Symbols

The Holbein painting A copy of Hans Holbein's Dead Christ hangs over a door in the gloomy house of Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, on Gorokhovaya Street, in a room full of portraits of bishops. It is a painting of an odd shape, long and low, showing the Savior just taken down from... The exchange of crosses Two breast crosses change hands on the staircase of Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin's house. One is of tin, eight-pointed, which a drunken soldier sold to Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin for twenty kopecks, swearing it was silver; the other is Rogozhin's gold cross.... The knife A new garden knife, with a deer-horn handle, lies on Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin's table, beside a book, in the house on Gorokhovaya Street. Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin picks it up twice without noticing, Rogozhin tears it out of his hand, and that same night... The money in the fire A bundle of one hundred thousand rubles, wrapped in newspaper, which Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin gathered one afternoon from moneylenders, and which Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova tosses into the fireplace on her birthday night, offering it to Gavrila... The poor knight A ballad by Pushkin about a knight who had a vision, never looked at another woman again, wrote the initials of the Virgin in his own blood on his shield, fought in Palestine crying out a holy name, and died like a madman. In the Epanchins' house it first... The Chinese vase A large, expensive Chinese vase in the Epanchins' drawing room, a gift that Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina treasures so much that, in her daughter's words, she would go out of her mind and weep before everyone if it broke. On the eve of the meeting at which... The fly A common housefly, which the novel places at three moments of death. It buzzes in the story General Epanchin tells in the game of confessions, while an old woman dies without his noticing; it buzzes in a ray of sunlight in Hippolyte Terentyev's Explanation,...