The Idiot

Overview

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, is an attempt to portray a truly beautiful soul. Here's a summary from the Bantam Classic edition:

Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life - abject poverty, incessant gambling, the death of his firstborn child - Dostoyevsky produced a second masterpiece, The Idiot, just two years after completing Crime and Punishment. Int it, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power and sexual conquest than with the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal and murder follow, testing Myshkin's moral feelings as Dostoyevsky searches through the wreckage left by human misery to find "man in man." The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian novel, one that penetrates the complex psyche of the Russian people. "They call me a psychologist," wrote Dostoyevsky. "That is not true. I'm only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul."

A page with quotes from The Idiot is at The Idiot/Quotes.

Summary and Analysis

Part One

The Opening

The book opens with a particularly memorable paragraph:

Towards the end of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o’clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg–Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full steam. It was so damp and foggy that dawn could barely break; ten paces to right or left of the line it was hard to make out anything at all through the carriage windows. Among the passengers there were some who were returning from abroad; but the third-class compartments were more crowded, and they were all petty business folk from not far away. Everyone was tired, as usual, everyone’s eyes had grown heavy overnight, everyone was chilled, everyone’s face was pale yellow, matching the color of the fog.

The story begins with Prince Myshkin (mysh is Russian for mouse) taking a train into Petersburg after being abroad in Switzerland for four years to be treated for epilepsy. It isn't long before he's entered into a conversation on a grim topic: capital punishment, and execution by the guillotine:

Think: if there’s torture, for instance, then there’s suffering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die. And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second—your soul will fly out of your body and you’ll no longer be a man, and it’s for certain—the main thing is that it’s for certain.

Here there’s the sentence, and the whole torment lies in the certainty that there’s no escape, and there’s no greater torment in the world than that.

The prince is preoccupied with this topic, the moments before death. He first begins speaking with General Empachin's footman about this topic, then later, when he meets the General's wife and daughters, the same topic comes up again.

This is one of the Prince's peculiarities. Another is his ability to get easily caught up in the schemes of the people around him. He's quiet, he's a good listener, he hides no information, it's easy for people to forget he's there, he makes a good/honest/reliable messenger or note carrier.

Oh yeah. He also falls in love with beautiful women very easily.

Vagueness abounds through the novel. Take this passage, for instance:

Something peculiar took place in Ganya as he was asking this question. It was as if some new and peculiar idea lit up in his brain and glittered impatiently in his eyes. The general, who was genuinely and simple-heartedly worried, also glanced sidelong at the prince, but as if he did not expect much from his reply.

What idea is Dostoyevsky referring to? He's going to let the reader find out for themselves. What do these glittering eyes and sidelong glances actually mean? It's unclear.

Compare this to Tolstoy's narration in Anna Karenina, which clearly lays out the various states of mind of both Anna and Vronsky during their period abroad in Italy, when their desire for each other wanes, even while their love for each other grows:

One consolatory reflection upon her conduct had occurred to her at the first moment of the final rupture, and when now she recalled all the past, she remembered that one reflection. "I have inevitably made that man wretched," she thought; "but I don’t want to profit by his misery. I too am suffering, and shall suffer; I am losing what I prized above everything—I am losing my good name and my son. I have done wrong, and so I don’t want happiness, I don’t want a divorce, and shall suffer from my shame and the separation from my child." But, however sincerely Anna had meant to suffer, she was not suffering. Shame there was not. With the tact of which both had such a large share, they had succeeded in avoiding Russian ladies abroad, and so had never placed themselves in a false position, and everywhere they had met people who pretended that they perfectly understood their position, far better indeed than they did themselves. Separation from the son she loved—even that did not cause her anguish in these early days. The baby girl—his child—was so sweet, and had so won Anna’s heart, since she was all that was left her, that Anna rarely thought of her son.

...

Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, and putting on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general of which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love,—and he was content, but not for long. He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires—ennui.

Tolstoy uses an interior dialogue, much like Dostoyevsky used for Raskolnikov's interior monologue, dipping into his stream of consciousness, in Crime and Punishment. Tolstoy fills Anna's interior monologue with her own monologue about her feelings. And Tolstoy is able to fluidly switch a paragraph later to describing Vronsky's mentality in as much detail.

We are told much about our characters from observations about their behavior, toward others around them, their behavior when they're alone, the ambiguous twinkles in their eyes or screwing up of the eyes - whatever that means...

Among other things, he had adopted a system of not rushing his daughters into marriage, that is, of not “hovering over” them and bothering them too much with his parental love’s longing for their happiness, as involuntarily and naturally happens all the time, even in the most intelligent families, where grown-up daughters accumulate.

Nastassya Filippovna

We end up spending a lot of time in Part One on some back-stories and circumstances, because the tangle of relations in The Idiot get complicated pretty quickly.

This complex and troublesome “occurrence” (as Totsky himself put it) had begun very far back, about eighteen years ago.

Soon only one girl, Nastya, was left, the younger one having died of whooping cough. Totsky, who was living abroad, soon forgot all about them. One day, some five years later, Afanasy Ivanovich, passing by, decided to have a look at his estate and suddenly noticed in his country house, in the family of his German, a lovely child, a girl of about twelve, lively, sweet, clever, and promising to become a great beauty—in that regard Afanasy Ivanovich was an unerring connoisseur.

Nastassya begins her life in an emotional prison, and longs for freedom. This is what's driving her irrational, compulsive behavior: she longs to live a life where she is free, independent. Further anecdotes:

but all the same an extraordinary upheaval took place in Nastasya Filippovna’s life after that. She suddenly showed an extraordinary resolve and revealed a most unexpected character. Without further thought, she left her little country house and suddenly went to Petersburg, straight to Totsky, all on her own. He was amazed, tried to begin speaking; but it suddenly turned out, almost from the first phrase, that he had to change completely the style, the vocal range, the former topics of pleasant and elegant conversation, which till then had been used so successfully, the logic—everything, everything!

Valuing nothing, and least of all herself (it took great intelligence and perception to guess at that moment that she had long ceased to value herself and, skeptic and society cynic that he was, to believe in the seriousness of that feeling), Nastasya Filippovna was capable of ruining herself, irrevocably and outrageously, facing Siberia and hard labor, if only she could wreak havoc on the man for whom she felt such inhuman loathing.

This loathing that Nastassya has for Totsky is the same kind of loathing and hatred that Anna Karenina feels for her husband Karenin. Both women are imprisoned, and under the control of some powerful man. But Dostoyevsky's descriptions of the changes in Nastassya (here, when she's still under the control of Totsky) are contradictory, filled with ambiguity:

However, he recalled moments, even before, when strange thoughts had come to him, for instance, while looking into those eyes: it was as if he had sensed some deep and mysterious darkness in them. Those eyes had gazed at him—and seemed to pose a riddle. During the last two years he had often been surprised by the change in Nastasya Filippovna’s color; she was growing terribly pale and—strangely—was even becoming prettier because of it.

The Epanchins

We meet the Epanchin girls:

“It’s simply my small drawing room, where we gather when we’re by ourselves, and each of us does her own thing: Alexandra, this one, my eldest daughter, plays the piano, or reads, or sews; Adelaida paints landscapes and portraits (and never can finish anything); and Aglaya sits and does nothing.

Aglaya is the prettiest and youngest of the sisters.

When Prince Myshkin visits the Epanchin family, he brings up the topic of capital punishment again, as he did in the conversation with General Epanchin's footman earlier in Part 1. This anecdote, however, gives us more insight into Dostoyevsky's fixation on the topic: the prince delivers an anecdote that parallels Dostoyevsky's own experiences of being condemned to execution, and the execution being called off at the last moment.

The passage is worth quoting at length:

"I once heard the story of a man who lived twelve years in a prison—I heard it from the man himself. He was one of the persons under treatment with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy, then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide. His life in prison was sad enough; his only acquaintances were spiders and a tree that grew outside his grating-but I think I had better tell you of another man I met last year. There was a very strange feature in this case, strange because of its extremely rare occurrence. This man had once been brought to the scaffold in company with several others, and had had the sentence of death by shooting passed upon him for some political crime. Twenty minutes later he had been reprieved and some other punishment substituted; but the interval between the two sentences, twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must die. I was very anxious to hear him speak of his impressions during that dreadful time, and I several times inquired of him as to what he thought and felt. He remembered everything with the most accurate and extraordinary distinctness, and declared that he would never forget a single iota of the experience.

"About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the ground, to which to fasten the criminals (of whom there were several). The first three criminals were taken to the posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross: and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live.

"He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions—one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good-bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.

"The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it." The prince paused and all waited, expecting him to go on again and finish the story.

"Is that all?" asked Aglaya.

"All? Yes," said the prince, emerging from a momentary reverie.

"And why did you tell us this?"

"Oh, I happened to recall it, that's all! It fitted into the conversation."

There's a key moment where Lizaveta Provnyenka (Mrs. Epanchin) asks Myshkin to comment on the beauty of her daughters, and when she presses him to say something about Aglaya, the youngest and most beautiful of the three daughters, he defers, and inadvertently slights her by comparing her to Nastassya Flippovna:

“Don’t tease him, my dears, he may be cleverer than all three of you put together. You’ll see. Only why have you said nothing about Aglaya, Prince? Aglaya’s waiting, and I am, too.”

“I can’t say anything now. I’ll say it later.”

“Why? She’s noticeable, I believe?”

“Oh, yes, she’s noticeable. You’re an extraordinary beauty, Aglaya Ivanovna. You’re so good-looking that one is afraid to look at you.”

“That’s all? And her qualities?” Mrs. Epanchin persisted.

“Beauty is difficult to judge; I’m not prepared yet. Beauty is a riddle.”

“That means you’ve set Aglaya a riddle,” said Adelaida. “Solve it, Aglaya. But she is good-looking, isn’t she, Prince?”

“Extremely!” the prince replied warmly, with an enthusiastic glance at Aglaya. “Almost like Nastasya Filippovna, though her face is quite different …”

They all exchanged astonished looks.

But the Prince's frankness and honesty throughout the conversation makes a big impression on the Epanchins, as we will discover in Part 2. Despite meeting them for only a single day, they remember him and he remembers them - particularly Aglaya. Even six months later, they welcome him back into their home immediately.

During that same conversation, Lizaveta Provonyenka says to her daughter Aglaya:

I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.”

Myshkin and Ganya

Myshkin has excellent recall abilities, and this makes him an ideal messenger; he has no information filter, and simply describes, in a completely honest way, everything he sees. Ganya is the first to take advantage of this fact. Here, after he visits the Epanchin girls, he is asked to deliver a secret note, from Ganya to Aglaya. Aglaya and the prince meet privately, and she tells the prince to read the note out loud, then to return the note to Ganya with no response. Ganya and Prince Myshkin:

“That can’t be! She couldn’t have told you to read it. You’re lying! You read it yourself!”

“I’m telling you the truth,” the prince replied in the same completely imperturbable tone, “and, believe me, I’m very sorry that it makes such an unpleasant impression on you.”

“But, you wretch, did she at least say anything as she did it? Did she respond in any way?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Speak then, speak—ah, the devil!…” And Ganya stamped his right foot, shod in a galosh, twice on the sidewalk.

“As soon as I finished reading it, she told me that you were trying to trap her; that you wished to compromise her, in order to obtain some hope from her and then, on the basis of that hope, to break without losses from the other hope for a hundred thousand. That if you had done it without negotiating with her, had broken it off by yourself without asking her for a guarantee beforehand, she might perhaps have become your friend. That’s all, I think. Ah, one more thing: when I had already taken the note and asked what the reply would be, she said that no reply would be the best reply—I think that was it; forgive me if I’ve forgotten her exact expression, but I’m conveying it as I understood it myself.”

Ganya's growing irritation with Prince Myshkin lead to Myshkin's growing irritation of Ganya (Gavrila Ardalionovich). It becomes unpleasant at one point:

“I must point out to you, Gavrila Ardalionovich,” the prince suddenly said, “that formerly I was indeed unwell, so that in fact I was almost an idiot; but I have been well for a long time now, and therefore I find it somewhat unpleasant when I’m called an idiot to my face. Though you might be excused, considering your misfortunes, in your vexation you have even abused me a couple of times. I dislike that very much, especially the way you do it, suddenly, from the start. And since we’re now standing at an intersection, it might be better if we parted: you go home to the right, and I’ll go left. I have twenty-five roubles, and I’m sure I’ll find furnished rooms.”

...

“A couple of words, Prince, I forgot to tell you, what with all these … doings. A request: do me a favor—if it’s not too much of a strain for you—don’t babble here about what just went on between me and Aglaya, or there about what you find here; because there’s also enough ugliness here. To hell with it, though … But control yourself, at least for today.”

“I assure you that I babbled much less than you think,” said the prince, somewhat annoyed at Ganya’s reproaches. Their relations were obviously becoming worse and worse.

Even Dostoyevsky's good-natured, beautiful soul becomes irritated and annoyed at Ganya's mistreatment.

The Ivolgins

(Chapter 8)

Myshkin and Ganya go to the house where Ganya lives with his family, the Ivolgins. (The names get a bit confusing here.)

Ganya (Gavril Ardalianovich) and Kolya (Nokolay Ardalianovich) are brothers. Ganya and Kola also have a sister, Varya (Varvara Ivolgin). Varya is married to Ptitsyn, a rich but unremarkable man.

Their father, General Ivolgin (Adalion Alexandrovich), is a drunkard and a chronic liar. He has a room in one part of the hall.

Their mother, Nina Alexandrovna, rents rooms and runs the house, and manages her husband (to some degree).

There are several other rooms, and one of the first people we meet here is Ferdyshchenko, a tenant:

“Do you have any money?” Ferdyshchenko asked suddenly, turning to the prince.

“A little.”

“How much, precisely?”

“Twenty-five roubles.”

“Show me.”

The prince took a twenty-five-rouble note from his waistcoat pocket and handed it to Ferdyshchenko. The man unfolded it, looked at it, turned it over, then held it up to the light.

“Quite strange,” he said, as if pondering. “Why do they turn brown? These twenty-fivers sometimes get terribly brown, while others, on the contrary, fade completely. Take it.”

The prince took the note from him. Ferdyshchenko got up from the chair.

“I came to warn you: first of all, don’t lend me any money, because I’m sure to ask.”

General Ivolgin is also a money-borrower, about which Nina Alexandrovna, the General's wife, also warns Myshkin.

The General begins by telling stories that sound like complete lies, something that he does a lot:

The prince began listening with a certain mistrust.

“I was passionately in love with your mother while she was still a fiancée—my friend’s fiancée.

He throws in enough truth that every once and a while he gets a detail right, and makes you wonder if there's an element of truth to anything else he's ever said. The implausibility of his stories, however, grows over time and removes all doubt.

We learn that that evening, Nastassya will give her verdict on whether she will marry Ganya. But unexpectedly, she makes an appearance at the Ivolgin household - something that rankles Ganya. He is particularly embarrassed at her meeting his father, who she catches red-handed in a lie.

Ganya has revealed that he is essentially buying Nastassya as a bride from Totsky (we got caught up on that backstory in previous chapters), and that he doesn't love her:

"How could she give you her consent and even present you with her portrait, when you don’t love her? Can it be that she, being so … so …”

“Experienced, you mean?”

“That’s not how I wanted to put it. Can it be that you could blind her eyes to such a degree?”

Nastassya's appearance is a big splash. First, she mistakes Myshkin for a footman:

The prince lifted the bar, opened the door, and—stepped back in amazement, even shuddered all over: before him stood Nastasya Filippovna. He recognized her at once from the portrait. Her eyes flashed with a burst of vexation when she saw him; she quickly came into the front hall, pushed him aside with her shoulder, and said wrathfully, flinging off her fur coat: “If you’re too lazy to fix the doorbell, you should at least be sitting in the front hall when people knock. Well, there, now he’s dropped my coat, the oaf!”

The coat was indeed lying on the floor; Nastasya Filippovna, not waiting for the prince to help her out of it, had flung it off into his arms without looking, but the prince had not managed to catch it.

“You ought to be dismissed. Go and announce me.”

...

“Ah, what an idiot!” Nastasya Filippovna cried indignantly, stamping her foot at him. “Well, what are you doing? Who are you going to announce?”

“Nastasya Filippovna,” murmured the prince.

“How do you know me?” she asked quickly. “I’ve never seen you before! Go and announce … What’s that shouting?”

“They’re quarreling,” the prince replied and went to the drawing room.

Ganya starts to become unhinged:

“Drink some water,” he whispered to Ganya, “and don’t stare like that …”

It was evident that he had said it without any calculation, without any particular design, just so, on the first impulse; but his words produced an extraordinary effect. It seemed that all of Ganya’s spite suddenly poured out on the prince; he seized him by the shoulder and looked at him silently, vengefully, and hatefully, as if unable to utter a word. There was general agitation. Nina Alexandrovna even gave a little cry. Ptitsyn took a step forward in alarm, Kolya and Ferdyshchenko appeared in the doorway and stopped in amazement, Varya alone watched as sullenly as before, but observed attentively. She did not sit down, but stood to one side, next to her mother, her arms folded on her breast. But Ganya came to his senses at once, almost at the moment of his reaction, and laughed nervously. He recovered completely.

“What are you, Prince, a doctor or something?” he cried as gaily and simple-heartedly as he could.

Next, she catches General Ivolgin in a lie, embarrassing just about everyone:

The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Highlight on Page 110

Rogozhin and His Crew

Rogozhin (etymology: rog = "horn" in Russian) is a figure who bears many resemblances to Satan. And his appearance at the Ivolgins certainly hammers that role home: he comes to buy Nastassya Filippovna as a bride by outbidding Ganya, giving her money and promising to give her more.

You don’t know me? Ptitsyn is my witness! If I was to show you three roubles, to take them out of my pocket right now, you’d crawl after them on all fours to Vassilievsky Island—that’s how you are! That’s how your soul is! I’ve come now to buy you out for money, never mind that I’m wearing these boots, I’ve got a lot of money, brother, I’ll buy you out with all you’ve got here … if I want, I’ll buy you all! Everything!”

“Forty thousand then, forty, not eighteen!” cried Rogozhin. “Vanka Ptitsyn and Biskup promised to produce forty thousand by seven o’clock. Forty thousand! All on the table.” The scene was becoming extremely ugly, but Nastasya Filippovna went on laughing and did not go away, as if she were intentionally drawing it out.

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Ganya's anger at the Prince makes him unhinged; he sees some kind of conspiracy, continually accusing the Prince of bringing up Nastassya Filippovna and blabbing about it. Nastassya's appearance made him unhinged with his anger for Myshkin, and upon Rogozhin's appearance (in the presence of the Satan figure) he unleashes his temper:

Ganya’s eyes went dim and, forgetting himself entirely, he swung at his sister with all his might. The blow would certainly have landed on her face. But suddenly another hand stopped his arm in midair. The prince stepped between him and his sister.

“Enough, no more of that!” he said insistently, but also trembling all over, as if from an extremely strong shock.

“What, are you always going to stand in my way!” Ganya bellowed, dropping Varya’s hand, and, having freed his arm, in the utmost degree of rage, he swung roundly and slapped the prince in the face.

“Ah!” Kolya clasped his hands, “ah, my God!” There were exclamations on all sides. The prince turned pale. With a strange and reproachful gaze, he looked straight into Ganya’s eyes; his lips trembled and attempted to say something; they were twisted by a strange and completely inappropriate smile.

“Well, let that be for me … but her … I still won’t let you!…” he said quietly at last; but suddenly unable to control himself, he left Ganya, covered his face with his hands, went to the corner, stood facing the wall, and said in a faltering voice: “Oh, how ashamed you’ll be of what you’ve done!”

Ganya indeed stood as if annihilated.

“He’ll be sorry!” shouted Rogozhin. “You’ll be ashamed, Ganka, to have offended such a … sheep!” (He was unable to find any other word.) “Prince, my dear soul, drop them all, spit on them, and let’s go! I'll show you what a friend Rogozhin can be!”

The interaction between General Ivolgin and Rogozhin is like something out of Shakespeare:

"What is the meaning of this, pray?" Ardalion Alexandrovitch, deeply stirred, suddenly cried in a menacing voice, going up to Rogozhin.

The suddenness of the old man's outburst, after his complete silence till that moment, made it very comic. There was laughter.

"Whom have we here?" laughed Rogozhin. "Come along, old fellow, we'll make you drunk."

After Nastassya leaves, Ganya asks the Prince for his forgiveness. They end up talking about Nastassya, and Ganya reveals that his primary motive for marrying Nastassya is money.

General Ivolgin's Unsaintliness

Myshkin sets out to find Nastassya's party and show up there; in order to do this, he tries to ask General Ivolgin. However, this turns into a visit to a bar and a drunken walk through town to visit old addresses which may or may not be the right address in the first place. Then we meet the "captain's widow" that the General is somehow romantically involved with, in an uncertain way:

the prince, still innocently laughing it off. But it was not all right.

As soon as they went through the dark and low front hall into the narrow drawing room, furnished with a half-dozen wicker chairs and two card tables, the hostess immediately started carrying on as if by rote in a sort of lamenting and habitual voice: “And aren’t you ashamed, aren’t you ashamed of yourself, barbarian and tyrant of my family, barbarian and fiend! He’s robbed me clean, sucked me dry, and he’s still not content! How long will I put up with you, you shameless and worthless man!”

“Marfa Borisovna, Marfa Borisovna! This … is Prince Myshkin. General Ivolgin and Prince Myshkin,” the general murmured, trembling and at a loss.

“Would you believe,” the captain’s widow suddenly turned to the prince, “would you believe that this shameless man hasn’t spared my orphaned children! He’s stolen everything, filched everything, sold and pawned everything, left nothing. What am I to do with your promissory notes, you cunning and shameless man? Answer, you sly fox, answer me, you insatiable heart: with what, with what am I to feed my orphaned children? Here he shows up drunk, can’t stand on his feet … How have I angered the Lord God, you vile and outrageous villain, answer me?” But the general had other things on his mind.

After Myshkin fails to get Nastassya's address from General Ivolgin, he goes to Kolya, who is much more helpful.

So it means that Nastasya Filippovna invited you to her place straight off?” “The thing is that she didn’t.” “How can you be going, then?” Kolya exclaimed and even stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “And … and dressed like that, and to a formal party?” “By God, I really don’t know how I’m going to get in. If they receive me—good; if not—then my business is lost. And as for my clothes, what can I do about that?” “You have business there? Or is it just so, pour passer le temps b in ‘noble society’?” “No, essentially I … that is, I do have business … it’s hard for me to explain it, but …”

...

“Well, as for what precisely, that can be as you like, but the main thing for me is that you’re not simply inviting yourself to a party, to be in the charming company of loose women, generals, and usurers. If that were so, excuse me, Prince, but I’d laugh at you and start despising you. There are terribly few honest people here, so that there’s nobody at all to respect.

Part Two

The Opening

Whereas the entirety of Part One is spent on a single day, Part Two begins by skipping over six months in just a few paragraphs. The narrator's knowledge becomes sketchy and resorts to rumors. Myshkin departs for Moscow, Nastassya runs away from Rogozhin, Myshkin and Nastassya end up living together for a month in Moscow, and the entire cycle is repeated again: Nastassya leaves Myshkin for Rogozhin, and even cheats on Rogozhin. While these events are referenced throughout Parts 2-4, the narrator never explains straight out what happened during these six months. It is clear from the novel's events in Pavlovsk, however, that the changes each character underwent over six months was tremendous.

It was said then that there might have been other reasons for such a hasty departure; but of that, as well as of the prince’s adventures in Moscow and generally in the course of his absence from Petersburg, we can supply very little information. The prince was away for exactly six months, and even those who had certain reasons to be interested in his fate could find out very little about him during all that time. True, some sort of rumors reached some of them, though very rarely, but these were mostly strange and almost always contradicted each other.

The Idiot (Vintage Classics) (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Highlight on Page 179

Gradually the rumors that had begun to spread around town also managed to be shrouded in the darkness of ignorance.

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The thing was that just two weeks earlier he had received undercover information, brief and therefore not quite clear, but reliable, that Nastasya Filippovna, who had first disappeared in Moscow, had then been found in Moscow by Rogozhin, had then disappeared again somewhere and had again been found by him, had finally given him an almost certain promise that she would marry him. And now, only two weeks later, his excellency had suddenly received information that Nastasya Filippovna had run away for a third time, almost from the foot of the altar, and this time had disappeared somewhere in the provinces, and meanwhile Prince Myshkin had also vanished from Moscow, leaving Salazkin in charge of all his affairs, “together with her, or simply rushing after her, no one knows, but there’s something in it,” the general concluded. Lizaveta Prokofyevna, for her part, also received some unpleasant information.

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As the story moves outside of Petersburg, the narrator's knowledge of what happens becomes more and more sketchy, and reliant on rumors. The descriptions become much briefer, the brushstrokes more broad, and the time scales longer. Whereas Part 1 covered a single day, the first chapter of Part 2 covers six months.

Throughout Part 2, each of the characters that have been introduced in Part 1 are woven into an increasingly complex social web. At the same time, the narrator's tale becomes heavier in ambiguous language, undercurrents of emotion and body language communication that go undescribed, words with layers of meaning the reader can't possibly understand, because of the novel's lack of an omniscient narrator to describe various characters' inner stream of consciousness.

“I don’t know, in the crowd—it even seems to me that I imagined it; I’ve somehow begun to imagine things all the time.

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Right away, there are several parallels between Part 1 and Part 2. Once the description of the six month period is finished, Part 2 spends much of its time on a single day - just as Part 1 covered a single day.

Both Part 1 and Part 2 begin the action with a train ride to St. Petersburg, though there is a big contrast between the two arrivals. In the second train trip, Myshkin arrives "sad and thoughtful and seemed worried about something," whereas during the first trip, he had made friends on the train, was eager to go straight to General Epanchin, and talked eagerly and openly with everyone.

Rogozhin is present at both arrivals. In Part 1, he is one of the new friends Prince Myshkin meets on the train; in the opening of Part 2, Rogozhin is a more insidious presence, only a pair of evil eyes, and his presence remains unannounced until later. This insidious presence will be detected by Myshkin throughout the rest of the novel, and the feeling of evil eyes watching becomes a sign of Rogozhin.

No one met him at the station; but as he was getting off the train, the prince suddenly thought he caught the gaze of two strange, burning eyes in the crowd surrounding the arriving people. When he looked more attentively, he could no longer see them. Of course, he had only imagined it; but it left an unpleasant impression. Besides, the prince was sad and pensive to begin with and seemed preoccupied with something.

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Rogozhin's presence, though the Prince feels it, remains ambiguous; these kinds of series of events, with vague indications and ambiguous meanings, unexplained by the narrator, become more common.

There are other examples of vagueness in the opening of Part 2: the report we get of Myshkin's letter to Aglaya, filled with meaning, all ambiguous, which even the Prince doesn't understand:

How is it that I am writing to you? I do not know; but I have an irrepressible desire to remind you of myself, and you precisely.

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The narrator leaves us hanging, without explaining such "irrepressible desires." Aglaya's response is no more clear, even to her sisters, who understand her best:

Aglaya laughed terribly—no one knew why. Nor did anyone know whether she showed her acquisition to any of her sisters.

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Meeting with Lebedyev

After he arrives in Petersburg, the Prince goes first to Lebedyev, another character who was present in the opening of Part 1, and we see Myshkin's old friend behaving strangely. It recalls another of Dostoyevsky's themes in The Idiot, which appears throughout Part 2, the theme of mental illness. Except now, it is Lebedyev who seems to be acting strangely. Here, Lebedyev's nephew describes Lebedyev's behavior:

“I’ve been lying here for three days, and the things I’ve seen!” the young man went on shouting without listening. “Imagine, he suspects this angel, this young girl, now an orphan, my cousin, his own daughter; every night he searches for her sweethearts! He comes here on the sly and also searches for something under my sofa. He’s gone crazy from suspiciousness; he sees thieves in every corner. All night he keeps popping out of bed to see whether the windows are well latched, to check the doors, to peek into the stove, as much as seven times a night. He defends swindlers in court, and he gets up three times in the night to pray, here in the living room, on his knees, pounding his head on the floor for half an hour, and who doesn’t he pray for, what doesn’t he pray for, the drunken mumbler! He prayed for the repose of the soul of the countess Du Barry, 9 I heard it with my own ears; Kolya also heard it: he’s gone quite crazy!”

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During Lebedyev and Myshkin's conversation, Dostoyevsky gives the reader some information on the Moscow back-story, about how Nastassya Filippovna was ready to marry Myshkin, but ended up leaving him at the altar and running to Lebedyev to hide her. This makes Nastassya's history ambiguous and difficult to sort out - how many times did she leave Myshkin? Rogozhin?

Most importantly, however, at this meeting Myshkin discovers that Aglaa Ivanovna and her family will be in Pavlovsk, and he also learns that Lebedyev has a house in Pavlovsk where Myshkin can stay.

Meeting with Rogozhin

The Prince also meets Rogozhin, with whom he has developed a relationship that the reader does not understand, and that the narrator alludes to only in passing:

They addressed each other as familiars. In Moscow they had often happened to spend long hours together, and there had even been several moments during their meetings that had left an all too memorable imprint on both their hearts. Now it was over three months since they had seen each other.

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When they are talking, the Prince makes a promise to Rogozhin: not to see Nastassya Filippovna.This is a promise he quickly breaks, and will lead to the climactic scene of Part 2.

If it’s completely true that things have been made up again between you, I won’t even allow her a glimpse of me, and I’ll never come to see you either.

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Rogozhin also reveals more of his circumstances with Nastassya Filippovna. We already know that Rogozhin is jealous and protective of Nastassya, but we also learn that, after she agreed to marry Rogozhin in Moscow a second time (after she abandoned Myshkin at the altar), she cheated on Rogozhin with a military officer:

“Didn’t she disgrace me in Moscow, with that officer, that Zemtiuzhnikov? I know for sure she did, and that’s after she set the date for the wedding herself.” “It can’t be!” cried the prince. “I know for sure,” Rogozhin said with conviction. “What, she’s not like that, or something? There’s no point, brother, in saying she’s not like that. It’s pure nonsense. With you she wouldn’t be like that, and might be horrified at such a thing herself, but with me that’s just what she’s like. So it is.

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Rogozhin drops an implicit hint about killing Nastassya Flippovna, then tells Myshkin he physically beat her, and then there's this:

“Well, your love is indistinguishable from spite,” smiled the prince, “and when it passes, there may be still worse trouble. This I tell you, brother Parfyon …”

“That I’ll put a knife in her?”

The prince gave a start. “You’ll hate her very much for this present love, for all this torment that you’re suffering now. For me the strangest thing is how she could again decide to marry you. When I heard it yesterday—I could scarcely believe it, and it pained me so. She has already renounced you twice and run away from the altar, which means she has a foreboding!…

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There's also the foreshadowing of an attack on Myshkin by Rogozhin, with the small knife Myshkin keeps playing with:

“This is all jealousy, Parfyon, it’s all illness, you exaggerate it beyond all measure …” the prince murmured in great agitation. “What’s the matter?” “Let it alone,” Parfyon said and quickly snatched from the prince’s hand the little knife he had picked up from the table, next to the book, and put it back where it had been.

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Quotes

A page with quotes from The Idiot is at The Idiot/Quotes.