The epigraph is the passage from Luke 8:32-36: on a hillside a large herd of pigs was grazing; the demons that had come out of a man entered them, and the herd rushed down the steep slope into the lake and drowned. The people went to see and found the man from whom the demons had come out sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. The novel takes this scene seriously as the key to its own story.
It is read aloud by Stepan Trofimovich, in the inn where he dies. He asks for the passage "literally," and says that since childhood it has been a stumbling block for him. Then he deciphers it: the sick man is Russia, the demons are the sores accumulated over centuries, and the great idea and the great will will come down from above upon the country, as upon the demoniac, and the demons will come out and beg to enter the pigs, "and perhaps they have already entered."
Next he includes himself in the image, beside his son: it is we, he says, we and those, and Petrusha, and I, "perhaps the first," and we will hurl ourselves off a cliff into the sea. Even so, he ends by betting that the sick man will be healed and will sit at the feet of Jesus.
There are two possible readings of the scene, and the text does not choose between them: it may be the lucidity of fever, which tells the truth because it no longer needs an audience, or the last speech of an orator, who still needs one. Either way, it is the only moment in the book when a character hands over the key that the narrator left, without comment, at the opening.