Hippolyte Terentyev

Who They Are

Hippolyte Terentyev is the eldest son of the captain's widow Marfa Borisovna, the woman to whom General Ivolgin hands over the prince's twenty-five rubles, a young man of seventeen or eighteen in the final stage of consumption, and a friend of Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin (chapter XII of Part One). He comes on stage as one of the four young men who go to Lebedev's dacha to demand from Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, in Burdovsky's name, the money that the benefactor Pavlishchev supposedly owed the alleged son (chapter VII of Part Two). He lives with his mother, spends some days at the prince's dacha (chapter I of Part Three), then at Ptitsyn's house, where the Ivolgin family lives (chapter II of Part Four), and goes back to his mother to die (chapter XII of Part Four). He is the voice of death marked out in The Idiot: he knows the approximate term of his own death and uses that term as license to say aloud what the other characters only hint at. The Necessary Explanation that he reads at the prince's birthday party (chapter V of Part Three, chapter VI of Part Three and chapter VII of Part Three) is the only block of the novel devoted entirely to the confession of a single man, and it is there, second-hand, that the most quoted line of the book appears.

Trajectory

In chapter XII of Part One he does not yet appear: Kolya tells the prince that his friend thinks a man who takes a slap and does not challenge the other is a scoundrel. In chapter VII of Part Two he comes in with Burdovsky, Doktorenko and Keller, thin as a skeleton, coughing, with two red spots on his cheeks, and in chapter VIII of Part Two he asks by what right the case goes before the court of the prince's friends and shouts that ten thousand is too little. In chapter IX of Part Two, when Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina grabs his arm, he coughs blood, says a doctor gave him two weeks, and asks for one last conversation, with air and trees. In chapter X of Part Two he invites everyone to his own funeral, says that from the window he sees only the brick wall of Meyer's house, and complains of a nature that mocks the best beings:

He weeps like a child in the lap of Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina and finds in her tear what he said he had never had:

Minutes later, ashamed of his own weeping and of the prince having foreseen that shame, he explodes against him:

In chapter I of Part Three he moves into the prince's dacha. Radomsky mocks the consumptive who wants to die with eloquence and says he forgives him everything, and the prince corrects him:

In chapter IV of Part Three, on the terrace full of the prince's birthday guests, he asks how many hours remain until the sun rises, drinks his third glass and wants to know whether the prince has heard of the star Wormwood. In chapter V of Part Three he wakes from a seven-minute nap and provokes the prince in front of everyone:

Dostoevsky never puts the phrase about beauty that will save the world in the mouth of Myshkin himself. It reaches the reader always filtered through this second-hand irony, from a dying man who heard it from Kolya, and then through Aglaya's, who forbids the prince to repeat it (chapter VI of Part Four). It is the most economical way the novel finds to keep the phrase from turning into doctrine.

He takes out of his pocket the envelope sealed in red and leaves to a coin the decision whether to read it:

In the Explanation he tells of the dream of the venomous creature with a trident that the Newfoundland Norma snaps at, of his hatred for the poor who do not know how to live the sixty years ahead of them, and of his thesis on happiness:

In chapter VI of Part Three he tells of the March night when he returned a wallet to an impoverished doctor and found him a post, and of the speech he made about the isolated good deed:

Then he describes the painting of the dead Christ that he saw in the house of Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, the same canvas before which Myshkin had already said that one can lose one's faith:

It is the opposite answer to that of Nastasya Filippovna, who in the letters of chapter X of Part Three imagines a pensive Christ, alone with a child: where she sees a possible consolation, Hippolyte sees only matter winning, with no transcendence at all. The two visions of Christ divide Part Three between them.

That night, he says, Rogozhin came into the room at one in the morning, sat under the icon lamp and looked at him in silence, mocking, until he left on tiptoe, with the doors locked. The decision was born from that:

In chapter VII of Part Three he reads the ending. The Explanation closes with the justification of suicide:

And in the harshest complaint of the book against the beauty of the world:

He shouts that the sun has risen, calls Gania a scoundrel because he yawned, embraces the prince saying he is taking leave of Man, goes to the terrace steps, presses the pistol to his temple and pulls the trigger: there is no cap. The fright turns to laughter, and he, in hysterics, shows the ten caps from his waistcoat pocket and shouts that he is dishonored forever, until he faints.

The failure of the gesture is the most ironic point of the book: the whole argument about the right to choose one's own death collapses before a banal forgetfulness, the missing cap, the very piece that Aglaya's pistol lesson to the prince had put on stage that same night (chapter III of Part Three), and the audience passes in seconds from emotion to spiteful laughter.

In chapter I of Part Four he already lives in Ptitsyn's house, where Gania brought him, calculating to use him against the prince, and, according to Gania, he told his mother, for the pleasure of hurting her, that the general had stolen Lebedev's four hundred rubles. In chapter II of Part Four he says aloud that Captain Yeropegov may never have existed, which knocks the general down, and, before going back to his mother's house, Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin receives the same treatment the prince received:

In chapter V of Part Four he confronts the prince in the park to provoke him, complains about the Ivolgins, who would have taken him in on the condition that he die soon, speaks of the death of Stepan Glebov, impaled in Peter's time, and asks which would be the better way to die. The prince answers:

In chapter VIII of Part Four, coughing blood, he tells the prince that it was he who arranged, through Rogozhin, the meeting of Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna that night, and he tells it out of spite, because Aglaya called him a gossip. In chapter X of Part Four, worse and worse, he calls the prince a nanny, quarrels and makes peace with him, and at last frightens him on purpose with the idea that Rogozhin, having lost his bride, may kill Aglaya out of revenge. In chapter XII of Part Four he dies in great agitation, about two weeks after Nastasya Filippovna, earlier than he expected.

Themes Embodied

Hippolyte is Death seen from within, by someone who counts the days, and that is why the novel gives him the most serious objection it makes to faith: before the dead Christ, nature is a mute machine that ground up a being worth more than itself (chapter VI of Part Three), and the beauty of the world, the fly in the sunbeam and the trees of Pavlovsk, shows the condemned man only the feast from which he has been excluded (chapter VII of Part Three). The book does not refute the argument: the shot fails through a technical detail, the guests laugh, and the only answer that suggests itself is the prince's, who recognizes in the fly his own weeping in Switzerland and, even so, did not reach despair (chapter VII of Part Three).

The pattern repeats: Hippolyte attacks whoever shows him kindness or mediocrity, as if both were equally unbearable to someone who knows he will soon die. He himself confesses, at the decisive point of the Explanation, that the decision to die came from revulsion and not from logic (chapter VI of Part Three), and what wounds him in every scene is being seen: weeping in the lap of Yelizaveta Prokofyevna (chapter X of Part Two), foreseen by the prince (chapter X of Part Two), laughed at by the guests (chapter VII of Part Three). The same spite leads him, in chapter X of Part Four, to frighten the prince on purpose with the danger to Aglaya; and the gesture in which he seems most to act on someone's behalf, telling the prince about the meeting of the two women (chapter VIII of Part Four), he himself says he does out of revenge against Aglaya.

His refusal is not toward God but toward gratitude: he accepts eternal life and even providence, and refuses to praise what devours him (chapter VII of Part Three). It is the same refusal of Burdovsky's group, which demands as a right so as never to have to be grateful (chapter VIII of Part Two), and the same word, right, which he claims over the two or three weeks left to him.

Divergent Readings

The book itself leaves open whether the forgetting of the cap was sincere. Keller threatens anyone who says otherwise, Lebedev and Radomsky doubt it, and Radomsky calls him a home-made Lacenaire, capable of killing ten people for fun (chapter VII of Part Three). On the green bench, Aglaya thinks the pistol had to fail because it suits him better, and the prince says Hippolyte wanted everyone to surround him and beg him to live (chapter VIII of Part Three). In the prince's reading he is a young man who wants to be loved; in Radomsky's, a dangerous vain man.

The text supports both readings of the shot and does not choose between them: the Explanation is read as a death sentence handed to a coin (chapter V of Part Three), and Hippolyte is still alive weeks later, laughs, provokes and dies earlier than he expected (chapter XII of Part Four). What remains beyond doubt is the force of the argument, which the book does not dismantle, and the fragility of the man who holds it, which the book shows without mocking him.

Relationships

• Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin: the target of Hippolyte's love and hate, who hates in him precisely the goodness he cannot imitate or despise outright (chapter X of Part Two), and to whom he leaves a copy of the Explanation (chapter VII of Part Three).
• Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin: owner of the painting of the dead Christ that underpins the central thesis of the Explanation, and the figure who visits him at one in the morning (chapter VI of Part Three); through him Hippolyte arranges the meeting of the two women (chapter VIII of Part Four).
• Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin: accused by Hippolyte of embodying the mediocrity he most despises (chapter II of Part Four).
• Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina: hears his weeping in chapter X of Part Two, before the fit of rage against the prince.
• Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin: Kolya, the friend who keeps watch over him after the shot and is moved by the courage of the Explanation (chapter IX of Part Three).
• Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina: receives the other copy of the Explanation (chapter VII of Part Three) and calls him a gossip on the green bench (chapter VIII of Part Four).
• Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky: who does not take his eyes off him on the night of the reading and judges him capable of killing out of vanity (chapter VII of Part Three).