The Idiot

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.