What It Is
A common housefly, which the novel places at three moments of death. It buzzes in the story General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin tells in the game of confessions, while an old woman dies without his noticing; it buzzes in a ray of sunlight in the Explanation of Hippolyte Terentyev, as the tiny creature that has a place at the feast of the world, from which he feels excluded; and it buzzes, finally, over the bed where the body of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova lies, on the night Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin enters Rogozhin's house. Between the last two, the prince recognizes in Hippolyte's fly his own weeping in Switzerland.
Where It Appears
In ch. XIV of Part One, Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin recounts, as the worst act of his life, the visit in which he came back to insult an eighty-year-old widow over a bowl; she was dying while he shouted, and the detail he keeps is this one.
Я постоял в нерешимости; мухи жужжат, солнце закатывается, тишина; в совершенном смущении я, наконец, ухожу, I stood there, undecided; the flies buzz, the sun sets, silence; in complete confusion, I finally leave.
In ch. V of Part Three, at the start of the Explanation, Hippolyte says that he could have raged at the blind and deaf fortune that decided to crush him like a fly, without knowing why, and asks why, then, he began to live knowing he could no longer begin.
In ch. VII of Part Three, near the end of the reading, the fly returns, now alive and happy.
Что мне во всей этой красоте, когда я каждую минуту, каждую секунду должен и принужден теперь знать, что вот даже эта крошечная мушка, которая жужжит теперь около меня в солнечном луче, и та даже во всем этом пире и хоре участница, место знает свое, любит его и счастлива, а я один выкидыш, What is all this beauty to me, when every minute, every second, I must and am forced to know that even this tiny fly that buzzes near me now in a ray of sunlight takes part in all this feast and chorus, knows its place, loves it, and is happy, while I alone am a miscarriage.
Still in ch. VII of Part Three, after three in the morning, sitting on the green bench, the prince recalls the sentence and understands why it wounded him: in the first year of treatment in Switzerland, before the lake and the mountains, he wept because he felt shut out of the world's endless feast.
один он ничего не знает, ничего не понимает, ни людей, ни звуков, всему чужой и выкидыш, only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a miscarriage.
In ch. XI of Part Four, in the dark office on Gorokhovaya Street, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin leads the prince to the bed behind the green curtain.
В ногах, сбиты были в комок какие-то кружева, и на белевших кружевах, выглядывая из-под простыни, обозначался кончик обнаженной ноги; он казался как бы выточенным из мрамора и ужасно был неподвижен. Князь глядел и чувствовал, что чем больше он глядит, тем еще мертвее и тише становится в комнате. Вдруг зажужжала проснувшаяся муха, пронеслась над кроватью и затихла у изголовья., At the foot of the bed some lace had been bunched into a ball, and on the white lace, peeking out from under the sheet, the tip of a bare foot could be made out; it looked as if carved from marble and was terribly still. The prince looked and felt that the more he looked, the deader and quieter the room became. Suddenly a fly that had woken buzzed, flew over the bed, and went quiet at the headboard.
What It Means
The fly is the creature that watches over the dying and that death does not touch. In the general's story it marks the moment he failed to understand; in the Explanation it is proof that the beauty of the world has room for everything except Hippolyte; in Rogozhin's house it is the only movement in a room where no one says there is a dead woman. The book shows it without comment all three times and leaves the connection to the reader: the fly that Hippolyte envied now buzzes over the body of the woman the prince wanted to save.
The prince and Hippolyte have the same fly and make opposite things of it. In ch. VII of Part Three Hippolyte sees it happy in its place and concludes that he is a miscarriage; the prince, the same night, recalls that he felt exactly this in Switzerland, and the text does not say what pulled him out of it. In ch. XI of Part Four, before the body, it is he who hears the fly, and the buzzing is the first sign that he has understood. Two readings. In one, the fly is the indifferent nature of the Explanation, which goes on living where the person has ended, and the book's ending proves Hippolyte right; in the other, it is only what is alive in the room, and the prince, who once wept for having no place at the feast, stays until dawn beside someone who has none either.
Relationships
- Default themes: Death, Beauty.
- Themes in the novel: Death, Beauty.
- Characters: Hippolyte Terentyev, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin.
- Related symbols: the Holbein painting, before which the indifferent nature of the Explanation is born, and the knife, the other object of the last night.