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The Idiot · Part Two

The painting

Money and WealthTruth and LiesCompassion and CharityBeautyFaith

Summary of the part

The thread of this part is the word with which the prince defines himself before Rogozhin: he loves Nastasya Filippovna not with love but with pity, and in Pavlovsk, after a day of suspicion, he concludes that compassion is the main law of human existence. The twelve chapters put this law to the test against four resistances. Parfen Semyonovich Rogozhin hears in the rival's pity a superiority and answers with the knife he hides in a book and then raises on the hotel stairs. Burdovsky's group receives charity as an insult and demands as a right what the prince was already going to give. Hippolyte Terentyev, who wants to be recognized before he dies, receives pity and turns it into hatred. Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina admires in public the loyalty of the poor knight and swaps the initials on the shield for Nastasya's. At the center is the Holbein painting in Rogozhin's house, a Christ just taken down from the cross, before which one can lose one's faith, and the prince's answer, which is not an argument: it is the joy of a peasant woman at her child's first smile. The part ends with him knowing he is being deceived and trusting anyway, and being pulled back to the house from which they had just forbidden him to go.

Chapter I: Six Months of Rumors

Money and Wealth

Chapter summary

Two days after the night at the house of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin leaves for Moscow to receive the inheritance, and for six months Petersburg knows of him only through contradictory rumors. In the Epanchins' house no one speaks of the prince for a month; Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina declares that she was mistaken about him and that her life has been a continuous error about people. Two letters from the old Princess Belokonskaya, who receives him every day in Moscow, change the mood of the house, and Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin tells what he had found out: the inheritance is smaller than it was said to be, and the prince paid almost all the creditors of the dead merchant, even those without documents, because some of them had really been wronged. Two weeks later comes the news that Nastasya Filippovna, found and lost twice by Rogozhin in Moscow, has run away for the third time, almost from the altar, and that the prince vanished from Moscow at the same time. Silence returns.

Analysis

Meanwhile, the Ivolgin household is falling apart. Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin falls ill and gives up his job, and the city learns that on the night of the party he waited for the prince to return from Yekaterinhof, set before him the half-burned package, and wept for two hours at his side; they parted as friends. Varvara Ardalionovna Ivolgina marries Ptitsyn and begins to visit the Epanchin girls through the back door. The planned marriage of Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky with the eldest daughter comes undone on its own, and he becomes infatuated with a French marquise. Prince Sch., a serious man of thirty-five, asks for the hand of Adelaida Ivanovna Epanchina; through him Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky enters the house, an aide-de-camp of twenty-eight, rich and witty, who becomes a regular visitor after seeing Aglaya. General Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin ends up in debtors' prison, taken there by a friend, the widow of a captain, to whom he had signed promissory notes. Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin, Kolya, who has cut loose from home, meets the Epanchins on his own account and wins over Yelizaveta Prokofyevna by not flattering her. At Easter, alone with Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina, he hands her a note from the prince, signed as a brother:

Вы мне нужны, очень нужны. Мне нечего писать вам о себе, нечего рассказывать. Я и не хотел того; мне ужасно бы желалось, чтобы вы были счастливы. Счастливы ли вы? Вот это только я и хотел вам сказать, I need you, I need you very much. I have nothing to write to you about myself, nothing to tell. I did not want that; I was terribly wishing that you might be happy. Are you happy? That is all I wanted to tell you.

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Chapter II: Lebedev

Money and WealthDeathFaith

Chapter summary

At the beginning of June the Epanchins move to the Pavlovsk dacha, and two or three days later Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin gets off the train from Moscow. At the station he has the impression of a burning gaze, two eyes in the middle of the crowd, and can no longer make them out. He rents two dark rooms in a bad hotel near Liteynaya and hurries off to the house of Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev, in the Peski district. He finds him haranguing the family: Vera, twenty years old, in mourning, with the newborn sister in her arms (their mother died in childbirth five weeks earlier), a thirteen-year-old girl, a fifteen-year-old boy, and the nephew Doktorenko stretched out on the sofa, who contradicts him all the time. The nephew says that the uncle has become a lawyer of small cases and defended a moneylender against the old woman he had robbed, for a fee of fifty rubles; that he himself lost twenty rubles at cards to a retired lieutenant from Rogozhin's old gang, a boxer, and that he is lying there until his uncle gives him fifteen; and that Lebedev prays at night for the soul of the Countess Du Barry. Lebedev defends himself by recounting her death, which he had just read about in a dictionary: the countess dragged to the guillotine, begging the executioner for one more minute.

Analysis

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Chapter III: Rogozhin's House

Compassion and Charity

Chapter summary

Instead of going to Pavlovsk, the prince looks for a house on Gorokhovaya, hesitating at every step. He recognizes it from afar by its look: large, gloomy, three stories, a dirty green, with few windows, and on the plaque the name of the hereditary honorary citizen Rogozhin. Parfen Semyonovich Rogozhin opens the study door and turns pale as a stone statue. The two have used the familiar "tu" with each other since Moscow. The prince asks whether he knew of his arrival and speaks of the eyes at the station; Rogozhin evades the subject. The prince notices the portrait of Rogozhin's father, an old man with a distrustful and sad look, and a volume of Soloviev's History open on the table. Then he says why he has come: he is no enemy and will not get in the way of the marriage; he came because he heard from Lebedev of the new flight and wanted to persuade her to go abroad for treatment, without him. He always said that with Rogozhin she would be lost, and that Rogozhin would be lost too. And he defines what he feels for her:

Analysis

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Chapter IV: The Painting and the Crosses

Faith

Chapter summary

Rogozhin leads the prince back through the dark rooms. In a room with portraits of bishops, above the door, hangs a painting of odd shape, long and low, showing the Savior just taken down from the cross. His father bought it for two rubles at an auction; an expert said it was not rubbish, they have already offered five hundred for it, and Rogozhin kept it for himself. The prince recognizes a good copy of Hans Holbein, which he saw abroad and cannot forget. Rogozhin drops the subject, takes a few steps, and suddenly asks whether the prince believes in God; then he says that he likes to look at that painting.

Analysis

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Chapter V: The Knife on the Stairs

MadnessCompassion and CharityBeautyFaith

Chapter summary

General Epanchin is not at home, and the prince waits in vain for Kolya at the Viessi Hotel, where he leaves a note. At four he sets out walking aimlessly, on a clear, hot day, wanting to remain alone with his anguish, without seeking a way out. At six he buys a ticket for Pavlovsk and, almost at the carriage, throws the note on the floor and leaves the station. In the street he catches himself in a movement he has been repeating for hours without noticing: looking around for something. He remembers that the last time he stood before a shop window, appraising an object for sixty kopecks, he went back five hundred paces to check whether the shop existed, found the object, laughed hysterically and fled from it. He refuses to think and thinks of something else: the stage that comes before an epileptic attack, when the brain is lit with light and everything resolves into a high, harmonious calm.

Analysis

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Chapter VI: The Poor Knight

Truth and LiesBeauty

Chapter summary

Lebedev's dacha has a terrace decorated with orange trees, lemon trees, and jasmine in tubs, which he bought at an auction to charge the tenant more. On the third day after the attack the prince already looks almost sound. Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev watches him, comes in on tiptoe every fifteen minutes, listens at the door and drives the daughters away; in his part of the house he shelters General Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin, with whom he discusses learned matters, and of whom he says that he has entertained two hundred guests at table every day for thirty years. He tells the prince that Rogozhin comes every day to ask after his health, that a certain person wants a secret meeting, and that this person is afraid of Aglaya Ivanovna; the prince threatens to leave the dacha. Ganya arrives, much changed, with Varya and Ptitsyn and, through the terrace, Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina with her three daughters and Prince Sch. She, who had imagined finding him on his deathbed, is annoyed to see him smiling and well dressed, and says so. She takes a liking to Vera, calls Lebedev a fool, and Aglaya asks her to interpret the Apocalypse for her one day.

Analysis

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Chapter VII: The Swapped Letters

Beauty

Chapter summary

The young man is Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, of whom the prince had heard a great deal. Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina does not turn to him; she recites the ballad looking only at the prince, who takes refuge behind the armchair. She covers the affectation with a seriousness and simplicity that hold everyone spellbound, and reads the verses of the knight who had a vision, never looked at a woman again, wrote the letters on his shield with his own blood, fought in Palestine crying out a holy name, and died like a madman. But the prince notices something:

Analysis

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Chapter VIII: Pavlishchev's Son

Money and WealthMadnessCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

The prince proposes to talk in another room. Doktorenko protests the two hours of waiting, Burdovsky stammers that he is not a lackey, and Hippolyte asks by what right the matter is brought before his friends' judgment. Yelizaveta Prokofyevna, to whom Lebedev had passed a humorous weekly with a column marked, orders Kolya to read it aloud. The article mocks the heir treated as an idiot in Switzerland, claims that his father embezzled the company's money, that the benefactor P. was an idle libertine, that P.'s real son lives on tutoring, and that the millionaire sent him fifty rubles as alms; it closes with an epigram. Kolya finishes, runs to a corner and hides his face in shame. Hippolyte and Doktorenko disapprove of the article; Keller confesses to being its author, and says publicity is everyone's right. Doktorenko states the demand:

Analysis

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Chapter IX: Ganya's Proofs

Money and Wealth

Chapter summary

Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin presents the proofs, speaking directly to Burdovsky: he was born two years after his mother's legal marriage to the collegiate secretary Burdovsky, and three letters from Pavlishchev, obtained through Varya and a retired colonel, show that Pavlishchev left for abroad, where he stayed for three years, a year and a half before that birth. Burdovsky stands up: he was deceived, not by Chebarov, but long before; he refuses the ten thousand and wants to leave. Ganya asks for five more minutes and tells the rest: Pavlishchev had loved, in his youth, a servant girl, the sister of Burdovsky's mother, and he only failed to marry her because she died suddenly; he took the younger sister as a ward at ten years old, gave her a dowry, and she married for love the father of Burdovsky, who lost the dowry in business, drank, and died. Pavlishchev supported her with six hundred rubles a year and grew fond of the boy precisely because he seemed stammering, crippled, an unhappy child. The rumor that Burdovsky was his son took hold only in recent years, when the family feared for the will. The mother, whom Ganya visited in Pskov, lives poor and survives only on her son's help. Ganya concludes, with venom, that Pavlishchev loved Burdovsky out of generosity, that there was no theft, and that the prince may now offer his help again. Burdovsky throws an envelope onto the table: the two hundred and fifty rubles sent by Chebarov. Ganya opens it and announces that there are only a hundred. Doktorenko explains that a hundred and fifty went to Chebarov's travel expenses, and that the group will pay, even if it is one ruble at a time. The prince asks forgiveness in a disjointed way: he was wrong to speak of trickery, to say that Burdovsky was sick like him, and to offer the money the way he did. Doktorenko replies:

Analysis

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Chapter X: Hippolyte

DeathCompassion and Charity

Chapter summary

Hippolyte Terentyev notices that Lebedev served tea in the porcelain cups from his wife's dowry, which never leave the cupboard, and says that Lebedev corrected the article. Keller confirms: he paid six rubles for the facts, not for the style. Yelizaveta Prokofyevna flies into a rage; Hippolyte praises her eccentricity with irony, and General Epanchin reprimands him: the woman stayed out of compassion for a sick man. Hippolyte says none of those present loved the mother as Burdovsky did, and reveals that the prince secretly sent money to his mother, through Ganya. Radomsky sums up the group's theory as the triumph of right before anyone knows what right consists of, and says that from there one leaps to the right of force, that of tigers and crocodiles; Hippolyte, scarcely listening, holds out his hand to him and says he is not angry. Then he invites everyone to his funeral, says he came to see the trees, that from his window he sees only the red brick wall of Meyer's house, and that a dead man can say anything:

Analysis

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Chapter XI: Double Thoughts

Truth and LiesFaith

Chapter summary

Only on the third day do the Epanchins make peace with the prince. In the meantime he blames himself for two extremes, a senseless trust and a base distrust, and the episode of the caleche grows in his mind. Prince Sch. and Adelaida visit him, in secret from the family; they talk of an old tree she wants to draw and, on leaving, ask who the woman was. The prince says it was Nastasya Filippovna; Prince Sch. assures him that Radomsky, being rich, cannot hold promissory notes with a moneylender or address her as "tu," that perhaps he knew her years ago through Totsky, and the prince realizes they take him for an accomplice in a plot. He thinks of her: mad. Ganya spends twenty minutes talking without touching on the essential: Nastasya Filippovna has been in Pavlovsk for four days, at Darya Alexeyevna's house, already has a court of admirers and the most beautiful caleche in town; the story of the promissory notes may be true, because Radomsky's affairs are in some disorder. Varya tells that Aglaya quarreled with the whole family. Alone in the park, the prince feels like going far away, without saying goodbye, because he senses that if he stays a few more days he will be dragged into that world with no way back:

Analysis

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Chapter XII: Aglaya's Note

Truth and Lies

Chapter summary

At seven in the evening Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina enters the terrace alone, says she has not come to ask forgiveness, and forbids him to speak of the young men. She questions him about the letter he sent Aglaya at Easter; he recites it by heart and explains that he wrote it in a moment of hope, of feeling at home in Russia, as to a sister. She says that Aglaya called him a cripple and an idiot, that a daughter, when she loves, swears aloud, as she herself used to, and she makes him swear that he did not marry that woman; he admits he almost married her and swears he did not come for that. She kisses him, says she can finally breathe, and that Aglaya will not be his as long as she lives. And she confesses why she was waiting for him:

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