The Idiot/Quotes

Quotes

Introduction

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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 133-35  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 12:21 AM

René Girard was right to say that the failure of the initial idea is the triumph of another more profound idea, and that this prolonged uncertainty gives the novel “an existential density that few works have.” 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 136-40  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 12:21 AM

Part one of The Idiot introduces most of the characters of the novel — the three central figures, Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Nastasya Filippovna; the three families of the Epanchins, the Ivolgins, and the Lebedevs — and entangles them in various complex relations. Riddles and enigmas appear from the start, surrounded by rumors, gossip, attempted explanations, analyses by different characters (reasonable but usually wrong). The narrator himself is not always sure of what has happened or is going to happen. 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 146-47  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 12:22 AM

The prince’s humility and compassion acquire a strange ambiguity, and before long, the epilepsy for which he had been treated in Switzerland returns with a violent attack that throws him headlong down the stairs. 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 151-53  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 12:23 AM

It is a first variation on one of the central themes of the novel: the difference between love and pity. The relation of the first part to the rest of the novel is one of question and answer, and the question was posed first of all for Dostoevsky himself, who did not know the answer when he started. 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 153-58  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 01:55 PM

It is essentially the same question implied in Holbein’s painting: what if Christ were not the incarnate God but, in this case, simply a “positively beautiful man,” a “moral genius,” as a number of nineteenth-century biographers of Jesus chose to portray him, and as Leo Tolstoy was about to proclaim — “a Christ more romantic than Christian,” in René Girard’s words, sublime and ideal, but with no power to redeem fallen mankind? The prince cannot tell Nastasya Filippovna that her sins are forgiven. What he tells her is that she is pure, that she is not guilty of anything. These apparently innocent words, coming at the end of part one, unleash all that follows in the novel. 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 181-85  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 01:57 PM

He says nothing of the youngest, Aglaya. The mother asks why, and he demurs: “I can’t say anything now. I’ll say it later.” When she presses him, he admits that she is “an extraordinary beauty,” adding: “Beauty is difficult to judge; I’m not prepared yet. Beauty is a riddle.” This is the prince’s first real moment of reticence in the novel. By the end he will have moved from naïve candor to an anguished silence in the face of the unspeakable. 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 203-5  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 02:00 PM

But, owing to the chasteness of his art (as opposed to its obvious scandalousness), Dostoevsky allows himself no direct statement of his idea, no symbolistic abstraction, no simple identification of the “archetypes” behind his fiction. He uses the methods and conventions of the social novel to embody an ultimate human drama. 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 225-28  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 02:02 PM

Speaking of Holbein’s Christ, he says that it shows nature as “some huge machine of the newest construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being.” And he wonders how Christ’s disciples, seeing a corpse like that, could believe “that this sufferer would resurrect,” and whether Christ himself, if he could have seen his own image on the eve of his execution, would have “gone to the cross and died as he did.” 
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The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 231-34  | Added on Saturday, December 13, 2014, 02:51 PM

Rogozhin, on the other hand, tells the prince that he likes looking at the Holbein painting. The prince, “under the impression of an unexpected thought,” replies: “At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” “Lose it he does,” Rogozhin agrees. 

The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Highlight Loc. 174

The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Highlight Loc. 246-47