Metaphor

Saying one thing through another, with no word of comparison: instead of saying that something is like another thing, one says that it is. The image transfers to the subject the qualities of the thing it has been identified with.

In The Idiot

you are an extraordinary beauty, Aglaya Ivanovna. You are so beautiful it frightens one to look at you. [...] Beauty is hard to judge; I am not ready yet. Beauty is a riddle.

“Beauty is a riddle” identifies an abstract concept with a puzzle. The image says that beauty offers itself to the gaze and at the same time refuses to be understood, and that is why the prince prefers not to judge it.

Part One: The Arrival, Myshkin

And let us finally dare to say that the springs of life have not weakened, have not been clouded under this star, under this net that has ensnared men. [...] There is more wealth, but less strength; the idea that united us is gone; everything has gone soft, everything has rotted, and everyone has rotted! All, all, all of us have rotted!

Part Three: The Explanation, Lebedev

Looking at this painting, nature takes shape as an enormous, implacable, mute beast [...] as a gigantic machine, of the most modern make, which senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed [...] a great and priceless being, a being that alone was worth all of nature and all its laws, the whole earth.

Part Three: The Explanation, Hippolyte

What good is all this beauty to me, when every minute, every second, I must and am obliged to know that even this tiny fly, buzzing near me now in a ray of sunlight, takes part in all this banquet and chorus, knows its place, loves it, and is happy, while I alone am a miscarriage.

Part Three: The Explanation, Hippolyte

Because he found the fatherland that he had failed to see here, and rejoiced; he found the shore, the earth, and threw himself to kiss it! [...] "Whoever has no ground beneath them also has no God".

Part Four: The Denouement, Myshkin