allows himself no direct statement of his idea, no symbolistic abstraction, no simple identification of the "archetypes" behind his fiction. He uses the methods and conventions of the social novel to embody an ultimate human drama.

Money, the most ambiguous of values, is the medium of the social world. Its fatal quality is treated in all tones, at all levels, in The Idiot. Totsky wants to "sell" Nastasya Filippovna to Ganya for seventy-five thousand roubles; Rogozhin offers a hundred thousand for her. In one of the greatest scenes in the novel, Nastasya Filippovna throws his hundred thousand into the fire with everyone watching and challenges Ganya to pull it out. There are many other variations: the prince's unexpected inheritance, and Burdovsky's outrageous attempt, spurred on by his nihilist friends, to claim part of it while maintaining his nihilist principles; General Ivolgin's theft of Lebedev's four hundred roubles and his subsequent disgrace; Ptitsyn's successful moneylending and his dream of owning two houses (or maybe even three) on Liteinaya Street; Evgeny Pavlovich's rich uncle and his embezzlement of government funds; Ippolit's story of the impoverished doctor; Ferdyshchenko's "worst deed"; the repeatedly mentioned newspaper stories of murders for the sake of robbery. The clownish clerk Lebedev, though a petty usurer himself, is also an interpreter of the Apocalypse: "we live in the time of the third horse, the black one, and the rider with a balance in his hand, because in our time everything is in balances and contracts, and people are all only seeking their rights: 'A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny . . .' And with all that they want to preserve a free spirit, and a pure heart, and a healthy body, and all of God's gifts. But they can't do it with rights alone, and there will follow a pale horse and him whose

name is Death." His interpretation unwittingly reveals the twofold structure of reality in The Idiot.

Prince Myshkin has two loves, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya, one belonging to each "world" of the novel. He also has two doubles: Rogozhin and Ippolit. There is a deep bond between the dying consumptive nihilist thinker and the impulsive, unreflecting, passionate merchant's son, between the suicide and the murderer, and Ippolit recognizes it. "Les extrémités se touchent" he says, quoting Pascal. As late as September 1868, Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook: "Ippolit - the main axis of the novel." The young nihilist belongs among Dostoevsky's "rebels against Creation," along with Kirillov in Demons and Ivan Karamazov. His "Necessary Explanation," as Joseph Frank has observed,* contains all the elements of the prince's worldview, but with an opposite attitude. Speaking of Holbein's Christ, he says that it shows nature as "some huge machine of the newest construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being." And he wonders how Christ's disciples, seeing a corpse like that, could believe "that this sufferer would resurrect," and whether Christ himself, if he could have seen his own image on the eve of his execution, would have "gone to the cross and died as he did." Ippolit is also a man sentenced to death by the "dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power to which everything is subjected," but instead of meekly accepting his fate, instead of passing by and forgiving others their happiness, as the prince advises, he protests, weeps, revolts. If Ippolit is not finally the main axis of the novel, he poses its central question in the most radical and explicit way.

Rogozhin, on the other hand, tells the prince that he likes looking at the Holbein painting. The prince, "under the impression of an unexpected thought," replies: "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!" "Lose it he does," Rogozhin agrees. But to Rogozhin's direct question, whether he believes in God, the prince gives no direct reply. That is another significant moment of reticence

*Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, Princeton, 1995.

on Myshkin's part. Instead, he turns the conversation to "the essence of religious feeling" and says, "There are things to be done in our Russian world, believe me!" A moment later, at Rogozhin's request, they exchange crosses and become "brothers." Yet the exact nature of their brotherhood remains a mystery. From that point on, Rogozhin becomes the prince's shadow, lurking, menacing, hiding, yet inseparable from him, until the final scene finds them pressed face to face. Dostoevsky's doubles, which might seem images of personal division, are in fact images of human oneness.

The Idiot is Dostoevsky's most autobiographical novel. He gave Prince Myshkin many details of his own childhood and youth, his epilepsy, his separation from life and Russia (the author's years of hard labor and "exile" in Siberia corresponding to the prince's treatment in Switzerland), his return with a new sense of mission. More specifically, in Myshkin's story of the mock execution of an "acquaintance," Dostoevsky gives a detailed account of his own experience on the scaffold in the Semyonovsky parade ground, at the age of twenty-eight, when he thought he had only three more minutes to live. According to a memoir by another of the condemned men, Fyodor Lvov,* Dostoevsky turned to their comrade Speshnyov and said: "We will be together with Christ." And Speshnyov, with a wry smile, replied: "A handful of ashes." As Myshkin puts it: "now he exists and lives, and in three minutes there would be something, some person or thing — but who? and where?" The Idiot is built on that eschatological sense of time. It is the desolate time of Holy Saturday, when Christ is buried, the disciples are scattered and - worse than that - abandoned. "Who could believe that this sufferer would resurrect?" As it turned out, Dostoevsky had not three minutes but thirty-two years to think over Speshnyov's words and his own response to them. The Idiot marks an important step on that way.

Richard Pevear

*Published in Literaturnoe nasledstvo ("Literary Heritage"), vol. 63, p. 188; Moscow, 1956.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mikhail BAKHTIN, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985. The classic study of Dostoevsky's formal innovations and his relations to the traditions of Menippean satire and carnival humor. Michel ELTCHANINOFF, L'Expression du corps chez Dostoevski], unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Paris, 2000. A study of the phenomenology of the body in Dostoevsky's work, in the context of philosophical and religious tradition.

Joseph frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous fears, 1865-1871, Princeton University Press, 1995. The volume of Frank's major five-volume literary-historical study that covers the period of composition of The Idiot.

bruce a. French, Dostoevsky's "Idiot": Dialogue and the Spiritually Good Life, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2001. rené Girard, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground, tr. J. Williams, Crossroads, New York, 1997. An English translation of Girard's 1963 essay Dostoïevski: du double à l'unité, indispensable for its commentary on the erotic/mimetic aspects of Dostoevsky's work. romano guardini, Der Mensch und der Glaube: Versuche iiber die religiose Existenz in Dostojewskijsgrossen Romanen, Hegner, Leipzig, 1932. (French translation: L'Univers religieux de Dostoïevski, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1947.) An important interpretation of the Christian structure of Dostoevsky's work as a whole, never translated into English. vyacheslav ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky, tr. Norman Cameron, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1968. A classic study of Dostoevsky by one of the major Russian symbolist poets.

liza knapp (éd.), Dostoevsky's "The Idiot": A Critical Companion, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1998.

olga meerson, Dostoevsky's Taboos, Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden University Press, Dresden-Munich, 1998.  study of the meta-psychology of tabooing and the meanings of the unsaid in Dostoevsky.

robin feuer miller, Dostoevsky and "The Idiot": Author, Narrator, and Reader, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981.

Konstantin mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, tr. Michael A. Minihan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1967. The work of a distinguished émigré scholar, first published in 1947 and still the best critical biography of Dostoevsky.

Harriet murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1992. george pattison and diane OENNING Thompson, Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2001.

edward wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Notebooks for "The Idiot", tr. Katherine Strelsky, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967. Dostoevsky's notebooks and drafts in preparation for writing The Idiot.

CHRONOLOGY

DATE

AUTHOR'S LIFE

LITERARY CONTEXT

1821

Born in Moscow.

1823-31

Pushkin: Evgeny Onegin.

1825

1830

Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir.

1833-7

At school in Moscow.

1834

Family purchases estate of Darovoe.

Pushkin: The Queen of Spades.

1835

Balzac: Le Père Goriot.

1836

Gogol: The Government Inspector.

l837

Death of mother.

Enters St Petersburg Academy

of Military Engineering.

Dickens: Pickwick Papers. Death of Pushkin in duel.

1839

Death of father, assumed murdered by serfs.

Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme.

1840

Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time.

1841

Death of Lermontov in duel.

1842

Gogol: Dead Souls and The Overcoat.

1844

Graduates, but resigns commission in order to pursue literary career.

1845

Completes Poor Folk - acclaimed by the critic Belinsky.

1846

Publication of Poor Folk and The Double.

1847

Breaks with Belinsky. Joins Petrashevsky circle. "The Landlady", "A Novel in Nine Letters", "A Petersburg Chronicle".

Herzen: Who is to Blame? Herzen leaves Russia. Goncharov: An Ordinary Story.

1848

"A Faint Heart" and "White

Nights".

Death of Belinsky. Thackeray: Vanity Fair.

1849

Netochka Nezvanova. Arrested and imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress. Mock execution. Sentenced to hard labour and Siberian exile.

DATE

AUTHOR'S LIFE

LITERARY CONTEXT

1850

Arrives at Omsk penal colony.

Turgenev: A Month in the Country. Herzen: From the Other Shore. Dickens: David Copperfield.

1851

1852

Tolstoy: Childhood. Turgenev: A Sportsman's Notebook. Death of Gogol.

1853-6

1854

Posted to Semipalatinsk.

1855

1856

Turgenev: Rudin.

1857

Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva.

Flaubert: Madame Bovary. Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal.

1859

The Friend of the Family. Returns to St Petersburg.

Turgenev: A Nest of Gentlefolk. Goncharov: Oblomov. Tolstoy: Family Happiness. Darwin: The Origin of Species.

1860

Starts publication of House of the Dead.

Turgenev: On the Eve.

George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss.

Birth of Chekhov.

1861

Time commences publication. The Insulted and Injured.

Dickens: Great Expectations.

1862

Travels in Europe. Affair with Polina Suslova.

Turgenev: Fathers and Children. Hugo: Les Misérables. Chernyshevsky arrested.

1863

Further travel abroad. Time closed. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.

Tolstoy: The Cossacks. Chernyshevsky: What is to be . Done?

1864

Launch of The Epoch. Death of wife and brother. Notes from Underground.

1865

The Epoch closes. Severe financial difficulties.

Dickens: Our Mutual Friend.

1865-9

Tolstoy: War and Peace.

1866

(Mme and Punishment. The Gambler.

1867

Marries Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Flees abroad to escape creditors.

Turgenev: Smoke.

1868

The Idiot. Birth and death of daughter, Sonya. Visits Switzerland and Italy.

1869

Birth of daughter Liubov.

Flaubert: L'Education sentimentale.

DATE

AUTHOR'S LIFE

LITERARY CONTEXT

1870

The Eternal Husband.

Death of Dickens and Herzen.

1871

Returns to St Petersburg. ' Birth of son, Fyodor.

1871-

Demons (The Devils/The Possessed).

1872

Summer in Staraia Russa -becomes normal summer residence. Becomes editor of The Citizen.

Marx's Das Kapital published

in Russia.

George Eliot: Middlemarch.

1873

Starts Diary of a Writer.

1874

Resigns from The Citizen. Seeks treatment for emphysema in Bad Ems.

1875

A Raw Youth.

1875-8

Tolstoy: Anna Karenina.

1876

1877

Turgenev: Virgin Soil.

1878

Birth and death of son, Alexey. Visits Optina monastery with Vladimir Solovyov.

1879

1879-80

The Brothers Karamazov.

Tolstoy's religious crisis, during which he writes A Confession.

1880

Speech at Pushkin celebrations in Moscow.

Death of Flaubert and George Eliot.

1881

Dies of lung haemorrhage. Buried at Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St Petersburg.

TRANSLATORS' NOTES

LIST OF PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father's first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic. Diminutives are commonly used among family and intimate friends; they have two forms, the familiar and the casual or disrespectful; thus Varvara Ivolgin is called Varya in her family, but Varka by her little brother. A shortened form of the patronymic (i.e., Ivanych for Ivanovich, or Pavlych for Pavlovich), used only in speech, also suggests a certain familiarity. In the following list, stressed syllables are marked. In Russian pronunciation, the stressed vowel is always long, and the unstressed vowels are very short.

Myshkin, Prince Lev Nikoláevich

Baráshkov, Nastásya Filippovna (Nâstya)

Rogôzhin, Parfyôn Semyônovich

Epanchin, General Iván Fyódorovich

_______, Elizavéta (Lizavéta) Prokófyevna

_______, Alexándra Ivánovna

_______, Adelaída Ivánovna

_______, Agláya Ivanovna

Ívolgin, General Ardalión Alexándrovich

_______, Nína Alexándrovna

_______, Gavríla Ardaliónovich (Gánya, Gánechka, Gánka)

_______, Varvára Ardaliónovna (Várya, Várka)

_______, Nikolái Ardaliónovich (Kólya)

Lébedev, Lukyân Timoféevich

_______,Véra Lukyânovna

Teréntyev, Ippolit (no patronymic)

Ptítsyn, Ivân Petrôvich (Vánka)

Radômsky, Evgény Pávlovich

Shch., Prince (no first name, patronymic, or last name)

Tótsky, Afanâsy Ivanovich

Ferdyshchenko (no first name or patronymic)

Keller, Lieutenant, ret. ("the fist gentleman"; no first name

or patronymic) Pavlishchev, Nikolái Andréevich

Dárya Alexéevna ("the sprightly lady"; no last name) Burdôvsky, Antip (no patronymic) Belokónsky, Princess ("old Belokonsky"; no first name or

patronymic)

A NOTE ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF ST PETERSBURG

The city was founded in the early eighteenth century by a decree of the emperor Peter the Great. It is built on the delta of the river Neva, which divides into three main branches: the Big Neva, the Little Neva, the Nevka. On the left bank of the Neva is the city center, where the government buildings, the Winter Palace, the Senate, the Summer Palace and Summer Garden, the theaters, and the main thoroughfares such as Nevsky Prospect and Liteiny Prospect (Liteinaya Street in Dostoevsky's time) are located. Here, too, were the Semyonovsky and Izmailovsky quarters, named for army regiments stationed there. On the right bank of the Neva before it divides is the area known as the Vyborg side; on the right bank between the Nevka and the Little Neva is the Petersburg side, where the Peter and Paul Fortress, the oldest structure of the city, stands; between the Little Neva and the Big Neva is Vassilievsky Island. Further north are smaller islands such as Kamenny Island and Elagin Island, which were then mainly garden suburbs. To the south, some fifteen or twenty miles from the city, are the suburbs of Tsarskoe Selo ("the Tsar's Village") and Pavlovsk, where much of the action of The Idiot takes place.

THE IDIOT

PART ONE

I

Towards the end of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o'clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full steam. It was so damp and foggy that dawn could barely break; ten paces to right or left of the line it was hard to make out anything at all through the carriage windows. Among the passengers there were some who were returning from abroad; but the third-class compartments were more crowded, and they were all petty business folk from not far away. Everyone was tired, as usual, everyone's eyes had grown heavy overnight, everyone was chilled, everyone's face was pale yellow, matching the color of the fog.

In one of the third-class carriages, at dawn, two passengers found themselves facing each other just by the window—both young men, both traveling light, both unfashionably dressed, both with rather remarkable physiognomies, and both, finally, willing to get into conversation with each other. If they had known what was so remarkable about the one and the other at that moment, they would certainly have marveled at the chance that had so strangely seated them facing each other in the third-class carriage of the Petersburg-Warsaw train. One of them was of medium height, about twenty-seven years old, with curly, almost black hair, and small but fiery gray eyes. He had a broad, flat nose and high cheekbones; his thin lips were constantly twisting into a sort of impudent, mocking, and even malicious smile; but his forehead was high and well formed and made up for the lack of nobility in the lower part of his face. Especially notable was the deathly pallor of his face, which gave the young man's whole physiognomy an exhausted look, despite his rather robust build, and at the same time suggested something passionate, to the point of suffering, which was out of harmony with his insolent and coarse smile and his sharp, self-satisfied gaze. He was warmly dressed in an ample lambskin coat covered with black cloth and had not been cold during the night, while his neighbor had been forced to bear on his chilled back all the sweetness of a damp Russian November

night, for which he was obviously not prepared. He was wearing a rather ample and thick sleeveless cloak with an enormous hood, the sort often worn by winter travelers somewhere far abroad, in Switzerland or northern Italy, for instance, certainly not reckoning on such long distances as from Eydkuhnen¹ to Petersburg. But what was proper and quite satisfactory in Italy turned out to be not entirely suitable to Russia. The owner of the cloak with the hood was a young man, also about twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, slightly taller than average, with very blond, thick hair, sunken cheeks, and a sparse, pointed, nearly white little beard. His eyes were big, blue, and intent; their gaze had something quiet but heavy about it and was filled with that strange expression by which some are able to guess at first sight that the subject has the falling sickness. The young man's face, however, was pleasant, fine, and dry, but colorless, and now even blue with cold. From his hands dangled a meager bundle made of old, faded foulard, containing, apparently, all his traveling possessions. On his feet he had thick-soled shoes with gaiters—all not the Russian way. His black-haired companion in the lambskin coat took all this in, partly from having nothing to do, and finally asked, with that tactless grin which sometimes expresses so unceremoniously and carelessly people's pleasure in their neighbor's misfortunes:

"Chilly?"

And he hunched his shoulders.

"Very," his companion replied with extreme readiness, "and note that this is a warm spell. What if it were freezing? It didn't even occur to me that it was so cold at home. I'm unaccustomed to it."

"Coming from abroad, are you?"

"Yes, from Switzerland."

"Whew! Fancy that! ..."

The black-haired man whistled and laughed.

They got to talking. The readiness of the blond young man in the Swiss cloak to answer all his swarthy companion's questions was astonishing and betrayed no suspicion of the utter carelessness, idleness, and impropriety of some of the questions. In answering them he said, among other things, that he had indeed been away from Russia for a long time, more than four years, that he had been sent abroad on account of illness, some strange nervous illness like the falling sickness or St. Vitus's dance, some sort of trembling and convulsions. Listening to him, the swarthy man grinned several

times; he laughed particularly when, to his question: "And did they cure you?" the blond man answered: "No, they didn't."

"Heh! Got all that money for nothing, and we go believing them," the swarthy man remarked caustically.

"That's the real truth!" a poorly dressed gentleman who was sitting nearby broke into the conversation—some sort of encrusted copying clerk, about forty years old, strongly built, with a red nose and a pimply face, "the real truth, sir, they just draw all Russian forces to themselves for nothing!"

"Oh, you're quite wrong in my case," the Swiss patient picked up in a soft and conciliatory voice. "Of course, I can't argue, because I don't know everything, but my doctor gave me some of his last money for the trip and kept me there for almost two years at his own expense."

"What, you mean there was nobody to pay?" asked the swarthy man.

"Mr. Pavlishchev, who supported me there, died two years ago. Then I wrote here to General Epanchin's wife, my distant relation, but I got no answer. So with that I've come back."

"Come back where, though?"

"You mean where will I be staying? ... I don't really know yet . . . so . . ."

"You haven't decided yet?"

And both listeners burst out laughing again.

"And I supppose that bundle contains your whole essence?" the swarthy man asked.

"I'm ready to bet it does," the red-nosed clerk picked up with an extremely pleased air, "and that there's no further belongings in the baggage car—though poverty's no vice, that again is something one can't help observing."

It turned out to be so: the blond young man acknowledged it at once and with extraordinary alacrity.

"Your bundle has a certain significance all the same," the clerk went on after they had laughed their fill (remarkably, the owner of the bundle, looking at them, finally started laughing himself, which increased their merriment), "and though you can bet it doesn't contain any imported gold packets of napoleondors or fried-richsdors, or any Dutch yellow boys,² a thing that might be deduced merely from the gaiters enclosing your foreign shoes, but ... if to your bundle we were to add some such supposed relation as General Epanchin's wife, then your bundle would take on a

somewhat different significance, naturally only in the case that General Epanchin's wife is indeed your relation, and you didn't make a mistake out of absentmindedness . . . which is quite, quite human . . . well, say . . . from an excess of imagination."

"Oh, you've guessed right again," the blond young man picked up. "I am indeed almost mistaken, that is, she's almost not my relation; so that I really wasn't surprised in the least when they didn't answer me there. I even expected it."

"Wasted your money franchising the letter for nothing. Hm . . . but at any rate you're simple-hearted and sincere, which is commendable! Hm . . . and General Epanchin we know, sir, essentially because he's a generally known man. And the late Mr. Pavlishchev, who supported you in Switzerland, we also knew, sir, if it was Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev, because there were two cousins. The other one is still in the Crimea, but the deceased Nikolai Andreevich was a respectable man, and with connections, and owned four thousand souls³ in his time, sir . . ."

"Just so, his name was Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev," and, having responded, the young man looked intently and inquisitively at Mr. Know-it-all.

These Mr. Know-it-alls are occasionally, even quite frequently, to be met with in a certain social stratum. They know everything, all the restless inquisitiveness of their minds and all their abilities are turned irresistibly in one direction, certainly for lack of more important life interests and perspectives, as a modern thinker would say. The phrase "they know all" implies, however, a rather limited sphere: where so-and-so works, who he is acquainted with, how much he is worth, where he was governor, who he is married to, how much his wife brought him, who his cousins are, who his cousins twice removed are, etc., etc., all in the same vein. For the most part these know-it-alls go about with holes at the elbows and earn a salary of seventeen roubles a month. The people whose innermost secrets they know would, of course, be unable to understand what interests guide them, and yet many of them are positively consoled by this knowledge that amounts to a whole science; they achieve self-respect and even the highest spiritual satisfaction. Besides, it is a seductive science. I have known scholars, writers, poets, political activists who sought and found their highest peace and purpose in this science, who positively made their careers by it alone. During this whole conversation the swarthy young man kept yawning, looking aimlessly out of the window and waiting

impatiently for the end of the journey. He seemed somehow distracted, very distracted, all but alarmed, was even becoming somehow strange: sometimes he listened without listening, looked without looking, laughed without always knowing or understanding himself why he was laughing.

"But, excuse me, with whom do I have the honor . . ." the pimply gentleman suddenly addressed the blond young man with the bundle.

"Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin," the other replied with full and immediate readiness.

"Prince Myshkin? Lev Nikolaevich? Don't know it, sir. Never even so much as heard it, sir," the clerk replied, pondering. "I don't mean the name, the name's historical, it can and should be found in Karamzin's History,⁴ I mean the person, sir, there's no Prince Myshkins to be met with anywhere, and even the rumors have died out."

"Oh, that's certain!" the prince answered at once. "There are no Prince Myshkins at all now except me; it seems I'm the last one. And as for our fathers and grandfathers, we've even had some farmers among them. My father, however, was a second lieutenant in the army, from the junkers.⁵ But I don't know in what way Mrs. Epanchin also turns out to be Princess Myshkin, also the last in her line . . ."

"Heh, heh, heh! The last in her line. Heh, heh! What a way to put it," the clerk tittered.

The swarthy man also smiled. The blond man was slightly surprised that he had managed to make a pun, though a rather bad one.

"And imagine, I never thought what I was saying," he finally explained in surprise.

"That's clear, that's clear, sir," the clerk merrily agreed.

"And say, Prince, did you do any studying there at your professor's?" the swarthy man suddenly asked.

"Yes . . . I did . . ."

"And me, I never studied anything."

"Well, I only did a little of this and that," the prince added, almost apologetically. "They found it impossible to educate me systematically because of my illness."

"You know the Rogozhins?" the swarthy man asked quickly.

"No, not at all. I know very few people in Russia. Are you a Rogozhin?"

"Yes, I'm Parfyon Rogozhin."

"Parfyon? You're not from those same Rogozhins . . ." the clerk began with increased importance.

"Yes, the same, the very same," the swarthy man interrupted quickly and with impolite impatience; he had, incidentally, never once addressed the pimply clerk, but from the very beginning had talked only to the prince.

"But . . . can it be?" The clerk was astonished to the point of stupefaction, his eyes nearly popped out, and his whole face at once began to compose itself into something reverent and obsequious, even frightened. "Of that same Semyon Parfyonovich Rogozhin, the hereditary honorary citizen⁶ who died about a month ago and left two and a half million in capital?"

"And how do you know he left two and a half million in pure capital?" the swarthy man interrupted, this time also not deigning to glance at the clerk. "Just look!" he winked at the prince. "And what's the good of them toadying like that straight off? It's true my parent died, and I'm coming home from Pskov a month later all but bootless. Neither my brother, the scoundrel, nor my mother sent me any money or any notice—nothing! Like a dog! Spent the whole month in Pskov in delirium ..."

"And now you've got a nice little million or more coming, and that's at the least—oh, Lord!" the clerk clasped his hands.

"Well, what is it to him, pray tell me!" Rogozhin nodded towards him again irritably and spitefully. "I won't give you a kopeck, even if you walk upside down right here in front of me."

"And I will, I will."

"Look at that! No, I won't give you anything, not even if you dance a whole week for it!"

"Don't give me anything! Don't! It serves me right! But I will dance. I'll leave my wife, my little children, and dance before you. Be nice, be nice!"

"Pah!" the swarthy man spat. "Five weeks ago," he turned to the prince, "I ran away from my parent to my aunt in Pskov, like you, with nothing but a little bundle; I fell into delirium there, and while I was gone he up and died. Hit by a stroke. Memory eternal to the deceased,⁷ but he almost did me in before then! By God, Prince, believe me! If I hadn't run away, he'd have done me to death."

"Did you do something to make him angry?" the prince responded, studying the millionaire in the lambskin coat with some special curiosity. But though there might well have been something

noteworthy in the million itself and in receiving an inheritance, the prince was surprised and intrigued by something else; besides, Rogozhin himself, for some reason, was especially eager to make the prince his interlocutor, though the need for an interlocutor seemed more mechanical than moral; somehow more from distraction than from simple-heartedness; from anxiety, from agitation, just to look at someone and wag his tongue about something. It seemed he was still delirious, or at least in a fever. As for the clerk, the man simply hovered over Rogozhin, not daring to breathe, catching and weighing every word as if searching for diamonds.

"Angry, yes, he was angry, and maybe rightly," Rogozhin replied, "but it was my brother who really got me. About my mother there's nothing to say, she's an old woman, reads the Menaion,⁸ sits with the old crones, and whatever brother Senka decides, so it goes. But why didn't he let me know in time? We understand that, sir! True, I was unconscious at the time. They also say a telegram was sent. But the telegram happened to come to my aunt. And she's been widowed for thirty years and sits with the holy fools⁹ from morning till evening. A nun, or not a nun but worse still. She got scared of the telegram and took it to the police station without opening it, and so it's been lying there ever since. Only Konev, Vassily Vassilyich, rescued me. He wrote about everything. At night my brother cut the gold tassels off the brocade cover on the old man's coffin: 'They cost a whole lot of money,' he says. But for that alone he could go to Siberia if I want, because that's a blasphemy. Hey, you, scarecrow!" he turned to the clerk. "What's the law: is it a blasphemy?"

"A blasphemy! A blasphemy!" the clerk agreed at once.

"Meaning Siberia?"

"Siberia! Siberia! Straight off to Siberia!"

"They keep thinking I'm still sick," Rogozhin continued to the prince, "but without saying a word, secretly, I got on the train, still sick, and I'm coming. Open the gates, brother Semyon Semyonych! He said things to the old man about me, I know it. And it's true I really irritated the old man then, on account of Nastasya Filippovna. That's my own doing. Sin snared me."

"On account of Nastasya Filippovna?" the clerk said obsequiously, as if realizing something.

"You don't know her!" Rogozhin shouted at him impatiently.

"Or maybe I do!" the clerk replied triumphantly.

"Well, now! As if there's so few Nastasya Filippovnas! And what

a brazen creature you are, I tell you! I just knew some creature like him would cling to me at once!" he continued to the prince.

"Or maybe I do know her, sir!" the clerk fidgeted. "Lebedev knows! You, Your Highness, are pleased to reproach me, but what if I prove it? It's the same Nastasya Filippovna on account of whom your parent wanted to admonish you with a blackthorn stick, and Nastasya Filippovna is Barashkov, she's even a noble lady, so to speak, and also a sort of princess, and she keeps company with a certain Totsky, Afanasy Ivanovich, exclusively with him alone, a landowner and a big capitalist, a member of companies and societies, and great friends on that account with General Epanchin . . ."

"Aha, so that's how you are!" Rogozhin was really surprised at last. "Pah, the devil, so he does know."

"He knows everything! Lebedev knows everything! I, Your Highness, spent two months driving around with Alexashka Likhachev, and also after your parent's death, and I know everything, meaning every corner and back alley, and in the end not a step is taken without Lebedev. Nowadays he's abiding in debtor's prison, but before that I had occasion to know Armance, and Coralie, and Princess Patsky, and Nastasya Filippovna, and I had occasion to know a lot more besides."

"Nastasya Filippovna? Are she and Likhachev ..." Rogozhin looked at him spitefully, his lips even turned pale and trembled.

"N-nothing! N-n-nothing! Nothing at all!" the clerk caught himself and quickly hurried on. "That is, Likhachev couldn't get her for any amount of money! No, it's not like with Armance. There's only Totsky. And in the evening, at the Bolshoi or the French Theater,¹⁰ she sits in her own box. The officers say all kinds of things among themselves, but even they can't prove anything: 'There's that same Nastasya Filippovna,' they say, and that's all; but concerning the rest—nothing! Because there's nothing to say."

"That's how it all is," Rogozhin scowled and confirmed gloomily. "Zalyozhev told me the same thing then. That time, Prince, I was running across Nevsky Prospect in my father's three-year-old coat, and she was coming out of a shop, getting into a carriage. Burned me right through. I meet Zalyozhev, there's no comparing me with him, he looks like a shopkeeper fresh from the barber's, with a lorgnette in his eye, while the old man has us flaunting tarred boots and eating meatless cabbage soup. That's no match for you, he says, that's a princess, and she's called Nastasya Filippovna, family name

Barashkov, and she lives with Totsky, and now Totsky doesn't know how to get rid of her, because he's reached the prime of life, he's fifty-five, and wants to marry the foremost beauty in all Petersburg. And then he let on that I could see Nastasya Filippovna that night at the Bolshoi Theater, at the ballet, in her own box, in the baignoire, sitting there. With our parent, just try going to the ballet—it'll end only one way—he'll kill you! But, anyhow, I ran over for an hour on the quiet and saw Nastasya Filippovna again; didn't sleep all that night. The next morning the deceased gives me two five percent notes, five thousand roubles each, and says go and sell them, take seven thousand five hundred to the Andreevs' office, pay them, and bring me what's left of the ten thousand without stopping anywhere; I'll be waiting for you. I cashed the notes all right, took the money, but didn't go to the Andreevs' office, I went to the English shop without thinking twice, chose a pair of pendants with a diamond almost the size of a nut in each of them, and left owing them four hundred roubles—told them my name and they trusted me. I went to Zalyozhev with the pendants. Thus and so, brother, let's go and see Nastasya Filippovna. Off we went. What was under my feet then, what was in front of me, what was to the sides—I don't know or remember any of it. We walked right into her drawing room, she came out to us herself. I didn't tell her then that it was me, but Zalyozhev says, 'This is for you from Parfyon Rogozhin, in memory of meeting you yesterday. Be so good as to accept it.' She opened it, looked, smiled: 'Thank your friend Mr. Rogozhin for his kind attention,' she said, bowed, and went out. Well, why didn't I die right then! If I went at all, it was only because I thought, 'Anyway, I won't come back alive!' And what offended me most was that that beast Zalyozhev had it all for himself. I'm short and dressed like a boor, and I stand silently staring at her because I'm embarrassed, and he's all so fashionable, pomaded and curled, red-cheeked, in a checkered tie—fawning on her, bowing to her, and it's sure she took him for me! 'Well,' I say when we've left, 'don't you go getting any ideas on me, understand?' He laughs: And what kind of accounting will you give Semyon Parfyonych now?' The truth is I wanted to drown myself right then, without going home, but I thought: 'It makes no difference,' and like a cursed man I went home."

"Ah! Oh!" the clerk went all awry and was even trembling. "And the deceased would have hounded you into the next world for ten roubles, let alone ten thousand," he nodded to the prince. The

prince studied Rogozhin with curiosity; the man seemed still paler at that moment.

"Hounded!" Rogozhin repeated. "What do you know? He found out all about it at once," he continued to the prince, "and Zalyozhev also went blabbing to everybody he met. The old man took me and locked me upstairs, and admonished me for a whole hour. 'I'm just getting you prepared now,' he said. 'I'll come back later to say good night.' And what do you think? The old gray fellow went to Nastasya Filippovna, bowed to the ground before her, pleaded and wept. She finally brought the box and threw it at him: 'Here are your earrings for you, graybeard, and now they're worth ten times more to me, since Parfyon got them under such a menace. Give my regards to Parfyon Semyonych,' she says, 'and thank him for me.' Well, and meanwhile, with my mother's blessing, I got twenty roubles from Seryozhka Protushin and went by train to Pskov, and arrived there in a fever. The old women started reading prayers at me, and I sat there drunk, then went and spent my last money in the pot-houses, lay unconscious in the street all night, and by morning was delirious, and the dogs bit me all over during the night. I had a hard time recovering."

"Well, well, sir, now our Nastasya Filippovna's going to start singing!" the clerk tittered, rubbing his hands. "Now, my good sir, it's not just pendants! Now we'll produce such pendants . . ."

"If you say anything even once about Nastasya Filippovna, by God, I'll give you a whipping, even if you did go around with Likhachev!" cried Rogozhin, seizing him firmly by the arm.

"If you whip me, it means you don't reject me! Whip me! Do it and you put your mark on me . . . But here we are!"

Indeed, they were entering the station. Though Rogozhin said he had left secretly, there were several people waiting for him. They shouted and waved their hats.

"Hah, Zalyozhev's here, too!" Rogozhin muttered, looking at them with a triumphant and even as if spiteful smile, and he suddenly turned to the prince. "Prince, I don't know why I've come to love you. Maybe because I met you at such a moment, though I met him, too" (he pointed to Lebedev), "and don't love him. Come and see me, Prince. We'll take those wretched gaiters off you; I'll dress you in a top-notch marten coat; I'll have the best of tailcoats made for you, a white waistcoat, or whatever you like; I'll stuff your pockets with money, and . . . we'll go to see Nastasya Filippovna! Will you come or not?"

"Hearken, Prince Lev Nikolaevich!" Lebedev picked up imposingly and solemnly. "Ah, don't let it slip away! Don't let it slip away!"

Prince Myshkin rose a little, courteously offered Rogozhin his hand, and said affably:

"I'll come with the greatest pleasure, and I thank you very much for loving me. I may even come today, if I have time. Because, I'll tell you frankly, I like you very much, and I especially liked you when you were telling about the diamond pendants. Even before the pendants I liked you, despite your gloomy face. I also thank you for promising me the clothes and a fur coat, because in fact I'll need some clothes and a fur coat soon. And I have almost no money at the present moment."

"There'll be money towards evening—come!"

"There will be, there will be," the clerk picked up, "towards evening, before sundown, there will be."

"And are you a great fancier of the female sex, Prince? Tell me beforehand!"

"N-n-no! I'm . . . Maybe you don't know, but because of my inborn illness, I don't know women at all."

"Well, in that case," Rogozhin exclaimed, "you come out as a holy fool, Prince, and God loves your kind!"

"The Lord God loves your kind," the clerk picked up.

"And you come with me, pencil pusher," Rogozhin said to Lebedev, and they all got off the train.

Lebedev ended up with what he wanted. Soon the noisy band withdrew in the direction of Voznesensky Prospect. The prince had to turn towards Liteinaya Street. It was damp and wet; the prince inquired of passersby—to reach the end of his route he had to go some two miles, and he decided to hire a cab.

II

General Epanchin lived in his own house off Liteinaya, towards the Cathedral of the Transfiguration. Besides this (excellent) house, five-sixths of which was rented out, General Epanchin owned another enormous house on Sadovaya Street, which also brought him a large income. Besides these two houses, he had quite a profitable and considerable estate just outside Petersburg; and there was also some factory in the Petersburg district. In the old days General Epanchin, as everyone knew, had

participated in tax farming.¹¹ Now he participated and had quite a considerable voice in several important joint-stock companies. He had the reputation of a man with big money, big doings, and big connections. He had managed to make himself absolutely necessary in certain quarters, his own department among others. And yet it was also known that Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin was a man of no education and the son of a common soldier; this last, to be sure, could only do him credit, but the general, though an intelligent man, was also not without his little, quite forgivable weaknesses and disliked certain allusions. But he was unquestionably an intelligent and adroit man. He had a system, for instance, of not putting himself forward, of effacing himself wherever necessary, and many valued him precisely for his simplicity, precisely for always knowing his place. And yet, if these judges only knew what sometimes went on in the soul of Ivan Fyodorovich, who knew his place so well! Though he did indeed have practical sense, and experience in worldly matters, and certain very remarkable abilities, he liked to present himself more as the executor of someone else's idea than as being his own master, as a man "loyal without fawning,"¹² and— what does not happen nowadays?—even Russian and warmhearted. In this last respect several amusing misadventures even happened to him; but the general was never downcast, even at the most amusing misadventures; besides, luck was with him, even at cards, and he played for extremely high stakes, and not only did not want to conceal this little weakness of his for a bit of cardplaying, which came in handy for him so essentially and on many occasions, but even deliberately flaunted it. He belonged to a mixed society, though naturally of a "trumpish" sort. But everything was before him, there was time enough for everything, and everything would come in time and in due course. As for his years, General Epanchin was still, as they say, in the prime of life, that is, fifty-six and not a whit more, which in any case is a flourishing age, the age when true life really begins. His health, his complexion, his strong though blackened teeth, his stocky, sturdy build, the preoccupied expression on his physiognomy at work in the morning, the merry one in the evening over cards or at his highness's— everything contributed to his present and future successes and strewed his excellency's path with roses.

The general had a flourishing family. True, here it was no longer all roses, but instead there were many things on which his excellency's chief hopes and aims had long begun to be seriously and

heartily concentrated. And what aim in life is more important or sacred than a parental aim? What can one fasten upon if not the family? The general's family consisted of a wife and three grownup daughters. Long ago, while still a lieutenant, the general had married a girl nearly his own age, who had neither beauty nor education, and who brought him only fifty souls—which, true, served as the foundation of his further fortune. But the general never murmured later against his early marriage, never regarded it as the infatuation of an improvident youth, and respected his wife so much, and sometimes feared her so much, that he even loved her. The general's wife was from the princely family of the Myshkins, a family which, while not brilliant, was quite old, and she quite respected herself for her origins. One of the influential persons of that time, one of those patrons for whom, incidentally, patronage costs nothing, consented to take an interest in the young princess's marriage. He opened the gate for the young officer and gave him a starting push, though he did not need a push but only a glance— it would not have been wasted! With a few exceptions, the couple lived the whole time of their long jubilee in accord. While still young, the general's wife, as a born princess and the last of the line, and perhaps through her own personal qualities, was able to find some very highly placed patronesses. Later on, with her husband's increasing wealth and significance in the service, she even began to feel somewhat at home in this high circle.

During these last years all three of the general's daughters— Alexandra, Adelaida, and Aglaya—grew up and matured. True, the three were only Epanchins, but they were of princely origin through their mother, with no little dowry, with a father who might later claim a very high post, and, which was also quite important, all three were remarkably good-looking, including the eldest, Alexandra, who was already over twenty-five. The middle one was twenty-three, and the youngest, Aglaya, had just turned twenty. This youngest was even quite a beauty and was beginning to attract great attention in society. But that was still not all: all three were distinguished by their cultivation, intelligence, and talent. It was known that they had a remarkable love for each other and stood up for each other. Mention was even made of some supposed sacrifices the elder two had made in favor of the common idol of the house— the youngest. In society they not only did not like putting themselves forward, but were even much too modest. No one could reproach them with haughtiness or presumption, and yet it was

known that they were proud and knew their own worth. The eldest was a musician, the middle one an excellent painter; but almost no one knew of that for many years and it was discovered only quite recently, and that by accident. In short, a great many laudable things were said about them. But there were also ill-wishers. With horror it was told how many books they had read. They were in no rush to get married; they did esteem a certain social circle, but not too highly. This was the more remarkable as everyone knew the tendency, character, aims, and wishes of their father.

It was already around eleven o'clock when the prince rang at the general's apartment. The general lived on the second floor and occupied lodgings which, though as modest as possible, were still proportionate to his significance. A liveried servant opened the door for the prince, and he had to spend a long time talking with this man, who from the start looked suspiciously at him and his bundle. Finally, to his repeated and precise statement that he was indeed Prince Myshkin and that he absolutely had to see the general on urgent business, the perplexed servant sent him to another small anteroom, just before the reception room by the office, and handed him over to another man, who was on duty in this anteroom in the mornings and announced visitors to the general. This other man wore a tailcoat, was over forty, and had a preoccupied physiognomy, and was the special office attendant and announcer to his excellency, owing to which he was conscious of his worth.

"Wait in the reception room, and leave your bundle here," he said, sitting down unhurriedly and importantly in his armchair and glancing with stern astonishment at the prince, who had settled down right next to him in a chair, his bundle in his hands.

"If I may," said the prince, "I'd rather wait here with you. What am I going to do in there by myself?"

"You oughtn't to stay in the anteroom, being a visitor, that is to say, a guest. Do you wish to see the general in person?"

The lackey obviously could not reconcile himself to the thought of admitting such a visitor, and decided to ask again.

"Yes, I have business . . ." the prince began.

"I am not asking you precisely what business—my business is simply to announce you. And without the secretary, as I said, I am not going to announce you."

The man's suspiciousness seemed to be increasing more and more; the prince was too far from fitting into the category of everyday visitors, and though the general had rather often, if not

daily, at a certain hour, to receive sometimes even the most varied sorts of visitors, especially on business, still, in spite of habit and his rather broad instructions, the valet was in great doubt; the secretary's mediation was necessary for the announcement.

"But are you really . . . from abroad?" he finally asked somehow involuntarily—and became confused; perhaps he had wanted to ask: "But are you really Prince Myshkin?"

"Yes, I just got off the train. It seems to me you wanted to ask if I'm really Prince Myshkin, but did not ask out of politeness."

"Hm . . ." the astonished lackey grunted.

"I assure you, I am not lying to you, and you won't have to answer for me. And as for why I've come looking like this and with this bundle, there's nothing surprising about it: my present circumstances are not very pretty."

"Hm. That's not what I'm afraid of, you see. It's my duty to announce you, and the secretary will come out, unless you . . . But that's just it, that unless. You're not going to petition the general on account of your poverty, if I may be so bold?"

"Oh, no, you may be completely assured about that. I have other business."

"Forgive me, but I asked by the look of you. Wait for the secretary; the general is busy with the colonel right now, and afterwards comes the secretary . . . of the company."

"In that case, if I'll have a long wait, let me ask you: is there someplace where I can smoke here? I have a pipe and tobacco with me."

"Smo-o-oke?" The valet raised his eyes to him with scornful perplexity, as if still not believing his ears. "Smoke? No, you can't smoke here, and moreover you should be ashamed of having such thoughts. Hah . . . very odd, sir!"

"Oh, I wasn't asking about this room. I know. I'd have gone wherever you told me, because I've got the habit, and I haven't smoked for three hours now. However, as you please, and, you know, there's a saying: when in Rome . . ."

"Well, how am I going to announce the likes of you?" the valet muttered almost inadvertently. "First of all, you oughtn't to be here at all, but in the reception room, because you're in the line of a visitor, that is to say, a guest, and I'm answerable . . . What is it, do you plan on living with us or something?" he added, casting another sidelong glance at the prince's bundle, which obviously kept bothering him.

"No, I don't think so. Even if they invite me, I won't stay. I've come simply to get acquainted, that's all."

"How's that? To get acquainted?" the valet asked in surprise and with trebled suspiciousness. "How is it you said first that you were here on business?"

"Oh, it's almost not on business! That is, if you like, there is one piece of business, just to ask advice, but it's mainly to introduce myself, because I'm Prince Myshkin, and the general's wife is also the last Princess Myshkin, and except for the two of us, there are no more Myshkins."

"So you're also a relation?" the now all but frightened lackey fluttered himself up.

"That's not quite so either. However, if we stretch it, of course, we're related, but so distantly it's really impossible to work out. I once wrote a letter to the general's wife from abroad, but she didn't answer me. All the same, I thought I should get in touch on my return. I'm telling you all this now so that you won't have doubts, because I can see you're still worried: announce that Prince Myshkin is here, and the announcement itself will contain the reason for my visit. If they receive me—good; if not—that also may be very good. Though I don't think they can not receive me: the general's wife will certainly want to see the eldest and sole representative of her family, and she values her origins very much, as I've heard specifically about her."

It would seem that the prince's conversation was the most simple; but the simpler it was, the more absurd it became in the present case, and the experienced valet could not help feeling something that was perfectly proper between servant and servant, but perfectly improper between a guest and a servant. And since servants are much more intelligent than their masters commonly think, it occurred to the valet that there was one of two things here: either the prince was some sort of moocher and had certainly come to beg for money, or the prince was simply a little fool and had no ambitions, because a clever prince with ambitions would not have sat in the anteroom and discussed his affairs with a lackey, and therefore, in one case or the other, might he not be held answerable?

"But all the same you ought to go to the reception room," he observed as insistently as possible.

"I'd be sitting there and wouldn't have told you all that," the prince laughed merrily, "which means you'd still be looking at my

cloak and bundle and worrying. And now maybe you don't need to wait for the secretary, but can go and announce me yourself."

"I can't announce a visitor like you without the secretary, and besides, the general gave me a specific order earlier not to bother him for anyone while he was with the colonel, but Gavrila Ardalionych can go in without being announced."

"A clerk?"

"Gavrila Ardalionych? No. He works for the Company on his own. You can at least put your bundle down here."

"I already thought of that. With your permission. And, you know, I'll take the cloak off, too."

"Of course, you can't go and see him in your cloak."

The prince stood up, hastily took off his cloak, and remained in a rather decent and smartly tailored, though shabby, jacket. A steel chain hung across his waistcoat. The chain turned out to be attached to a silver Swiss watch.

Though the prince was a little fool—the lackey had already decided that—all the same the general's valet finally found it unsuitable to continue his conversation with the visitor, despite the fact that for some reason he liked the prince, in his own way, of course. But from another point of view, he provoked in him a decided and crude indignation.

"And when does the general's wife receive?" asked the prince, sitting down in his former place.

"That's none of my business, sir. She receives at various times, depending on the person. She'd receive the dressmaker even at eleven o'clock. Gavrila Ardalionych is also admitted earlier than others, even for an early lunch."

"Here it's warmer inside in winter than it is abroad," the prince observed, "but there it's warmer outside than here, while a Russian can't even live in their houses in winter unless he's used to it."

"They don't heat them?"

"No, and the houses are also built differently—the stoves and windows, that is."

"Hm! Have you been traveling long?"

"Four years. Though I sat in the same place almost the whole time, in the country."

"You're unaccustomed to things here?"

"That's true, too. Would you believe, I marvel at myself that I haven't forgotten how to speak Russian. Here I'm talking to you now and thinking to myself: 'I speak well enough after all.' That

may be why I'm talking so much. Really, since yesterday all I've wanted to do is speak Russian."

"Hm! Heh! And did you live in Petersburg before?" (Try as he might, the lackey could not help keeping up such a courteous and polite conversation.)

"In Petersburg? Hardly at all, just in passing. And before I didn't know anything here, but now I've heard so much is new that they say anyone who knew it has to learn to know it all over again. There's a lot of talk about the courts."¹³

"Hm! . . . The courts. The courts, it's true, there's the courts. And do the courts there judge more fairly or not?"

"I don't know. I've heard a lot of good about ours. Then, again, we have no capital punishment."¹⁴

"And they have it there?"

"Yes. I saw it in France, in Lyons. Schneider took me there with him."

"By hanging?"

"No, in France they always cut their heads off."

"And what, do they scream?"

"Hardly! It's instantaneous. The man is laid down, and a broad knife drops, it's a special machine called the guillotine, heavy, powerful... The head bounces off before you can blink an eye. The preparations are the bad part. When they read out the sentence, get everything ready, tie him up, lead him to the scaffold, then it's terrible! People gather, even women, though they don't like it when women watch."

"It's not their business."

"Of course not! Of course not! Such suffering! . . . The criminal was an intelligent man, fearless, strong, mature, his name was Legros. And I tell you, believe it or not, he wept as he climbed the scaffold, he was white as paper. Is it possible? Isn't it terrible? Do people weep from fear? I never thought it was possible for a man who has never wept, for a man of forty-five, not a child, to weep from fear! What happens at that moment with the soul, what convulsions is it driven to? It's an outrage on the soul, and nothing more! It's said, 'Do not kill.' So he killed, and then they kill him? No, that's impossible. I saw it a month ago, and it's as if it were still there before my eyes. I've dreamed about it five times."

The prince even grew animated as he spoke, a slight flush came to his pale face, though his speech was as quiet as before. The valet watched him with sympathetic interest and seemed unwilling to

tear himself away; perhaps he, too, was a man with imagination and an inclination to thinking.

"It's a good thing there's not much suffering," he observed, "when the head flies off."

"You know what?" the prince picked up hotly. "You've just observed that, and everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that. But a thought occurred to me then: what if it's even worse? To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination even a thought like that can pop into your head. Think: if there's torture, for instance, then there's suffering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die. And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second—your soul will fly out of your body and you'll no longer be a man, and it's for certain—the main thing is that it's for certain. When you put your head under that knife and hear it come screeching down on you, that one quarter of a second is the most horrible of all. Do you know that this isn't my fantasy, but that many people have said so? I believe it so much that I'll tell you my opinion outright. To kill for killing is an immeasurably greater punishment than the crime itself. To be killed by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than to be killed by robbers. A man killed by robbers, stabbed at night, in the forest or however, certainly still hopes he'll be saved till the very last minute. There have been examples when a man's throat has already been cut, and he still hopes, or flees, or pleads. But here all this last hope, which makes it ten times easier to die, is taken away for certain; here there's the sentence, and the whole torment lies in the certainty that there's no escape, and there's no greater torment in the world than that. Take a soldier, put him right in front of a cannon during a battle, and shoot at him, and he'll still keep hoping, but read that same soldier a sentence for certain, and he'll lose his mind or start weeping. Who ever said human nature could bear it without going mad? Why such an ugly, vain, unnecessary violation? Maybe there's a man who has had the sentence read to him, has been allowed to suffer, and has then been told, 'Go, you're forgiven.' That man might be able to tell us something. Christ spoke of this suffering and horror. No, you can't treat a man like that!"¹⁵

The valet, though of course he could not have expressed it all

like the prince, nevertheless understood, if not all, at least the main thing, as could be seen by his softened expression.

"If you have such a wish to smoke," he said, "it might be possible, if you do it quickly. Because he may ask for you suddenly, and you won't be here. There, under the stairway, you see, there's a door. As you go through the door, there's a little room to the right: you can smoke there, only open the vent window, because it's against the rules . . ."

But the prince had no time to go and smoke. A young man suddenly came into the anteroom with papers in his hands. The valet began to help him out of his fur coat. The young man cocked an eye at the prince.

"Gavrila Ardalionych," the valet began confidentially and almost familiarly, "this gentleman here presents himself as Prince Myshkin and the lady's relation, come by train from abroad with a bundle in his hands, only . . ."

The prince did not hear the rest, because the valet started whispering. Gavrila Ardalionovich listened attentively and kept glancing at the prince with great curiosity. Finally he stopped listening and approached him impatiently.

"You are Prince Myshkin?" he asked extremely amiably and politely. He was a very handsome young man, also of about twenty-eight, a trim blond, of above average height, with a small imperial, and an intelligent and very handsome face. Only his smile, for all its amiability, was somewhat too subtle; it revealed his somewhat too pearly and even teeth; his gaze, for all its cheerfulness and ostensible simple-heartedness, was somewhat too intent and searching.

"When he's alone he probably doesn't look that way, and maybe never laughs," the prince somehow felt.

The prince explained all he could, hurriedly, almost in the same way as he had explained to the valet earlier, and to Rogozhin earlier still. Gavrila Ardalionovich meanwhile seemed to be recalling something.

"Was it you," he asked, "who sent a letter to Elizaveta Prokofyevna about a year ago, from Switzerland, I believe?"

"Exactly so."

"In that case they know you here and certainly remember. You wish to see his excellency? I'll announce you presently . . . He'll be free presently. Only you . . . you must kindly wait in the reception room . . . Why is the gentleman here?" he sternly addressed the valet.

"I tell you, he didn't want to . . ."

At that moment the door of the office suddenly opened and some military man with a portfolio in his hand came through it, speaking loudly and bowing his way out.

"Are you there, Ganya?" a voice called from the office. "Come in, please!"

Gavrila Ardalionovich nodded to the prince and hastily went into the office.

About two minutes later the door opened again and the affable voice of Gavrila Ardalionovich rang out:

"Please come in, Prince!"

III

General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin was standing in the middle of his office, looking with extreme curiosity at the entering prince, and even took two steps towards him. The prince approached and introduced himself.

"So, sir," replied the general, "what can I do for you?"

"I don't have any pressing business; my purpose was simply to make your acquaintance. I wouldn't want to disturb you, since I don't know anything about your day or your arrangements . . . But I just got off the train . . . I've come from Switzerland . . ."

The general was about to smile, but thought better of it and stopped; then he thought more, narrowed his eyes, looked his guest over once again from head to foot, after which he quickly motioned him to a chair, sat down himself somewhat obliquely, and turned to the prince in impatient expectation. Ganya stood in the corner of the office, by the desk, sorting papers.

"In fact, I have little time for making acquaintances," said the general, "but since you, of course, have some purpose of your own . . ."

"I did anticipate," the prince interrupted, "that you would not fail to see some special purpose in my visit. But, by God, apart from the pleasure of making your acquaintance, I have no particular purpose at all."

"For me, too, of course, it is certainly an extreme pleasure, but amusement isn't all, you know, one sometimes happens to be busy . . . Besides, so far I'm unable to see between us any common . . . any, so to speak, reason . . ."

"There's no reason, indisputably, and, of course, very little in common. Because if I am Prince Myshkin and your spouse is from our family, that, naturally, is no reason. I understand that very well. But nevertheless, my whole pretext consists only in that. I haven't been in Russia for four years or so; and what was I when I left— all but out of my mind! I knew nothing then, and know still less now. I'm in need of good people; there's even one piece of business I have, and I don't know who to turn to. When I was in Berlin, I thought: 'They're almost my relations, I'll start with them; we might be useful to each other—they to me, and I to them—if they're good people.' And I'd heard you were good people."

"Much obliged, sir," the general was surprised. "Allow me to inquire where you're staying."

"I'm not staying anywhere yet."

"So you came to me straight from the train? And . . . with your luggage?"

"All the luggage I have is a little bundle of linen, and nothing else; I usually carry it with me. I'll have time to take a room in the evening."

"Then you still intend to take a room?"

"Oh, yes, of course."

"Judging by your words, I was of a mind that you had come straight to me."

"That could be, but not otherwise than by your invitation. Though, I confess, I wouldn't stay even then, not that there's any reason, but just ... by character."

"Well, that makes it opportune that I did not and do not invite you. Excuse me, Prince, but to clarify it all at once: since you and I have just concluded that there can be no talk between us of being related—though, naturally, I'd find it very flattering—it means that . . ."

"It means that I can get up and leave?" the prince rose slightly, laughing even somehow merrily, despite all the apparent embarrassment of his situation. "There, by God, General, though I have absolutely no practical knowledge either of local customs or of how people normally live here, things went with us just now as I thought they were certain to go. Well, maybe that's how it should be . . . And you also didn't answer my letter then . . . Well, good-bye and forgive me for bothering you."

The prince's gaze was so gentle at that moment, and his smile was so free of the least shade of any concealed hostility, that the

general suddenly stopped and somehow suddenly looked at his visitor in a different way; the whole change of view occurred in a single instant.

"But you know, Prince," he said in an almost totally different voice, "after all, I don't know you, and Elizaveta Prokofyevna might want to have a look at her namesake . . . Perhaps you'd like to wait, if your time will keep."

"Oh, my time will keep; my time is all my own" (and the prince immediately put his round, soft-brimmed hat on the table). "I confess, I counted on Elizaveta Prokofyevna maybe remembering that I had written to her. Your servant, when I was waiting for you earlier, suspected that I had come to beg from you out of poverty; I noticed it, and you must have given him strict instructions about that; but I really didn't come for that, I really came only so as to get to know people. Only I have a slight suspicion that I've disturbed you, and that troubles me."

"I'll tell you what, Prince," the general said with a cheerful smile, "if you are indeed the way you seem to be, it might very well be pleasant to become acquainted with you; only, you see, I'm a busy man and presently I'll sit down again to look something over and sign it, and then I'll go to see his highness, and then to my department, and the result is that though I'm glad to meet people ... I mean, good people . . . still. . . However, I'm so convinced of your perfect upbringing that . . . And how old are you, Prince?"

"Twenty-six."

"Hah! And I thought you were much younger."

"Yes, people say I have a youthful face. But I'll learn not to disturb you and figure it out quickly, because I myself don't like to disturb . . . And, finally, it seems to me that we're such different people, by the look of it... in many ways, that we perhaps cannot have many points in common, only, you know, I personally don't believe in that last notion, because it often only seems that there are no points in common, when there really are a lot ... it comes from people's laziness, that they sort themselves out by looks and can't find anything . . . But, anyhow, maybe I've begun to bore you? It's as if you . . ."

"A couple of words, sir: do you have some property at least? Or perhaps you intend to take something up? I apologize for being so . . ."

"Good heavens, I understand your question and appreciate it very much. So far I have no property, nor any occupation either,

and I should have, sir. And the money I now have isn't mine, it was given to me by Schneider, the professor who treated me and taught me in Switzerland, for the trip, and he gave me just enough, so that now, for instance, I have only a few kopecks left. I have one bit of business, it's true, and I'm in need of advice, but . . ."

"Tell me, how do you intend to subsist meanwhile, and what were your intentions?" the general interrupted.

"I wanted to do some sort of work."

"Oh, so you're a philosopher! But still . . . are you aware of having any talents, any abilities, at least of some sort, that could earn you your daily bread? Again, I apologize . . ."

"Oh, don't apologize. No, sir, I don't think I have any talents or special abilities; even the contrary, because I'm a sick man and have had no regular education. As for daily bread, it seems to me . . ."

The general interrupted again, and again began to ask questions. The prince told him once more all that has already been told. It turned out that the general had heard of the late Pavlishchev and had even known him personally. Why Pavlishchev had concerned himself with his upbringing, the prince himself was unable to explain—however, it might simply have been out of old friendship for his late father. The prince, at his parents' death, was left still a little child; all his life he lived and grew up in the country, since his health also called for village air. Pavlishchev entrusted him to some old lady landowners, his relations; first a governess was hired for him, then a tutor; he said, however, that though he remembered everything, he was hardly capable of giving a satisfactory account of it, because he had been unaware of many things. The frequent attacks of his illness had made almost an idiot of him (the prince actually said "idiot"). He told, finally, how one day in Berlin, Pavlishchev met Professor Schneider, a Swiss, who studied precisely such illnesses, had an institution in Switzerland, in canton Valais, used his own method of treatment by cold water and gymnastics, treated idiotism, insanity, also provided education, and generally attended to spiritual development; that Pavlishchev had sent him to Schneider in Switzerland about five years ago, and had died himself two years ago, suddenly, without making any arrangements; that Schneider had kept him and gone on with his treatment for another two years; that he had not cured him but had helped him very much; and that, finally, by his own wish and owing to a certain new circumstance, he had now sent him to Russia.

The general was very surprised.

"And you have no one in Russia, decidedly no one?" he asked.

"No one right now, but I hope . . . besides, I received a letter . . ."

"At least," the general interrupted, not hearing about the letter, "you have some sort of education, and your illness won't hinder you from occupying, for example, some undemanding post in some branch of the service?"

"Oh, certainly not. And concerning a post, I'd even like that very much, because I want to see for myself what I'm able to do. I studied constantly for four years, though not quite in a regular way but by his special system, and I also managed to read a great many Russian books."

"Russian books? So you're literate and can write without mistakes?"

"Oh, indeed I can."

"Splendid, sir. And your handwriting?"

"My handwriting is excellent. That's perhaps where my talent lies; I'm a real calligrapher. Let me write something for you now as a sample," the prince said warmly.

"Kindly do. And there's even a need for it . . . And I like this readiness of yours, Prince, you're really very nice."

"You have such fine handwriting accessories, and so many pencils, pens, such fine, thick paper . . . And it's such a fine office you have! I know that landscape, it's a view of Switzerland. I'm sure the artist painted it from nature, and I'm sure I've seen that spot: it's in canton Uri . . ."

"Quite possible, though I bought it here. Ganya, give the prince some paper; here are pens and paper, sit at this table, please. What's that?" the general turned to Ganya, who meanwhile had taken a large-format photographic portrait from his portfolio and handed it to him. "Bah! Nastasya Filippovna! She sent it to you herself, she herself?" he asked Ganya with animation and great curiosity.

"She gave it to me just now, when I came to wish her a happy birthday. I've been asking for a long time. I don't know, I'm not sure it's not a hint on her part about my coming empty-handed, without a present, on such a day," Ganya added, smiling unpleasantly.

"Ah, no," the general interrupted with conviction, "and really, what a turn of mind you've got! She wouldn't go hinting . . . and she's completely unmercenary. And besides, what kind of presents can you give: it's a matter of thousands here! Your portrait, maybe? And say, incidentally, has she asked you for your portrait yet?"

"No, she hasn't. And maybe she never will. You remember about this evening, of course, Ivan Fyodorovich? You're among those specially invited."

"I remember, I remember, of course, and I'll be there. What else, it's her birthday, she's twenty-five! Hm ... You know, Ganya— so be it—I'm going to reveal something to you, prepare yourself. She promised Afanasy Ivanovich and me that this evening at her place she will say the final word: whether it's to be or not to be! So now you know."

Ganya suddenly became so confused that he even turned slightly pale.

"Did she say it for certain?" he asked, and his voice seemed to quaver.

"She gave her word two days ago. We both badgered her so much that we forced her into it. Only she asked us not to tell you meanwhile."

The general peered intently at Ganya; he evidently did not like Ganya's confusion.

"Remember, Ivan Fyodorovich," Ganya said anxiously and hesitantly, "she gave me complete freedom of decision until she decides the matter herself, and even then what I say is still up to me . . ."

"So maybe you ... maybe you ..." The general suddenly became alarmed.

"Never mind me."

"Good heavens, what are you trying to do to us!"

"But I'm not backing out. Maybe I didn't put it right . . ."

"I'll say you're not backing out!" the general said vexedly, not even wishing to conceal his vexation. "Here, brother, it's not a matter of your not backing out, but of the readiness, the pleasure, the joy with which you receive her words . . . How are things at home?"

"At home? At home everything's the way I want it to be, only my father plays the fool, as usual, but it's become completely outrageous; I no longer speak to him, but I keep him in an iron grip, and, in fact, if it weren't for my mother, I'd have shown him the door. My mother cries all the time, of course, my sister's angry, but I finally told them straight out that I'm the master of my fate and at home I want to be . . . obeyed. I spelled it all out to my sister anyway, in front of my mother."

"And I, brother, go on not understanding," the general observed pensively, heaving his shoulders slightly and spreading his arms a

little. "Nina Alexandrovna—remember when she came to us the other day? She moaned and sighed. 'What's the matter?' I ask. It comes out that there's supposedly some dishonor in it for them. Where's the dishonor, may I ask? Who can reproach Nastasya Filippovna with anything or point at anything in her? Is it that she was with Totsky? But that's such nonsense, especially considering certain circumstances! 'You wouldn't let her meet your daughters, would you?' she says. Well! So there! That's Nina Alexandrovna! I mean, how can she not understand it, how can she not understand ..."

"Her position?" Ganya prompted the faltering general. "She does understand it; don't be angry with her. Besides, I gave them a dressing-down then, so they wouldn't poke their noses into other people's business. And anyhow, so far things are holding together at home only because the final word hasn't been spoken; that's when the storm will break. If the final word is spoken tonight, then everything will be spoken."

The prince heard this whole conversation, sitting in the corner over his calligraphic sample. He finished, went up to the desk, and handed over his page.

"So this is Nastasya Filippovna?" he said, gazing at the portrait attentively and curiously. "Remarkably good-looking!" he warmly added at once. The portrait showed a woman of extraordinary beauty indeed. She had been photographed in a black silk dress of a very simple and graceful cut; her hair, apparently dark blond, was done simply, informally; her eyes were dark and deep, her forehead pensive; the expression of her face was passionate and as if haughty. Her face was somewhat thin, perhaps also pale . . . Ganya and the general looked at the prince in amazement . . .

"How's that? Nastasya Filippovna! So you already know Nastasya Filippovna?" asked the general.

"Yes, just one day in Russia and I already know such a great beauty," the prince answered and at once told them about his meeting with Rogozhin and recounted his whole story.

"Well, that's news!" The general, who had listened to the story with extreme attention, became alarmed again and glanced searchingly at Ganya.

"It's probably just outrageous talk," murmured Ganya, also somewhat bewildered. "A merchant boy's carousing. I've already heard something about him."

"So have I, brother," the general picked up. "Right after the earrings, Nastasya Filippovna told the whole anecdote. But now

it's a different matter. There may actually be a million sitting here and ... a passion, an ugly passion, if you like, but all the same it smacks of passion, and we know what these gentlemen are capable of when they're intoxicated! . . . Hm! . . . Some sort of anecdote may come of it!" the general concluded pensively.

"You're afraid of a million?" Ganya grinned.

"And you're not, of course?"

"How did it seem to you, Prince?" Ganya suddenly turned to him. "Is he a serious man or just a mischief maker? What's your personal opinion?"

Something peculiar took place in Ganya as he was asking this question. It was as if some new and peculiar idea lit up in his brain and glittered impatiently in his eyes. The general, who was genuinely and simple-heartedly worried, also glanced sidelong at the prince, but as if he did not expect much from his reply.

"I don't know, how shall I put it," replied the prince, "only it seemed to me there's a lot of passion in him, and even some sort of sick passion. And he seems to be quite sick himself. It's very possible he'll take to his bed again during his first days in Petersburg, especially if he goes on a spree."

"So? It seemed so to you?" the general latched on to this idea.

"Yes, it did."

"And, anyhow, that kind of anecdote needn't take several days. Something may turn up even today, this same evening," Ganya smiled to the general.

"Hm! . . . Of course ... So it may, and then it all depends on what flashes through her head," said the general.

"And you know how she can be sometimes?"

"How do you mean?" the general, who by now was extremely disturbed, heaved himself up. "Listen, Ganya, please don't contradict her too much tonight, and try, you know, to ... in short, to humor . . . Hm! . . . Why are you twisting your mouth like that? Listen, Gavrila Ardalionych, it would be opportune, even very opportune, to say now: what's all this fuss about? You see, concerning the profit that's in it for me, I've long been secure; one way or another I'll turn it to my benefit. Totsky's decision is firm, and so I, too, am completely assured. And therefore, if there's anything I wish for now, it's your benefit. Judge for yourself—or don't you trust me? Besides, you're a man ... a man ... in short, a man of intelligence, and I've been counting on you . . . and in the present case that is . . . that is . . ."

"That is the main thing," Ganya finished, again helping out the faltering general, and contorting his lips into a most venomous smile, which he no longer cared to hide. He fixed his inflamed gaze directly on the general's eyes, as if he even wished to read the whole of his thought in them. The general turned purple and flared up.

"Well, yes, intelligence is the main thing!" he agreed, looking sharply at Ganya. "And what a funny man you are, Gavrila Ardalionych! You seem to be glad, I notice, of that little merchant, as a way out for yourself. But here you precisely should have gone by intelligence from the very beginning; here precisely one must understand and . . . and act honestly and directly on both sides, or else . . . give a warning beforehand, so as not to compromise others, the more so as there's been plenty of time for that, and even now there's still plenty of time" (the general raised his eyebrows meaningfully), "though there are only a few hours left . . . Do you understand? Do you? Are you willing or are you not, in fact? If you're not, say so and—you're welcome. Nobody's holding you, Gavrila Ardalionych, nobody's dragging you into a trap by force, if you do see this as a trap."

"I'm willing," Ganya said in a low but firm voice, dropped his eyes, and fell gloomily silent.

The general was satisfied. The general had lost his temper, but now apparently regretted having gone so far. He suddenly turned to the prince, and the uneasy thought that the prince was right there and had heard them seemed to pass over his face. But he instantly felt reassured: one glance at the prince was enough for him to be fully reassured.

"Oho!" cried the general, looking at the calligraphy sample the prince presented. "That's a model hand! And a rare one, too! Look here, Ganya, what talent!"

On the thick sheet of vellum the prince had written a phrase in medieval Russian script:

"The humble hegumen Pafnuty here sets his hand to it."

"This," the prince explained with great pleasure and animation, "this is the actual signature of the hegumen Pafnuty, copied from a fourteenth-century manuscript. They had superb signatures, all those old Russian hegumens and metropolitans, and sometimes so tasteful, so careful! Can it be you don't have Pogodin's book,¹⁶ General? Then here I've written in a different script: it's the big, round French script of the last century; some letters are even written

differently; it's a marketplace script, a public scrivener's script, borrowed from their samples (I had one)—you must agree, it's not without virtue. Look at these round d's and a's. I've transposed the French characters into Russian letters, which is very difficult, but it came out well. Here's another beautiful and original script, this phrase here: 'Zeal overcometh all.'¹⁷ This is a Russian script—a scrivener's, or military scrivener's, if you wish. It's an example of an official address to an important person, also a rounded script, nice and black, the writing is black, but remarkably tasteful. A calligrapher wouldn't have permitted these flourishes, or, better to say, these attempts at flourishes, these unfinished half-tails here—you notice—but on the whole, you see, it adds up to character, and, really, the whole military scrivener's soul is peeking out of it: he'd like to break loose, his talent yearns for it, but his military collar is tightly hooked, and discipline shows in the writing—lovely! I was recently struck by a sample of it I found—and where? in Switzerland! Now, here is a simple, ordinary English script of the purest sort: elegance can go no further, everything here is lovely, a jewel, a pearl; this is perfection; but here is a variation, again a French one, I borrowed it from a French traveling salesman: this is the same English script, but the black line is slightly blacker and thicker than in the English, and see—the proportion of light is violated; and notice also that the ovals are altered, they're slightly rounder, and what's more, flourishes are permitted, and a flourish is a most dangerous thing! A flourish calls for extraordinary taste; but if it succeeds, if the right proportion is found, a script like this is incomparable, you can even fall in love with it."

"Oho! What subtleties you go into!" the general laughed. "You're not simply a calligrapher, my dear fellow, you're an artist—eh, Ganya?"

"Astonishing," said Ganya, "and even with a consciousness of his purpose," he added with a mocking laugh.

"You may laugh, you may laugh, but there's a career here," said the general. "Do you know, Prince, which person we'll have you write documents to? I could offer you thirty-five roubles a month straight off, from the first step. However, it's already half-past twelve," he concluded, glancing at the clock. "To business, Prince, because I must hurry and we probably won't meet again today! Sit down for a moment. I've already explained to you that I cannot receive you very often; but I sincerely wish to help you a bit, only a bit, naturally, that is, with regard to the most necessary, and for

the rest it will be as you please. I'll find you a little post in the chancellery, not a difficult one, but requiring accuracy. Now, as concerns other things, sir: in the home, that is, in the family of Gavrila Ardalionych Ivolgin, this young friend of mine here, whose acquaintance I beg you to make, there are two or three furnished rooms which his mother and sister have vacated and rent out to highly recommended lodgers, with board and maid services. I'm sure Nina Alexandrovna will accept my recommendation. And for you, Prince, this is even more than a find, first, because you won't be alone, but, so to speak, in the bosom of a family, and, as far as I can see, it's impossible for you to take your first steps on your own in a capital like Petersburg. Nina Alexandrovna, Gavrila Ardalionych's mother, and Varvara Ardalionovna, his sister, are ladies whom I respect exceedingly. Nina Alexandrovna is the wife of Ardalion Alexandrovich, a retired general, my former comrade from when I entered the service, but with whom, owing to certain circumstances, I have ceased all contact, though that does not prevent my having a sort of respect for him. I'm explaining all this to you, Prince, so that you will understand that I am, so to speak, recommending you personally, consequently it's as if I'm vouching for you. The rent is the most moderate, and soon enough, I hope, your salary will be quite sufficient for that. True, a man also needs pocket money, at least a small amount, but you won't be angry, Prince, if I point out to you that it would be better for you to avoid pocket money and generally carrying money in your pocket. I say it just from looking at you. But since your purse is quite empty now, allow me to offer you these twenty-five roubles to begin with. We'll settle accounts, of course, and if you're as candid and genuine a man as your words make you seem, there can be no difficulties between us. And if I take such an interest in you, it's because I even have some intention concerning you; you'll learn what it is later. You see, I'm being quite plain with you. Ganya, I hope you have nothing against putting the prince up in your apartment?"

"Oh, on the contrary! And my mother will be very glad ..." Ganya confirmed politely and obligingly.

"I believe only one of your rooms is taken. That—what's his name—Ferd . . . Fer . . ."

"Ferdyshchenko."

"Ah, yes. I don't like this Ferdyshchenko of yours: some sort of salacious buffoon. I don't understand why Nastasya Filippovna encourages him so. Is he really related to her?"

"Oh, no, it's all a joke! There's not a whiff of a relation."

"Well, devil take him! So, how about it, Prince, are you pleased or not?"

"Thank you, General, you have acted as an extremely kind man towards me, especially as I didn't even ask—I don't say it out of pride; I didn't know where to lay my head. Though, it's true, Rogozhin invited me earlier."

"Rogozhin? Ah, no. I'd advise you in a fatherly, or, if you prefer, a friendly way to forget about Mr. Rogozhin. And in general I'd advise you to keep to the family you're going to be with."

"Since you're so kind," the prince tried to begin, "I have one bit of business here. I've received notification . . ."

"Well, forgive me," the general interrupted, "but right now I don't have a minute more. I'll tell Lizaveta Prokofyevna about you at once: if she wishes to receive you now (and I'll try to recommend you with a view to that), I advise you to make use of the opportunity and please her, because Lizaveta Prokofyevna may be of great use to you; you're her namesake. If she doesn't wish to, don't take it badly, she will some other time. And you, Ganya, look over these accounts meanwhile; Fedoseev and I already tried earlier. We mustn't forget to include them ..."

The general went out, and so the prince had no time to ask about his business, which he had tried to bring up for perhaps the fourth time. Ganya lit a cigarette and offered one to the prince; the prince accepted, but did not start a conversation, not wishing to interfere, but began looking around the office; but Ganya barely glanced at the sheet of paper all covered with figures that the general had indicated to him. He was distracted: in the prince's view, Ganya's smile, gaze, and pensiveness became more strained when they were left alone. Suddenly he went up to the prince; at that moment he was again standing over the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna and studying it.

"So you like such a woman, Prince?" he asked him suddenly, giving him a piercing look. And it was as if he had some exceptional intention.

"An astonishing face!" replied the prince. "And I'm convinced that her fate is no ordinary one. It's a gay face, but she has suffered terribly, eh? It speaks in her eyes, these two little bones, the two points under her eyes where the cheeks begin. It's a proud face, terribly proud, and I don't know whether she's kind or not. Ah, if only she were kind! Everything would be saved!"

"And would you marry such a woman?" Ganya continued, not taking his inflamed eyes off him.

"I can't marry anybody, I'm unwell," said the prince.

"And would Rogozhin marry her? What do you think?"

"Why, I think he might marry her tomorrow. He'd marry her, and a week later he might well put a knife in her."

He had no sooner uttered these words than Ganya suddenly gave such a start that the prince almost cried out.

"What's wrong?" he said, seizing his arm.

"Your Highness! His excellency asks that you kindly come to her excellency's rooms," the lackey announced, appearing in the doorway. The prince followed the lackey out.

IV

All three Epanchin girls were healthy young ladies, tall, blossoming, with astonishing shoulders, powerful bosoms, strong, almost masculine arms, and, of course, owing to their strength and health, they liked to eat well on occasion, something they had no wish to conceal. Their mama, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, sometimes looked askance at the frankness of their appetite, but since some of her opinions, despite all the external deference with which her daughters received them, had in fact long lost their original and unquestionable authority among them, so much so that the harmonious conclave established by the three girls was beginning to gain the upper hand on most occasions, the general's wife, mindful of her own dignity, found it more convenient not to argue but to yield. True, her character quite often did not heed and obey the decisions of her good sense; with every year Lizaveta Prokofyevna was becoming more and more capricious and impatient, she was even becoming somehow eccentric, but since in any case a submissive and well-trained husband remained at hand, all superfluous and accumulated things usually poured down on his head, and then the family harmony was restored again and everything went better than ever.

The general's wife herself, however, never lost her own good appetite, and at half-past twelve usually partook, together with her daughters, of a copious lunch, which more resembled a dinner. Earlier, at exactly ten o'clock, while still in bed, at the moment of waking up, the young ladies had a cup of coffee. That was how

they liked it and how it had always been arranged. At half-past twelve the table was laid in the small dining room, near the mother's rooms, and occasionally the general himself, time permitting, joined them at this intimate family lunch. Besides tea, coffee, cheese, honey, butter, the special pancakes the lady herself was particularly fond of, the cutlets, and so on, they were even served a strong, hot bouillon. On the morning when our story begins, the whole family was gathered in the dining room in expectation of the general, who had promised to come by half-past twelve. If he had been even a minute late, he would have been sent for at once; but he arrived punctually. Going over to greet his spouse and kiss her hand, he noticed this time something all too peculiar in her face. And though he had anticipated even the day before that it would be precisely so, on account of a certain "anecdote" (as he was accustomed to put it), and had worried about it while falling asleep the previous night, all the same he now turned coward again. His daughters came up to kiss him; here there was no anger against him, but here, too, all the same there was also something peculiar, as it were. True, the general, owing to certain circumstances, had become overly suspicious; but as he was an experienced and adroit father and husband, he at once took his measures.

Perhaps we will do no great harm to the vividness of our narrative if we stop here and resort to the aid of a few clarifications in order to establish directly and more precisely the relations and circumstances in which we find General Epanchin's family at the beginning of our story. We said just now that the general, though not a very educated but, on the contrary, as he himself put it, a "self-taught man," was nevertheless an experienced husband and adroit father. Among other things, he had adopted a system of not rushing his daughters into marriage, that is, of not "hovering over" them and bothering them too much with his parental love's longing for their happiness, as involuntarily and naturally happens all the time, even in the most intelligent families, where grown-up daughters accumulate. He even succeeded in winning Lizaveta Prokofyevna over to his system, though that was normally a difficult thing to do—difficult because it was also unnatural; but the general's arguments were extremely weighty and based on tangible facts. Besides, left entirely to their own wishes and decisions, the brides would naturally be forced to see reason at last, and then things would take off, because they would do it eagerly, casting aside their caprices and excessive choosiness; all the parents would have to do

would be to keep a watchful and, if possible, inconspicuous eye on them, lest some strange choice or unnatural deviation occur, and then, seizing the proper moment, step in with all their help and guide the affair with all their influence. Finally, the fact alone, for instance, that their fortune and social significance increased every year in geometrical progression meant that the more time that passed, the more advantageous it was to his daughters, even as brides. But among all these irrefutable facts another fact occurred: the eldest daughter, Alexandra, suddenly and almost quite unexpectedly (as always happens) turned twenty-five. And at almost the same time Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky, a man of high society, with high connections and extraordinary wealth, again showed his old desire to marry. He was a man of about fifty-five, of elegant character and with extraordinary refinement of taste. He wanted to marry well; he was an exceeding connoisseur of beauty. Since he had for some time maintained an extraordinary friendship with General Epanchin, especially strengthened by a joint participation in certain financial undertakings, he therefore asked the general—looking for friendly counsel and guidance, so to speak—whether it would or would not be possible to think of him marrying one of his daughters. In the quiet and beautiful flow of General Epanchin's family life, an obvious upheaval was coming.

The undoubted beauty in the family, as has already been said, was the youngest, Aglaya. But even Totsky himself, a man of exceeding egoism, understood that he was not to seek there and that Aglaya was not destined for him. It may be that the somewhat blind love and all too ardent friendship of the sisters exaggerated the matter, but among them, in the most sincere way, they determined that Aglaya's fate was to be not simply a fate, but the most ideal possible earthly paradise. Aglaya's future husband would have to be endowed with all perfections and successes, to say nothing of wealth. The sisters even decided among themselves, and somehow without any special superfluous words, on the possibility, if need be, of making sacrifices on their own part in favor of Aglaya: the dowry allotted to Aglaya was colossal and quite out of the ordinary. The parents knew of this agreement between the two elder sisters, and therefore, when Totsky asked for advice, they had little doubt that one of the elder sisters would not refuse to crown their desires, the more so as Afanasy Ivanovich would make no difficulties over the dowry. As for Totsky's offer, the general, with his particular knowledge of life, at once valued it extremely highly. Since Totsky

himself, owing to certain special circumstances, had meanwhile to observe an extreme prudence in his steps and was still only probing into the matter, the parents, too, offered only the most remote suggestions for their daughters' consideration. In response to which they received from them a reassuring, if not very definite, statement that the eldest, Alexandra, would perhaps not decline. Though of firm character, she was a kind, reasonable girl and extremely easy to get along with; she might even marry Totsky willingly, and if she gave her word, she would honestly keep it. She cared nothing for splendor, and not only threatened no fusses or abrupt upheavals, but might even sweeten and soothe one's life. She was very good-looking, though not in a spectacular way. What could be better for Totsky?

And yet the matter still went ahead gropingly. It was mutually and amicably agreed between Totsky and the general that for the time being they would avoid any formal and irrevocable steps. The parents had still not even begun to speak quite openly with their daughters; some dissonance seemed to set in: Mrs. Epanchin, the mother of the family, was becoming displeased for some reason, and that was very grave. There was one circumstance here that hindered everything, one complex and troublesome occurrence, owing to which the whole matter might fall apart irrevocably.

This complex and troublesome "occurrence" (as Totsky himself put it) had begun very far back, about eighteen years ago. Next to one of Afanasy Ivanovich's rich estates, in one of the central provinces, an impoverished petty landowner was living an impoverished life. This was a man remarkable for his ceaseless and anecdotal misfortunes—a retired officer, from a good noble family, and in that respect even better than Totsky, a certain Filipp Alexandrovich Barashkov. Buried in debts and mortgages, he succeeded at last, after hard, almost peasant-like labors, in setting up his small estate more or less satisfactorily. The smallest success encouraged him extraordinarily. Encouraged and radiant with hopes, he went for a few days to his district town, to meet and, if possible, come to a final agreement with one of his chief creditors. On the third day after his arrival in town, his warden came from the village, on horseback, his cheek burned and his beard singed, and informed him that the "family estate burned down" the day before, at noon, and that "his wife burned with it, but the little children were left unharmed." This surprise even Barashkov, accustomed as he was to the "bruises of fortune," could not bear; he went mad and a

month later died in delirium. The burned-down estate, with its peasants gone off begging, was sold for debts; and Barashkov's children, two little girls aged six and seven, were taken out of magnanimity to be kept and brought up by Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky. They were brought up together with the children of Afanasy Ivanovich's steward, a retired official with a large family and a German besides. Soon only one girl, Nastya, was left, the younger one having died of whooping cough. Totsky, who was living abroad, soon forgot all about them. One day, some five years later, Afanasy Ivanovich, passing by, decided to have a look at his estate and suddenly noticed in his country house, in the family of his German, a lovely child, a girl of about twelve, lively, sweet, clever, and promising to become a great beauty—in that regard Afanasy Ivanovich was an unerring connoisseur. That time he spent only a few days on his estate, but he had time to arrange things; a considerable change took place in the girl's education: a respectable, elderly governess was called in, experienced in the higher upbringing of girls, an educated Swiss woman, who, along with French, taught various other subjects. She settled into the country house, and little Nastya's upbringing acquired exceptional scope. Exactly four years later, this upbringing came to an end; the governess left, and a certain lady came to fetch Nastya, also a landowner of some sort, and also Mr. Totsky's neighbor, but in another, distant province, and on the instructions and by the authority of Afanasy Ivanovich, took Nastya away with her. On this small estate there also turned out to be a small but newly constructed wooden house; it was decorated with particular elegance, and the little village, as if on purpose, was called "Delight." The lady landowner brought Nastya straight to this quiet little house, and as she herself, a childless widow, lived less than a mile away, she settled in with Nastya. Around Nastya an old housekeeper and a young, experienced maid appeared. There were musical instruments in the house, an elegant library for girls, paintings, prints, pencils, brushes, paints, an astonishing greyhound, and two weeks later Afanasy Ivanovich himself arrived . . . After that he somehow became especially fond of this little village lost in the steppes, came every summer, stayed for two, even three months, and thus a rather long time, some four years, passed peacefully and happily, with taste and elegance.

Once it happened, at the beginning of winter, about four months after one of Afanasy Ivanovich's summer visits to Delight, which this time had lasted only two weeks, that a rumor spread, or,

rather, the rumor somehow reached Nastasya Filippovna, that in Petersburg, Afanasy Ivanovich was about to marry a beauty, a rich girl, from the nobility—in short, to make a respectable and brilliant match. Later it turned out that the rumor was not accurate in all details: the wedding was then only a project, and everything was still very uncertain, but all the same an extraordinary upheaval took place in Nastasya Filippovna's life after that. She suddenly showed an extraordinary resolve and revealed a most unexpected character. Without further thought, she left her little country house and suddenly went to Petersburg, straight to Totsky, all on her own. He was amazed, tried to begin speaking; but it suddenly turned out, almost from the first phrase, that he had to change completely the style, the vocal range, the former topics of pleasant and elegant conversation, which till then had been used so successfully, the logic—everything, everything! Before him sat a totally different woman, not at all like the one he had known till then and had left only that July in the village of Delight.

This new woman, it turned out, first of all knew and understood an extraordinary amount—so much that it was a cause of profound wonder where she could have acquired such information, could have developed such precise notions in herself. (Could it have been from her girls' library?) What's more, she even understood an exceeding amount about legal matters and had a positive knowledge, if not of the world, then at least of how certain things went in the world; second of all, this was a completely different character from before, that is, not something timid, uncertain in a boarding-school way, sometimes charming in its original liveliness and naivety, sometimes melancholy and pensive, astonished, mistrustful, weepy, and restless.

No: here before him an extraordinary and unexpected being laughed and stung him with a most poisonous sarcasm, telling him outright that she had never felt anything in her heart for him except the deepest contempt, contempt to the point of nausea, which had followed directly upon her initial astonishment. This new woman announced to him that in the fullest sense it would make no difference to her if he married any woman he liked right then and there, but that she had come to prevent this marriage of his, and to prevent it out of spite, solely because she wanted it that way, and consequently it must be that way—"well, so that now I can simply laugh at you to my heart's content, because now I, too, finally feel like laughing."

At least that was how she put it, though she may not have said everything she had in mind. But while the new Nastasya Filippovna was laughing and explaining all this, Afanasy Ivanovich was thinking the matter over to himself and, as far as possible, putting his somewhat shattered thoughts in order. This thinking went on for some time; for almost two weeks he grappled with it and tried to reach a final decision; but after two weeks his decision was taken. The thing was that Afanasy Ivanovich was about fifty at that time, and he was in the highest degree a respectable and settled man. His position in the world and in society had long been established on a most solid foundation. He loved and valued himself, his peace, and his comfort more than anything in the world, as befitted a man decent in the highest degree. Not the slightest disturbance, not the slightest wavering, could be tolerated in what had been established by his entire life and had acquired such a beautiful form. On the other hand, his experience and profound insight into things told Totsky very quickly and with extraordinary sureness that he now had to do with a being who was completely out of the ordinary, that this was precisely the sort of being who would not merely threaten, but would certainly act, and above all would decidedly stop at nothing, the more so as she valued decidedly nothing in the world, so that it was even impossible to tempt her. Here, obviously, was something else, implying some heartful and soulful swill—like some sort of romantic indignation, God knows against whom or why, some insatiable feeling of contempt that leaps completely beyond measure—in short, something highly ridiculous and inadmissible in decent society, something that was a sheer punishment from God for any decent man to encounter. To be sure, with Totsky's wealth and connections, it was possible to produce some small and totally innocent villainy at once, so as to be rid of this trouble. On the other hand, it was obvious that Nastasya Filippovna herself was scarcely capable of doing any harm, for instance, in the legal sense; she could not even cause a significant scandal, because it would always be too easy to limit her. But all that was so only in case Nastasya Filippovna decided to act as everyone generally acts in such cases, without leaping too eccentrically beyond measure. But it was here that Totsky's keen eye also proved useful: he was able to perceive that Nastasya Filippovna herself understood perfectly well how harmless she was in the legal sense, but that she had something quite different in mind and ... in her flashing eyes. Valuing nothing, and least of all herself (it took great intelligence

and perception to guess at that moment that she had long ceased to value herself and, skeptic and society cynic that he was, to believe in the seriousness of that feeling), Nastasya Filippovna was capable of ruining herself, irrevocably and outrageously, facing Siberia and hard labor, if only she could wreak havoc on the man for whom she felt such inhuman loathing. Afanasy Ivanovich had never concealed the fact that he was somewhat cowardly or, better to say, conservative in the highest degree. If he knew, for instance, that he would be killed at the foot of the altar, or that something of that sort would happen, extremely improper, ridiculous, and socially unacceptable, he would of course be frightened, but not so much at being killed or gravely wounded, or having his face publicly spat in, and so on and so forth, as at it happening to him in such an unnatural and unacceptable form. And this was precisely what Nastasya Filippovna foretold, though so far she had been silent about it; he knew that she understood and had studied him to the highest degree, and therefore knew how to strike at him. And since the wedding was indeed only an intention, Afanasy Ivanovich humbled himself and yielded to Nastasya Filippovna.

Another circumstance contributed to this decision: it was difficult to imagine how little this new Nastasya Filippovna resembled the former one in looks. Formerly she had been merely a very pretty girl, but now . . . For a long time Totsky could not forgive himself that he had looked for four years and not seen. True, it means much when an upheaval occurs on both sides, inwardly and unexpectedly. However, he recalled moments, even before, when strange thoughts had come to him, for instance, while looking into those eyes: it was as if he had sensed some deep and mysterious darkness in them. Those eyes had gazed at him—and seemed to pose a riddle. During the last two years he had often been surprised by the change in Nastasya Filippovna's color; she was growing terribly pale and— strangely—was even becoming prettier because of it. Totsky, who, like all gentlemen who have had a bit of fun in their time, at first looked with scorn on this untried soul he had obtained for himself so cheaply, more recently had begun to doubt his view. In any case, he had already resolved that past spring to arrange a marriage for Nastasya Filippovna before too long, in an excellent and well-provided way, with some sensible and respectable gentleman serving in a different province. (Oh, how terribly and wickedly Nastasya Filippovna laughed at that now!) But now Afanasy Ivanovich, charmed by the novelty, even thought he might again make use of

this woman. He decided to settle Nastasya Filippovna in Petersburg and surround her with luxurious comfort. If not the one thing, then the other: he could show Nastasya Filippovna off and even boast of her in a certain circle. And Afanasy Ivanovich cherished his reputation along that line.

Five years of Petersburg life had already gone by, and, naturally, in such a period many things had become clear. Afanasy Ivanovich's position was ungratifying; worst of all was that, having once turned coward, he could never afterwards be at peace. He was afraid— and did not even know why—he was simply afraid of Nastasya Filippovna. For some time, during the first two years, he began to suspect that Nastasya Filippovna wanted to marry him herself, but said nothing out of her extraordinary vanity and was stubbornly waiting for him to propose. It would have been a strange pretension; Afanasy Ivanovich scowled and pondered heavily. To his great and (such is man's heart!) rather unpleasant amazement, he had occasion suddenly to become convinced that even if he had proposed, he would not have been accepted. For a long time he could not understand it. Only one explanation seemed possible to him, that the pride of the "insulted and fantastic woman" had reached such frenzy that she found it more pleasant to show her contempt once by refusing than to define her position forever and attain an unattainable grandeur. The worst of it was that Nastasya Filippovna had gained the upper hand terribly much. She also would not yield to mercenary interests, even if the interests were very great, and though she accepted the offered comfort, she lived very modestly and in those five years saved almost nothing. Afanasy Ivanovich risked another very clever means of breaking his fetters: he began inconspicuously and artfully to tempt her, being skillfully aided, with various ideal temptations; but the incarnate ideals—princes, hussars, embassy secretaries, poets, novelists, even socialists—nothing made any impression on Nastasya Filippovna, as if she had a stone in place of a heart, and her feeling had dried up and died out once and for all. She lived a largely solitary life, read, even studied, liked music. She had very few acquaintances; she kept company with some poor and ridiculous wives of officials, knew two actresses, some old women, was very fond of the numerous family of a certain respectable teacher, and this family was very fond of her and received her with pleasure. In the evening she quite often had gatherings of five or six acquaintances, not more. Totsky came very often and punctually. More recently General Epanchin, not without

difficulty, had made Nastasya Filippovna's acquaintance. At the same time, quite easily and without any difficulty, a young clerk named Ferdyshchenko had made her acquaintance—a very indecent and salacious buffoon, with a pretense to gaiety and a penchant for drink. She was also acquainted with a strange young man by the name of Ptitsyn, modest, neat, and sleek, who had risen from destitution and become a moneylender. Gavrila Ardalionovich, too, finally made her acquaintance ... It ended with Nastasya Filippovna acquiring a strange fame: everyone knew of her beauty, but only that; no one had anything to boast of, no one had anything to tell. This reputation, her cultivation, elegant manners, wit—all this finally confirmed Afanasy Ivanovich in a certain plan. And it was at this moment that General Epanchin himself began to take such an active and great part in the story.

When Totsky so courteously turned to him for friendly advice concerning one of his daughters, he at once, in the noblest fashion, made a most full and candid confession. He revealed that he had already resolved to stop at nothing to gain his freedom; that he would not be at peace even if Nastasya Filippovna herself declared to him that henceforth she would leave him entirely alone; that words were not enough for him, and he wanted the fullest guarantees. They came to an understanding and decided to act together. At first they determined to try the gentlest ways and to touch, so to speak, only on "the noble strings of the heart." They both went to Nastasya Filippovna, and Totsky began straight off with the unbearable horror of his position; he blamed himself for everything; he said frankly that he was unable to repent of his initial behavior with her, because he was an inveterate sensualist and not in control of himself, but that now he wanted to marry, and the whole fate of this most highly respectable and society marriage was in her hands; in short, that he placed all his hopes in her noble heart. Then General Epanchin began to speak in his quality as father, and spoke reasonably, avoiding emotion, mentioning only that he fully recognized her right to decide Afanasy Ivanovich's fate, deftly displaying his own humility, pointing out that the fate of his daughter, and perhaps of his two other daughters, now depended on her decision. To Nastasya Filippovna's question: "Precisely what did they want of her?"—Totsky, with the same perfectly naked candor, admitted to her that he had been so frightened five years ago that even now he could not be entirely at peace until Nastasya Filippovna herself had married someone. He added at once that this request would, of

course, be absurd on his part, if he did not have some grounds in this regard. He had noted very well and had positive knowledge that a young man of very good name, and living in a most worthy family, Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, whom she knew and received in her house, had long loved her with all the force of passion and would certainly give half his life just for the hope of obtaining her sympathy. Gavrila Ardalionovich himself had confessed it to him, Afanasy Ivanovich, long ago, in a friendly way and out of the purity of his young heart, and it had long been known to Ivan Fyodorovich, the young man's benefactor. Finally, if he was not mistaken, Nastasya Filippovna herself had known of the young man's love for a long time, and it even seemed to him that she looked indulgently upon that love. Of course, it was hardest for him of all people to speak of it. But if Nastasya Filippovna would allow him, Totsky, apart from egoism and the desire to arrange his own lot, to wish her at least some good as well, she would understand that he had long found it strange and even painful to contemplate her solitude: that here there was only uncertain darkness, total disbelief in the renewal of life, which could so beautifully resurrect in love and a family, and thereby acquire a new purpose; that here were ruined abilities, perhaps brilliant ones, a voluntary reveling in her own sorrow, in short, even some sort of romanticism unworthy both of Nastasya Filippovna's common sense and of her noble heart. After repeating once again that it was harder for him to speak than for anyone else, he ended by saying that he could not give up the hope that Nastasya Filippovna would not reply to him with contempt if he expressed his sincere wish to secure her lot in the future and offer her the sum of seventy-five thousand roubles. He added by way of clarification that in any case this sum had already been allotted to her in his will; in short, that this was in no way a compensation of any sort. . . and that, finally, why not allow and excuse in him the human wish to unburden his conscience at least in some way, and so on and so forth—all that is usually said on the subject in such cases. Afanasy Ivanovich spoke long and eloquently, having appended, in passing so to speak, the very curious piece of information that he was now mentioning the seventy-five thousand for the first time and that no one knew of it, not even Ivan Fyodorovich himself, who was sitting right there; in short, no one knew.

Nastasya Filippovna's answer amazed the two friends.

Not only was there not the slightest trace to be observed in her of the former mockery, the former hostility and hatred, the former

laughter, the mere recollection of which sent a chill down Totsky's spine, but, on the contrary, she seemed glad that she could finally speak with someone in an open and friendly way. She admitted that she herself had long wanted to ask for some friendly advice, that only pride had prevented her, but that now, since the ice had been broken, nothing could be better. At first with a sad smile, then with gay and brisk laughter, she confessed that the previous storm would in any case not be repeated; that she had long ago partly changed her view of things, and though she had not changed in her heart, she was still bound to allow for many things as accomplished facts; what was done was done, what was past was past, so that she even found it strange that Afanasy Ivanovich could go on being so frightened. Here she turned to Ivan Fyodorovich and, with a look of the profoundest respect, told him that she had long since heard a great deal about his daughters and was long accustomed to having a profound and sincere respect for them. The thought alone that she might be of at least some use to them would for her be a cause of happiness and pride. It was true that she now felt oppressed and bored, very bored; Afanasy Ivanovich had divined her dreams; she would like to resurrect, if not in love, then in a family, with the consciousness of a new purpose; but of Gavrila Ardalionovich she could say almost nothing. True, he seemed to love her; she felt that she herself might come to love him, if she could trust in the firmness of his attachment; but, even if sincere, he was very young; it was hard to decide here. Incidentally, she liked most of all the fact that he worked, toiled, and supported the whole family by himself. She had heard that he was an energetic and proud man, that he wanted a career, wanted to make his way. She had also heard that Nina Alexandrovna Ivolgin, Gavrila Ardalionovich's mother, was an excellent and highly estimable woman; that his sister, Varvara Ardalionovna, was a very remarkable and energetic girl; she had heard a lot about her from Ptitsyn. She had heard that they endured their misfortunes cheerfully; she wished very much to make their acquaintance, but the question was whether they would welcome her into their family. In general, she had nothing to say against the possibility of this marriage, but there was a great need to think it over; she did not wish to be rushed. Concerning the seventy-five thousand—Afanasy Ivanovich need not have been so embarrassed to speak of it. She understood the value of money and, of course, would take it. She thanked Afanasy Ivanovich for his delicacy, for not having mentioned it even to the general, let alone to Gavrila

Ardalionovich, but anyhow, why should he not also know about it beforehand? She had no need to be ashamed of this money on entering their family. In any case, she had no intention of apologizing to anyone for anything, and wished that to be known. She would not marry Gavrila Ardalionovich until she was sure that neither he nor his family had any hidden thoughts concerning her. In any case, she did not consider herself guilty of anything, and Gavrila Ardalionovich had better learn on what terms she had been living all those years in Petersburg, in what relations with Afanasy Ivanovich, and how much money she had saved. Finally, if she did accept the capital now, it was not at all as payment for her maidenly dishonor, for which she was not to blame, but simply as a recompense for her maimed life.

By the end she even became so excited and irritated as she was saying it all (which, incidentally, was quite natural) that General Epanchin was very pleased and considered the matter concluded; but the once frightened Totsky did not quite believe her even now and feared for a long time that here, too, there might be a serpent among the flowers.¹⁸ The negotiations nevertheless began; the point on which the two friends' whole maneuver was based—namely, the possibility of Nastasya Filippovna being attracted to Ganya— gradually began to take shape and justify itself, so that even Totsky began to believe at times in the possibility of success. Meanwhile Nastasya Filippovna had a talk with Ganya: very few words were spoken, as if her chastity suffered from it. She admitted, however, and allowed him his love, but said insistently that she did not want to hamper herself in any way; that until the wedding itself (if the wedding took place) she reserved for herself the right to say no, even in the very last hour; exactly the same right was granted to Ganya. Soon Ganya learned positively, by an obliging chance, that the hostility of his whole family towards this marriage and towards Nastasya Filippovna personally, which had manifested itself in scenes at home, was already known to Nastasya Filippovna in great detail; she had not mentioned it to him, though he expected it daily. However, it would be possible to tell much more out of all the stories and circumstances that surfaced on the occasion of this engagement and its negotiations; but we have run ahead of ourselves as it is, especially since some of these circumstances appeared only as very vague rumors. For instance, Totsky was supposed to have learned somewhere that Nastasya Filippovna, in secret from everyone, had entered into some sort of vague relations with the

Epanchin girls—a perfectly incredible rumor. But another rumor he involuntarily believed and feared to the point of nightmare: he had heard for certain that Nastasya Filippovna was supposedly aware in the highest degree that Ganya was marrying only for money, that Ganya's soul was dark, greedy, impatient, envious, and boundlessly vain, out of all proportion to anything; that, although Ganya had indeed tried passionately to win Nastasya Filippovna over before, now that the two friends had decided to exploit that passion, which had begun to be mutual, for their own advantage, and to buy Ganya by selling him Nastasya Filippovna as a lawful wife, he had begun to hate her like his own nightmare. It was as if passion and hatred strangely came together in his soul, and though, after painful hesitations, he finally consented to marry "the nasty woman," in his soul he swore to take bitter revenge on her for it and to "give it to her" later, as he supposedly put it. Nastasya Filippovna supposedly knew all about it and was secretly preparing something. Totsky was so afraid that he even stopped telling his worries to Epanchin; but there were moments when, being a weak man, he would decidedly feel heartened again and his spirits would quickly rise: he felt exceedingly heartened, for instance, when Nastasya Filippovna at last gave the two friends her word that on the evening of her birthday she would speak her final word. On the other hand, a most strange and incredible rumor concerning the esteemed Ivan Fyodorovich himself was, alas! proving more and more true.

Here at first sight everything seemed utterly wild. It was hard to believe that Ivan Fyodorovich, in his venerable old age, with his excellent intelligence and positive knowledge of life, and so on and so forth, should be tempted by Nastasya Filippovna—and that, supposedly, to such an extent that the caprice almost resembled passion. Where he placed his hopes in this case is hard to imagine; perhaps even in the assistance of Ganya himself. Totsky at least suspected something of the sort, suspected the existence of some sort of almost silent agreement, based on mutual understanding, between the general and Ganya. As is known, however, a man too carried away by passion, especially if he is of a certain age, becomes completely blind and is ready to suspect hope where there is no hope at all; moreover, he takes leave of his senses and acts like a foolish child, though he be of the most palatial mind. It was known that for Nastasya Filippovna's birthday the general had prepared his own present of an astonishing string of pearls, which had cost an enormous sum, and was very concerned about this present, though

he knew that Nastasya Filippovna was an unmercenary woman. The day before Nastasya Filippovna's birthday he was as if in a fever, though he skillfully concealed it. It was precisely these pearls that Mrs. Epanchin had heard about. True, Elizaveta Prokofyevna had long ago begun to experience her husband's frivolity and was somewhat used to it; but it was impossible to overlook such an occasion: the rumor about the pearls interested her exceedingly. The general had perceived it just in time; certain little words had already been uttered the day before; he anticipated a major confrontation and was afraid of it. That was why he was terribly reluctant, on the morning on which we began our story, to go and have lunch in the bosom of his family. Before the prince's arrival, he had resolved to use the excuse that he was busy and get out of it. To get out, for the general, sometimes simply meant to get away. He wanted to gain at least that one day and, above all, that evening, without any unpleasantnesses. And suddenly the prince came along so opportunely. "As if sent by God!" the general thought to himself as he entered his wife's rooms.

V

The general's wife was jealous of her origins. Imagine her feelings when she was told, directly and without preliminaries, that this Prince Myshkin, the last of their line, whom she had already heard something about, was no more than a pathetic idiot and nearly destitute, and that he took beggar's alms. The general was precisely after that effect, in order to draw her interest all at once and somehow turn everything in another direction.

In extreme cases his wife usually rolled her eyes out exceedingly and, with her body thrown slightly back, stared vaguely ahead of her without saying a word. She was a tall, lean woman, of the same age as her husband, with much gray in her dark but still thick hair, a somewhat hooked nose, hollow yellow cheeks, and thin, sunken lips. Her forehead was high but narrow; her gray, rather large eyes sometimes had a most unexpected expression. She had once had the weakness of believing that her gaze produced an extraordinary effect; that conviction remained indelible in her.

"Receive him? You say receive him now, this minute?" and the general's wife rolled her eyes out with all her might at Ivan Fyodorovich as he fidgeted before her.

"Oh, in that respect you needn't stand on ceremony, my friend, provided you wish to see him," the general hastened to explain. "A perfect child, and even quite pathetic; he has fits of some illness; he's just come from Switzerland, straight from the train, strangely dressed, in some German fashion, and besides without a penny, literally; he's all but weeping. I gave him twenty-five roubles and want to obtain some scrivener's post for him in the chancellery. And you, mesdames, I ask to give him something to eat, because he also seems to be hungry ..."

"You astonish me," Mrs. Epanchin went on as before. "Hungry, and some sort of fits! What fits?"

"Oh, they don't occur too often, and besides, he's almost like a child, though he's cultivated. I'd like to ask you, mesdames," he again turned to his daughters, "to give him an examination; it would be good, after all, to know what he's able to do."

"An ex-am-i-na-tion?" Mrs. Epanchin drew out and, in deep amazement, again began to roll her eyes from her daughters to her husband and back.

"Ah, my friend, don't take it in that sense . . . however, as you wish; I had in mind to be nice to him and receive him in our house, because it's almost a good deed."

"In our house? From Switzerland?!"

"Switzerland is no hindrance. But anyhow, I repeat, it's as you wish. I suggested it, first, because he's your namesake and maybe even a relation, and second, he doesn't know where to lay his head. I even thought you might be somewhat interested, because, after all, he's of the same family."

"Of course, maman, if we needn't stand on ceremony with him; besides, he's hungry after the journey, why not give him something to eat, if he doesn't know where to go?" said the eldest daughter, Alexandra.

"And a perfect child besides, we can play blindman's buff with him."

"Play blindman's buff? In what sense?"

"Oh, maman, please stop pretending," Aglaya interfered vexedly.

The middle daughter, Adelaida, much given to laughter, could not help herself and burst out laughing.

"Send for him, papa, maman allows it," Aglaya decided. The general rang and sent for the prince.

"But be sure a napkin is tied around his neck when he sits at the table," Mrs. Epanchin decided. "Send for Fyodor, or let Mavra

... so as to stand behind his chair and tend to him while he eats. Is he at least quiet during his fits? Does he gesticulate?"

"On the contrary, he's very well brought up and has wonderful manners. A bit too simple at times . . . But here he is! Allow me to introduce Prince Myshkin, the last of the line, a namesake and maybe even a relation, receive him, be nice to him. They'll have lunch now, Prince, do them the honor . . . And I, forgive me, I'm late, I must hurry ..."

"We know where you're hurrying to," Mrs. Epanchin said imposingly.

"I must hurry, I must hurry, my friend, I'm late! Give him your albums,¹⁹ mesdames, let him write something for you, he's a rare calligrapher! A talent! He did such a piece of old handwriting for me: 'The hegumen Pafnuty here sets his hand to it . . .' Well, good-bye."

"Pafnuty? Hegumen? Wait, wait, where are you going? What Pafnuty?" Mrs. Epanchin cried with insistent vexation and almost anxiously to her fleeing husband.

"Yes, yes, my friend, there was such a hegumen in the old days . . . and I'm off to the count's, he's been waiting, waiting a long time, and, above all, it was he who made the appointment . . . Good-bye, Prince!"

The general withdrew with quick steps.

"I know which count that is!" Elizaveta Prokofyevna said sharply and turned her gaze irritably on the prince. "What was it!" she began, trying squeamishly and vexedly to recall. "What was it! Ah, yes. Well, what about this hegumen?"

"Maman," Alexandra began, and Aglaya even stamped her little foot.

"Don't interrupt me, Alexandra Ivanovna," Mrs. Epanchin rapped out to her, "I also want to know. Sit down here, Prince, in this chair, facing me—no, here, move closer to the sun, to the light, so that I can see. Well, what about this hegumen?"

"Hegumen Pafnuty," the prince replied attentively and seriously.

"Pafnuty? That's interesting. Well, who was he?"

Mrs. Epanchin asked impatiently, quickly, sharply, not taking her eyes off the prince, and when he answered, she nodded her head after each word he said.

"The hegumen Pafnuty, of the fourteenth century," the prince began. "He was the head of a hermitage on the Volga, in what is now Kostroma province. He was known for his holy life. He went

to the Horde,²⁰ helped to arrange some affairs of that time, and signed his name to a certain document, and I saw a copy of that signature. I liked the handwriting and learned it. Today, when the general wanted to see how I can write, in order to find a post for me, I wrote several phrases in various scripts, and among them 'The hegumen Pafnuty here sets his hand to it' in the hegumen Pafnuty's own handwriting. The general liked it very much, and he remembered it just now."

"Aglaya," said Mrs. Epanchin, "remember: Pafnuty, or better write it down, because I always forget. However, I thought it would be more interesting. Where is this signature?"

"I think it's still in the general's office, on the desk."

"Send at once and fetch it."

"I could just as well write it again for you, if you like."

"Of course, maman," said Alexandra, "and now we'd better have lunch; we're hungry."

"Well, so," Mrs. Epanchin decided. "Come, Prince, are you very hungry?"

"Yes, at the moment I'm very hungry and I thank you very much."

"It's very good that you're polite, and I note that you're not at all such an . . . odd man as we were told. Come. Sit down here, across from me," she bustled about, getting the prince seated, when they came to the dining room, "I want to look at you. Alexandra, Adelaida, offer the prince something. Isn't it true that he's not all that . . . sick? Maybe the napkin isn't necessary . . . Do they tie a napkin around your neck when you eat, Prince?"

"Before, when I was about seven, I think they did, but now I usually put my napkin on my knees when I eat."

"So you should. And your fits?"

"Fits?" the prince was slightly surprised. "I have fits rather rarely now. Though, I don't know, they say the climate here will be bad for me."

"He speaks well," Mrs. Epanchin observed, turning to her daughters and continuing to nod her head after each word the prince said. "I didn't even expect it. So it was all nonsense and lies, as usual. Eat, Prince, and go on with your story: where were you born and brought up? I want to know everything; you interest me exceedingly."

The prince thanked her and, eating with great appetite, again began to tell everything he had already told more than once that morning. Mrs. Epanchin was becoming more and more pleased.

The girls also listened rather attentively. They discussed families; the prince turned out to know his genealogy rather well, but hard as they searched, they could find almost no connection between him and Mrs. Epanchin. There might have been some distant relation between their grandmothers and grandfathers. Mrs. Epanchin especially liked this dry subject, since she hardly ever had the chance to talk about her genealogy, despite all her wishes, so that she even got up from the table in an excited state of mind.

"Let's all go to our gathering room," she said, "and have coffee served there. We have this common room here," she said to the prince, leading him out. "It's simply my small drawing room, where we gather when we're by ourselves, and each of us does her own thing: Alexandra, this one, my eldest daughter, plays the piano, or reads, or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (and never can finish anything); and Aglaya sits and does nothing. I'm also hopeless at handwork: nothing comes out right. Well, here we are; sit down there, Prince, by the fireplace, and tell us something. I want to know how you tell a story. I want to make completely sure, so that when I see old Princess Belokonsky, I can tell her all about you. I want them all to become interested in you, too. Well, speak then."

"But, maman, it's very strange to tell anything that way," observed Adelaida, who meanwhile had straightened her easel, taken her brushes and palette, and started working on a landscape begun long ago, copied from a print. Alexandra and Aglaya sat down together on a small sofa, folded their arms, and prepared to listen to the conversation. The prince noticed that special attention was turned on him from all sides.

"I wouldn't tell anything, if I were ordered to like that," observed Aglaya.

"Why? What's so strange about it? Why shouldn't he tell a story? He has a tongue. I want to see if he knows how to speak. Well, about anything. Tell me how you liked Switzerland, your first impressions. You'll see, he's going to begin now, and begin beautifully."

"The impression was a strong one . . ." the prince began.

"There," the impatient Lizaveta Prokofyevna picked up, turning to her daughters, "he's begun."

"Give him a chance to speak at least, maman" Alexandra stopped her. "This prince may be a great rogue and not an idiot at all," she whispered to Aglaya.

"He surely is, I saw it long ago," answered Aglaya. "And it's mean of him to play a role. What does he want to gain by it?"

"The first impression was a very strong one," the prince repeated. "When they brought me from Russia, through various German towns, I only looked on silently and, I remember, I didn't even ask about anything. That was after a series of strong and painful fits of my illness, and whenever my illness worsened and I had several fits in a row, I always lapsed into a total stupor, lost my memory completely, and though my mind worked, the logical flow of thought was as if broken. I couldn't put more than two or three ideas together coherently. So it seems to me. But when the fits subsided, I became healthy and strong again, as I am now. I remember a feeling of unbearable sadness; I even wanted to weep; I was surprised and anxious all the time: it affected me terribly that it was all foreign—that much I understood. The foreign was killing me. I was completely awakened from that darkness, I remember, in the evening, in Basel, as we drove into Switzerland, and what roused me was the braying of an ass in the town market. The ass struck me terribly and for some reason I took an extraordinary liking to it, and at the same time it was as if everything cleared up in my head."

"An ass? That's strange," observed Mrs. Epanchin. "And yet there's nothing strange about it, some one of us may yet fall in love with an ass," she observed, looking wrathfully at the laughing girls. "It has happened in mythology.²¹ Go on, Prince."

"Since then I've had a terrible fondness for asses. It's even some sort of sympathy in me. I began inquiring about them, because I'd never seen them before, and I became convinced at once that they're most useful animals, hardworking, strong, patient, cheap, enduring; and because of that ass I suddenly took a liking to the whole of Switzerland, so that my former sadness went away entirely."

"That's all very strange, but we can skip the ass; let's go on to some other subject. Why are you laughing, Aglaya? And you, Adelaida? The prince spoke beautifully about the ass. He saw it himself, and what have you ever seen? You haven't been abroad."

"I've seen an ass, maman," said Adelaida.

"And I've heard one," Aglaya picked up. The three girls laughed again. The prince laughed with them.

"That's very naughty of you," observed Mrs. Epanchin. "You must forgive them, Prince, they really are kind. I'm eternally scolding them, but I love them. They're flighty, frivolous, mad."

"But why?" the prince laughed. "In their place I wouldn't have missed the chance either. But all the same I stand up for the ass: an ass is a kind and useful fellow."

"And are you kind, Prince? I ask out of curiosity," Mrs. Epanchin asked.

They all laughed again.

"Again that accursed ass turns up! I wasn't even thinking of it!" Mrs. Epanchin cried. "Please believe me, Prince, I wasn't . . ."

"Hinting? Oh, I believe you, without question!"

And the prince never stopped laughing.

"It's very good that you laugh. I see you're a most kind young man," said Mrs. Epanchin.

"Sometimes I'm not," replied the prince.

"And I am kind," Mrs. Epanchin put in unexpectedly, "I'm always kind, if you wish, and that is my only failing, because one should not always be kind. I'm often very angry, with these ones here, with Ivan Fyodorovich especially, but the trouble is that I'm kindest when I'm angry. Today, before you came, I was angry and pretended I didn't and couldn't understand anything. That happens to me—like a child. Aglaya taught me a lesson; I thank you, Aglaya. Anyhow, it's all nonsense. I'm still not as stupid as I seem and as my daughters would have me appear. I have a strong character and am not very shy. Anyhow, I don't say it spitefully. Come here, Aglaya, kiss me. Well . . . enough sentiment," she observed, when Aglaya kissed her with feeling on the lips and hand. "Go on, Prince. Perhaps you'll remember something more interesting than the ass."

"I still don't understand how it's possible to tell things just like that," Adelaida observed again. "I wouldn't find anything to say."

"But the prince would, because the prince is extremely intelligent and at least ten times more intelligent than you, or maybe twelve times. I hope you'll feel something after that. Prove it to them, Prince, go on. We can indeed finally get past that ass. Well, so, besides the ass, what did you see abroad?"

"That was intelligent about the ass, too," observed Alexandra. "The prince spoke very interestingly about the case of his illness, and how he came to like everything because of one external push. It has always been interesting to me, how people go out of their minds and then recover again. Especially if it happens suddenly."

"Isn't it true? Isn't it true?" Mrs. Epanchin heaved herself up. "I see you, too, can sometimes be intelligent. Well, enough

laughing! You stopped, I believe, at nature in Switzerland, Prince. Well?"

"We came to Lucerne, and I was taken across the lake. I felt how good it was, but I also felt terribly oppressed," said the prince.

"Why?" asked Alexandra.

"I don't understand why. I always feel oppressed and uneasy when I look at such nature for the first time—both good and uneasy. Anyhow, that was all while I was still sick."

"Ah, no, I've always wanted very much to see it," said Adelaida. "I don't understand why we never go abroad. For two years I've been trying to find a subject for a picture:

East and South have long since been portrayed . . ²²

Find me a subject for a picture, Prince."

"I don't understand anything about it. It seems to me you just look and paint."

"I don't know how to look."

"Why are you talking in riddles? I don't understand a thing!" Mrs. Epanchin interrupted. "What do you mean, you don't know how to look? You have eyes, so look. If you don't know how to look here, you won't learn abroad. Better tell us how you looked yourself, Prince."

"Yes, that would be better," Adelaida added. "The prince did learn to look abroad."

"I don't know. My health simply improved there; I don't know if I learned to look. Anyhow, I was very happy almost the whole time."

"Happy! You know how to be happy?" Aglaya cried out. "Then how can you say you didn't learn to look? You should teach us."

"Teach us, please," Adelaida laughed.

"I can't teach you anything," the prince was laughing, too. "I spent almost all my time abroad living in a Swiss village; occasionally I went somewhere not far away; what can I teach you? At first I was simply not bored; I started to recover quickly; then every day became dear to me, and the dearer as time went on, so that I began to notice it. I went to bed very content, and got up happier still. But why all that—it's rather hard to say."

"So you didn't want to go anywhere, you had no urge to go anywhere?" asked Alexandra.

"At first, at the very first, yes, I did have an urge, and I would fall into great restlessness. I kept thinking about how I was going to live; I wanted to test my fate, I became restless especially at

certain moments. You know, there are such moments, especially in solitude. We had a waterfall there, not a big one, it fell from high up the mountain in a very thin thread, almost perpendicular— white, noisy, foamy; it fell from a great height, but it seemed low; it was half a mile away, but it seemed only fifty steps. I liked listening to the noise of it at night; and at those moments I'd sometimes get very restless. Also at noon sometimes, when I'd wander off somewhere into the mountains, stand alone halfway up a mountain, with pines all around, old, big, resinous; up on a cliff there's an old, ruined medieval castle, our little village is far down, barely visible; the sun is bright, the sky blue, the silence terrible. Then there would come a call to go somewhere, and it always seemed to me that if I walked straight ahead, and kept on for a long, long time, and went beyond that line where sky and earth meet, the whole answer would be there, and at once I'd see a new life, a thousand times stronger and noisier than ours; I kept dreaming of a big city like Naples, where it was all palaces, noise, clatter, life ... I dreamed about all kinds of things! And then it seemed to me that in prison, too, you could find an immense life."

"That last praiseworthy thought I read in my Reader when I was twelve years old," said Aglaya.

"It's all philosophy," observed Adelaida. "You're a philosopher and have come to teach us."

"Maybe you're even right," the prince smiled, "perhaps I really am a philosopher, and, who knows, maybe I actually do have a thought of teaching ... It may be so; truly it may."

"And your philosophy is exactly the same as Evlampia Nikolavna's," Aglaya picked up again. "She's an official's wife, a widow, she calls on us, a sort of sponger. Her whole purpose in life is cheapness; only to live as cheaply as possible; the only thing she talks about is kopecks—and, mind you, she has money, she's a sly fox. Your immense life in prison is exactly the same, and maybe also your four-year happiness in the village, for which you sold your city of Naples, and not without profit, it seems, though it was only a matter of kopecks."

"Concerning life in prison there may be disagreement," said the prince. "I heard one story from a man who spent twelve years in prison; he was one of the patients being treated by my professor. He had fits, he was sometimes restless, wept, and once even tried to kill himself. His life in prison had been very sad, I assure you, but certainly worth more than a kopeck. And the only acquaintances he

had were a spider and a little tree that had grown up under his window . . . But I'd better tell you about another encounter I had last year with a certain man. Here there was one very strange circumstance—strange because, in fact, such chances very rarely occur. This man had once been led to a scaffold, along with others, and a sentence of death by firing squad was read out to him, for a political crime. After about twenty minutes a pardon was read out to him, and he was given a lesser degree of punishment; nevertheless, for the space between the two sentences, for twenty minutes, or a quarter of an hour at the least, he lived under the certain conviction that in a few minutes he would suddenly die. I wanted terribly much to listen when he sometimes recalled his impressions of it, and several times I began questioning him further. He remembered everything with extraordinary clarity and used to say he would never forget anything from those minutes. About twenty paces from the scaffold, around which people and soldiers were standing, three posts had been dug into the ground, since there were several criminals. The first three were led to the posts, tied to them, dressed in death robes (long white smocks), and had long white caps pulled down over their eyes so that they would not see the guns; then a squad of several soldiers lined up facing each post. My acquaintance was eighth in line, which meant he would go to the posts in the third round. A priest went up to each of them with a cross. Consequently, he had about five minutes left to live, not more. He said those five minutes seemed like an endless time to him, an enormous wealth. It seemed to him that in those five minutes he would live so many lives that there was no point yet in thinking about his last moment, so that he even made various arrangements: he reckoned up the time for bidding his comrades farewell and allotted two minutes to that, then allotted two more minutes to thinking about himself for the last time, and then to looking around for the last time. He remembered very well that he made precisely those three arrangements, and reckoned them up in precisely that way. He was dying at the age of twenty-seven, healthy and strong; bidding farewell to his comrades, he remembered asking one of them a rather irrelevant question and even being very interested in the answer. Then, after he had bidden his comrades farewell, the two minutes came that he had allotted to thinking about himself. He knew beforehand what he was going to think about: he kept wanting to picture to himself as quickly and vividly as possible how it could be like this: now he exists and

lives, and in three minutes there would be something, some person or thing—but who? and where? He wanted to resolve it all in those two minutes! There was a church nearby, and the top of the cathedral with its gilded dome shone in the bright sun. He remembered gazing with terrible fixity at that dome and the rays shining from it: it seemed to him that those rays were his new nature and in three minutes he would somehow merge with them . . . The ignorance of and loathing for this new thing that would be and would come presently were terrible; yet he said that nothing was more oppressive for him at that moment than the constant thought: 'What if I were not to die! What if life were given back to me—what infinity! And it would all be mine! Then I'd turn each minute into a whole age, I'd lose nothing, I'd reckon up every minute separately, I'd let nothing be wasted!' He said that in the end this thought turned into such anger in him that he wished they would hurry up and shoot him."

The prince suddenly fell silent; everyone waited for him to go on and arrive at a conclusion.

"Have you finished?" asked Aglaya.

"What? Yes," said the prince, coming out of a momentary pensiveness.

"Why did you tell us about that?"

"Just ... I remembered ... to make conversation . . ."

"You're very fragmentary," observed Alexandra. "You probably wanted to conclude, Prince, that there's not a single moment that can be valued in kopecks, and that five minutes are sometimes dearer than a treasure. That is all very praiseworthy, but, forgive me, what ever happened to the friend who told you all those horrors ... his punishment was changed, which means he was granted that 'infinite life.' Well, what did he do with so much wealth afterwards? Did he live 'reckoning up' every minute?"

"Oh, no, he told me himself—I asked him about it—he didn't live that way at all and lost many, many minutes."

"Well, so, there's experience for you, so it's impossible to live really 'keeping a reckoning.' There's always some reason why it's impossible."

"Yes, for some reason it's impossible," the prince repeated. "I thought so myself. . . But still it's somehow hard to believe . . ."

"That is, you think you can live more intelligently than everyone else?" asked Aglaya.

"Yes, I've sometimes thought so."

"And you still do?"

"And ... I still do," the prince replied, looking at Aglaya, as before, with a quiet and even timid smile; but he immediately laughed again and looked at her merrily.

"How modest!" said Aglaya, almost vexed.

"But how brave you all are, though. You're laughing, but I was so struck by everything in his story that I dreamed about it later, precisely about those five minutes . . ."

Once again he looked around keenly and gravely at his listeners.

"You're not angry with me for something?" he asked suddenly, as if in perplexity, and yet looking straight into their eyes.

"For what?" the three girls cried in astonishment.

"That it's as if I keep teaching . . ."

They all laughed.

"If you're angry, don't be," he said. "I myself know that I've lived less than others and understand less about life than anyone. Maybe I sometimes speak very strangely ..."

And he became decidedly embarrassed.

"Since you say you were happy, it means you lived more, not less; why do you pretend and apologize?" Aglaya began sternly and carpingly. "And please don't worry about lecturing us, there's nothing there to make you triumphant. With your quietism²³ one could fill a hundred years of life with happiness. Show you an execution or show you a little finger, you'll draw an equally praiseworthy idea from both and be left feeling pleased besides. It's a way to live."

"Why you're so angry I don't understand," picked up Mrs. Epanchin, who had long been watching the faces of the speakers, "and what you're talking about I also cannot understand. What little finger, what is this nonsense? The prince speaks beautifully, only a little sadly. Why do you discourage him? He laughed at the beginning, but now he's quite crestfallen."

"Never mind, maman. But it's a pity you haven't seen an execution, there's one thing I'd ask you."

"I have seen an execution," the prince replied.

"You have?" cried Aglaya. "I must have guessed it! That crowns the whole thing. If you have, how can you say you lived happily the whole time? Well, isn't it true what I told you?"

"Were there executions in your village?" asked Adelaida.

"I saw it in Lyons, I went there with Schneider, he took me. I arrived and happened right on to it."

"So, what, did you like it very much? Was it very instructive? Useful?" Aglaya went on asking.

"I didn't like it at all, and I was a bit ill afterwards, but I confess I watched as if I was riveted to it, I couldn't tear my eyes away."

"I, too, would be unable to tear my eyes away," said Aglaya.

"They dislike it very much there when women come to watch, and even write about these women afterwards in the newspapers."

"Meaning that, since they find it's no business for women, they want to say by that (and thus justify) that it is a business for men. I congratulate them for their logic. And you think the same way, of course?"

"Tell us about the execution," Adelaida interrupted.

"I'd be very reluctant to now . . ." the prince became confused and seemed to frown.

"It looks as if you begrudge telling us," Aglaya needled him.

"No, it's because I already told about that same execution earlier."

"Whom did you tell?"

"Your valet, while I was waiting . . ."

"What valet?" came from all sides.

"The one who sits in the anteroom, with gray hair and a reddish face. I was sitting in the anteroom waiting to see Ivan Fyodorovich."

"That's odd," observed Mrs. Epanchin.

"The prince is a democrat," Aglaya snapped. "Well, if you told it to Alexei, you can't refuse us."

"I absolutely want to hear it," repeated Adelaida.

"Earlier, in fact," the prince turned to her, becoming somewhat animated again (it seemed he became animated very quickly and trustingly), "in fact it occurred to me, when you asked me for a subject for a picture, to give you this subject: to portray the face of a condemned man a minute before the stroke of the guillotine, when he's still standing on the scaffold, before he lies down on the plank."

"What? Just the face?" asked Adelaida. "That would be a strange subject, and what sort of picture would it make?"

"I don't know, why not?" the prince insisted warmly. "I recently saw a picture like that in Basel.²⁴ I'd like very much to tell you . . . Someday I'll tell you about it... it struck me greatly."

"Be sure to tell us about the Basel picture later," said Adelaida, "but now explain to me about the picture of this execution. Can you say how you imagine it yourself? How should the face be portrayed? As just a face? What sort of face?"

"It was exactly one minute before his death," the prince began with perfect readiness, carried away by his recollection, and apparently forgetting at once about everything else, "the very moment when he had climbed the little stairway and just stepped onto the scaffold. He glanced in my direction; I looked at his face and understood everything . . . But how can one talk about it! I'd be terribly, terribly glad if you or someone else could portray that! Better if it were you! I thought then that it would be a useful painting. You know, here you have to imagine everything that went before, everything, everything. He lived in prison and expected it would be at least another week till the execution; he somehow calculated the time for the usual formalities, that the paper still had to go somewhere and would only be ready in a week. And then suddenly for some reason the procedure was shortened. At five o'clock in the morning he was asleep. It was the end of October; at five o'clock it's still cold and dark. The prison warden came in quietly, with some guards, and cautiously touched his shoulder. The man sat up, leaned on his elbow—saw a light: 'What's this?' 'The execution's at ten.' Still sleepy, he didn't believe it, started objecting that the paper would be ready in a week, but when he woke up completely, he stopped arguing and fell silent—so they described it—then said: 'All the same, it's hard so suddenly . . .' and fell silent again, and wouldn't say anything after that. Then three or four hours were spent on the well-known things: the priest, breakfast, for which he was given wine, coffee, and beef (now, isn't that a mockery? You'd think it was very cruel, yet, on the other hand, by God, these innocent people do it in purity of heart and are sure of their loving kindness), then the toilette (do you know what a criminal's toilette is?), and finally they drive him through the city to the scaffold ... I think that here, too, while they're driving him, it seems to him that he still has an endless time to live. I imagine he probably thought on the way: 'It's still long, there are still three streets left to live; I'll get to the end of this one, then there's still that one, and the one after it, with the bakery on the right . . . it's still a long way to the bakery!' People, shouting, noise all around him, ten thousand faces, ten thousand pairs of eyes—all that must be endured, and above all the thought: 'There are ten thousand of them, and none of them is being executed, it's me they're executing!' Well, that's all the preliminaries. A little stairway leads up to the scaffold; there, facing the stairway, he suddenly burst into tears, and yet he was a strong and manly fellow and was said to be a great villain. A priest was

with him all the time, rode in the cart with him, and kept talking— the man scarcely heard him: he'd begin to listen and after three words lose all understanding. That's how it must have been. Finally, he started up the stairway; his legs were bound, so he could only take small steps. The priest, who must have been an intelligent man, stopped talking and kept giving him the cross to kiss. At the foot of the stairway he was very pale, but when he went up and stood on the scaffold, he suddenly turned white as paper, absolutely white as a sheet of writing paper. Probably his legs went weak and numb, and he felt nauseous—as if something was pressing his throat, and it was like a tickling—have you ever felt that when you were frightened, or in very terrible moments, when you keep your reason but it no longer has any power? It seems to me, for instance, that if disaster is imminent, if the house is collapsing on you, you want terribly much just to sit down, close your eyes, and wait—let come what may! ... It was here, when this weakness set in, that the priest hurriedly and silently, with such a quick gesture, put the cross suddenly right to his lips—a small silver cross with four points²⁵— and did it frequently, every minute. And the moment the cross touched his lips, he opened his eyes and seemed to revive for a few seconds, and his legs moved. He kissed the cross greedily, hurried to kiss it, as if hurrying to grasp something extra, just in case, but he was hardly conscious of anything religious at that moment. And so it went till he reached the plank . . . It's strange that people rarely faint in those last seconds! On the contrary, the head is terribly alive and must be working hard, hard, hard, like an engine running; I imagine various thoughts throbbing in it, all of them incomplete, maybe even ridiculous, quite irrelevant thoughts: 'That gaping one has a wart on his forehead . . . the executioner's bottom button is rusty . . .' and meanwhile you know everything and remember everything; there is this one point that can never be forgotten, and you can't faint, and around it, around that point, everything goes and turns. And to think that it will be so till the last quarter of a second, when his head is already lying on the block, and he waits, and . . . knows, and suddenly above him he hears the iron screech! You're bound to hear it! If I were lying there, I'd listen on purpose and hear it! It may be only one tenth of an instant, but you're bound to hear it! And imagine, to this day they still argue that, as the head is being cut off, it may know for a second that it has been cut off— quite a notion! And what if it's five seconds! Portray the scaffold so that only the last step is seen closely and clearly; the criminal has

stepped onto it: his head, his face white as paper, the priest offering him the cross, he greedily puts it to his blue lips and stares, and— knows everything. The cross and the head—there's the picture. The priest's face, the executioner, his two assistants, and a few heads and eyes below—all that could be painted as background, in a mist, as accessory . . . That's the sort of picture."

The prince fell silent and looked at them all.

"That, of course, is nothing like quietism," Alexandra said to herself.

"Well, now tell us how you were in love," said Adelaida.

The prince looked at her in surprise.

"Listen," Adelaida seemed to be hurrying, "you owe us the story about the Basel picture, but now I want to hear how you were in love. You were, don't deny it. Besides, as soon as you start telling about something, you stop being a philosopher."

"When you finish a story, you immediately feel ashamed of having told it," Aglaya suddenly observed. "Why is that?"

"This is quite stupid, finally," Mrs. Epanchin snapped, looking indignantly at Aglaya.

"Not clever," Alexandra agreed.

"Don't believe her, Prince," Mrs. Epanchin turned to him, "she does it on purpose out of some sort of spite; she hasn't been brought up so stupidly; don't think anything of their pestering you like this. They probably have something in mind, but they already love you. I know their faces."

"I know their faces, too," said the prince, giving special emphasis to his words.

"How is that?" Adelaida asked curiously.

"What do you know about our faces?" the other two also became curious.

But the prince was silent and serious; they all waited for his reply.

"I'll tell you later," he said quietly and seriously.

"You decidedly want to intrigue us," cried Aglaya. "And what solemnity!"

"Well, all right," Adelaida again began to hurry, "but if you're such an expert in faces, then surely you were also in love, which means I guessed right. Tell us about it."

"I wasn't in love," the prince replied as quietly and seriously, "I . . . was happy in a different way."

"How? In what way?"

"Very well, I'll tell you," the prince said, as if pondering deeply.

VI

"Here you all are now," the prince began, "looking at me with such curiosity that if I don't satisfy it, you may well get angry with me. No, I'm joking," he quickly added with a smile. "There . . . there it was all children, and I was with children all the time, only with children. They were the children of that village, a whole band, who went to school. It wasn't I who taught them; oh, no, they had a schoolmaster there for that—Jules Thibaut; or perhaps I did teach them, but more just by being with them, and I spent all my four years that way. I didn't need anything else. I told them everything, I didn't hide anything from them. Their fathers and relations all got angry with me, because the children finally couldn't do without me and kept gathering around me, and the schoolmaster finally even became my worst enemy. I acquired many enemies there, and all because of the children. Even Schneider scolded me. And what were they so afraid of? A child can be told everything—everything. I was always struck by the thought of how poorly grown-ups know children, even fathers and mothers their own children. Nothing should be concealed from children on the pretext that they're little and it's too early for them to know. What a sad and unfortunate idea! And how well children themselves can see that their fathers consider them too little and unable to understand anything, while they understand everything. Grown-ups don't know that a child can give extremely important advice even in the most difficult matters. Oh, God! when this pretty little bird looks at you trustingly and happily, it's a shame for you to deceive it! I call them little birds because nothing in the world is better than a little bird. However, they all got angry with me in the village mainly for a certain occurrence . . . and Thibaut simply envied me. At first he kept shaking his head and wondering how it was that with me the children understood everything and with him almost nothing, and then he started laughing at me when I told him that neither of us would teach them anything, but they might still teach us. And how could he be jealous of me and slander me, when he himself lived with children! The soul is cured through children . . . There was a patient at Schneider's institution, a very unhappy man. His unhappiness was so terrible, there could hardly be the like of it. He was placed there to be treated for insanity.