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certain strange circumstance which had perhaps no
connection whatever with the matter at issue. Ten days
ago Rogojin called upon me about certain business of his
own with which I have nothing to do at present. I had
never seen Rogojin before, but had often heard about
him.
‘I gave him all the information he needed, and he very
soon took his departure; so that, since he only came for
the purpose of gaining the information, the matter might
have been expected to end there.
‘But he interested me too much, and all that day I was
under the influence of strange thoughts connected with
him, and I determined to return his visit the next day.
‘Rogojin was evidently by no means pleased to see me,
and hinted, delicately, that he saw no reason why our
acquaintance should continue. For all that, however, I
spent a very interesting hour, and so, I dare say, did he.
There was so great a contrast between us that I am sure we
must both have felt it; anyhow, I felt it acutely. Here was
I, with my days numbered, and he, a man in the full
vigour of life, living in the present, without the slightest
thought for ‘final convictions,’ or numbers, or days, or, in
fact, for anything but that which-which—well, which he The Idiot
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was mad about, if he will excuse me the expression—as a
feeble author who cannot express his ideas properly.
‘In spite of his lack of amiability, I could not help
seeing, in Rogojin a man of intellect and sense; and
although, perhaps, there was little in the outside world
which was of. interest to him, still he was clearly a man
with eyes to see.
‘I hinted nothing to him about my ‘final conviction,’
but it appeared to me that he had guessed it from my
words. He remained silent—he is a terribly silent man. I
remarked to him, as I rose to depart, that, in spite of the
contrast and the wide differences between us two, les
extremites se touchent (’extremes meet,’ as I explained to
him in Russian); so that maybe he was not so far from my
final conviction as appeared.
‘His only reply to this was a sour grimace. He rose and
looked for my cap, and placed it in my hand, and led me
out of the house—that dreadful gloomy house of his—to
all appearances, of course, as though I were leaving of my
own accord, and he were simply seeing me to the door
out of politeness. His house impressed me much; it is like
a burial-ground, he seems to like it, which is, however,
quite natural. Such a full life as he leads is so overflowing The Idiot
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with absorbing interests that he has little need of assistance
from his surroundings.
‘The visit to Rogojin exhausted me terribly. Besides, I
had felt ill since the morning; and by evening I was so
weak that I took to my bed, and was in high fever at
intervals, and even delirious. Colia sat with me until
eleven o’clock.
‘Yet I remember all he talked about, and every word
we said, though whenever my eyes closed for a moment I
could picture nothing but the image of Surikoff just in the
act of finding a million roubles. He could not make up his
mind what to do with the money, and tore his hair over
it. He trembled with fear that somebody would rob him,
and at last he decided to bury it in the ground. I persuaded
him that, instead of putting it all away uselessly
underground, he had better melt it down and make a
golden coffin out of it for his starved child, and then dig
up the little one and put her into the golden coffin.
Surikoff accepted this suggestion, I thought, with tears of
gratitude, and immediately commenced to carry out my
design.
‘I thought I spat on the ground and left him in disgust.
Colia told me, when I quite recovered my senses, that I The Idiot
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had not been asleep for a moment, but that I had spoken
to him about Surikoff the whole while.
‘At moments I was in a state of dreadful weakness and
misery, so that Colia was greatly disturbed when he left
me.
‘When I arose to lock the door after him, I suddenly
called to mind a picture I had noticed at Rogojin’s in one
of his gloomiest rooms, over the door. He had pointed it
out to me himself as we walked past it, and I believe I
must have stood a good five minutes in front of it. There
was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel
strangely uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken
down from the cross. It seems to me that painters as a rule
represent the Saviour, both on the cross and taken down
from it, with great beauty still upon His face. This
marvellous beauty they strive to preserve even in His
moments of deepest agony and passion. But there was no
such beauty in Rogojin’s picture. This was the
presentment of a poor mangled body which had evidently
suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full
of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers
and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when He
had fallen with the cross—all this combined with the
anguish of the actual crucifixion. The Idiot
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‘The face was depicted as though still suffering; as
though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering
with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the
face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it
would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such
anguish.
‘I know that the earliest Christian faith taught that the
Saviour suffered actually and not figuratively, and that
nature was allowed her own way even while His body was
on the cross.
‘It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the
mangled corpse of the Saviour, and to put this question to
oneself: ‘Supposing that the disciples, the future apostles,
the women who had followed Him and stood by the
cross, all of whom believed in and worshipped Him—
supposing that they saw this tortured body, this face so
mangled and bleeding and bruised (and they MUST have
so seen it)—how could they have gazed upon the dreadful
sight and yet have believed that He would rise again?’
‘The thought steps in, whether one likes it or no, that
death is so terrible and so powerful, that even He who
conquered it in His miracles during life was unable to
triumph over it at the last. He who called to Lazarus,
‘Lazarus, come forth!’ and the dead man lived—He was The Idiot
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now Himself a prey to nature and death. Nature appears
to one, looking at this picture, as some huge, implacable,
dumb monster; or still better—a stranger simile—some
enormous mechanical engine of modern days which has
seized and crushed and swallowed up a great and
invaluable Being, a Being worth nature and all her laws,
worth the whole earth, which was perhaps created merely
for the sake of the advent of that Being.
‘This blind, dumb, implacable, eternal, unreasoning
force is well shown in the picture, and the absolute
subordination of all men and things to it is so well
expressed that the idea unconsciously arises in the mind of
anyone who looks at it. All those faithful people who were
gazing at the cross and its mutilated occupant must have
suffered agony of mind that evening; for they must have
felt that all their hopes and almost all their faith had been
shattered at a blow. They must have separated in terror
and dread that night, though each perhaps carried away
with him one great thought which was never eradicated
from his mind for ever afterwards. If this great Teacher of
theirs could have seen Himself after the Crucifixion, how
could He have consented to mount the Cross and to die as
He did? This thought also comes into the mind of the
man who gazes at this picture. I thought of all this by The Idiot
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snatches probably between my attacks of delirium—for an
hour and a half or so before Colia’s departure.
‘Can there be an appearance of that which has no
form? And yet it seemed to me, at certain moments, that I
beheld in some strange and impossible form, that dark,
dumb, irresistibly powerful, eternal force.
‘I thought someone led me by the hand and showed
me, by the light of a candle, a huge, loathsome insect,
which he assured me was that very force, that very
almighty, dumb, irresistible Power, and laughed at the
indignation with which I received this information. In my
room they always light the little lamp before my icon for
the night; it gives a feeble flicker of light, but it is strong
enough to see by dimly, and if you sit just under it you
can even read by it. I think it was about twelve or a little
past that night. I had not slept a wink, and was lying with
my eyes wide open, when suddenly the door opened, and
in came Rogojin.
‘He entered, and shut the door behind him. Then he
silently gazed at me and went quickly to the corner of the
room where the lamp was burning and sat down
underneath it.
‘I was much surprised, and looked at him expectantly. The Idiot
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‘Rogojin only leaned his elbow on the table and
silently stared at me. So passed two or three minutes, and I
recollect that his silence hurt and offended me very much.
Why did he not speak?
‘That his arrival at this time of night struck me as more
or less strange may possibly be the case; but I remember I
was by no means amazed at it. On the contrary, though I
had not actually told him my thought in the morning, yet
I know he understood it; and this thought was of such a
character that it would not be anything very remarkable, if
one were to come for further talk about it at any hour of
night, however late.
‘I thought he must have come for this purpose.
‘In the morning we had parted not the best of friends; I
remember he looked at me with disagreeable sarcasm once
or twice; and this same look I observed in his eyes now—
which was the cause of the annoyance I felt.
‘I did not for a moment suspect that I was delirious and
that this Rogojin was but the result of fever and
excitement. I had not the slightest idea of such a theory at
first.
‘Meanwhile he continued to sit and stare jeeringly at
me. The Idiot
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‘I angrily turned round in bed and made up my mind
that I would not say a word unless he did; so I rested
silently on my pillow determined to remain dumb, if it
were to last till morning. I felt resolved that he should
speak first. Probably twenty minutes or so passed in this
way. Suddenly the idea struck me—what if this is an
apparition and not Rogojin himself?
‘Neither during my illness nor at any previous time had
I ever seen an apparition;—but I had always thought, both
when I was a little boy, and even now, that if I were to
see one I should die on the spot—though I don’t believe
in ghosts. And yet NOW, when the idea struck me that
this was a ghost and not Rogojin at all, I was not in the
least alarmed. Nay—the thought actually irritated me.
Strangely enough, the decision of the question as to
whether this were a ghost or Rogojin did not, for some
reason or other, interest me nearly so much as it ought to
have done;—I think I began to muse about something
altogether different. For instance, I began to wonder why
Rogojin, who had been in dressing—gown and slippers
when I saw him at home, had now put on a dress-coat and
white waistcoat and tie? I also thought to myself, I
remember—’if this is a ghost, and I am not afraid of it,
why don’t I approach it and verify my suspicions? Perhaps The Idiot
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I am afraid—’ And no sooner did this last idea enter my
head than an icy blast blew over me; I felt a chill down my
backbone and my knees shook.
‘At this very moment, as though divining my thoughts,
Rogojin raised his head from his arm and began to part his
lips as though he were going to laugh—but he continued
to stare at me as persistently as before.
‘I felt so furious with him at this moment that I longed
to rush at him; but as I had sworn that he should speak
first, I continued to lie still—and the more willingly, as I
was still by no means satisfied as to whether it really was
Rogojin or not.
‘I cannot remember how long this lasted; I cannot
recollect, either, whether consciousness forsook me at
intervals, or not. But at last Rogojin rose, staring at me as
intently as ever, but not smiling any longer,—and walking
very softly, almost on tip- toes, to the door, he opened it,
went out, and shut it behind him.
‘I did not rise from my bed, and I don’t know how
long I lay with my eyes open, thinking. I don’t know
what I thought about, nor how I fell asleep or became
insensible; but I awoke next morning after nine o’clock
when they knocked at my door. My general orders are
that if I don’t open the door and call, by nine o’clock, The Idiot
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Matreona is to come and bring my tea. When I now
opened the door to her, the thought suddenly struck me—
how could he have come in, since the door was locked? I
made inquiries and found that Rogojin himself could not
possibly have come in, because all our doors were locked
for the night.
‘Well, this strange circumstance—which I have
described with so much detail—was the ultimate cause
which led me to taking my final determination. So that no
logic, or logical deductions, had anything to do with my
resolve;—it was simply a matter of disgust.
‘It was impossible for me to go on living when life was
full of such detestable, strange, tormenting forms. This
ghost had humiliated me;—nor could I bear to be
subordinate to that dark, horrible force which was
embodied in the form of the loathsome insect. It was only
towards evening, when I had quite made up my mind on
this point, that I began to feel easier. The Idiot
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VII
‘I HAD a small pocket pistol. I had procured it while
