The Idiot

And perhaps a parting smile of love will shine Upon the sad sunset of my decline.⁴³

Ha, ha, ha!" he suddenly dissolved in hysterical laughter and began to cough. "Please note," he croaked through his coughing, "about our Ganechka: he goes talking about 'leavings,' and now look what he wants to make use of!"

The prince said nothing for a long time; he was horrified.

"You mentioned a meeting with Nastasya Filippovna?" he murmured at last.

"Eh, but can you really and truly not know that there will be a meeting today between Aglaya Ivanovna and Nastasya Filippovna, for which Nastasya Filippovna has been summoned purposely from Petersburg, through Rogozhin, at Aglaya Ivanovna's invitation and by my efforts, and is now staying, together with Rogozhin, not very far from you, in her former house, with that lady, Darya Alexeevna ... a very ambiguous lady, her friend, and it's there, to that ambiguous house, that Aglaya Ivanovna will go today for a friendly conversation with Nastasya Filippovna and for the solving of various problems. They want to do some arithmetic. You didn't know? Word of honor?"

"That's incredible!"

"Well, all right, so it's incredible; anyhow, where could you find out from? Though here a fly flies by and everybody knows: it's that kind of little place! I've warned you, however, and you can be grateful to me. Well, good-bye—see you in the other world, most likely. And here's another thing: even though I acted meanly towards you, because . . . why should I lose what's mine, kindly tell me? For your benefit, or what? I dedicated my 'Confession' to her (you didn't know that?). Yes, and how she accepted it! Heh, heh! But I've never behaved meanly towards her, I'm not guilty of anything before her; it was she who disgraced me and let me down . . . And, incidentally, I'm not guilty of anything before you either; if I did make mention of those 'leavings' and all the rest in the same sense, to make up for it I'm now telling you the day, and the hour, and the address of the meeting, and revealing this whole game to you . . . out of vexation, naturally, and not out of magnanimity. Good-bye, I'm talkative, like a stammerer or a consumptive; watch out, take measures, and quickly, if you're worthy to be called a human being. The meeting is this evening, that's certain."

Ippolit went to the door, but the prince called out to him, and he stopped in the doorway.

"So, Aglaya Ivanovna, in your opinion, will go herself this evening to see Nastasya Filippovna?" the prince asked. Red spots appeared on his cheeks and forehead.

"I don't know exactly, but probably so," Ippolit answered, glancing over his shoulder. "And anyhow it can't be otherwise. Can Nastasya Filippovna go to her? And not to Ganechka's

either; he's almost got himself a dead man there. That general's something, eh?"

"It's impossible for that alone!" the prince picked up. "How could she leave, even if she wanted to? You don't know . . . the ways of that house: she can't leave by herself and go to see Nastasya Filippovna; it's nonsense!"

"You see, Prince: nobody jumps out of windows, but if the house is on fire, then the foremost gentleman and the foremost lady might up and jump out of the window. If the need comes along, there's no help for it, our young lady will go to Nastasya Filippovna. Don't they let them go out anywhere, those young ladies?"

"No, that's not what I . . ."

"If it's not that, then she only has to go down the front steps and walk straight off, and then she may not even come back. There are occasions when one may burn one's boats, and one may even not come back: life doesn't consist only of lunches and dinners and Princes Shch. It seems to me that you take Aglaya Ivanovna for some sort of young lady or boarding-school girl; I talked to her about that; it seems she agreed. Expect it at seven or eight ... If I were you, I'd send somebody to keep watch there, to catch the moment when she goes down the front steps. Well, you could even send Kolya; he'd be very pleased to do some spying, rest assured— for you, that is . . . because everything's relative . . . Ha, ha!"

Ippolit left. The prince had no cause to ask anyone to spy, even if he were capable of it. Aglaya's order to stay at home was now almost explained: perhaps she wanted to take him along. True, it might be that she precisely did not want him to end up there, and that was why she told him to stay home . . . That, too, could be. His head was spinning; the whole room whirled around. He lay down on the sofa and closed his eyes.

One way or the other, the matter was decisive, definitive. No, the prince did not consider Aglaya a young lady or a boarding-school girl; he felt now that he had long been afraid, and precisely of something like this; but why did she need to see her? A chill ran through his whole body; again he was in a fever.

No, he did not consider her a child! Lately, certain of her looks, certain of her words had horrified him. Sometimes it had seemed to him as if she was restraining herself, holding herself back too much, and he remembered that this had frightened him. True, for all those days he had tried not to think of it, had driven the painful thoughts away, but what was hidden in that soul? This question

had long tormented him, though he trusted in that soul. And here it all had to be resolved and revealed today. A terrible thought! And again—"that woman!" Why had it always seemed to him that that woman would appear precisely at the very last minute and snap his whole destiny like a rotten thread? He was ready to swear now that it had always seemed so to him, though he was almost semidelirious. If he had tried to forget about her lately, it was solely because he was afraid of her. What then: did he love that woman or hate her? That question he had never once asked himself today; here his heart was pure: he knew whom he loved . . . He was afraid, not so much of the meeting of the two women, not of the strangeness, not of the reason for the meeting, which he did not know, not of its outcome, whatever it might be—he was afraid of Nastasya Filippovna herself. He remembered afterwards, a few days later, that almost all the time during those feverish hours he pictured to himself her eyes, her gaze, heard her words—some sort of strange words, though little stayed in his memory after those feverish and anguished hours. He barely remembered, for instance, how Vera brought him dinner and he ate it; he did not remember whether he slept after dinner or not. He knew only that he began to make everything out clearly that evening only from the moment when Aglaya suddenly came to his terrace and he jumped up from the sofa and went to meet her in the middle of the room: it was a quarter past seven. Aglaya was quite alone, dressed simply and as if in haste in a light cloak. Her face was as pale as in the morning, and her eyes flashed with a bright, dry glint; he had never known her to have such an expression of the eyes. She looked him over attentively.

"You're all ready," she observed softly and as if calmly, "you're dressed and have your hat in your hand; that means someone warned you, and I know who: Ippolit?"

"Yes, he told me . . ." the prince murmured, nearly half dead.

"Let's go, then: you know that you absolutely must accompany me. I suppose you're strong enough to go out?"

"Yes, I am, but . . . can this be possible?"

He broke off after a moment and could not utter anything more. This was his only attempt to stop the crazy girl, and after that he followed her like a slave. However clouded his thoughts were, he still understood that she would go there even without him, and therefore he had to follow her in any case. He guessed the strength of her resolve; it was not for him to stop this wild impulse. They

walked in silence, hardly saying a single word all the way. He only noticed that she knew the way well, and when he wanted to make a detour through a further lane, because the way was more deserted there, and he suggested it to her, she listened as if straining her attention, and answered curtly: "It makes no difference!" When they had almost come right up to Darya Alexeevna's house (a large and old wooden house), a magnificent lady and a young girl were stepping off the porch; laughing and talking loudly, the two got into a splendid carriage that was waiting at the porch and did not glance even once at the approaching people, as if they did not notice them. As soon as the carriage drove off, the door immediately opened again, and the waiting Rogozhin let the prince and Aglaya in and locked the door behind them.

"There's nobody in the whole house now except the four of us," he observed aloud and gave the prince a strange look.

In the very first room, Nastasya Filippovna, too, was waiting for them, also dressed very simply and all in black; she rose to meet them, but did not smile and did not even offer the prince her hand.

Her intent and anxious gaze impatiently turned to Aglaya. The two women sat down at some distance from each other, Aglaya on the sofa in the corner of the room, Nastasya Filippovna by the window. The prince and Rogozhin did not sit down, and were not invited to sit down. With perplexity and as if with pain, the prince again looked at Rogozhin, but the man went on smiling his former smile. The silence continued for another few moments.

A sort of sinister feeling finally passed over Nastasya Filippovna's face; her gaze was becoming stubborn, firm, and almost hateful, not tearing itself from her guest for a single moment. Aglaya was obviously abashed, but not intimidated. Coming in, she had barely glanced at her rival and so far had been sitting all the time with downcast eyes, as if lost in thought. Once or twice, as if by chance, she looked around the room; an obvious repugnance showed itself in her face, as if she feared soiling herself there. She mechanically straightened her clothes and once even changed her place anxiously, moving towards the corner of the sofa. She herself was hardly aware of all her movements; but the unawareness increased the offense still more. At last she looked firmly and directly into Nastasya Filippovna's eyes, and at once clearly read everything that flashed in the incensed gaze of her rival. Woman understood woman. Aglaya shuddered.

"You know, of course, why I asked for this meeting," she spoke

finally, but very quietly, and even pausing a couple of times in this short phrase.

"No, I have no idea," Nastasya Filippovna answered drily and curtly.

Aglaya blushed. Perhaps it suddenly seemed terribly strange and incredible to her that she was now sitting with "that woman," in "that woman's" house, and was in need of her reply. At the first sounds of Nastasya Filippovna's voice, it was as if a shudder passed over her body. All this, of course, was very well noted by "that woman."

"You understand everything . . . but you deliberately make it look as if you don't," Aglaya said almost in a whisper, looking sullenly at the ground.

"Why would I do that?" Nastasya Filippovna smiled slightly.

"You want to take advantage of my position . . . that I am in your house," Aglaya went on absurdly and awkwardly.

"You are to blame for that position, not I!" Nastasya Filippovna suddenly flared up. "I didn't invite you, but you me, and so far I don't know why."

Aglaya raised her head arrogantly.

"Hold your tongue; it is not with this weapon of yours that I have come to fight with you . . ."

"Ah! So you've come to 'fight' after all? Imagine, I thought that, anyhow, you were . . . more clever ..."

They both looked at each other, no longer concealing their spite. One of these women was the same one who had so recently written such letters to the other. And now everything scattered at their first meeting and with their first words. What then? At that moment it seemed that none of the four people in the room found it strange. The prince, who the day before would not have believed it possible even to dream of it, now stood, looked, and listened as if he had long anticipated it all. The most fantastic dream had suddenly turned into the most glaring and sharply outlined reality. One of these women despised the other so much at that moment, and wished so much to say it to her (perhaps she had come only for that, as Rogozhin put it the next day), that, however fantastic the other woman was, with her disordered mind and sick soul, it seemed no preconceived idea could withstand the venomous, purely female despite of her rival. The prince was certain that Nastasya Filippovna would not start talking about the letters on her own; by her flashing glances, he could tell what those letters might cost

her now; but he would have given half his life if Aglaya, too, would not start talking about them now.

But Aglaya suddenly seemed to make an effort and at once gained control of herself.

"You misunderstand me," she said. "I haven't come ... to quarrel with you, though I don't like you. I . . . I've come to you . . . for a human talk. When I summoned you, I had already decided what I was going to speak about, and I will not go back on my decision, though you may misunderstand me completely. That will be the worse for you, not for me. I wanted to reply to what you wrote to me, and to reply in person, because it seemed more convenient to me. Listen, then, to my reply to all your letters: I felt sorry for Prince Lev Nikolaevich for the first time the very day I made his acquaintance and later when I learned about all that had happened at your party. I felt sorry for him because he is such a simple-hearted man and in his simplicity believed that he could be happy . . . with a woman ... of such character. What I feared for him was just what happened: you could not love him, you tormented him and abandoned him. You could not love him because you are too proud . . . no, not proud, I'm mistaken, but because you are vain . . . and not even that: you are selfish to the point of madness, of which your letters to me also serve as proof. You could not love him, simple as he is, and may even have despised him and laughed at him to yourself; you could love only your own disgrace and the incessant thought that you had been disgraced and offended. If you had had less disgrace or none at all, you would have been unhappier . . ." (It was a pleasure for Aglaya to articulate these words, so hurriedly leaping out, yet long prepared and pondered, already pondered when today's meeting could not even have been pictured in a dream; with a venomous gaze she followed their effect in Nastasya Filippovna's face, distorted with emotion.) "You remember," she went on, "he wrote me a letter then; he says you know about the letter and have even read it? I understood everything from that letter and understood it correctly; he recently confirmed it to me himself, that is, everything I'm telling you now, even word for word. After the letter I began to wait. I guessed that you'd have to come here, because you really can't do without Petersburg: you're still too young and good-looking for the provinces . . . However, those are also not my words," she added, blushing terribly, and from that moment on the color never left her face to the very end of her speech. "When I saw the prince

again, I felt terribly pained and offended for him. Don't laugh; if you laugh, you're not worthy of understanding it . . ."

"You can see that I'm not laughing," Nastasya Filippovna said sadly and sternly.

"However, it's all the same to me, laugh as much as you like. When I asked him myself, he told me that he had stopped loving you long ago, that even the memory of you was painful for him, but that he pitied you, and that when he remembered you, his heart felt 'pierced forever.' I must tell you, too, that I have never met a single person in my life who is equal to him in noble simple-heartedness and infinite trustfulness. I guessed after what he said that anyone who wanted to could deceive him, and whoever deceived him he would forgive afterwards, and it was for that that I loved him . . ."

Aglaya stopped for a moment, as if struck, as if not believing herself that she could utter such a word; but at the same moment an almost boundless pride flashed in her eyes; it seemed that it was now all the same for her, even if "that woman" should laugh now at the confession that had escaped her.

"I've told you everything, and, of course, you've now understood what I want from you?"

"Perhaps I have; but say it yourself," Nastasya Filippovna replied quietly.

Wrath lit up in Aglaya's face.

"I wanted to find out from you," she said firmly and distinctly, "by what right do you interfere in his feelings towards me? By what right do you dare write letters to me? By what right do you declare every minute to me and to him that you love him, after you yourself abandoned him and ran away from him in such an offensive and . . . disgraceful way?"

"I have never declared either to him or to you that I love him," Nastasya Filippovna spoke with effort, "and . . . you're right, I ran away from him . . ." she added barely audibly.

"What do you mean you 'never declared either to him or to me'?" cried Aglaya. "And what about your letters? Who asked you to matchmake us and persuade me to marry him? Isn't that a declaration? Why do you force yourself on us? At first I thought you wanted, on the contrary, to make me loathe him by meddling with us, so that I would abandon him, and only later did I guess what it was: you simply imagined that you were doing a lofty deed with all this posturing . . . Well, how could you love him, if you

love your vanity so much? Why didn't you simply go away, instead of writing ridiculous letters to me? Why don't you now marry the noble man who loves you so much and has honored you by offering his hand? It's all too clear why: if you marry Rogozhin, what sort of offense will you have left then? You'll even get too much honor! Evgeny Pavlych said of you that you've read too many poems and are 'too well educated for your . . . position'; that you're a bookish woman and a lily-white; add your vanity, and there are all your reasons . . ."

"And you're not a lily-white?"

The matter had arrived too hastily, too nakedly at such an unexpected point, unexpected because Nastasya Filippovna, on her way to Pavlovsk, had still been dreaming of something, though, of course, she anticipated it would sooner be bad than good; as for Aglaya, she was decidedly carried along by the impulse of the moment, as if falling down a hill, and could not resist the terrible pleasure of revenge. For Nastasya Filippovna it was even strange to see Aglaya like this; she looked at her and could not believe her eyes, and was decidedly at a loss for the first moment. Whether she was a woman who had read too many poems, as Evgeny Pavlovich suggested, or was simply a madwoman, as the prince was convinced, in any case this woman—who on occasion had so cynical and brazen a manner—was in reality far more shy, tender, and trustful than one might have thought. True, there was much in her that was bookish, dreamy, self-enclosed, and fantastical, but much, too, that was strong and deep . . . The prince understood that; suffering showed in his face. Aglaya noticed it and trembled with hatred.

"How dare you address me like that?" she said with inexpressible haughtiness, in reply to Nastasya Filippovna's remark.

"You probably misheard me," Nastasya Filippovna was surprised. "How did I address you?"

"If you wanted to be an honest woman, why didn't you drop your seducer Totsky then, simply . . . without theatrics?" Aglaya said suddenly out of the blue.

"What do you know about my position, that you dare to judge me?" Nastasya Filippovna gave a start and turned terribly pale.

"I know that you didn't go to work, but went off with the rich Rogozhin, in order to present yourself as a fallen angel. I'm not surprised that Totsky wanted to shoot himself because of a fallen angel!"

"Stop it!" Nastasya Filippovna said with repugnance and as if through pain. "You understand me as well as . . . Darya Alexeevna's chambermaid, who went to the justice of the peace the other day to make a complaint against her fiancé. She'd have understood better than you . . ."

"She's probably an honest girl and lives by her own labor. Why do you have such contempt for a chambermaid?"

"I don't have contempt for labor, but for you when you speak about labor."

"If you wanted to be an honest woman, you should have gone to work as a washerwoman."

The two women stood up, pale-faced, and looked at each other.

"Aglaya, stop! This is unfair," the prince cried out like a lost man. Rogozhin was no longer smiling, but listened with compressed lips and crossed arms.

"Here, look at her," Nastasya Filippovna said, trembling with spite, "at this young lady! And I took her for an angel! Have you come to see me without your governess, Aglaya Ivanovna? .. . And do you want ... do you want me to tell you straight out, here and now, without embellishments, why you came? You were scared, that's why."

"Scared of you?" asked Aglaya, beside herself with naïve and impudent amazement that the woman would dare to address her that way.

"Yes, of me! You're afraid of me, since you decided to come and see me. If you're afraid of someone, you don't despise him. And to think that I respected you, even up to this very minute! But do you know why you're afraid of me and what your main purpose is now? You wanted to find out personally whether he loves me more than you or not, because you're terribly jealous . . ."

"He has already told me that he hates you . . ." Aglaya barely murmured.

"Maybe; maybe I'm not worthy of him, only . . . only I think you're lying! He can't hate me, and he couldn't have said that! However, I'm prepared to forgive you . .. considering your position . . . only all the same I did think better of you; I thought you were more intelligent, yes, and even better-looking, by God! . . . Well, so take your treasure . . . here he is, looking at you, unable to collect his wits, take him for yourself, but on one condition: get out right now! This minute! . . ." She fell into an armchair and dissolved in tears. But suddenly

something new began to gleam in her eyes; she looked intently and fixedly at Aglaya and got up from her seat:

"Or if you like, my girl, right now . . . I'll or-der him, do you hear? I'll simply or-der him, and he'll drop you at once and stay with me forever, and marry me, and you'll run home alone! Would you like that, my girl, would you?" she cried like a crazy woman, perhaps almost not believing herself that she could utter such words.

Aglaya rushed to the door in fear, but stopped in the doorway as if rooted there and listened.

"Would you like me to throw Rogozhin out? You thought, my girl, that I was going to up and marry Rogozhin for your good pleasure? Now I'll shout in front of you: 'Go, Rogozhin!' and say to the prince: 'Remember what you promised?' Lord! Why did I humiliate myself so before them? Didn't you assure me yourself, Prince, that you'd follow me whatever happened and never leave me; that you loved me, and forgave me everything, and re . . . resp . . . Yes, you said that, too! And I ran away from you only in order to unbind you, but now I don't want to! Why did she treat me like a loose woman? Ask Rogozhin how loose I am, he'll tell you! Now, when she has disgraced me, and that right in front of you, are you going to turn away from me and go out arm in arm with her? Then may you be cursed for that, because you're the only one I trusted. Go, Rogozhin, I don't need you!" she cried, almost oblivious, struggling to free the words from her breast, her face distorted and her lips parched, obviously not believing one drop of her own bravado, but at the same time wishing to prolong the moment if only for a second and deceive herself. The impulse was so strong that she might have died, or so at least it seemed to the prince. "Here he is, look, my girl!" she finally cried out to Aglaya, pointing at the prince with her hand. "If he doesn't come to me right now, if he doesn't take me and drop you, then you can have him, I give him up, I don't need him! . . ."

Both she and Aglaya stopped as if in expectation, and they both gave him mad looks. But he may not have understood all the force of this challenge, even certainly did not, one may say. He only saw before him the desperate, insane face, because of which, as he had once let slip to Aglaya, "his heart was forever pierced." He could no longer bear it and with entreaty and reproach turned to Aglaya, pointing to Nastasya Filippovna:

"It's not possible! She's ... so unhappy!"

But that was all he managed to say, going dumb under Aglaya's terrible look. That look expressed so much suffering, and at the same time such boundless hatred, that he clasped his hands, cried out, and rushed to her, but it was already too late! She could not bear even a moment of hesitation in him, covered her face with her hands, cried: "Oh, my God!"—and rushed out of the room, Rogozhin going after her to unlock the street door.

The prince also ran, but arms seized him on the threshold. Nastasya Filippovna's stricken, distorted face looked at him point-blank, and her blue lips moved, saying:

"After her? After her? . . ."

She fell unconscious in his arms. He picked her up, brought her into the room, laid her in an armchair, and stood over her in dull expectation. There was a glass of water on the table; Rogozhin, who had returned, snatched it up and sprinkled her face with water; she opened her eyes and for a moment understood nothing; but suddenly she looked around, gave a start, cried out, and rushed to the prince.

"Mine! Mine!" she cried. "Is the proud young lady gone? Ha, ha, ha!" she laughed hysterically, "ha, ha, ha! I wanted to give him to that young lady! But why? What for? Madwoman! Madwoman! . . . Get out, Rogozhin, ha, ha, ha!"

Rogozhin looked at them intently, did not say a word, took his hat, and left. Ten minutes later the prince was sitting beside Nastasya Filippovna, gazing at her without tearing his eyes away, and stroking her dear head and face with both hands, like a little child. He laughed when she laughed and was ready to weep at her tears. He did not say anything, but listened intently to her fitful, rapturous, and incoherent babbling, hardly understood anything, but smiled quietly, and as soon as it seemed to him that she had begun to be anguished again, or to weep, or reproach, or complain, he would at once begin again to stroke her dear head and tenderly pass his hands over her cheeks, comforting and reassuring her like a child.

IX

Two weeks went by after the events recounted in the last chapter, and the position of the characters in our story changed so much that it is extremely difficult for us to set out on the

continuation without special explanations. And yet we feel that we must limit ourselves to the simple statement of facts, as far as possible without special explanations, and for a very simple reason: because we ourselves, in many cases, have difficulty explaining what happened. Such a warning on our part must appear quite strange and unclear to the reader: how recount that of which we have neither a clear understanding nor a personal opinion? Not to put ourselves in a still more false position, we had better try to explain things with an example, and perhaps the benevolent reader will understand precisely what our difficulty is, the more so as this example will not be a digression, but, on the contrary, a direct and immediate continuation of the story.

Two weeks later, that is, at the beginning of July, and over the course of those two weeks, the story of our hero, and especially the last adventure of that story, turned into a strange, rather amusing, almost unbelievable, and at the same time almost graphic anecdote, which gradually spread through all the streets neighboring the dachas of Lebedev, Ptitsyn, Darya Alexeevna, the Epanchins, in short, over almost the whole town and even its environs. Almost all of society—the locals, the summer people, those who came for the music—everyone began telling one and the same story, in a thousand different versions, about a certain prince who, having caused a scandal in an honorable and well-known house, and having rejected the daughter of that house, already his fiancée, had been enticed away by a well-known tart, had broken all his former connections, and, regardless of everything, regardless of threats, regardless of general public indignation, intended to marry the disgraced woman one of those days, right there in Pavlovsk, openly, publicly, with head held high and looking everyone straight in the eye. The anecdote was becoming so embroidered with scandals, so many well-known and important persons were mixed up in it, it was endowed with such a variety of fantastic and mysterious nuances, and, on the other hand, it was presented in such irrefutable and graphic facts, that the general curiosity and gossip were, of course, quite excusable. The most subtle, clever, and at the same time plausible interpretation belonged to several serious gossips, from that stratum of sensible people who, in every society, always hasten first of all to explain an event to others, finding in it a vocation, and often also a consolation. According to their interpretation, a young man, of good family, a prince, almost wealthy, a fool, but a democrat, and gone crazy over modern nihilism, which

was discovered by Mr. Turgenev,⁴⁴ barely able to speak Russian, had fallen in love with a daughter of General Epanchin, and had succeeded in being received in the house as a fiancé. But, like that French seminarian about whom an anecdote had just been published, who had purposely allowed himself to be ordained a priest, had purposely sought this ordination, had performed all the rites, all the bowing, kissing, vows, etc., in order to proclaim publicly, the next day, in a letter to his bishop, that, not believing in God, he considered it dishonest to deceive folk and be fed by them gratis, and therefore he was laying aside his yesterday's dignity, and would publish his letter in the liberal newspapers—like this atheist, the prince was supposed to have dissembled in his own way. The story went that he had supposedly waited on purpose for a solemn, formal party given by his fiancee's parents, at which he had been introduced to a great many important persons, in order to proclaim his way of thinking aloud and in front of everyone, to denounce the venerable dignitaries, to reject his fiancée publicly and offensively, and, while resisting the servants who were taking him out, to smash a beautiful Chinese vase. To this was added, with a view to characterizing modern morals, that the muddle-headed young man actually loved his fiancée, the general's daughter, but had rejected her solely out of nihilism and for the sake of the imminent scandal, so as not to deny himself the pleasure of marrying a fallen woman before the whole world and thereby proving that in his conviction there were neither fallen nor virtuous women, but only free women; that he did not believe in the social and old distinction, but believed only in the "woman question." That, finally, a fallen woman, in his eyes, was even somewhat higher than an unfallen one. This explanation seemed quite plausible and was accepted by the majority of the summer people, the more so as it was confirmed by everyday facts. True, many things remained unexplained: the story went that the poor girl loved her fiancé—her "seducer" according to some—so much that she came running to him the very next day after he abandoned her and sat there with his mistress; others insisted, on the contrary, that he purposely lured her to his mistress, solely out of nihilism, that is, for the sake of the disgrace and offense. Be that as it may, interest in the event grew daily, the more so as there remained not the slightest doubt that the scandalous wedding would actually take place.

And so, if we were asked to explain—not about the nihilistic nuances of the event, but simply to what extent the appointed

wedding satisfied the actual desires of the prince, precisely what those desires consisted in at the present moment, precisely how to define our hero's state of mind at the present moment, etc., etc., in the same vein—we confess, we would have great difficulty in answering. We know only one thing, that the wedding was indeed appointed, and that the prince himself had entrusted Lebedev, Keller, and some acquaintance of Lebedev's, whom he had introduced to the prince for the occasion, to take upon themselves all the cares connected with the matter, both churchly and practical; that money was not to be spared, that Nastasya Filippovna was hurrying and insisting on the wedding; that Keller, at his own fervent request, had been appointed the prince's groomsman,⁴⁵ and for Nastasya Filippovna—Burdovsky, who accepted the appointment with rapture, and that the day of the wedding was appointed for the beginning of July. But apart from these very specific circumstances, some other facts are known to us which have decidedly thrown us off, precisely because they contradict the foregoing ones. We strongly suspect, for instance, that, having entrusted Lebedev and the others to take all the cares on themselves, the prince all but forgot that very same day that he had a master of ceremonies, and a groomsman, and a wedding, and that if he so quickly arranged the transfer of his cares to others, it was solely so as not to think about them himself, and even perhaps to forget them as quickly. What was he thinking about, in that case? What did he want to remember, and what was he striving for? There was also no doubt that there had been no forcing of him here (on Nastasya Filippovna's part, for instance); that Nastasya Filippovna indeed wished absolutely for a quick wedding, and that the wedding had been her idea and not the prince's at all; but the prince had consented freely, even somehow distractedly and as if he had been asked some rather ordinary thing. Of such strange facts we have a great many before us, yet they not only do not explain, but, in our opinion, even obscure the interpretation of the affair, however many we may cite; but, anyhow, we shall present one more.

Thus, it is perfectly well known to us that in the course of those two weeks the prince spent whole days and evenings with Nastasya Filippovna; that she took him with her for walks, for concerts; that he went for rides with her every day in the carriage; that he would begin to worry about her if he did not see her for only an hour (which meant that, by all tokens, he sincerely loved her); that he listened to her with a quiet and meek smile, whatever she might

talk to him about, for whole hours, saying almost nothing himself. But we also know that during those same days, several times and even many times, he suddenly betook himself to the Epanchins', not concealing it from Nastasya Filippovna, which drove her almost to despair. We know that he was not received at the Epanchins' while they remained in Pavlovsk, that he was constantly denied a meeting with Aglaya Ivanovna; that he would leave without saying a word and the next day go to them again, as though he had completely forgotten the previous day's refusal, and, naturally, receive a new refusal. It is also known to us that an hour after Aglaya Ivanovna ran out of Nastasya Filippovna's house, and perhaps even earlier, the prince was already at the Epanchins', in the certainty, of course, of finding Aglaya there, and that his appearance at the Epanchins' had caused extreme confusion and fear in the house, because Aglaya had not come home yet, and it was only from him that they first heard that she had gone with him to Nastasya Filippovna's. It was said that Lizaveta Prokofyevna, her daughters, and even Prince Shch. had treated the prince extremely harshly, inimically, and right then refused him, in vehement terms, their acquaintance and friendship, especially when Varvara Arda-lionovna suddenly came to Lizaveta Prokofyevna and announced that Aglaya Ivanovna had been at her house for an hour, in a terrible state, and seemed not to want to go home. This last news struck Lizaveta Prokofyevna most of all, and it was perfectly correct: having left Nastasya Filippovna's, Aglaya indeed would sooner have died than show herself now to the eyes of her family, and therefore she had rushed to Nina Alexandrovna's. Varvara Ardalionovna, for her part, had at once found it necessary to inform Lizaveta Prokofyevna of all this without the least delay. Mother, daughters, everyone at once rushed to Nina Alexandrovna's, followed by the father of the family, Ivan Fyodorovich himself, who had just returned home; after them trudged Prince Lev Nikolaevich, in spite of the banishment and harsh words; but, on Varvara Ardalionovna's orders, he was not permitted to see Aglaya there either. The end of the matter, however, was that when Aglaya saw her mother and sisters weeping over her and not reproaching her at all, she threw herself into their arms and at once returned home with them. It was said, though the rumors were not quite precise, that Gavrila Ardalionovich was terribly unlucky this time as well; that, seizing the moment when Varvara Ardalionovna had run to Lizaveta Prokofyevna's, he, alone with Aglaya, had decided to try

and speak to her about his love, that, listening to him, Aglaya, despite all her anguish and tears, had suddenly burst out laughing and suddenly asked him a strange question: would he, in proof of his love, burn his finger right now in a candle? Gavrila Ardalionovich was, they say, dumbfounded by the suggestion and so much at a loss, showed such extreme perplexity on his face, that Aglaya laughed at him as if in hysterics and ran away from him upstairs to Nina Alexandrovna, where her parents found her. This anecdote reached the prince through Ippolit the next day. Bedridden by then, Ippolit purposely sent for the prince to tell him the story. How this rumor had reached Ippolit we do not know, but when the prince heard about the candle and the finger, he burst into such laughter that he even surprised Ippolit; then he suddenly trembled and dissolved in tears . . . Generally during those days he was in great anxiety and extraordinary confusion, vague and tormenting. Ippolit affirmed directly that the prince had lost his mind; but that could not yet be said affirmatively.

In presenting all these facts and declining to explain them, we by no means wish to justify our hero in our readers' eyes. What's more, we are fully prepared to share the same indignation he aroused in his friends. Even Vera Lebedev was indignant with him for a time; even Kolya was indignant; Keller was even indignant, up to the time when he was chosen as groomsman, to say nothing of Lebedev himself, who even began to intrigue against the prince, also out of indignation, which was even quite genuine. But we shall speak of that later. In general, we sympathize fully and in the highest degree with certain words, quite forceful and even profound in their psychology, which Evgeny Pavlovich said to the prince, directly and without ceremony, in a friendly talk on the sixth or seventh day after the event at Nastasya Filippovna's. We shall note, incidentally, that not only the Epanchins themselves, but everyone directly or indirectly affiliated with the house of the Epanchins, found it necessary to break off all relations with the prince entirely. Prince Shch., for instance, even looked away when he met the prince and did not return his bow. But Evgeny Pavlovich was not afraid of compromising himself by calling on the prince, though he had again begun visiting the Epanchins every day and was received even with an obviously increased cordiality. He went to see the prince exactly the day after all the Epanchins left Pavlovsk. He came in already knowing all the rumors spread among the public and having perhaps even contributed to them himself. The

prince was terribly glad to see him and at once spoke about the Epanchins; such a simple-hearted and direct opening completely unbound Evgeny Pavlovich as well, so that without preliminaries he, too, went straight to the point.

The prince did not know yet that the Epanchins had left; he was struck, turned pale; but a moment later he shook his head, embarrassed and pensive, and admitted that "it had to be so"; after which he quickly asked "where did they go?"

Evgeny Pavlovich meanwhile watched him intently, and all of it —that is, the quickness of the questions, their simple-heartedness, the embarrassment, and at the same time some strange frankness, anxiousness, and agitation—all of it surprised him not a little. He, however, told the prince about everything courteously and in detail: there were many things the prince still did not know, and this was his first news from that house. He confirmed that Aglaya had indeed been sick, in a fever, and had hardly slept for three nights; that she was better now and out of all danger, but in a nervous, hysterical condition . . . "It's already a good thing that there is perfect peace in the house! They try not to allude to what happened, even among themselves, not only in front of Aglaya. The parents have discussed between them the possibility of going abroad in the autumn, right after Adelaida's wedding; Aglaya received the first mention of it in silence." He, Evgeny Pavlovich, might also go abroad. Even Prince Shch. might decide to go, for a couple of months, with Adelaida, if his affairs permitted. The general himself would stay. They had now all moved to Kolmino, their estate, about twenty miles from Petersburg, where they had a roomy mansion. Princess Belokonsky had not yet gone to Moscow and, it seemed, was even staying on purpose. Lizaveta Prokofyevna had strongly insisted that it was impossible to remain in Pavlovsk after all that had happened; he, Evgeny Pavlovich, had informed her every day of the rumors going around town. They also had not found it possible to settle in their dacha on Elagin Island.

"Well, yes, and in fact," Evgeny Pavlovich added, "you'll agree yourself, how could they stand it . . . especially knowing all that goes on here every hour, in your house, Prince, and after your daily visits there, despite the refusals . . ."

"Yes, yes, yes, you're right, I wanted to see Aglaya Ivanovna . . ." The prince again began shaking his head.

"Ah, my dear Prince," Evgeny Pavlovich exclaimed suddenly, with animation and sadness, "how could you have allowed ... all

that to happen? Of course, of course, it was all so unexpected for you ... I agree that you were bound to be at a loss and . . . you couldn't have stopped the crazy girl, that was beyond your power! But you ought to have understood how serious and strong the girl's . . . attitude towards you was. She didn't want to share with the other one, and you . . . and you could abandon and break such a treasure!"

"Yes, yes, you're right; yes, I'm to blame," the prince said again in terrible anguish, "and you know: only she, only Aglaya, looked at Nastasya Filippovna that way . . . No one else looked at her that way."

"But that's what makes it so outrageous, that there was nothing serious in it!" cried Evgeny Pavlovich, decidedly carried away. "Forgive me, Prince, but . . . I . . . I've thought about it, Prince; I've thought a lot about it; I know everything that happened before, I know everything that happened half a year ago, everything, and— it was all not serious! It was all only a cerebral infatuation, a picture, a fantasy, smoke, and only the frightened jealousy of a totally inexperienced girl could have taken it for something serious!"

Here Evgeny Pavlovich, now completely without ceremony, gave free rein to all his indignation. Sensibly and clearly and, we repeat, even extremely psychologically, he unfolded before the prince the picture of all the prince's relations with Nastasya Filippovna. Evgeny Pavlovich had always had a gift for speaking; now he even attained to eloquence. "From the very beginning," he pronounced, "you began with a lie; what began with a lie was bound to end with a lie; that is a law of nature. I don't agree and even feel indignant when they—well, whoever—call you an idiot; you're too intelligent to be called that; but you're strange enough not to be like all other people, you'll agree. I've decided that the foundation of all that has happened was composed, first, of your, so to speak, innate inexperience (note that word, Prince: 'innate'), then of your extraordinary simple-heartedness; further, of a phenomenal lack of the sense of measure (which you've admitted several times)—and, finally, of an enormous, flooding mass of cerebral convictions, which you, with all your extraordinary honesty, have taken all along for genuine, natural, and immediate convictions! You yourself will agree, Prince, that your relations with Nastasya Filippovna from the very beginning had something conventionally democratic about them (I put it that way for the sake of brevity), the charm, so to speak, of the 'woman question' (to put it still more briefly). I know

in exact detail that whole strange, scandalous scene that took place at Nastasya Filippovna's when Rogozhin brought his money. If you like, I'll analyze you for yourself, counting off on my fingers; I'll show you to yourself as in a mirror, so exactly do I know what it was about and why it turned out that way! You, a young man, longed for your native land in Switzerland, you strained towards Russia as towards a promised but unknown land; you read a lot of books about Russia, excellent books, perhaps, but harmful for you; you arrived with the initial fervor of the desire to act, you, so to speak, fell upon action! And so, on that same day they tell you a sad, heart-stirring story about an offended woman, they tell you, that is, a knight, a virgin, about a woman! On that same day you meet the woman; you're enchanted by her beauty, her fantastic, demonic beauty (I do agree that she's a beauty). Add nerves, add your falling sickness, add our nerve-shattering Petersburg thaw; add that whole day in an unknown and almost fantastic city, a day of encounters and scenes, a day of unexpected acquaintances, a day of the most unexpected reality, a day of the three Epanchin beauties, and Aglaya among them; add fatigue, dizziness; add Nastasya Filippovna's drawing room and the tone of that drawing room, and . . . what do you think you could have expected of yourself at that moment?"

"Yes, yes; yes, yes," the prince was shaking his head and beginning to blush, "yes, it was almost so; and, you know, I actually hardly slept all the previous night, on the train, or the night before, and I was very disconcerted ..."

"Well, of course, that's what I'm driving at," Evgeny Pavlovich went on vehemently. "It's clear that, drunk with rapture, you fell upon the opportunity of publicly proclaiming the magnanimous thought that you, a born prince and a pure man, did not find dishonorable a woman who had been disgraced through no fault of her own, but through the fault of a loathsome high-society debaucher. Oh, Lord, it's so understandable! But that's not the point, my dear Prince, the point is whether there was truth here, whether your feeling was genuine, was it natural, or was it only a cerebral rapture? What do you think: a woman was forgiven in the Temple,⁴⁶ the same sort of woman, but was she told that she had done well and was worthy of all honor and respect? Didn't common sense whisper to you, after three months, telling you what it was about? Let her be innocent now—I don't insist, because I have no wish to—but can all her adventures justify such unbearable

demonic pride as hers, such insolent, such greedy egoism? Forgive me, Prince, I'm getting carried away, but . . ."

"Yes, that all may be; it may be that you're right . . ." the prince began to murmur again, "she really is very edgy, and you're right, of course, but ..."

"She deserves compassion? Is that what you want to say, my good Prince? But for the sake of compassion and for the sake of her good pleasure, was it possible to disgrace this other, this lofty and pure girl, to humiliate her before those arrogant, before those hateful eyes? How far can compassion go, then? That is an incredible exaggeration! Is it possible, while loving a girl, to humiliate her so before her rival, to abandon her for the other one, right in front of that other one, after making her an honorable proposal yourself. . . and you did make her a proposal, you said it to her in front of her parents and sisters! Are you an honorable man after that, Prince, may I ask? And . . . and didn't you deceive a divine girl, after assuring her that you loved her?"

"Yes, yes, you're right, ah, I feel I'm to blame!" the prince said in inexpressible anguish.

"But is that enough?" Evgeny Pavlovich cried in indignation. "Is it sufficient merely to cry out: 'I'm to blame!' You're to blame, and yet you persist! And where was your heart then, your 'Christian' heart! You saw her face at that moment: tell me, did she suffer less than that one, than your other one, her rival? How could you see it and allow it? How?"

"But ... I didn't allow it . . ." murmured the unhappy prince.

"What do you mean you didn't?"

"By God, I didn't allow anything. I still don't understand how it all came about . . . I—I ran after Aglaya Ivanovna then, and Nastasya Filippovna fainted; and since then I haven't been allowed to see Aglaya Ivanovna."

"All the same! You should have run after Aglaya, even though the other one fainted!"

"Yes . . . yes, I should have . . . but she would have died! She would have killed herself, you don't know her, and ... all the same, I'd have told everything to Aglaya Ivanovna afterwards, and . . . You see, Evgeny Pavlych, I can see that you don't seem to know everything. Tell me, why won't they let me see Aglaya Ivanovna? I'd have explained everything to her. You see: neither of them talked about the right thing, not about the right thing at all, that's why it turned out like this . . . There's no way I can explain it to

you; but I might be able to explain it to Aglaya . . . Ah, my God, my God! You speak of her face at the moment she ran out. . . oh, my God, I remember! Let's go, let's go!" he suddenly pulled Evgeny Pavlovich's sleeve, hurriedly jumping up from his seat.

"Where?"

"Let's go to Aglaya Ivanovna, let's go right now! . . ."

"But I told you, she's not in Pavlovsk, and why go?"

"She'll understand, she'll understand!" the prince murmured, pressing his hands together in entreaty. "She'll understand that it's all not that, but something completely, completely different!"

"How is it completely different? Aren't you getting married all the same? That means you persist . . . Are you getting married or not?"

"Well, yes ... I am; yes, I am getting married!"

"Then how is it not that?"

"Oh, no, not that, not that! It makes no difference that I'm getting married, it doesn't matter!"

"It makes no difference and doesn't matter? It's not a trifling thing, is it? You're marrying a woman you love in order to make her happiness, and Aglaya Ivanovna sees and knows it, so how does it make no difference?"

"Happiness? Oh, no! I'm simply getting married; she wants it; and so what if I'm getting married, I . . . Well, it makes no difference! Only she would certainly have died. I see now that this marriage to Rogozhin was madness! I now understand everything I didn't understand before, and you see: when the two of them stood facing each other, I couldn't bear Nastasya Filippovna's face then . . . You don't know, Evgeny Pavlych" (he lowered his voice mysteriously), "I've never spoken to anyone about this, not even Aglaya, but I can't bear Nastasya Filippovna's face . . . You spoke the truth earlier about that evening at Nastasya Filippovna's; but there was one thing you left out, because you don't know it: I was looking at her face! That morning, in her portrait, I already couldn't bear it . . . Take Vera, Vera Lebedev, she has completely different eyes; I . . . I'm afraid of her face!" he added with extreme fear.

"Afraid?"

"Yes; she's—mad!" he whispered, turning pale.

"You know that for certain?" Evgeny Pavlovich asked with extreme curiosity.

"Yes, for certain; now it's certain; now, in these days, I've learned it quite certainly!"

"But what are you doing to yourself?" Evgeny Pavlovich cried out in alarm. "It means you're marrying out of some sort of fear? It's impossible to understand anything here . . . Even without loving her, perhaps?"

"Oh, no, I love her with all my soul! She's ... a child; now she's a child, a complete child! Oh, you don't know anything!"

"And at the same time you assured Aglaya Ivanovna of your love?"

"Oh, yes, yes!"

"How's that? So you want to love them both?"

"Oh, yes, yes!"

"Good heavens, Prince, what are you saying? Come to your senses!"

"Without Aglaya I ... I absolutely must see her! I . . . I'll soon die in my sleep; I thought last night that I was going to die in my sleep. Oh, if Aglaya knew, knew everything . . . that is, absolutely everything. Because here you have to know everything, that's the first thing! Why can we never know everything about another person when it's necessary, when the person is to blame! . . . However, I don't know what I'm saying, I'm confused; you struck me terribly . . . Can she really still have the same face as when she ran out? Oh, yes, I'm to blame! Most likely I'm to blame for everything! I still don't know precisely for what, but I'm to blame . . . There's something in it that I can't explain to you, Evgeny Pavlych, I lack the words, but.. . Aglaya Ivanovna will understand! Oh, I've always believed she would understand."

"No, Prince, she won't understand! Aglaya Ivanovna loved as a woman, as a human being, not as ... an abstract spirit. You know, my poor Prince: most likely you never loved either of them!"

"I don't know. .. maybe, maybe; you're right about many things, Evgeny Pavlych. You're extremely intelligent, Evgeny Pavlych; ah, my head's beginning to ache again, let's go to her! For God's sake, for God's sake!"

"I tell you, she's not in Pavlovsk, she's in Kolmino."

"Let's go to Kolmino, let's go now!"

"That is im-pos-sible!" Evgeny Pavlovich drew out, getting up.

"Listen, I'll write a letter; take a letter to her!"

"No, Prince, no! Spare me such errands, I cannot!"

They parted. Evgeny Pavlovich left with some strange convictions: and, in his opinion, it came out that the prince was slightly out of his mind. And what was the meaning of this face that he

was afraid of and that he loved so much! And at the same time he might actually die without Aglaya, so that Aglaya might never know he loved her so much! Ha, ha! And what was this about loving two women? With two different loves of some sort? That's interesting . . . the poor idiot! And what will become of him now?

X

The prince, however, did not die before his wedding, either awake or "in his sleep," as he had predicted to Evgeny Pavlovich. He may indeed have slept poorly and had bad dreams, but in the daytime, with people, he seemed kind and even content, only sometimes very pensive, but that was when he was alone. They were hurrying the wedding; it was to take place about a week after Evgeny Pavlovich's call. Given such haste, even the prince's best friends, if he had any, were bound to be disappointed in their efforts to "save" the unfortunate madcap. There was a rumor that General Ivan Fyodorovich and his wife Lizaveta Prokofyevna were partly responsible for Evgeny Pavlovich's visit. But even if the two of them, in the immeasurable goodness of their hearts, might have wanted to save the pathetic madman from the abyss, they had, of course, to limit themselves to this one feeble attempt; neither their position, nor even, perhaps, the disposition of their hearts (as was natural) could correspond to more serious efforts. We have mentioned that even those around the prince partly rose up against him. Vera Lebedev, however, limited herself only to solitary tears and to staying home more and looking in on the prince less often than before. Kolya was burying his father at that time; the old man died of a second stroke eight days after the first. The prince shared greatly in the family's grief and in the first days spent several hours a day at Nina Alexandrovna's; he attended the burial and the church service. Many noticed that the public in the church met the prince and saw him off with involuntary whispers; the same thing happened in the streets and in the garden: when he walked or drove by, people talked, spoke his name, pointed at him, mentioned Nastasya Filippovna's name. She was looked for at the burial, but she was not at the burial. Neither was the captain's widow, whom Lebedev had managed to stop and cancel in time. The burial service made a strong and painful impression on the prince; he whispered to Lebedev, still in church, in reply to some

question, that it was the first time he had attended an Orthodox burial service and only from childhood did he remember one other burial in some village church.

"Yes, sir, it's as if it's not the same man lying there in the coffin, sir, as the one we set up so recently to preside over us, remember, sir?" Lebedev whispered to the prince. "Who are you looking for, sir?"

"Never mind, I just imagined . . ."

"Not Rogozhin?"

"Is he here?"

"In the church, sir."

"That's why it seemed I saw his eyes," the prince murmured in embarrassment. "And what . . . why is he here? Was he invited?"

"Never thought of it, sir. They don't know him at all, sir. There are all sorts of people here, the public, sir. Why are you so amazed? I often meet him now; this past week I met him some four times here in Pavlovsk."

"I haven't seen him once . . . since that time," the prince murmured.

Because Nastasya Filippovna had also never once told him that she had met him "since that time," the prince now concluded that Rogozhin was deliberately keeping out of sight for some reason. That whole day he was in great pensiveness; but Nastasya Filippovna was extraordinarily merry all day and all evening.

Kolya, who had made peace with the prince before his father's death, suggested (since it was an essential and urgent matter) inviting Keller and Burdovsky to be his groomsmen. He guaranteed that Keller would behave properly and might even "be of use," and for Burdovsky it went without saying, he was a quiet and modest man. Nina Alexandrovna and Lebedev pointed out to the prince that if the wedding was already decided on, why have it in Pavlovsk of all places, and during the fashionable summer season, why so publicly? Would it not be better in Petersburg and even at home? It was only too clear to the prince what all these fears were driving at; but he replied briefly and simply that such was the absolute wish of Nastasya Filippovna.

The next day Keller also came to see the prince, having been informed that he was a groomsman. Before coming in, he stopped in the doorway and, as soon as he saw the prince, held up his right hand with the index finger extended and cried out by way of an oath:

"I don't drink!"

Then he went up to the prince, firmly pressed and shook both his hands, and declared that, of course, at first, when he heard, he was against it, which he announced over the billiard table, and for no other reason than that he had intentions for the prince and was waiting every day, with the impatience of a friend, to see him married to none other than the Princess de Rohan;⁴⁷ but now he could see for himself that the prince was thinking at least ten times more nobly than all of them "taken together!" For he wanted not brilliance, not riches, and not even honor, but only—truth! The sympathies of exalted persons were all too well known, and the prince was too exalted by his education not to be an exalted person, generally speaking! "But scum and all sorts of riffraff judge differently; in town, in the houses, at gatherings, in dachas, at concerts, in bars, over billiards, there was no other talk, no other cry than about the impending event. I hear they even want to organize a charivari under your windows, and that, so to speak, on the first night! If you need the pistol of an honest man, Prince, I'm ready to exchange a half-dozen noble shots, even before you get up the next morning from your honey bed." He also advised having a fire hose ready in the yard, in anticipation of a big influx of thirsty people at the church door; but Lebedev objected: "They'll smash the house to splinters," he said, "if there's a fire hose."

"This Lebedev is intriguing against you, Prince, by God! They want to put you into government custody, if you can imagine that, with everything, with your free will and your money, that is, with the two things that distinguish each of us from the quadrupeds! I've heard it, indeed I have! It's the real, whole truth!"

The prince remembered that he seemed to have heard something of the kind himself, but, naturally, he had paid no attention to it. This time, too, he only laughed and forgot it again at once, Lebedev actually was bustling about for a time; the man's calculations were always conceived as if by inspiration and, from excessive zeal, grew more complex, branched out, and moved away from their starting point in all directions; that was why he had succeeded so little in life. When afterwards, almost on the day of the wedding, he came to the prince with his repentance (he had an unfailing habit of always coming with his repentance to those he had intrigued against, especially if he had not succeeded), he announced to him that he was born a Talleyrand⁴⁸ and in some unknown way had remained a mere Lebedev. Then he laid out his whole game before

him, which interested the prince enormously. By his own admission, he began by seeking the protection of exalted persons, in whom he might find support in case of need, and went to General Ivan Fyodorovich. General Ivan Fyodorovich was perplexed, very much wished the "young man" well, but declared that "for all his desire to save him, it was improper for him to act here." Lizaveta Prokofyevna did not want either to see or to hear him; Evgeny Pavlovich and Prince Shch. only waved him away. But he, Lebedev, did not lose heart and consulted a clever lawyer, a venerable old man, his great friend and almost his benefactor; the man concluded that the business was perfectly possible as long as there were competent witnesses to his derangement and total insanity, and with that, above all, the patronage of exalted persons. Lebedev did not despond here either, and once even brought a doctor to see the prince, also a venerable old man, a summer person, with an Anna on his neck,⁴⁹ solely in order to reconnoiter the terrain, so to speak, to get acquainted with the prince and, not yet officially but, so to speak, in a friendly way, to inform him of his conclusions. The prince remembered the doctor calling on him; he remembered that the day before Lebedev had been nagging him about his being unwell, and when the prince resolutely rejected medicine, he suddenly showed up with the doctor, under the pretext that the two of them were just coming from Mr. Terentyev, who was very sick, and the doctor had something to tell the prince about the patient. The prince praised Lebedev and received the doctor with extreme cordiality. They at once got to talking about the sick Ippolit; the doctor asked for a more detailed account of the scene of the suicide, and the prince absolutely fascinated him with his story and his explanation of the event. They talked about the Petersburg climate, about the prince's own illness, about Switzerland, about Schneider. The doctor was so interested in the prince's stories and his account of Schneider's system of treatment that he stayed for two hours; he smoked the prince's excellent cigars all the while, and from Lebedev's side a most tasty liqueur appeared, brought by Vera, and the doctor, a married and family man, let himself go into particular compliments before Vera, which aroused profound indignation in her. They parted friends. Having left the prince, the doctor said to Lebedev that if all such people were taken into custody, who then would be the custodians? To the tragic account, on Lebedev's part, of the impending event, the doctor shook his head slyly and insidiously, and finally observed that, not to mention the fact that

"men marry all kinds of women," "this seductive individual, at least as far as he had heard, besides her immeasurable beauty, which in itself could attract a man of wealth, also possesses capital from Totsky and from Rogozhin, pearls and diamonds, shawls and furniture, and therefore the impending choice not only does not show any, so to speak, especially eye-striking stupidity on the dear prince's part, but even testifies to the cleverness of a subtle, worldly intelligence and calculation, and therefore contributes to the opposite conclusion, quite favorable to the prince .. ." This thought struck Lebedev as well; he stayed with that, and now, he added to the prince, "now you won't see anything from me but devotion and the shedding of blood; that's what I've come to say."

Ippolit, too, diverted the prince during those last days; he sent for him quite often. They lived nearby, in a small house; the little children, Ippolit's brother and sister, were glad of the dacha, because they could at least go to the garden to escape the sick boy; but the poor captain's widow remained entirely under his will and was wholly his victim; the prince had to separate and arbitrate between them every day, and the sick boy continued to call him his "nanny," at the same time not daring, as it were, not to despise him for his role as conciliator. He bore a big grudge against Kolya for hardly visiting him at all, staying first with his dying father and then with his widowed mother. He finally set up as the target of his mockery the impending marriage of the prince and Nastasya Filippovna, and ended by offending the prince and making him finally lose his temper: the prince stopped visiting him. Two days later the captain's widow came trudging in the morning and tearfully begged the prince please to come, otherwise that one would eat her alive. She added that he wanted to reveal a big secret. The prince went. Ippolit wanted to make peace, wept, and after his tears, naturally, became still more spiteful, only he was afraid to show his spite. He was very sick, and everything indicated that he would now die soon. There was no secret, except for certain extreme entreaties, breathless, so to speak, from excitement (perhaps affected), to "beware of Rogozhin." "He's a man who won't give up what's his; he's not like you and me, Prince; if he wants to, he won't flinch at . . ." etc., etc. The prince began to inquire in more detail, wanting to obtain some facts; but there were no facts, except for Ippolit's personal feelings and impressions. To his extreme satisfaction, Ippolit ended by finally frightening the prince terribly. At first the prince did not want to answer certain particular

questions of his and only smiled at his advice "to run away, even abroad; there are Russian priests everywhere, you can be married there." But, finally, Ippolit ended with the following thought: "I'm only afraid for Aglaya Ivanovna: Rogozhin knows how much you love her; love for love; you've taken Nastasya Filippovna from him, he'll kill Aglaya Ivanovna; though she's not yours now, all the same it will be hard for you, won't it?" He achieved his goal; the prince went away no longer himself.

These warnings about Rogozhin came on the eve of the wedding. That same evening the prince saw Nastasya Filippovna for the last time before their marriage; but Nastasya Filippovna was unable to calm him down, and recently, on the contrary, had even increased his confusion still more. Before, that is, several days earlier, at her meetings with him, she had made every effort to divert him, and was terribly afraid of his sad look: she had even tried to sing for him; most often she told him all the funny things she could remember. The prince almost always pretended to laugh very much, and sometimes did in fact laugh at the brilliant intelligence and bright feeling with which she sometimes told a story, when she got carried away, and she often got carried away. Seeing the prince laugh, seeing the impression she made on him, she was delighted and felt proud of herself. But now her sadness and pensiveness grew with almost every hour. His opinion of Nastasya Filippovna was settled, otherwise, naturally, everything in her would now have seemed mysterious and incomprehensible. But he sincerely believed that she could still rise. He had said quite correctly to Evgeny Pavlovich that he sincerely and fully loved her, and his love for her indeed consisted in being drawn, as it were, towards some pitiful and sick child whom it was difficult and even impossible to abandon to its own will. He did not explain his feelings for her to anyone and even did not like talking about it, if it was impossible to avoid talking; and when he and Nastasya Filippovna sat together, they never discussed "feelings," as if they had both promised not to. Anyone could take part in their ordinary, cheerful, and animated conversation. Darya Alexeevna said afterwards that she had simply admired and rejoiced looking at them all that while.

But this view he had of the state of Nastasya Filippovna's soul and mind delivered him in part from many other perplexities. This was now a completely different woman from the one he had known some three months earlier. He did not brood, for instance, on why

she had run away from marrying him then, with tears, curses, and reproaches, but now insisted herself on a speedy marriage. "It means she's not afraid, as she was then, that marrying her would be his unhappiness," thought the prince. Such quickly reborn self-assurance could not, in his view, be natural to her. Nor, again, could this assurance come only from hatred of Aglaya: Nastasya Filippovna was capable of somewhat deeper feelings. Nor from fear of facing her life with Rogozhin. In short, all these reasons, together with the rest, might have had a share in it; but the clearest thing of all for him was that it was precisely what he had long suspected, and that the poor, sick soul had been unable to endure. All this, though it delivered him, in a way, from perplexities, could not give him either peace or rest all that time. Sometimes he tried not to think about anything; it did seem, in fact, that he looked upon marriage as some sort of unimportant formality; he valued his own fate much too cheaply. With regard to objections, to conversations, such as the one with Evgeny Pavlovich, here he could say decidedly nothing in reply and felt himself totally incompetent, and therefore he avoided all conversations of that sort.

He noticed, however, that Nastasya Filippovna knew and understood only too well what Aglaya meant to him. She did not say anything, but he saw her "face" at those times when she occasionally caught him, in the beginning, on the point of going to the Epanchins'. When the Epanchins left, she really brightened. Unobservant and unsuspecting as the prince was, he had been worried by the thought that Nastasya Filippovna might venture upon some scandal in order to drive Aglaya out of Pavlovsk. The noise and rumble about the wedding in all the dachas was, of course, partly maintained by Nastasya Filippovna in order to annoy her rival. Since it was difficult to meet the Epanchins, Nastasya Filippovna put the prince into the carriage once and gave orders that they be driven right past the windows of their dacha. This was a terrible surprise for the prince: he realized it, as usual, when it was impossible to do anything about it and the carriage was already driving right past the windows. He did not say anything, but was ill for two days afterwards; Nastasya Filippovna did not repeat the experiment again. In the last days before the wedding she began to lapse into deep thought; she always ended by overcoming her sadness and becoming merry again, but somehow more quietly, not so noisily, not so happily merry as before, still so recently. The prince redoubled his attention. He was curious why she never spoke to

him about Rogozhin. Only once, some five days before the wedding, Darya Alexeevna suddenly sent for him to come immediately, because Nastasya Filippovna was very unwell. He found her in a state resembling total madness: she was exclaiming, trembling, crying that Rogozhin was hiding in the garden, in their own house, that she had just seen him, that he was going to kill her in the night . . . put a knife in her! She could not calm down the whole day. But that same evening, when the prince stopped at Ippolit's for a moment, the captain's widow, who had just come back from town, where she had gone on some little errands of her own, told them that Rogozhin had called on her that day in her apartment in Petersburg and questioned her about Pavlovsk. When the prince asked precisely when Rogozhin had called, the captain's widow named almost the same hour when Nastasya Filippovna had supposedly seen him that day in her garden. The matter was explained as a simple mirage; Nastasya Filippovna herself went to the captain's widow for more detail and was extremely comforted. On the eve of the wedding the prince left Nastasya Filippovna in great animation: the next day's finery had arrived from the dressmaker in Petersburg, the wedding dress, the headpiece, etc., etc. The prince had not expected that she would be so excited over the finery; he praised everything himself, and his praise made her still happier. But she let something slip: she had heard that there was indignation in town and that some scapegraces were indeed arranging a charivari, with music and all but with verses written specially for the occasion, and that it was all but approved of by the rest of society. And so now she precisely wanted to hold her head still higher before them, to outshine them all with the taste and wealth of her finery—"let them shout, let them whistle, if they dare!" The mere thought of it made her eyes flash. She had yet another secret thought, but she did not voice it aloud: she dreamed that Aglaya, or at least someone sent by her, would also be in the crowd, incognito, in the church, would look and see, and she was inwardly preparing herself for that. She parted from the prince, all taken up with these thoughts, at about eleven o'clock in the evening; but before it struck midnight, a messenger came running to the prince from Darya Alexeevna saying "come quickly, it's very bad." The prince found his fiancée locked in the bedroom, in tears, in despair, in hysterics; for a long time she refused to listen to anything they said to her through the locked door; at last she opened it, let in only the prince, locked the door after him, and fell

on her knees before him. (So, at least, Darya Alexeevna reported afterwards, having managed to spy out a thing or two.)

"What am I doing! What am I doing! What am I doing to you!" she kept exclaiming, convulsively embracing his legs.

The prince stayed for a whole hour with her; we do not know what they talked about. According to Darya Alexeevna, they parted after an hour, reconciled and happy. The prince sent once more that night to inquire, but Nastasya Filippovna was already asleep. In the morning, before she woke up, two more messengers came to Darya Alexeevna's from the prince, and a third was instructed to tell him that "Nastasya Filippovna is now surrounded by a whole swarm of dressmakers and hairdressers from Petersburg, that there was no trace of yesterday's mood, that she was occupied as only such a beauty could be occupied with dressing for her wedding, and that now, precisely at that moment, an extraordinary congress was being held about precisely which of the diamonds to wear and how to wear them." The prince was completely set at ease.

The whole following story about this wedding was told by knowledgeable people in the following way and seems to be correct:

The wedding was set for eight o'clock in the evening; Nastasya Filippovna was ready by seven. From six o'clock on, crowds of idlers gradually began to gather around Lebedev's dacha, but more especially near Darya Alexeevna's house; after seven o'clock the church also began to fill up. Vera Lebedev and Kolya were terribly afraid for the prince; however, they were very busy at home: they were responsible for the reception and refreshments in the prince's rooms. However, almost no real gathering was planned after the wedding; besides the necessary persons present at the church ceremony, Lebedev had invited the Ptitsyns, Ganya, the doctor with an Anna on his neck, and Darya Alexeevna. When the curious prince asked Lebedev why he had decided to invite the doctor, "almost a total stranger," Lebedev answered self-contentedly: "An order on his neck, a respectable man, for appearances, sir"—and made the prince laugh. Keller and Burdovsky, in tailcoats and gloves, looked very proper; only Keller still worried the prince and his own backers slightly by his open propensity for battle and the very hostile look he gave the idlers who were gathering around the house. Finally, at half-past seven, the prince set out for the church in a carriage. We will note, incidentally, that he himself purposely did not want to leave out any of the usual habits and customs; everything was done publicly, obviously,

openly, and "as it should be." In the church, having somehow passed through the crowd, to the ceaseless whispers and exclamations of the public, under the guidance of Keller, who cast menacing looks to right and left, the prince hid for a time in the sanctuary, while Keller went to fetch the bride, where he found the crowd at the porch of Darya Alexeevna's house not only two or three times denser than at the prince's, but perhaps even three times more uninhibited. Going up to the porch, he heard such exclamations that he could not restrain himself and was just about to turn to the public with the intention of delivering an appropriate speech, but fortunately he was stopped by Burdovsky and Darya Alexeevna herself, who ran out to the porch; they seized him and took him inside by force. Keller was annoyed and hurried. Nastasya Filippovna stood up, glanced once more in the mirror, observed with a "crooked" smile, as Keller reported later, that she was "pale as a corpse," bowed piously before the icon, and went out to the porch. A buzz of voices greeted her appearance. True, in the first moment there was laughter, applause, almost whistling; but after a moment other voices were heard:

"What a beauty!" someone shouted in the crowd.

"She's not the first and she's not the last!"

"Marriage covers up everything, fools!"

"No, go and find another beauty like that! Hurrah!" the nearest ones shouted.

"A princess! I'd sell my soul for such a princess!" some clerk shouted. "'A life for one night with me! . . .' "⁵⁰

Nastasya Filippovna indeed came out white as a sheet; but her large black eyes flashed at the crowd like burning coals; it was this gaze that the crowd could not bear; indignation turned into enthusiastic shouts. The door of the carriage was already open, Keller had already offered the bride his arm, when she suddenly gave a cry and threw herself off the porch straight into the mass of people. All who were accompanying her froze in amazement, the crowd parted before her, and Rogozhin suddenly appeared five or six steps from the porch. It was his gaze that Nastasya Filippovna had caught in the crowd. She rushed to him like a madwoman and seized him by both hands.

"Save me! Take me away! Wherever you like, now!"

Rogozhin almost picked her up in his arms and all but carried her to the carriage. Then, in an instant, he took a hundred-rouble note from his wallet and gave it to the driver.

"To the station, and another hundred roubles if you make the train!"

And he jumped into the carriage after Nastasya Filippovna and closed the door. The driver did not hesitate a moment and whipped up the horses. Afterwards Keller blamed the unexpectedness of it all: "Another second and I'd have found what to do, I wouldn't have let it happen!" he explained as he recounted the adventure. He and Burdovsky jumped into another carriage that happened to be there and set off in pursuit, but he changed his mind on the way, thinking that "it's too late in any case! You can't bring her back by force!"

"And the prince wouldn't want that!" the shaken Burdovsky decided.

Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna came galloping up to the station in time. Getting out of the carriage, Rogozhin, as he was about to board the train, managed to stop a girl passing by in an old but decent dark mantilla and with a foulard kerchief thrown over her head.

"How's about fifty roubles for your mantilla!" he suddenly held the money out to the girl. Before she had time to be surprised, before she tried to understand, he had already put the fifty-rouble note into her hand, taken off the mantilla and foulard, and thrown it all over Nastasya Filippovna's shoulders and head. Her much too magnificent finery struck the eye, it would have attracted attention on the train, and only later did the girl understand why her worthless old rag had been bought at such profit for her.

The buzz about the adventure reached the church with extraordinary speed. As Keller was making his way to the prince, a host of people totally unknown to him ran up to ask him questions. There was loud talk, a shaking of heads, even laughter; no one left the church, they all waited to see how the groom would take the news. He blanched, but took the news quietly, saying barely audibly: "I was afraid; but all the same I didn't think it would be that . . ."—and then, after some silence, added: "However ... in her condition . . . it's completely in the order of things." Such a reaction Keller himself later called "unexampled philosophy." The prince left the church looking calm and brisk; so at least many noticed and reported afterwards. It seemed he wanted very much to get home and be left alone as quickly as possible; but that he was not allowed to do. He was followed into his rooms by some of the invited people, Ptitsyn and Gavrila Ardalionovich among

others, and with them the doctor, who also showed no intention of leaving. Besides that, the whole house was literally besieged by the idle public. While still on the terrace, the prince heard Keller and Lebedev get into a fierce argument with some completely unknown but decent-looking people, who wanted at all costs to enter the terrace. The prince went up to the arguers, asked what it was about, and, politely pushing Lebedev and Keller aside, delicately addressed a gray-haired and stocky gentleman, who was standing on the porch steps at the head of several other aspirants, and invited him to do him the honor of favoring him with his visit. The gentleman became embarrassed but nevertheless went in; and after him a second, a third. Out of all the crowd, some seven or eight persons were found who did go in, trying to do it as casually as possible; but no more volunteers turned up, and soon the same crowd began to denounce the parvenus. The visitors were seated, a conversation began, tea was served—and all that extremely decently, modestly, to the slight surprise of the visitors. There were, of course, several attempts to liven up the conversation and lead it to an "appropriate" theme; several immodest questions were asked, several "daring" observations were made. The prince answered everyone so simply and affably, and at the same time with such dignity, such trust in his guests' decency, that the immodest questions faded away of themselves. The conversation gradually began to turn almost serious. One gentleman, seizing on a word, suddenly swore in extreme indignation that he would not sell his estate, whatever happened; that, on the contrary, he would wait and bide his time, and that "enterprises are better than money"; "that, my dear sir, is what my economic system consists in, if you care to know, sir." As he was addressing the prince, the prince warmly praised him, though Lebedev whispered in his ear that this gentleman did not have a penny to his name and had never had any estate. Almost an hour went by, the tea was finished, and after tea the guests finally felt ashamed to stay longer. The doctor and the gray-haired gentleman warmly took leave of the prince; and everyone else also took their leave warmly and noisily. Wishes and opinions were expressed, such as that "there was nothing to grieve about, and perhaps it was all the better this way," etc. True, there were attempts to ask for champagne, but the older guests stopped the younger ones. When they were all gone, Keller leaned over to Lebedev and said: "You and I would start shouting, fighting, disgrace ourselves, get the police involved; and here he's got himself

some new friends, and what friends! I know them!" Lebedev, who was already "loaded," sighed and said: "Hidden from the wise and clever, and revealed unto babes,⁵¹ I said that about him before, but now I'll add that God has preserved the babe himself, saved him from the abyss, he and all his saints!"

Finally, at around half-past ten, the prince was left alone; he had a headache; the last to leave was Kolya, who helped him to change his wedding costume for house clothes. They parted warmly. Kolya did not talk about what had happened, but promised to come early the next day. He later testified that the prince had not warned him about anything at this last farewell, which meant that he had concealed his intentions even from him. Soon there was almost no one left in the whole house: Burdovsky went to Ippolit's, Keller and Lebedev also took themselves off somewhere. Only Vera Lebedev remained in the rooms for some time, hastily turning everything from a festive to its ordinary look. As she was leaving, she peeked into the prince's room. He was sitting at the table, both elbows resting on it and his head in his hands. She quietly went up to him and touched his shoulder; the prince looked at her in perplexity, and for almost a minute seemed as if he was trying to remember; but having remembered and realized everything, he suddenly became extremely excited. It all resolved itself, however, in a great and fervent request to Vera, that she knock at his door the next morning at seven o'clock, before the first train. Vera promised; the prince began asking her heatedly not to tell anyone about it; she promised that as well, and finally, when she had already opened the door to leave, the prince stopped her for a third time, took her hands, kissed them, then kissed her on the forehead, and with a certain "extraordinary" look, said: "Till tomorrow!" So at least Vera recounted afterwards. She left fearing greatly for him. In the morning she was heartened a little when she knocked at his door at seven o'clock, as arranged, and announced to him that the train for Petersburg would leave in a quarter of an hour; it seemed to her that he was quite cheerful and even smiling when he opened the door to her. He had almost not undressed for the night, but he had slept. In his opinion, he might come back that same day. It turned out, therefore, that at that moment she was the only one he had found it possible and necessary to inform that he was going to town.

XI

An hour later he was in Petersburg, and after nine o'clock he was ringing at Rogozhin's. He came in by the front entrance and had to wait a long time. At last, the door of old Mrs. Rogozhin's apartment opened, and an elderly, decent-looking maid appeared.

"Parfyon Semyonovich is not at home," she announced from the doorway. "Whom do you want?"

"Parfyon Semyonovich."

"He's not at home, sir."

The maid looked the prince over with wild curiosity.

"At least tell me, did he spend the night at home? And . . . did he come back alone yesterday?"

The maid went on looking, but did not reply.

"Didn't he come here yesterday ... in the evening . . . with Nastasya Filippovna?"

"And may I ask who you are pleased to be yourself?"

"Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, we're very well acquainted."

"He's not at home, sir."

The maid dropped her eyes.

"And Nastasya Filippovna?"

"I know nothing about that, sir."

"Wait, wait! When will he be back?"

"We don't know that either, sir."

The door closed.

The prince decided to come back in an hour. Looking into the courtyard, he met the caretaker.

"Is Parfyon Semyonovich at home?"

"He is, sir."

"How is it I was just told he's not at home?"

"Did somebody at his place tell you?"

"No, the maid at his mother's, but when I rang at Parfyon Semyonovich's nobody answered."

"Maybe he went out," the caretaker decided. "He doesn't always say. And sometimes he takes the key with him and the rooms stay locked for three days."

"Are you sure he was at home yesterday?"

"He was. Sometimes he comes in the front entrance, so I don't see him."

"And wasn't Nastasya Filippovna with him yesterday?"

"That I don't know, sir. She doesn't care to come often; seems we'd know if she did."

The prince went out and for some time walked up and down the sidewalk, pondering. The windows of the rooms occupied by Rogozhin were all shut; the windows of the half occupied by his mother were almost all open; it was a hot, clear day; the prince went across the street to the opposite sidewalk and stopped to look once more at the windows; not only were they shut, but in almost all of them the white blinds were drawn.

He stood there for a minute and—strangely—it suddenly seemed to him that the edge of one blind was raised and Rogozhin's face flashed, flashed and disappeared in the same instant. He waited a little longer and decided to go and ring again, but changed his mind and put it off for an hour: "Who knows, maybe I only imagined it . . ."

Above all, he now hurried to the Izmailovsky quarter, where Nastasya Filippovna recently had an apartment. He knew that, having moved out of Pavlovsk three weeks earlier at his request, she had settled in the Izmailovsky quarter with one of her good acquaintances, a teacher's widow, a respectable and family lady, who sublet a good furnished apartment in her house, which was almost her whole subsistence. It was very likely that Nastasya Filippovna had kept the apartment when she went back to Pavlovsk; at least it was quite possible that she had spent the night in this apartment, where Rogozhin would surely have brought her yesterday. The prince took a cab. On the way it occurred to him that he ought to have started there, because it was incredible that she would have gone at night straight to Rogozhin's. Here he also recalled the caretaker's words, that Nastasya Filippovna did not care to come often. If she had never come often anyway, then why on earth would she now be staying at Rogozhin's? Encouraging himself with such consolations, the prince finally arrived at the Izmailovsky quarter more dead than alive.

To his utter astonishment, not only had no one heard of Nastasya Filippovna at the teacher's widow's either yesterday or today, but they ran out to look at him as at some sort of wonder. The whole numerous family of the teacher's widow—all girls with a year's difference, from fifteen down to seven years old—poured out after their mother and surrounded him, their mouths gaping. After them came their skinny yellow aunt in a black kerchief, and, finally, the

grandmother of the family appeared, a little old lady in spectacles. The teacher's widow urged him to come in and sit down, which the prince did. He realized at once that they were well informed about who he was, and knew perfectly well that his wedding was to have taken place yesterday, and were dying to ask about both the wedding and the wonder that he was there asking them about the woman who should have been nowhere else but with him in Pavlovsk, but they were too delicate to ask. In a brief outline, he satisfied their curiosity about the wedding. There was amazement, gasps and cries, so that he was forced to tell almost all the rest, in broad outline, of course. Finally, the council of wise and worried ladies decided that they absolutely had to go first of all and knock at Rogozhin's till he opened, and find out everything positively from him. And if he was not at home (which was to be ascertained) or did not want to tell, they would drive to the Semyonovsky quarter, to a certain German lady, Nastasya Filippovna's acquaintance, who lived with her mother: perhaps Nastasya Filippovna, in her agitation and wishing to hide, had spent the night with them. The prince got up completely crushed; they reported afterwards that he "turned terribly pale"; indeed, his legs nearly gave way under him. Finally, through the terrible jabber of voices, he discerned that they were arranging to act in concert with him and were asking for his town address. He turned out to have no address; they advised him to put up somewhere in a hotel. The prince thought and gave the address of his former hotel, the one where he had had a fit some five weeks earlier. Then he went back to Rogozhin's.

This time not only Rogozhin's door but even the one to the old lady's apartment did not open. The prince went for the caretaker and had great difficulty finding him in the courtyard; the caretaker was busy with something and barely answered, even barely looked at him, but all the same declared positively that Parfyon Semyonovich "left very early in the morning, went to Pavlovsk, and wouldn't be home today."

"I'll wait; maybe he'll come towards evening?"

"And he may not be home for a week, who knows about him."

"So he did spend the night here?"

"The night, yes, he spent the night . . ."

All this was suspicious and shady. The caretaker might very well have had time, during that interval, to receive new instructions: earlier he had even been talkative, while now he simply turned his back. But the prince decided to come by once more in about two

hours, and even to stand watch by the house, if need be, while now there was still hope for the German woman, and he drove to the Semyonovsky quarter.

But at the German woman's they did not even understand him. From certain fleeting remarks, he was even able to guess that the German beauty had quarreled with Nastasya Filippovna some two weeks ago, so that she had not even heard of her in all those days, and tried as hard as she could to make it clear that she was not interested in hearing anything now, "even if she's married all the princes in the world." The prince hastened to leave. It occurred to him, among other things, that she might have left for Moscow, as she did the other time, and Rogozhin, naturally, would have followed her, or perhaps had gone with her. "At least let me find some trace!" He remembered, however, that he had to stop at the inn, and he hurried to Liteinaya; there he was given a room at once. The floorboy asked if he wanted a bite to eat; he answered absent-mindedly that he did, and on second thought was furious with himself, because eating would take an extra half hour, and only later did he realize that nothing prevented him from leaving the food uneaten on the table. A strange sensation came over him in this dim and stifling corridor, a sensation that strove painfully to realize itself in some thought; but he was quite unable to tell what this new importunate thought was. He finally left the inn, no longer himself; his head was spinning, but—anyhow, where to go? He raced to Rogozhin's again.

Rogozhin had not come back; no one opened to his ringing; he rang at old Mrs. Rogozhin's; they opened the door and also announced that Parfyon Semyonovich was not at home and might not be back for some three days. What disturbed the prince was that he was again studied with the same wild curiosity. The caretaker this time was nowhere to be found. He went, as earlier, to the opposite sidewalk, looked at the windows, and paced up and down in the torrid heat for about half an hour or maybe more; this time nothing stirred; the windows did not open, the white blinds were motionless. It finally occurred to him that he had probably only imagined it earlier, that the windows by all tokens were even so dim, so long in need of washing, that it would have been hard to make anything out, even if anyone in fact had looked through the glass. Gladdened by this thought, he again went to the Izmailovsky quarter, to the teacher's widow.

He was expected there. The teacher's widow had already gone

to three or four places and had even stopped at Rogozhin's: not the slightest trace. The prince listened silently, went into the room, sat on the sofa, and began looking at them all as if not understanding what they were telling him. Strange: first he was extremely observant, then suddenly impossibly distracted. The whole family reported later that he had been an "astonishingly" strange man that day, so that "perhaps all the signs were already there." He finally stood up and asked to be shown Nastasya Filippovna's rooms. These were two large, bright, high-ceilinged rooms, quite well furnished, and not cheap. All these ladies reported afterwards that the prince studied every object in the rooms, saw an open book on the table, from a lending library, the French novel Madame Bovary,⁵² looked at it, earmarked the page on which the book lay open, asked permission to take it with him, and, not listening to the objection that it was a library book, put it into his pocket. He sat down by the open window and, seeing a card table covered with writing in chalk, asked who played. They told him that Nastasya Filippovna had played every night with Rogozhin—fools, preference, millers, whist, hearts—all sorts of games, and that the cards had appeared only very recently, when she moved from Pavlovsk to Petersburg, because Nastasya Filippovna kept complaining that she was bored, that Rogozhin sat silent for whole evenings and could not talk about anything, and she often wept; and suddenly the next evening Rogozhin took cards from his pocket; here Nastasya Filippovna laughed and they began to play. The prince asked where the cards they had played with were. But there were no cards; Rogozhin himself always brought the cards in his pocket, a new deck every day, and then took them away with him.

The ladies advised him to go once more to Rogozhin's and to knock harder once more, not now, but in the evening: "something might turn up." The teacher's widow herself volunteered meanwhile to go to Pavlovsk to see Darya Alexeevna before evening: they might know something there. The prince was invited to come by ten o'clock that evening, in any case, to make plans for the next day. Despite all consolations and reassurances, a perfect despair overwhelmed the prince's soul. In inexpressible anguish, he reached his inn on foot. The dusty, stifling summer Petersburg squeezed him as in a vice; he jostled among stern or drunken people, aimlessly peered into faces, probably walked much more than he had to; it was nearly evening when he entered his hotel room. He decided to rest a little and then go again to Rogozhin's, as he had

been advised, sat down on the sofa, rested both elbows on the table, and fell to thinking.

God knows how long he thought and God knows what about. There was much that he feared, and he felt painfully and tormentingly that he was terribly afraid. Vera Lebedev came into his head; then it occurred to him that Lebedev might know something about this matter, and if he did not, he would be able to find out sooner and more easily than he would himself. Then he remembered Ippolit, and that Rogozhin had gone to see Ippolit. Then he remembered Rogozhin himself: recently at the burial, then in the park, then—suddenly here in the corridor, when he had hidden himself in the corner that time and waited for him with a knife. His eyes he now remembered, his eyes looking out of the darkness then. He gave a start: the earlier importunate thought now came to his head.

It was in part that if Rogozhin was in Petersburg, then even if he was hiding for a time, all the same he would end by coming to him, the prince, with good or bad intentions, perhaps, just as then. At least, if Rogozhin had to come for some reason or other, then he had nowhere else to come than here, to this same corridor again. He did not know his address; therefore he would very possibly think that the prince was staying at the same inn; at least he would try looking here ... if he needed him very much. And, who knows, perhaps he would need him very much?

So he reflected, and for some reason this thought seemed perfectly possible to him. He would not have been able to account for it to himself, if he had begun to go deeper into this thought: "Why, for instance, should Rogozhin suddenly need him so much, and why was it even impossible that they should not finally come together?" But the thought was painful: "If things are well with him, he won't come," the prince went on thinking, "he'll sooner come if things are not well with him; and things are probably not well ..."

Of course, with such a conviction, he ought to have waited for Rogozhin at home, in his hotel room; but he was as if unable to bear his new thought, jumped up, seized his hat, and ran. It was now almost quite dark in the corridor: "What if he comes out of that corner now and stops me by the stairs?" flashed in him as he approached the familiar spot. But no one came out. He went down under the gateway, walked out to the sidewalk, marveled at the dense crowd of people who came pouring outside at sunset (as

always in Petersburg at vacation time), and went in the direction of Gorokhovaya Street. Fifty paces from the inn, at the first intersection, in the crowd, someone suddenly touched his elbow and said in a low voice, just at his ear:

"Lev Nikolaevich, come with me, brother, you've got to."

It was Rogozhin.

Strange: the prince began telling him, suddenly, with joy, babbling and almost not finishing the words, how he had been expecting him just now in the corridor, at the inn.

"I was there," Rogozhin answered unexpectedly, "let's go."

The prince was surprised by the answer, but he was surprised at least two minutes later, when he understood. Having understood the answer, he became frightened and began studying Rogozhin. The man was walking almost half a step ahead, looking straight in front of him and not glancing at anyone he met, giving way to them all with mechanical care.

"Then why didn't you ask for me in my room ... if you were at the inn?" the prince asked suddenly.

Rogozhin stopped, looked at him, thought, and, as if not understanding the question at all, said:

"So, now, Lev Nikolaevich, you go straight on here, right to the house, you know? And I'll go along the other side. And watch out that we keep together ..."

Having said this, he crossed the street, stepped onto the opposite sidewalk, looked whether the prince was following, and seeing that he was standing and staring at him, waved his hand in the direction of Gorokhovaya and went on, constantly turning to look at the prince and beckoning to him to follow. He was obviously heartened to see that the prince had understood him and did not cross the street to join him. It occurred to the prince that Rogozhin had to keep an eye out for someone and not miss him on the way, and that that was why he had crossed to the other side. "Only why didn't he tell me who to look for?" They went some five hundred paces that way, and suddenly the prince began to tremble for some reason; Rogozhin still kept looking back, though more rarely; the prince could not help himself and beckoned to him with his hand. The man at once came across the street to him.

"Is Nastasya Filippovna at your house?"

"Yes."

"And was it you who looked at me from behind the curtain earlier?"

"It was . . ."

"Then why did you . . ."

But the prince did not know what to ask further and how to finish the question; besides, his heart was pounding so hard that it was difficult for him even to speak. Rogozhin was also silent and looked at him as before, that is, as if pensively.

"Well, I'm going," he said suddenly, preparing to cross the street again, "and you go, too. Let's stay separated in the street . . . it's better for us that way ... on different sides . . . you'll see."

When they finally turned from two different sidewalks onto Gorokhovaya and approached Rogozhin's house, the prince's legs again began to give way under him, so that he had difficulty walking. It was nearly ten o'clock in the evening. The windows on the old lady's side were open as before, Rogozhin's were closed, and the drawn white blinds seemed to have become still more noticeable in the twilight. The prince came up to the house from the opposite sidewalk; Rogozhin stepped onto the porch from his sidewalk and waved his hand to him. The prince went up to him on the porch.

"Even the caretaker doesn't know about me now, that I've come back home. I told him earlier that I was going to Pavlovsk, and I said the same thing at my mother's," he whispered with a sly and almost contented smile. "We'll go in and nobody'll hear."

He already had the key in his hand. Going up the stairs, he turned and shook his finger at the prince to step more quietly, quietly opened the door to his rooms, let the prince in, carefully came in after him, locked the door behind him, and put the key in his pocket.

"Let's go," he said in a whisper.

He had begun speaking in a whisper still on the sidewalk in Liteinaya. Despite all his external calm, he was in some deep inner anguish. When they entered the big room, just before his study, he went up to the window and beckoned mysteriously to the prince:

"So when you rang my bell earlier, I guessed straight off that it was you all right; I tiptoed to the door and heard you talking with Pafnutyevna, and I'd already been telling her at dawn: if you, or somebody from you, or anybody else starts knocking at my door, she shouldn't tell about me under any pretext; and especially if you came asking for me yourself, and I told her your name. And then, when you left, it occurred to me: what if he's standing there now and spying on me, or watching from the street? I went up to this

same window, raised the curtain a bit, looked, and you were standing there looking straight at me . . . That's how it was."

"And where is . . . Nastasya Filippovna?" the prince brought out breathlessly.

"She's . . . here," Rogozhin said slowly, as if waiting a bit before he answered.

"But where?"

Rogozhin raised his eyes to the prince and looked at him intently:

Let's go . . .

He kept speaking in a whisper and without hurrying, slowly and, as before, with some strange pensiveness. Even when he was telling about the curtain, it was as if he wanted to express something different with his story, despite all the expansiveness of the telling.

They went into the study. A certain change had taken place in this room since the prince had been there: a green silk damask curtain was stretched across the whole room, with openings at both ends, separating the study from the alcove in which Rogozhin's bed was set up. The heavy curtain was drawn and the openings were closed. But it was very dark in the room; the Petersburg "white" summer nights were beginning to turn darker, and if it had not been for the full moon, it would have been difficult to see anything in Rogozhin's dark rooms with the blinds drawn. True, it was still possible to make out faces, though not very clearly. Rogozhin's face was very pale, as usual; his eyes looked intently at the prince, with a strong gleam, but somehow motionlessly.

"Why don't you light a candle?" asked the prince.

"No, better not," Rogozhin replied and, taking the prince by the hand, he bent him down onto a chair; he sat down facing him and moved the chair so that his knees almost touched the prince's. Between them, a little to the side, was a small, round table. "Sit down, let's sit a while!" he said, as if persuading him to sit down. They were silent for a minute. "I just knew you'd stay in that same inn," he began, as people sometimes do, approaching the main conversation by starting with extraneous details, not directly related to the matter. "As soon as I stepped into the corridor, I thought: maybe he's sitting and waiting for me now, like me him, this same minute? Did you go to the teacher's widow's?"

"I did," the prince could barely speak for the strong pounding of his heart.

"I thought about that, too. There'll be talk, I thought . . . and then I thought: I'll bring him here to spend the night, so that this night together . . ."

"Rogozhin! Where is Nastasya Filippovna?" the prince suddenly whispered and stood up, trembling in every limb. Rogozhin got up, too.

"There," he whispered, nodding towards the curtain.

"Asleep?" whispered the prince.

Again Rogozhin looked at him intently, as earlier.

"Okay, let's go! . . . Only you . . . Well, let's go!"

He raised the curtain, stopped, and again turned to the prince.

"Come in!" he nodded towards the opening, inviting him to go first. The prince went in.

"It's dark here," he said.

"You can see!" Rogozhin muttered.

"I can barely see . . . the bed."

"Go closer," Rogozhin suggested quietly.

The prince took one step closer, then another, and stopped. He stood and peered for a minute or two; neither man said anything all the while they were there by the bed; the prince's heart was pounding so that it seemed audible in the dead silence of the room. But his eyes were accustomed now, so that he could make out the whole bed; someone was sleeping there, a completely motionless sleep; not the slightest rustle, not the slightest breath could be heard. The sleeper was covered from head to foot with a white sheet, but the limbs were somehow vaguely outlined; one could only see by the raised form that a person lay stretched out there. Scattered in disorder on the bed, at its foot, on the chair next to the bed, even on the floor, were the taken-off clothes, a costly white silk dress, flowers, ribbons. On the little table by the head of the bed, the taken-off and scattered diamonds sparkled. At the foot of the bed some lace lay crumpled in a heap, and against this white lace, peeping from under the sheet, the tip of a bare foot was outlined; it seemed carved from marble and was terribly still. The prince looked and felt that the more he looked, the more dead and quiet the room became. Suddenly an awakened fly buzzed, flew over the bed, and alighted by its head. The prince gave a start.

"Let's get out," Rogozhin touched his arm.

They went out, sat down again in the same chairs, again facing each other. The prince was trembling more and more, and did not take his questioning eyes off Rogozhin's face.

"You're trembling, I notice, Lev Nikolaevich," Rogozhin said at last, "almost like when your disorder comes over you, remember, how it was in Moscow? Or the way it was once before a fit. And I just can't think what I'm going to do with you now ..."

The prince listened, straining all his powers to understand, and still asking with his eyes.

"It was you?" he finally managed to say, nodding towards the curtain.

"It was . . . me . . ." Rogozhin whispered and looked down.

They were silent for about five minutes.

"Because," Rogozhin suddenly began to go on, as if he had not interrupted his speech, "because if it's your illness, and a fit, and shouting now, somebody may hear it in the street or the courtyard, and they'll figure that people are spending the night in the apartment; they'll start knocking, they'll come in . . . because they all think I'm not home. I didn't light a candle so they wouldn't suspect that in the street or the courtyard. Because when I'm not home, I take the key with me, and nobody comes in for three or four days, even to tidy up, that's how I set it up. Now, so they won't know we're spending the night..."

"Wait," said the prince, "I asked the caretaker and the old woman earlier whether Nastasya Filippovna hadn't spent the night. So they already know."

"I know you asked. I told Pafnutyevna that Nastasya Filippovna came yesterday and left for Pavlovsk yesterday, and that she spent ten minutes at my place. They don't know she spent the night— nobody knows. Yesterday we came in very quietly, like you and me today. I thought to myself on the way that she'd refuse to go in quietly—forget it! She talked in a whisper, walked on tiptoe, gathered her dress up all around her so it wouldn't rustle, and held it with her hands, she shook her finger at me on the stairs—all because she was frightened of you. On the train it was like she was completely crazy, all from fear, and she herself wanted to come here to spend the night; I first thought I'd take her to the teacher's widow's—forget it! 'He'll find me there,' she says, 'at dawn, but you can hide me, and tomorrow morning I'll go to Moscow,' and then she wanted to go to Orel somewhere. And as she was getting ready for bed, she kept saying we'd go to Orel. . ."

"Wait, what about now, Parfyon, what do you want now?"

"See, I just have doubts about you trembling all the time. We'll spend the night here together. There's no other bed here than that

one, so I decided to take the pillows from the two sofas, and I'll arrange them next to each other there, by the curtain, for you and me, so we're together. Because if they come in, they'll start looking and searching, they'll see her at once and take her out. They'll start questioning me, I'll tell them it was me, and they'll take me away at once. So let her lie here now, next to us, next to me and you . . ."

"Yes, yes!" the prince agreed warmly.

"Meaning not to confess or let them take her out."

"N-not for anything!" the prince decided. "No, no, no!"

"That's how I decided, too, so as not to give her up, man, not for anything, not to anybody! We'll spend the night quietly. Today I left the house only for one hour, in the morning, otherwise I was always by her. And then in the evening I went to get you. I'm also afraid it's stuffy and there'll be a smell. Do you notice the smell or not?"

"Maybe I do, I don't know. By morning there will be."

"I covered her with oilcloth, good American oilcloth, and the sheet's on top of the oilcloth, and I put four uncorked bottles of Zhdanov liquid there, they're standing there now."

"It's like there ... in Moscow?"

"Because of the smell, brother. But she's lying there so ... In the morning, when it's light, have a look. What, you can't get up?" Rogozhin asked with timorous surprise, seeing the prince trembling so much that he could not stand up.

"My legs won't work," the prince murmured. "It's from fear, I know it . . . The fear will pass, and I'll get up . . ."

"Wait, I'll make up the bed meanwhile, and then you can lie down . . . and I'll lie down with you . . . and we'll listen . . . because I don't know yet, man ... I don't know everything yet, man, so I'm telling you ahead of time, so you'll know all about it ahead of time ..."

Muttering these vague words, Rogozhin began to make up the beds. It was clear that he had perhaps thought of these beds as early as that morning. He himself had spent the past night lying on the sofa. But two people could not lie on the sofa, and he absolutely wanted to make up beds now side by side, and that was why, with great effort, he now dragged pillows of various sizes from both sofas all the way across the room, right up to the opening in the curtain. The bed got made up anyhow; he went over to the prince, took him tenderly and rapturously by the arm, got him to his feet, and led him to the bed; but it turned out that the prince

could walk by himself; which meant that "the fear was passing"; and yet he still went on trembling.

"Because, brother," Rogozhin began suddenly, laying the prince down on the left, better, pillows and himself stretching out on the right side, without undressing and thrusting both hands behind his head, "it's hot now, and sure to smell . . . I'm afraid to open the windows; but at my mother's there are pots of flowers, a lot of flowers, and they have such a wonderful smell; I thought I might bring them here, but Pafnutyevna would guess, because she's a curious one."

"She's a curious one," agreed the prince.

"We could buy some bouquets and lay flowers all around her? But I think it'd be a pity, friend, to cover her with flowers!"

"Listen . . ." the prince asked, as if in confusion, as if groping for precisely what he had to ask and forgetting it at once, "listen, tell me: what did you use? A knife? That same one?"

"That same one."

"Wait now! I also want to ask you, Parfyon ... I have a lot to ask you, about everything . . . but to begin with, you'd better tell me, from the first beginning, so that I know: did you want to kill her before my wedding, before the ceremony, on the church porch, with the knife? Did you want to or not?"

"I don't know if I wanted to or not..." Rogozhin replied drily, as if he even marveled somewhat at the question and could not comprehend it.

"You never brought the knife to Pavlovsk with you?"

"I never brought it. I can only tell you this about the knife, Lev Nikolaevich," he added, after a pause. "I took it out of the locked drawer this morning, because the whole thing happened this morning, between three and four. I kept it like a bookmark in a book . . . And . . . and this is still a wonder to me: the knife seemed to go in about three inches ... or even three and a half. . . just under the left breast. . . but only about half a tablespoon of blood came out on her nightshirt; no more than that ..."

"That, that, that," the prince suddenly raised himself up in terrible agitation, "that, that I know, that I've read about . . . it's called an internal hemorrhage . . . Sometimes there isn't even a drop. If the blow goes straight to the heart . . ."

"Wait, do you hear?" Rogozhin suddenly interrupted quickly and sat up fearfully on his bed. "Do you hear?"

"No!" the prince said quickly and fearfully, looking at Rogozhin.

"Footsteps! Do you hear? In the big room . . ."

They both began to listen.

"I hear," the prince whispered firmly.

"Footsteps?"

"Footsteps."

"Should we shut the door or not?"

"Shut it..."

They shut the door, and both lay down again. There was a long silence.

"Ah, yes!" the prince suddenly whispered in the same agitated and hurried whisper, as if he had caught the thought again and was terribly afraid of losing it again, even jumping up a little on his bed, "yes ... I wanted . . . those cards! cards . . . They say you played cards with her?"

"I did," Rogozhin said after some silence.

"Where are . . . the cards?"

"They're here ..." Rogozhin said after a still longer silence, "here . . ."

He pulled a used deck, wrapped in paper, out of his pocket and handed it to the prince. The prince took it, but as if in perplexity. A new, sad, and cheerless feeling weighed on his heart; he suddenly realized that at that moment, and for a long time now, he had not been talking about what he needed to talk about, and had not been doing what he needed to do, and that these cards he was holding in his hands, and which he was so glad to have, would be no help, no help at all now. He stood up and clasped his hands. Rogozhin lay motionless, as if he did not see or hear his movements; but his eyes glittered brightly through the darkness and were completely open and motionless. The prince sat on a chair and began to look at him in fear. About half an hour went by; suddenly Rogozhin cried out loudly and abruptly and began to guffaw, as if forgetting that he had to talk in a whisper:

"That officer, that officer . . . remember how she horsewhipped that officer at the concert, remember, ha, ha, ha! A cadet, too . . . a cadet . . . came running ..."

The prince jumped up from the chair in new fright. When Rogozhin quieted down (and he did suddenly quiet down), the prince quietly bent over him, sat down beside him, and with a pounding heart, breathing heavily, began to examine him. Rogozhin did not turn his head to him and even seemed to forget about him. The prince watched and waited; time passed, it began

to grow light. Now and then Rogozhin sometimes suddenly began to mutter, loudly, abruptly, and incoherently; began to exclaim and laugh; then the prince would reach out his trembling hand to him and quietly touch his head, his hair, stroke it and stroke his cheeks . . . there was nothing more he could do! He was beginning to tremble again himself, and again he suddenly lost the use of his legs. Some completely new feeling wrung his heart with infinite anguish. Meanwhile it had grown quite light; he finally lay down on the pillows, as if quite strengthless now and in despair, and pressed his face to the pale and motionless face of Rogozhin; tears flowed from his eyes onto Rogozhin's cheeks, but perhaps by then he no longer felt his own tears and knew nothing about them . . . In any case, when, after many hours, the door opened and people came in, they found the murderer totally unconscious and delirious. The prince was sitting motionless on the bed beside him, and each time the sick man had a burst of shouting or raving, he quietly hastened to pass his trembling hand over his hair and cheeks, as if caressing and soothing him. But he no longer understood anything of what they asked him about, and did not recognize the people who came in and surrounded him. And if Schneider himself had come now from Switzerland to have a look at his former pupil and patient, he, too, recalling the state the prince had sometimes been in during the first year of his treatment in Switzerland, would have waved his hand now and said, as he did then: "An idiot!"

XII

Conclusion

The teacher's widow, having galloped to Pavlovsk, went straight to Darya Alexeevna, who had been upset since the previous day, and, having told her all she knew, frightened her definitively. The two ladies immediately decided to get in touch with Lebedev, who was also worried in his quality as his tenant's friend and in his quality as owner of the apartment. Vera Lebedev told them everything she knew. On Lebedev's advice, they decided that all three of them should go to Petersburg so as to forestall the more quickly "what might very well happen." And so it came about that the next morning, at about eleven o'clock, Rogozhin's apartment was opened in the presence of the police, Lebedev, the

ladies, and Rogozhin's brother, Semyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, who was quartered in the wing. What contributed most to the success of the affair was the evidence of the caretaker, who had seen Parfyon Semyonovich and his guest going in from the porch and as if on the quiet. After this evidence they did not hesitate to break down the door, which did not open to their ringing.

Rogozhin survived two months of brain fever and, when he recovered—the investigation and the trial. He gave direct, precise, and perfectly satisfactory evidence about everything, as a result of which the prince was eliminated from the case at the very beginning. Rogozhin was taciturn during his trial. He did not contradict his adroit and eloquent lawyer, who proved clearly and logically that the crime he had committed was the consequence of the brain fever, which had set in long before the crime as a result of the defendant's distress. But he did not add anything of his own in confirmation of this opinion and, as before, clearly and precisely, confirmed and recalled all the minutest circumstances of the event that had taken place. He was sentenced, with allowance for mitigating circumstances, to Siberia, to hard labor, for fifteen years, and heard out his sentence sternly, silently, and "pensively." All his enormous fortune, except for a certain, comparatively speaking, rather small portion spent on the initial carousing, went to his brother, Semyon Semyonovich, to the great pleasure of the latter. Old Mrs. Rogozhin goes on living in this world and seems to recall her favorite son Parfyon occasionally, but not very clearly: God spared her mind and heart all awareness of the horror that had visited her sad house.

Lebedev, Keller, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and many other characters of our story are living as before, have changed little, and we have almost nothing to tell about them. Ippolit died in terrible anxiety and slightly sooner than he expected, two weeks after Nastasya Filippovna's death. Kolya was profoundly struck by what had happened; he became definitively close to his mother. Nina Alexandrovna fears for him, because he is too thoughtful for his years; a good human being will perhaps come out of him. Incidentally, partly through his efforts, the further fate of the prince has been arranged: among all the people he had come to know recently, he had long singled out Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky; he was the first to go to him and tell him all the details he knew about what had happened and about the prince's present situation. He was not mistaken: Evgeny Pavlovich took the warmest interest in the fate

of the unfortunate "idiot," and as a result of his efforts and concern, the prince ended up abroad again, in Schneider's Swiss institution. Evgeny Pavlovich himself, who has gone abroad, intends to stay in Europe for a very long time, and candidly calls himself "a completely superfluous man in Russia," visits his sick friend at Schneider's rather often, at least once every few months; but Schneider frowns and shakes his head more and more; he hints at a total derangement of the mental organs; he does not yet speak positively of incurability, but he allows himself the saddest hints. Evgeny Pavlovich takes it very much to heart, and he does have a heart, as he has already proved by the fact that he receives letters from Kolya and even sometimes answers those letters. But besides that, yet another strange feature of his character has become known; and as it is a good feature, we shall hasten to mark it: after each visit to Schneider's institution, Evgeny Pavlovich, besides writing to Kolya, sends yet another letter to a certain person in Petersburg, with a most detailed and sympathetic account of the state of the prince's illness at the present moment. Apart from the most respectful expressions of devotion, there have begun to appear in these letters (and that more and more often) certain candid accounts of his views, ideas, feelings—in short, something resembling friendly and intimate feelings have begun to appear. This person who is in correspondence (though still rather rarely) with Evgeny Pavlovich, and who has merited his attention and respect to such a degree, is Vera Lebedev. We have been quite unable to find out exactly how such relations could have been established; they were established, of course, on the occasion of the same story with the prince, when Vera Lebedev was so grief-stricken that she even became ill, but under what circumstances the acquaintance and friendship came about, we do not know. We have made reference to these letters mainly for the reason that some of them contain information about the Epanchin family and, above all, about Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin. Evgeny Pavlovich, in a rather incoherent letter from Paris, told of her that, after a brief and extraordinary attachment to some émigré, a Polish count, she had suddenly married him, against the will of her parents, who, if they did finally give their consent, did so only because the affair threatened to turn into an extraordinary scandal. Then, after an almost six-month silence, Evgeny Pavlovich informed his correspondent, again in a long and detailed letter, that during his last visit to Professor Schneider in Switzerland, he had met all the Epanchins there (except, of course, Ivan

Fyodorovich, who, on account of business, stays in Petersburg) and Prince Shch. The meeting was strange: they all greeted Evgeny Pavlovich with some sort of rapture; Adelaida and Alexandra even decided for some reason that they were grateful to him for his "angelic care of the unfortunate prince." Lizaveta Prokofyevna, seeing the prince in his sick and humiliated condition, wept with all her heart. Apparently everything was forgiven him. Prince Shch. voiced several happy and intelligent truths on the occasion. It seemed to Evgeny Pavlovich that he and Adelaida had not yet become completely close with each other; but the future seemed to promise a completely willing and heartfelt submission of the ardent Adelaida to the intelligence and experience of Prince Shch. Besides, the lessons endured by the family had affected her terribly and, above all, the last incident with Aglaya and the émigré count. Everything that had made the family tremble as they gave Aglaya up to this count, everything had come true within half a year, with the addition of such surprises as they had never even thought of. It turned out that this count was not even a count, and if he was actually an émigré, he had some obscure and ambiguous story. He had captivated Aglaya with the extraordinary nobility of his soul, tormented by sufferings over his fatherland, and had captivated her to such an extent that, even before marrying him, she had become a member of some foreign committee for the restoration of Poland and on top of that had ended up in the Catholic confessional of some famous padre, who had taken possession of her mind to the point of frenzy. The count's colossal fortune, of which he had presented nearly irrefutable information to Lizaveta Prokofyevna and Prince Shch., had turned out to be completely nonexistent. What's more, some six years after the marriage, the count and his friend, the famous confessor, had managed to bring about a complete quarrel between Aglaya and her family, so that they had not seen her for several months already ... In short, there was a lot to tell, but Lizaveta Prokofyevna, her daughters, and even Prince Shch. had been so struck by all this "terror" that they were even afraid to mention certain things in conversation with Evgeny Pavlovich, though they knew that even without that, he was well acquainted with the story of Aglaya Ivanovna's latest passions. Poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna wanted to be in Russia and, as Evgeny Pavlovich testified, she bitterly and unfairly criticized everything abroad: "They can't bake good bread anywhere, in the winter they freeze like mice in the cellar," she said. "But here at least I've had

a good Russian cry over this poor man," she added, pointing with emotion to the prince, who did not recognize her at all. "Enough of these passions, it's time to serve reason. And all this, and all these foreign lands, and all this Europe of yours, it's all one big fantasy, and all of us abroad are one big fantasy . . . remember my words, you'll see for yourself!" she concluded all but wrathfully, parting from Evgeny Pavlovich.

NOTES

For many details in the following notes we are indebted to the commentaries in volume 9 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition (Leningrad, 1974).

PART ONE

1. Eydkuhnen is a railway station on the border between Prussia and what was then Russian-occupied Poland.

2. Popular names for various gold coins: "napoleondors" (Napoléons d'or) were French coins equal to twenty francs; "friedrichsdors" were Prussian coins equal to five silver thalers; "Dutch yellow boys" (arapchiki) were Russian coins, the so-called Dutch chervonets, resembling the Dutch ducat, minted in Petersburg.

3. Before the emancipation of 1861, Russian estates were evaluated by the number of adult male serfs ("souls") living on them; they were bound to the land and thus were the property of the landowner.

4. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826) wrote a monumental twelve-volume History of the Russian State, the first eight volumes of which were published in 1818, and the remaining four later, the last (reaching the year 1612) appearing posthumously. There is indeed a Myshkin mentioned in the History; however, he was not a prince but an architect, who, in 1472, together with a certain Krivtsov, was entrusted by Filipp, the first metropolitan of Moscow, with the construction of a new stone cathedral in Moscow, the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God; after two years of work, when the vaults were nearly completed, the cathedral collapsed, owing to poor-quality mortar and architectural misjudgment. With Lebedev's strange insistence here, Dostoevsky may have wanted to point readers to that fact.

5. In Russian, the German word Junker, meaning "young lord," referred to a lower officer's rank open only to the nobility.

6. The title of "hereditary honorary citizen" was awarded to merchants or other persons not of noble rank for services to the city or the state.

7. A hymn on the words "memory eternal" comes at the end of the Orthodox funeral and memorial services; the prayer is for the person to remain eternally in God's memory.

8. Menaions (Greek for "monthly readings") were collections of old Russian spiritual literature, the materials organized day by day and month by month; they contained saints' lives, homilies, explanations of the various feasts, and were often the only reading matter of the uneducated classes.

9. A holy fool (a "fool for God" or "fool in Christ"—yurodivy in Russian) might be a harmless village idiot; but there are also saintly persons or ascetics whose saintliness expresses itself as "folly."

10. The Bolshoi (i.e. "Big") Theater in Petersburg, not to be confused with the still-extant Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, stood on Theatralnaya Square from 1783 until 1892, when it was demolished and replaced by the Petersburg Conservatory. The French Theater was a French-language company that performed in the Mikhailov-sky Theater (now the Maly, or "Small," Opera Theater). Incidentally, through this company, news from Paris reached Petersburg extraordinarily quickly.

11. A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee. The practice was obviously open to abuse, and tax farmers could become very rich, though never quite respectable. The practice was abolished by the reforms of the emperor Alexander II in the 1860s.

12. These words were the motto on the coat of arms of Count A. A. Arakcheev (1769-1834), minister of the interior under the emperors Paul I and Alexander I; they were paraphrased by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799—1837) in his epigram "On Arakcheev."

13. Open courts and trial by jury were first introduced in Russia by the judicial reforms of Alexander II in 1864 and remained controversial for a long time afterwards.

14. The prince's assertion is not quite accurate. In Russia, capital punishment was abolished in 1753-54 under the empress Elizaveta Petrovna (1709-62), but reintroduced by Catherine II (1729-96) as punishment for state, military, and certain other crimes. In the 1860s, owing to the rise of anarchist and terrorist movements, it was resorted to rather frequently. The commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition suggests that Dostoevsky may have introduced the phrase as a blind to keep the censors from interfering with the prince's later discussion.

15. On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky himself, along with a number of "co-conspirators" from the radical Petrashevsky circle, was subjected to precisely such a mock execution and last-minute reprieve; he "tells us something" about it in more than one of his later works. The prince's account of the experience of "a certain man" in part one, chapter five, reproduces the actual episode in detail. Dostoevsky also draws here and later from The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death, by Victor Hugo (1802-85), which he considered a masterpiece.

16. In 1840-41, the historian and archeologist M. P. Pogodin (1800-75) published an album of Samples of Old Slavonic-Russian Calligraphy, containing lithographic reproductions of forty-four samples of handwriting from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, among them the signature of Pafnuty, a fourteenth-century monk, founder of the Avraamy Monastery, of which he was the hegumen (abbot).

17. Words engraved on a medal awarded by the emperor Nicholas I to Count P. A. Kleinmiechel in 1838, after the reconstruction of the Winter Palace under his supervision.

18. A paraphrase of Romeo andfuliet, III, ii, 73: "O serpent heart, hid with a flow'ring face!" which Dostoevsky knew from the translation published by M. N. Katkov in 1841 (he quotes the same line in his Novel in Nine Letters written in 1847).

19. It was a custom among young ladies in the nineteenth century to keep personal albums in which friends and visitors would be asked to write witty or sentimental lines or verses; vers d'album ("album verse") reached its high point in the verses of the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98).

20. The Mongol empire, known as the Golden Horde, dominated southern Russia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. To "go to the Horde" meant to petition the Mongol rulers on behalf of the subject Russian people.

21. It happens to a rich Corinthian noblewoman in The Transformations of Lucius, otherwise known as The Golden Ass, by the

Latin writer Apuleius (second century a.d.), and to Titania, the queen of the fairies, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—neither case quite belongs to "mythology."

22. An imprecise quotation from the poem "The Journalist, the Reader, and the Writer" (1840), by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41).

23. Quietism was a form of religious mysticism going back to the writings of the Spanish monk Miguel de Molinos (1628-96), consisting of passive contemplation and a withdrawal from

experiences of the senses; but Aglaya refers more simply to the prince's meekness and passivity.

24. Dostoevsky is probably thinking of "The Beheading of John the Baptist" (1514), by the Swiss painter Hans Fries (c. 1460-1520), in the Basel museum, which portrays the face of St. John just as the sword is swung over him.

25. What Dostoevsky refers to as a "cross with four points" is the standard Roman Catholic and Protestant cross with one crossbar; in part two, mention will be made of the "eight-pointed cross" of Byzantine and Russian tradition, which has three crossbars (and thus eight "points" or tips).

26. Dostoevsky saw a copy of The Madonna with the Family of the Burgomeister Jacob Meyer (1525-26), by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), in the Dresden Gallery. The original is in the museum of Darmstadt.

27. In a ukase of April 2,1837, the emperor Nicholas I forbade the wearing of both moustaches and beards by civil service employees (military officers were allowed moustaches only).

28. An allusion to act IV, scene iii, of the play Cabal and Love (1784), by the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), in which Ferdinand, suspecting Louisa of unfaithfulness, challenges his rival to a duel "across a handkerchief."

29. The German title Kammerjunker ("gentleman of the bedchamber") was adopted by the Russian imperial court; it was a high distinction for a young man.

30. The name of the Novozemlyansky infantry regiment was invented by the poet, playwright, and diplomat Alexander Griboe-dov (1795-1829) in his comedy Woe from Wit (1824), the first real masterpiece of Russian drama, many lines of which have become proverbial.

31. First half of the Italian phrase: se non è vero e ben trovato ("if it's not true, it's well invented").

32. The names of the three musketeers in the novel of Alexandre Dumas père (1802-70). Porthos, whom General Ivolgin identifies with General Epanchin, was the fat epicure of the three.

33. Kars, in the northeast of Turkey, was besieged by the Russians for many months in 1855, during the Crimean War (1853-56).

34. The Independence Beige was published in Brussels from 1830 to 1937.

35. See note 22 above. Kolya is thinking of Arbenin insulting Prince Zvezdich (act II, scene iv).

36. Christ is repeatedly referred to in the Gospels as "the king of the Jews," most often as an accusation during his questioning by Pilate, and this mocking "title" was also attached to his cross. Ganya changes it ironically to mean king of the Jewish financiers. Dostoevsky has in mind The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, a satirical prose text by the poet Heinrich Heine (1797— 1856), in which an ironic parallel is drawn between Christ and the banker Meyer Rothschild (1744-1812). Dostoevsky published a Russian translation of Heine's piece in his magazine Epoch (Nos. 1-3, 1864); in fact, the Russian censors cut the passage about Christ and Rothschild, but Dostoevsky had of course seen the manuscript intact.

37. The general gives a fantastic interpretation of a real event. The great Russian surgeon N. I. Pirogov (1810-81), who organized medical care for the wounded at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, left for Petersburg at one point, displeased by the inattention of the high military authorities to problems of medical care. Auguste Nélaton (1807-73), a French surgeon of European repute and member of the Medical Academy of Paris, was the personal surgeon of Garibaldi and Napoleon III; he never set foot in Russia.

38. The reference is to a case that Dostoevsky himself read about in the newspapers: a nineteen-year-old Moscow University student by the name of Danilov was tried for the murder and robbery of the pawnbroker Popov and his maidservant Nordman in January 1866. Dostoevsky was particularly struck by the similarity to Ras-kolnikov's crime in Crime and Punishment, which he had been at work on for several months. During Danilov's trial it came out that the young man, who wanted to get married, had been advised by his father to stop at nothing, not even crime, to achieve his ends.

39. The poet Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) was Russia's greatest fabulist; further on, Ferdyshchenko slightly misquotes from "The Lion and the Ass" (the difference is lost in translation).

40. Provincial marshal of the nobility was the highest elective office in a province before the reforms of Alexander II in 1864.

41. La Dame aux camélias ("The Lady with the Camellias"), a novel (1848) and five-act play (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-95), tells a tragic story of illicit love. The heroine appears at promenades with bouquets of white camellias on certain days of the month and of red camellias on other days; after her death, her lover sees to it that white and red camellias alternate in the same way on her grave.

42. Marlinsky was the pen name of A. A. Bestuzhev (1795-1837), a Romantic writer popular in military circles, to which many of his characters belonged.

43. Russian social thought throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by the dispute between the Westernizers, who favored various degrees of liberal reform to bring Russia into line with developments in Europe, and the Slavophiles, proponents of Russian (and generally Slavic) national culture and Orthodoxy.

44. Dostoevsky drew these details from the case of the Moscow merchant V. F Mazurin, a young man from a well-off family, who killed the jeweler 1.1. Kalmykov with a similarly bound razor. This murder, further details of which will appear later, haunts Nastasya Filippovna throughout the novel.

45. Ekaterinhof, at that time on the southwest periphery of Petersburg, was named in honor of Catherine I (1684-1727), the wife of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725), who built a palace there in 1711. In the early nineteenth century, the park surrounding the palace became one of the finest public gardens in the capital and a favorite place for promenades and picnics.

PART TWO

1. The original Vauxhall was a seventeenth-century pleasure garden in London. The word entered Russian as a common noun meaning an outdoor space for concerts and entertainment, with a tearoom, tables, and so on. The vauxhall in Pavlovsk, a suburb of Petersburg where much of the novel is set, was built very near the Pavlovsk railway station, one of the first in Russia—so near, in fact, that vokzal also became the Russian word for "railway station."

2. That is, a supporter of the elder branch of the Bourbon family in France, deposed in 1830 in favor of the younger branch of Orléans.

3. The zemstvo was an elective provincial council for purposes of local administration, established in 1864 by Alexander II.

4. Tarasov House was the name of the debtors' prison in Petersburg.

5. Holy Week is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter.

6. Pavlovsk, to the south of Petersburg, is a garden suburb named for the emperor Paul I (1754-1801), who had a magnificent palace there. A number of important meetings in the novel take place in the vast, rambling "English" park surrounding the palace. A dacha is a summer residence outside the city, anything from a large

separate house to part of a house or one or two rented rooms; the word also summons up a certain summer mode of life, with outings, picnics, and a general air of festivity.

7. The reference is to another notorious murder reported in the newspapers, in which Vitold Gorsky, an eighteen-year-old high-school student from a noble family, killed six members of the merchant Zhemarin's household, including his eleven-year-old son, to whom he gave lessons.

8. These words come from the imperial ukase of November 24, 1864, which promulgated the new judicial statutes; they were carved in gold on a marble plaque in the Petersburg courthouse; the "lawgiver" is the "tsar-reformer" Alexander II.

9. Jeanne Bécu (1743-93), who became the Comtesse du Barry, was the last favorite of Louis XV (1710-74); she was guillotined on the order of the French revolutionary tribunal. The story of her execution and last words is told in the publisher's preface to Mémoires de madame la comtesse du Barry, vol. 1 (Paris, 1829).

10. Dostoevsky writes Lebedev's spoken French in Russian transcription, reproducing the speaker's accent. The levée du roi, or "king's levee," was a reception that would take place around the king's rising from bed and morning toilet; Lebedev read about it in Mme. du Barry's memoirs.

11. The Apocalypse, or Revelation, of St. John the Theologian is the closing book of the New Testament; balancing the book of Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament, it contains prophecies of the end of this world and of the Last Judgment. Its visionary, symbolic language has made it subject to many interpretations, often tendentious.

12. The various references in this paragraph are to Revelation 6:5-8.

13. St. Thomas's Sunday, in the Orthodox Church, is the first Sunday after Easter, named for the apostle who refused to believe in the resurrection until he had ocular and tactile evidence of it (John 20: 24-29).

14. The sect of the castrates (skoptsi) in Russia, a reform of the older sect of the flagellants {khlysti), was founded in Orlov province in the second half of the eighteenth century by a peasant named Kondraty Selivanov. To combat the promiscuous behavior that generally accompanied the "zeals" of the flagellants, he introduced the practice of self-castration. The sect, which for some reason attracted many rich merchants, moneylenders, and goldsmiths, was condemned by the Church and forbidden by law.

15. Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov (1820-79), one of the greatest Russian historians, began to publish his History of Russia from Ancient Times in 1851; of its twenty-nine volumes, seventeen had appeared by 1867, when Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot.

16. In the mid-seventeenth century, the ecclesiastical reforms of the patriarch Nikon caused a schism [raskoï) in the Russian Orthodox Church. Those who rejected the reforms, led by the archpriest Awakum, held to the "old belief" and became known as Old Believers.

17. The poem Nastasya Filippovna reads is "Heinrich," by Hein-rich Heine, which deals with the famous episode in the history of the Holy Roman Empire when Pope Gregory VII (io2o?-no6) forced the emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) to come to the Italian castle of Canossa in 1077 and make humble amends to him. The poem was translated into Russian in 1859 and again in 1862.

18. The prince is referring to the faith of the Old Believers, who did not accept the changes in the church service books instituted in the seventeenth century and made the sign of the cross in the old way, with two fingers, instead of in the three-fingered way introduced by the same reform.

19. See part one, note 26. The painting in question is Christ's Body in the Tomb (1521), which Dostoevsky saw in the Basel museum in August 1867, having made a special stop there for that purpose; he even stood on a chair in the museum in order to study the painting more closely. The prince's words further on, "A man can even lose his faith from that painting!" were Dostoevsky's own words to his wife at the time. The painting, which is of central importance to the novel, will be mentioned again later; Dostoevsky first read a description of it in Letters of a Russian Traveler (1801), by N. M. Karamzin (see part one, note 4).

20. The details of this murder are again drawn from an actual incident reported in the newspapers—the murder of the tradesman Suslov by a peasant named Balabanov, who repeated the same prayer before taking Suslov's silver watch.

21. The exchanging of crosses was a custom symbolizing spiritual brotherhood.

22. Dostoevsky, who suffered from epilepsy himself, sometimes experienced moments of such "illumination" just before a fit and said that they were "worth a whole life."

23. Cf. Revelation 10: 6: "that there should be time no longer" (King James version).

24- According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad (c. 570-632) was awakened one night by the archangel Gabriel, who in the process brushed against a jug of water with his wing. Muhammad then traveled to Jerusalem, from there rose into the seven heavens where he spoke with angels, prophets, and Allah, visited the fiery Gehenna, and came back in time to keep the jug from spilling.

25. These confused thoughts are connected with details of the Zhemarin murders (see part two, note 7).

26. The terrace of Lebedev's dacha, as of many country houses, is something between a room and an open veranda: a large, unheated space with many windows, with a door leading to the inner rooms, but also an outside door and steps leading down to the garden. The action of much Russian literature and drama takes place on such terraces.

27. The first Russian state was founded at Novgorod by Rurik, chief of the Scandinavian rovers known as Varangians, in 862, on the invitation of the local Slavic populace. The millennium of Russia was celebrated on September 8, 1862.

28. The poem in question is by Pushkin. The version Dostoevsky quotes is untitled and appears in "Scenes from Knightly Life" (1835), one of Pushkin's "little tragedies." It is Pushkin's revision of a longer version written in 1829.

29. A misquotation from Pushkin's poem "To ***" (1825); it should read "like a genius of pure beauty."

30. "A.N.D." is also incorrect, as we shall see further on. The knight wrote "A.M.D." on his shield, which stood for Ave Mater Dei ("Hail Mother of God").

31. The phrase "there's no need to go breaking chairs," which is proverbial in Russia, comes from The Inspector General (1836), the famous comedy by Nikolai Gogol (1809-52), in which the mayor says of the schoolteacher, "Of course Alexander the Great is a hero, but why go breaking chairs?"

32. P. V. Annenkov's edition of Pushkin, the first to be based on a study of the poet's manuscripts, was published in seven volumes in 1855-57. Dostoevsky owned it and quotes the verses on the "poor knight" from it.

33. The term "nihilism," first used philosophically in German (Nihilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrines of the

younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. The great nineteenth-century Russian lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801-72), normally a model of restraint, defines "nihilism" in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Language as "an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated." The term became current in Russia after it appeared in the novel Fathers and Sons (1862), by Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), where it is applied to the hero, Bazarov. The nihilist literary critic D. I. Pisarev (1840—68) was a great disparager of poetry, especially of Pushkin and his "cult of women's little feet."

34. See part two, note 7, and part one, note 38.

35. The opening words in Latin of Psalm 130: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee,  Lord," sung in Catholic funeral services; the meaning here is "May they rest in peace."

36. The quotation is from Act II, scene ii, of Griboedov's Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

37. See part one, note 30. "The Stormcloud" was written in 1815.

38. The commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition has established that this epigram is a takeoff on "Self-assured Fedya," by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89), a satirical epigram on Dostoevsky himself, published in The Whistle, No. 9 (1863).

39. The quoted phrase is an allusion to Vera Pavlovna's farewell to her mother, in the radical novel What Is to Be Done"? (1863), by N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89).

40. Probably a reference to the famous doctor S. P. Botkin (1832-89), physician to Alexander II and to Dostoevsky himself.

41. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) was one of the principal French socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, author of the memorable phrase "Property is theft." His libertarian socialism was opposed to Marxism.

42. The line about Princess Marya Alexeevna is a paraphrase of the final line of Famusov's last monologue, in act IV, scene xv, of Griboedov's Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

43. Ippolit is thinking of Christ.

44. Cf. Revelation 8:10-11.

45. Keller is referring to a real man: Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704), a Jesuit and a famous preacher in the age of Louis XIV, though never an archbishop. In the first case, however, he is actually making a pun on bordeaux wine and the Russian word burda, which

means "swill"; only in the second case does he come to the more appropriate question of "confession."

PART THREE

1. Russian seminary education was open to the lower classes and was often subsidized by state scholarships. Seminarians were thus not necessarily preparing for the priesthood. Many Russian radicals of the 1860s were former seminarians, like Joseph Stalin later. Dostoevsky wrote in a notebook around this time: "These seminarians have introduced a special negation into our literature, too complete, too hostile, too sharp, and therefore too limited."

2. See part one, note 12, and part two, note 31. Mikhail Vassilievich Lomonosov (1711-65) was a peasant who came on foot from Arch-angelsk to Petersburg in order to study; he became a great poet and scientist, and, like both Pushkin and Gogol after him, is often called "the father of modern Russian literature."

3. Pavel Afanasyevich Famusov is the father of the heroine in Griboedov's Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

4. See part one, note 13.

5. Provoked by the young Frenchman's attentions to his wife, Pushkin challenged Georges d'Anthès to a duel; having the first shot, d Anthès may have fired sooner than he intended to, and his bullet hit Pushkin in the stomach; the wound proved fatal.

6. General Epanchin is trying to use the French expression ne pas se sentir dans son assiette, literally "not to feel that you are in your plate," meaning "to be out of sorts."

7. Dueling was forbidden in Russia until 1894, when it was made legal for army officers. Taking part in a duel was severely punishable by law, and a lieutenant like Keller risked being broken to the ranks and thus acquiring the "red cap" of the common foot soldier.

8. Ippolit is recalling the song of the archangel Raphael (11. 243-244), from the "Prologue in Heaven" that begins the monumental drama Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): "Die Sonne tont nach alter Weise/In Brudersphàren Wettgesang. . ." ("The sun resounds as of old/In rival-singing with his brother spheres").

9. See part two, note 44.

10. Cf. Revelation n: 6-7.

n. François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694-1778), was a facetious debunker of religious literalism. Dostoevsky especially admired his philosophical novel Candide (1759).

12. An ironic reference to Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), English economist, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population, who first perceived the threat posed by the geometric increase of the earth's population; he declared that the "superfluous population" of the earth was bound to perish and that all social reforms would fail, and he called for the abolition of falsely philanthropic laws alleviating the condition of the poor. The radical Petrashevsky circle, to which Dostoevsky belonged as a young man, was interested in Malthus's thought and translated some of his writings.

13. See part two, note 23. Ippolit plays on the ambiguity of the Russian translation, which we render here.

14. See part one, notes 2 and 36. An imperial was a Russian gold coin worth ten roubles.

15. Actual state councillor was fourth in the table of fourteen civil service ranks established by Peter the Great, equivalent to the military rank of major general.

16. After his defeat at Waterloo and his second abdication in 1815, Napoleon (1769-1821) wanted to escape to America, but owing to the blockade of the port at Rochefort, he was forced to negotiate with the British, who exiled him to the island of St. Helena.

17. These words come from Pensées sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts on religion and on several other subjects"), by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-62).

18. The references are to the raising of Jairus's daughter (Mark 5: 22-43) and the raising of Lazarus (John n: 1-44). Talitha cumi is Aramaic for "Damsel, arise."

19. The lines that follow are not by Charles-Hubert Millevoye (1782-1816), romantic poet, author of "Falling Leaves," but by the satirical poet Nicolas Gilbert (1751-80), from the end of his A dieux à la vie ("Farewell to Life"). Dostoevsky misquotes slightly; the first verse should read: ^aAh, puissent voir longtemps votre beauté sacrée . . ." ("Ah, may they long behold your sacred beauty . . .").

20. In Petersburg during the month of June, the sun rises at between two and three o'clock in the morning; this is the season of the famous "white nights."

21. Pierre-François Lacenaire (1800-36), the subject of a notorious criminal trial in Paris, was a murderer of exceptional vanity and cruelty.

22. The prolific French novelist Paul de Kock (1794-1871) depicted petit bourgeois life, often in rather risqué detail.

23. The name Aglaya comes from the Greek aglabs, meaning "splendid, shining, bright, beautiful."

24. Cf. John 8:3-11: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" (King James version).

25. See part two, note 41, and part three, note 11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), Swiss-born French novelist and philosopher, author of The Social Contract, was influential on young Russian radicals like Ippolit and Kolya.

26. The English fraternity of Freemasons reorganized itself in 1717 to form a "grand lodge" in London, with a new constitution and ritual and a system of secret signs; this was to be the parent lodge of all the other lodges in Great Britain and throughout the world. Because of their secrecy and the political role they began to play (for instance, in the French revolution), the Masons were outlawed in some countries, including Russia, where they were forbidden by the emperor Alexander I in 1822. Kolya is probably referring here to the Masons' secrecy and conspiratorial reputation.

27. The French word is contrecarrer, "to oppose directly, to thwart."

28. Russian civil servants wore uniforms similar to the military, including hats with cockades.

29. The phrase is proverbial in Russian. In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy uses an abbreviated Latin version: "Quos vult perdere dementat." The ultimate source is in a lost Greek tragedy quoted by the Athenian politician and orator Lykurgos (390-24 b.c.).

30. The details come from the Mazurin murder case (see part one, note 44). Zhdanov liquid was a chemical mixture invented in the 1840s by N. I. Zhdanov to eliminate bad odors. Mazurin-kept Kalmykov's body for eight months this way.

PART FOUR

1. Podkolesin is one of the suitors in Gogol's play The Marriage (1842); at the decisive moment he jumps out of the window and runs away.

2. A line from the comedy Georges Dandin (1668), by Molière (1622-73).

3. Lieutenant Pirogov is one of the heroes of Gogol's tale "Nevsky Prospect" (1835); his name, while common in Russia, happens to come from the word for pastry.

4. See part one, note 36.

5- Nozdryov is another of Gogol's heroes, this time from the comic novel-poem Dead Souls (1842)—an absurd, blustering liar.

6. See part one, note 5.

7. The year 1812 was the year of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia.

8. This epitaph was actually composed by the Russian writer and historian N. M. Karamzin (see part one, note 4). Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail had it inscribed on their mother's tombstone in 1837.

9. A panikhida is an Orthodox memorial prayer service for the dead.

10. R. A. Chernosvitov (b. 1810), a member of the Petrashevsky circle (see part one, note 15, and part three, note 12), wrote a book entitled Instructions for the Designing of an Artificial Leg (1855).

11. The Russian Archive was a highly respected historical review founded in 1863 by P. Bartenev.

12. The reference is to the opening chapter of From my Past and Thought, autobiographical reflections by the liberal Russian writer Alexander Herzen (1812-70).

13. Moscow was evacuated at the approach of Napoleon's army and the city was set on fire.

14. The boyars were a privileged rank of the old nobility, the highest in Russia after the rank of prince. Since they were always ready to dispute the absolute power of the tsar, the rank was abolished by Peter the Great.

15. Baron Jean-Baptiste de Bazancourt (1767-1830) was a French general and took part in Napoleon's Russian campaign; he was never a chamber-page and outlived the emperor by nine years.

16. Jean-Baptiste Adolphe Charras (1810-65) was a French politician and military historian. Dostoevsky read his anti-Bonapartist History of the Campaign of1815: Waterloo (1864) while staying in Baden-Baden in 1867; he also had the book in his library.

17. Louis-Nicolas Davout (1770-1823), duke of Auerstaedt, prince of Eckmuhl, and maréchal de France, was one of Napoleon's best generals. The mameluke Rustan was Napoleon's bodyguard. Constant, one of Napoleon's favorite valets, is often mentioned in memoirs and novels about the emperor.

18. Marie-Josèphe ("Joséphine") Tascher de la Pagerie-Beauhar-nais (1763-1814) married General Bonaparte in 1796, her first husband, the vicomte de Beauharnais, having been guillotined in 1794. She became empress in 1804, but Napoleon divorced her

in 1809 to marry Marie-Louise de Lorraine-Autriche (1791-1847), daughter of the German emperor Franz II. Thus, in 1812 she was no longer empress.

19. Napoleon's son, François-Charles-Joseph Bonaparte (1811-32), known as Napoleon II, was declared king of Rome at birth. His mother was the empress Marie-Louise, not Josephine.

20. The quotation is from Pushkin's poem "Napoleon" (1821).

21. General Ivolgin quotes imprecisely from the beginning of volume one, chapter six, of Dead Souls; Gogol wrote simply: "Oh, my youth! Oh, my freshness!"

22. The Order of St. Anna, named for the mother of the Virgin Mary, was founded in 1735 by Karl Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, in honor of his wife, Anna Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great. It had four degrees, two civil and two military.

23. The line comes from the unfinished poem "Humor," by the Russian civic poet N. P. Ogaryov (1813-77).

24. Friedrich Christophe Schlosser (1776-1861), German historian, was the author of a Universal History (1844-56), which was translated into Russian in 1861-69.

25. An ironic inversion of the apostle Thomas's doubt of Christ's resurrection; see part two, note 13.

26. Stepan Bogdanovich Glebov (c. 1672-1718) was the lover of Peter the Great's repudiated first wife Evdokia Lopukhin. He was accused of conspiring with her and the tsarevich Alexei, was tortured and condemned to this cruel death; Evdokia was sent to a nunnery.

27. Andrei Ivanovich (or Heinrich Johann) Osterman (1686-1747) was a Russian diplomat and statesman.

28. In Russian these words echo proverbial lines from the poem "Borodino" (1837) by Mikhail Lermontov (see part one, note 22); an old man is speaking: "Yes, those were people of our time, / Not to be compared with today's breed . . ."

29. Lebedev makes absurd use of the words about Christ from the Nicene Creed: "the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages."

30. Sir Thomas More (Latin Morus) (1478-1535), English humanist, author of Utopia, and Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, was decapitated for refusing to acknowledge the spiritual authority of the king. He was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935. Lebedev's story is apocryphal, however; on the scaffold, More said to the executioner: "Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid

to do thine office; my neck is very short; take heed therefore thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty" (see the Lives of Saint Thomas More, by William Roper and Nicholas Harpsfield).

31. These Latin words from the penitential confiteor: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, are repeated by Roman Catholic priests before the Mass and by the faithful before communion.

32. In addition to cutting hair, barbers performed other operations, such as letting blood, which might have been thought necessary in the general's case.

33. The Latin words signify papal refusal to satisfy the demands of a secular power. The expression may go back to the Acts of the Apostles (4:20).

34. Egalité is the middle term of the French revolutionary motto: "Liberté, égalité, fraternité. In his Winter Notes from Summer Impressions (1863), Dostoevsky already cites the motto with ou la mort added to the end; his protagonist Kirillov will do the same in Demons (1872). The "two million heads" probably come from a reference in part five, chapter thirty-seven, of A. Herzen's From My Past and Thought (see part four, note 12) to a German socialist writer who declared that it was enough to destroy two million people and the socialist revolution would go swimmingly. Herzen, a radical himself, called this notion "pernicious rubbish" and traced its origins to the French revolution, describing it as "Marat transformed into a German." Dostoevsky refers to this notion again in Demons (1871-72) and in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80).

35. Cf. Matthew 7:15-16: "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits" (King James version).

36. That is, the "Pillars of Hercules," the ancient name for the straits of Gibraltar, which marked the boundary of the known world in classical times.

37. The Jesuit order, or Society of Jesus, was founded on Montmartre (Paris) in 1534 by St. îgnatius of Loyola (1491-1556), his friend and follower St. Francis Xavier (1506-52), and four other friends. More militant than contemplative, and with a strict hierarchical administration, the order quickly became very powerful. The Jesuits were eventually expelled from Portugal in 1759 and from France in 1762 (and again in 1880 and 1901). The exiled fathers either went "underground" or dispersed, some even going to Russia, where their influence was not inconsiderable.

38. See part two, note 16.

39- The sect of the flagellants (khlysti) emerged among the Russian peasants in the seventeenth century. Its adherents practiced self-flagellation as a means of purification from sin (see part two, note 14).

40. These words echo the words of Christ to the apostles (Mark 9:35): "If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all."

41. Cf. the episode of the healing of the demoniac in Mark 9:17-27 and Luke 9:42.

42. See part one, note 43.

43. The lines come from Pushkin's poem "Elegy" (1830).

44. See part two, note 33.

45. In the Orthodox wedding service, one or more "groomsmen" hold crowns above the heads of both bride and groom.

46. The reference is to Christ forgiving the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3-11); see part three, note 24.

47. The princely family of Rohan is one of the most ancient and illustrious in France; their motto is "Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Rohan suis" ("I cannot be first, I deign not to be second, I am Rohan").

48. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838), prince of Bénévent, bishop of Autun, was one of the most important French statesmen of his time, during which he served under the king, the constitutional assembly, the Directoire, the consulate, the empire, and finally the restoration of the Bourbons; he played a brilliant and skillful role at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), deciding the fate of post-Napoleonic France and Europe.

49. See part four, note 22. The first degree of the civil order of St. Anna was worn on a ribbon around the neck.

50. The quotation is from a verse fragment about Cleopatra that Pushkin included in his Egyptian Nights (1835): Cleopatra addresses the crowd gathered at her feast, asking who would be willing to give his life for a night with her.

51. An imprecise quotation from Matthew 11: 25, Luke 10: 21.

52. Madame Bovary, by French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), caused a scandal when it was first published in 1856 because of its frank treatment of adultery; the heroine commits suicide in the end. Dostoevsky read the novel in the summer of 1867 and admired it.