therefore, one and all, unworthy of it. Well, I affirm that
my reader is wrong again, for my convictions have
nothing to do with my sentence of death. Ask them, ask
any one of them, or all of them, what they mean by
happiness! Oh, you may be perfectly sure that if Columbus
was happy, it was not after he had discovered America, but
when he was discovering it! You may be quite sure that
he reached the culminating point of his happiness three
days before he saw the New World with his actual eves, The Idiot
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when his mutinous sailors wanted to tack about, and
return to Europe! What did the New World matter after
all? Columbus had hardly seen it when he died, and in
reality he was entirely ignorant of what he had discovered.
The important thing is life— life and nothing else! What is
any ‘discovery’ whatever compared with the incessant,
eternal discovery of life?
‘But what is the use of talking? I’m afraid all this is so
commonplace that my confession will be taken for a
schoolboy exercise—the work of some ambitious lad
writing in the hope of his work ‘seeing the light’; or
perhaps my readers will say that ‘I had perhaps something
to say, but did not know how to express it.’
‘Let me add to this that in every idea emanating from
genius, or even in every serious human idea—born in the
human brain—there always remains something—some
sediment—which cannot be expressed to others, though
one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-
thirty years. There is always a something, a remnant,
which will never come out from your brain, but will
remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever,
and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what
may be the very essence of your idea to a single living
soul. The Idiot
725 of 1149
‘So that if I cannot now impart all that has tormented
me for the last six months, at all events you will
understand that, having reached my ‘last convictions,’ I
must have paid a very dear price for them. That is what I
wished, for reasons of my own, to make a point of in this
my ‘Explanation.’
‘But let me resume. The Idiot
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VI
‘I WILL not deceive you. ‘Reality’ got me so
entrapped in its meshes now and again during the past six
months, that I forgot my ‘sentence’ (or perhaps I did not
wish to think of it), and actually busied myself with affairs.
‘A word as to my circumstances. When, eight months
since, I became very ill, I threw up all my old connections
and dropped all my old companions. As I was always a
gloomy, morose sort of individual, my friends easily forgot
me; of course, they would have forgotten me all the same,
without that excuse. My position at home was solitary
enough. Five months ago I separated myself entirely from
the family, and no one dared enter my room except at
stated times, to clean and tidy it, and so on, and to bring
me my meals. My mother dared not disobey me; she kept
the children quiet, for my sake, and beat them if they
dared to make any noise and disturb me. I so often
complained of them that I should think they must be very
fond, indeed, of me by this time. I think I must have
tormented ‘my faithful Colia’ (as I called him) a good deal
too. He tormented me of late; I could see that he always
bore my tempers as though he had determined to ‘spare The Idiot
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the poor invalid.’ This annoyed me, naturally. He seemed
to have taken it into his head to imitate the prince in
Christian meekness! Surikoff, who lived above us,
annoyed me, too. He was so miserably poor, and I used to
prove to him that he had no one to blame but himself for
his poverty. I used to be so angry that I think I frightened
him eventually, for he stopped coming to see me. He was
a most meek and humble fellow, was Surikoff. (N.B.—
They say that meekness is a great power. I must ask the
prince about this, for the expression is his.) But I
remember one day in March, when I went up to his
lodgings to see whether it was true that one of his children
had been starved and frozen to death, I began to hold
forth to him about his poverty being his own fault, and, in
the course of my remarks, I accidentally smiled at the
corpse of his child. Well, the poor wretch’s lips began to
tremble, and he caught me by the shoulder, and pushed
me to the door. ‘Go out,’ he said, in a whisper. I went
out, of course, and I declare I LIKED it. I liked it at the
very moment when I was turned out. But his words filled
me with a strange sort of feeling of disdainful pity for him
whenever I thought of them—a feeling which I did not in
the least desire to entertain. At the very moment of the
insult (for I admit that I did insult him, though I did not The Idiot
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mean to), this man could not lose his temper. His lips had
trembled, but I swear it was not with rage. He had taken
me by the arm, and said, ‘Go out,’ without the least anger.
There was dignity, a great deal of dignity, about him, and
it was so inconsistent with the look of him that, I assure
you, it was quite comical. But there was no anger. Perhaps
he merely began to despise me at that moment.
‘Since that time he has always taken off his hat to me
on the stairs, whenever I met him, which is a thing he
never did before; but he always gets away from me as
quickly as he can, as though he felt confused. If he did
despise me, he despised me ‘meekly,’ after his own
fashion.
‘I dare say he only took his hat off out of fear, as it
were, to the son of his creditor; for he always owed my
mother money. I thought of having an explanation with
him, but I knew that if I did, he would begin to apologize
in a minute or two, so I decided to let him alone.
‘Just about that time, that is, the middle of March, I
suddenly felt very much better; this continued for a couple
of weeks. I used to go out at dusk. I like the dusk,
especially in March, when the night frost begins to harden
the day’s puddles, and the gas is burning. The Idiot
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‘Well, one night in the Shestilavochnaya, a man passed
me with a paper parcel under his arm. I did not take stock
of him very carefully, but he seemed to be dressed in some
shabby summer dust-coat, much too light for the season.
When he was opposite the lamp-post, some ten yards
away, I observed something fall out of his pocket. I
hurried forward to pick it up, just in time, for an old
wretch in a long kaftan rushed up too. He did not dispute
the matter, but glanced at what was in my hand and
disappeared.
‘It was a large old-fashioned pocket-book, stuffed full;
but I guessed, at a glance, that it had anything in the world
inside it, except money.
‘The owner was now some forty yards ahead of me,
and was very soon lost in the crowd. I ran after him, and
began calling out; but as I knew nothing to say excepting
‘hey!’ he did not turn round. Suddenly he turned into the
gate of a house to the left; and when I darted in after him,
the gateway was so dark that I could see nothing
whatever. It was one of those large houses built in small
tenements, of which there must have been at least a
hundred. The Idiot
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‘When I entered the yard I thought I saw a man going
along on the far side of it; but it was so dark I could not
make out his figure.
‘I crossed to that corner and found a dirty dark
staircase. I heard a man mounting up above me, some way
higher than I was, and thinking I should catch him before
his door would be opened to him, I rushed after him. I
heard a door open and shut on the fifth storey, as I panted
along; the stairs were narrow, and the steps innumerable,
but at last I reached the door I thought the right one.
Some moments passed before I found the bell and got it to
ring.
‘An old peasant woman opened the door; she was busy
lighting the ‘samovar’ in a tiny kitchen. She listened
silently to my questions, did not understand a word, of
course, and opened another door leading into a little bit of
a room, low and scarcely furnished at all, but with a large,
wide bed in it, hung with curtains. On this bed lay one
Terentich, as the woman called him, drunk, it appeared to
me. On the table was an end of candle in an iron
candlestick, and a half-bottle of vodka, nearly finished.
Terentich muttered something to me, and signed towards
the next room. The old woman had disappeared, so there The Idiot
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was nothing for me to do but to open the door indicated.
I did so, and entered the next room.
‘This was still smaller than the other, so cramped that I
could scarcely turn round; a narrow single bed at one side
took up nearly all the room. Besides the bed there were
only three common chairs, and a wretched old kitchen-
table standing before a small sofa. One could hardly
squeeze through between the table and the bed.
‘On the table, as in the other room, burned a tallow
candle-end in an iron candlestick; and on the bed there
whined a baby of scarcely three weeks old. A pale-looking
woman was dressing the child, probably the mother; she
looked as though she had not as yet got over the trouble
of childbirth, she seemed so weak and was so carelessly
dressed. Another child, a little girl of about three years old,
lay on the sofa, covered over with what looked like a
man’s old dress-coat.
‘At the table stood a man in his shirt sleeves; he had
thrown off his coat; it lay upon the bed; and he was
unfolding a blue paper parcel in which were a couple of
pounds of bread, and some little sausages.
‘On the table along with these things were a few old
bits of black bread, and some tea in a pot. From under the
bed there protruded an open portmanteau full of bundles The Idiot
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of rags. In a word, the confusion and untidiness of the
room were indescribable.
‘It appeared to me, at the first glance, that both the man
and the woman were respectable people, but brought to
that pitch of poverty where untidiness seems to get the
better of every effort to cope with it, till at last they take a
sort of bitter satisfaction in it. When I entered the room,
the man, who had entered but a moment before me, and
was still unpacking his parcels, was saying something to his
wife in an excited manner. The news was apparently bad,
as usual, for the woman began whimpering. The man’s
face seemed tome to be refined and even pleasant. He was
dark-complexioned, and about twenty-eight years of age;
he wore black whiskers, and his lip and chin were shaved.
He looked morose, but with a sort of pride of expression.
A curious scene followed.
‘There are people who find satisfaction in their own
touchy feelings, especially when they have just taken the
deepest offence; at such moments they feel that they
would rather be offended than not. These easily-ignited
natures, if they are wise, are always full of remorse
afterwards, when they reflect that they have been ten
times as angry as they need have been. The Idiot
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‘The gentleman before me gazed at me for some
seconds in amazement, and his wife in terror; as though
there was something alarmingly extraordinary in the fact
that anyone could come to see them. But suddenly he fell
upon me almost with fury; I had had no time to mutter
more than a couple of words; but he had doubtless
observed that I was decently dressed and, therefore, took
deep offence because I had dared enter his den so
unceremoniously, and spy out the squalor and untidiness
of it.
‘Of course he was delighted to get hold of someone
upon whom to vent his rage against things in general.
‘For a moment I thought he would assault me; he grew
so pale that he looked like a woman about to have
hysterics; his wife was dreadfully alarmed.
‘‘How dare you come in so? Be off!’ he shouted,
trembling all over with rage and scarcely able to articulate
the words. Suddenly, however, he observed his
pocketbook in my hand.
‘‘I think you dropped this,’ I remarked, as quietly and
drily as I could. (I thought it best to treat him so.) For
some while he stood before me in downright terror, and
seemed unable to understand. He then suddenly grabbed The Idiot
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at his side-pocket, opened his mouth in alarm, and beat his
forehead with his hand.
‘‘My God!’ he cried, ‘where did you find it? How?’ I
explained in as few words as I could, and as drily as
possible, how I had seen it and picked it up; how I had
run after him, and called out to him, and how I had
followed him upstairs and groped my way to his door.
‘‘Gracious Heaven!’ he cried, ‘all our papers are in it!
My dear sir, you little know what you have done for us. I
should have been lost—lost!’
‘I had taken hold of the door-handle meanwhile,
intending to leave the room without reply; but I was
panting with my run upstairs, and my exhaustion came to
a climax in a violent fit of coughing, so bad that I could
hardly stand.
‘I saw how the man dashed about the room to find me
an empty chair, how he kicked the rags off a chair which
was covered up by them, brought it to me, and helped me
to sit down; but my cough went on for another three
minutes or so. When I came to myself he was sitting by
me on another chair, which he had also cleared of the
rubbish by throwing it all over the floor, and was
watching me intently. The Idiot
735 of 1149
‘‘I’m afraid you are ill?’ he remarked, in the tone which
doctors use when they address a patient. ‘I am myself a
medical man’ (he did not say ‘doctor’), with which words
he waved his hands towards the room and its contents as
though in protest at his present condition. ‘I see that
you—’
‘‘I’m in consumption,’ I said laconically, rising from my
