Part One: The arrival
well, if that's so [...] then you, Prince, turn out to be a complete holy fool, and people like you are the ones God loves!
Explanation and analysis
In the third-class car of the Warsaw train, on the morning he arrives in Petersburg, Prince Myshkin talks with Rogozhin, a merchant's son who has just inherited a fortune and is chasing after Nastasya Filippovna. Rogozhin wants to know whether his new acquaintance likes women, and the prince answers that, because of the illness that has accompanied him since childhood, he has never known any. It is to this answer that Rogozhin reacts with the phrase.
For a man consumed by desire, whoever does not desire is out of the contest, and Rogozhin settles the matter with a word from Russian popular piety: a holy fool is the disheveled beggar whom the people take to be under heaven's protection. The phrase classifies Myshkin as innocent, almost a saint, and at the same time takes him out of the game. Lebedev, who is listening, repeats the expression to flatter. From the first page the book hands the reader the ambiguity that holds up the title: the same person can be seen as a blessing or as a defect, and the whole day will trade the first word for the second.
The text supports two readings. Rogozhin may be generous and saying what he feels, having just grown attached to a stranger without knowing why. He may also be reassuring himself: if the prince is a holy fool, he will not be a rival for Nastasya, and the affection is safe.
but the main pain, the strongest, may not be in the wounds but in this: in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then right now, the soul will fly out of the body, and that you will no longer be a man, and that this is certain; the main thing is that it is certain.
Explanation and analysis
Subscription
The explanation of this quote and the other 39 quotes from The Idiot comes with a subscription.
A surprising face! [...] The face is cheerful, and yet she suffered terribly, didn't she? [...] It is a proud face, terribly proud, and yet I don't know whether she is good. Ah, if only she were good! Everything would be saved!
Explanation and analysis
if she now accepts the capital, it is by no means as payment for her dishonor as a young woman, for which she is not to blame, but simply as compensation for a crippled destiny.
Explanation and analysis
thanks to them, I assure you, she died almost happy. Thanks to them she forgot her black misfortune, as if she had received forgiveness from them, because to the end she considered herself a great criminal.
Explanation and analysis
everyone takes me for an idiot too, I don't know why; indeed, I was once so ill that at that time I did seem like an idiot; but what kind of idiot am I now, if I myself understand that they take me for an idiot? I walk in and think: here they take me for an idiot, and yet I am intelligent, and they don't even suspect...
Explanation and analysis
you are an extraordinary beauty, Aglaya Ivanovna. You are so beautiful it is frightening to look at you. [...] Beauty is hard to judge; I am not ready yet. Beauty is an enigma.
Explanation and analysis
he valued me at a hundred thousand! [...] Did you really mean to take me into your family? Me, Rogozhin's woman!
Explanation and analysis
will you take me as I am, with nothing! [...] I accept, Nastasya Filippovna... [...] I accept you as an honorable woman, Nastasya Filippovna, and not as Rogozhin's woman.
Explanation and analysis
I was Totsky's concubine... Prince! Now what you need is Aglaya Epanchina, not Nastasya Filippovna [...] That's how all of you are: either you deal with the dishonored women or with the honorable ones, one choice only!
Explanation and analysis
Do you see this packet? There are a hundred thousand in it! [...] As soon as the fire catches it entirely, plunge into the fireplace, but without gloves, with bare hands [...] Take it out and it's yours, the hundred thousand is yours!
Explanation and analysis
didn't I dream of you myself? You're right about that, I dreamed of you a long time ago, still in his village; I lived five years alone; one thinks and thinks, dreams and dreams, and it's always someone like you, good, honest, kind and just as silly, who suddenly comes and says: you are not to blame, Nastasya Filippovna, and I adore you!
Explanation and analysis
Part Two: The painting
I love her not with love, but with pity.
Explanation and analysis
She loves another, that's what you have to understand! Just as I love her now, that's how she loves another now. And do you know who that other is? It's you!
Explanation and analysis
Why, this painting can make someone even lose his faith! And Rogozhin: And it does.
Explanation and analysis
the same joy God has each time He sees from heaven a sinner begin to pray before Him with all his heart.
Explanation and analysis
If in that second [...] it happened that he had time to tell himself, with clarity and awareness: Yes, for this moment one could give a whole life! then, of course, that moment alone was worth a whole life.
Explanation and analysis
Compassion is the primary and, perhaps, the only law of the existence of all mankind.
Explanation and analysis
for this poor knight it no longer mattered who his lady was or what she had done. It was enough that he had chosen her and believed in her pure beauty, and then bowed before her forever; the merit lies precisely in the fact that, even if she later turned out to be a thief, he should still believe in her.
Explanation and analysis
nature is mocking! Why, he resumed suddenly with ardor, why does she create the best beings only to mock them afterward?
Explanation and analysis
I know very well that he sometimes deceives me, [...] and he knows that I know.
Explanation and analysis
Part Three: The explanation
that the most hardened and unrepentant murderer still knows that he is a criminal, that is, in conscience he judges that he acted badly, even without any remorse at all [...] whereas those of whom Evgeny Pavlovich began to speak do not even want to consider themselves criminals, and think to themselves that they had the right and... that they even acted well.
Explanation and analysis
That day we felt the same thing, in one word. If you had not raised your hand against me (the hand God turned aside), what would I be now before you? For I too suspected you of it: one sin, ours, in one word!
Explanation and analysis
And let them dare to say, at last, that the springs of life have not grown weaker, have not been clouded under this star, under this net that has entangled men. [...] There is more wealth, but less strength; the idea that united us has ended; everything has gone soft, everything has rotted, and everyone has rotted! All, all, all of us have rotted!
Explanation and analysis
Is it true, Prince, that you once said that beauty will save the world? [...] And I assert that he has these playful ideas because he is now in love.
Explanation and analysis
In Rogozhin's painting there is not a word of beauty; it is, entirely, the corpse of a man who endured endless torments [...] In the painting, that face is terribly disfigured by blows, swollen, with terrible bruises, swollen and bloodied, the eyes open, the pupils askew; the large whites of the eyes, open, shine with a dead, glassy reflection.
Explanation and analysis
Looking at this picture, nature appears in the form of an enormous beast, implacable and mute [...] in the form of a gigantic machine, of the most modern make, which senselessly seized, ground up and swallowed [...] a great and priceless being, a being that alone was worth all of nature and all its laws, the whole earth.
Explanation and analysis
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 now near me in a sunbeam, even it takes part in all this feast and in this chorus, knows its place, loves it and is happy, and only I am an abortion.
Explanation and analysis
This unhappy woman is deeply convinced that she is the most fallen, the most depraved being in the whole world. [...] that she is the first not to believe in herself, and that with all her moral conscience she believes, on the contrary, that she... that she herself is guilty.
Explanation and analysis
That I only feel pity for her, and that I... no longer love her.
Explanation and analysis
Part Four: The denouement
he was one of those liars who, although they lie to the point of voluptuousness and self-forgetting, even at the highest point of ecstasy still suspect, inwardly, that they are not believed, nor can they be.
Explanation and analysis
if you begin to talk about something like the death penalty, or the economic situation of Russia, or that "beauty will save the world", then... I, of course, will be delighted and laugh heartily, but... I warn you now: afterward, don't show yourself before my eyes again!
Explanation and analysis
It is because he found the homeland that he had not seen here, and rejoiced; he found the shore, the land, and threw himself down to kiss it! [...] "Whoever has no ground beneath his feet has no God either."
Explanation and analysis
You know, I do not understand how one can pass a tree and not be happy to see it. Talk to a person and not be happy to love them! Oh, only I cannot say it... and how many beautiful things there are at every step, that even the most lost man finds beautiful? Look at a child, look at God's dawn, look at the grass, how it grows, look at the eyes that look at you and love you...
Explanation and analysis
But is that possible? She is... mad!
Explanation and analysis
Happiness? Oh, no! I'm simply marrying her; she wants it; and what does it matter whether I marry: I... Well, it's all the same! Only she would die, for certain.
Explanation and analysis
Aglaya Ivanovna loved as a woman, as a human being, and not as... an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince? The most certain thing is that you never loved either of them!
Explanation and analysis
At the feet, some lace was bundled up in a heap, and over the white lace, emerging from the sheet, the tip of a bare foot was outlined; it looked carved in marble and was terribly still. The prince looked and felt that, the more he looked, the deader and more silent the room became. Suddenly a fly that had woken up buzzed, flew over the bed and fell silent by the headboard.
Explanation and analysis
the prince then extended a trembling hand to him and lightly touched his head, his hair, smoothing it, and smoothed his cheeks... there was nothing more he could do!
Explanation and analysis
And if Schneider himself came now from Switzerland to see his former pupil and patient, he too, recalling the state the prince sometimes fell into during the first year of treatment in Switzerland, would now make a gesture of discouragement and say, as he did back then: "Idiot!"