The Idiot (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Gavrila Ardalionovich was starting out precisely in that line; but he was only starting out. He still had a long time ahead for acting up. A profound and continual awareness of his talentlessness and at the same time an insuperable desire to be convinced that he was an independent man, painfully wounded his heart, even almost from the age of adolescence. He was a young man with envious and impulsive desires and, it seemed, had even been born with frayed nerves. He mistook the impulsiveness of his desires for their strength. With his passionate desire to distinguish himself, he was sometimes ready for a most reckless leap; but when it came to the point of making the reckless leap, our hero always proved too clever to venture upon it. This was killing him. He might even have ventured, on occasion, upon an extremely base deed, so long as he achieved at least something of what he dreamed; but, as if on purpose, when it reached the limit, he always proved too honest for an extremely base deed. (On a small base deed, however, he was always ready to agree.) He looked upon the poverty and decline of his own family with loathing and hatred. He even treated his mother haughtily and contemptuously, though he understood very well that his mother’s character and reputation had so far constituted the main support of his own career. Having entered Epanchin’s service, he immediately said to himself: “If I am to be mean, then I shall be mean to the end, so long as I win out”—and—he was almost never mean to the end. And why did he imagine that he would absolutely have to be mean? He had simply been frightened of Aglaya then, but he had not dropped the affair, but dragged it on just in case, though he never seriously believed that she would stoop to him. Then, during his story with Nastasya Filippovna, he had suddenly imagined to himself that the achievement of everything lay in money. “If it’s meanness, it’s meanness,” he had repeated to himself every day then with self-satisfaction, but also with a certain fear; “if it’s meanness, it’s also getting to the top,” he encouraged himself constantly, “a routine man would turn timid in this case, but we won’t turn timid!” Having lost Aglaya and been crushed by circumstances, he had lost heart completely and had actually brought the prince the money thrown to him then by a crazy woman, to whom it had also been brought by a crazy man. Afterwards he regretted this returning of the money a thousand times, though he constantly gloried in it. He had actually wept for three days, while the prince remained in Petersburg, but during those three days he had also come to hate the prince for looking upon him much too compassionately, whereas the fact that he had returned so much money was something “not everyone would bring himself to do.” But the noble self-recognition that all his anguish was only a constantly pinched vanity made him suffer terribly. Only a long time afterwards did he see clearly and become convinced of how seriously his affair with such an innocent and strange being as Aglaya might have turned out. Remorse gnawed at him; he abandoned his work and sank into anguish and dejection. He lived in Ptitsyn’s house and at his expense, with his father and mother, and despised Ptitsyn openly, though at the same time he listened to his advice and was almost always sensible enough to ask for it. Gavrila Ardalionovich was angry, for instance, at the fact that Ptitsyn did not aim to become a Rothschild and had not set himself that goal. “If you’re a usurer, go through with it, squeeze people dry, coin money out of them, become a character, become the king of the Jews!”4 Ptitsyn was modest and quiet; he only smiled, but once he even found it necessary to have a serious talk with Ganya and even did it with a certain dignity. He proved to Ganya that he was not doing anything dishonest and that he should not go calling him a Jew; that if money had so much value, it was not his fault; that he acted truthfully and honestly, and that in reality he was only an agent in “these” affairs, and, finally, that thanks to his accuracy in business he was already known from quite a good standpoint to some most excellent people, and that his business was expanding. “Rothschild I won’t be, and why should I,” he added, laughing, “but I’ll have a house on Liteinaya, maybe even two, and that will be the end of it.” “And, who knows, maybe three!” he thought to himself, but never said it aloud and kept his dream hidden. Nature loves and coddles such people: she will certainly reward Ptitsyn not with three but with four houses, and that precisely because he has known since childhood that he would never be a Rothschild. But beyond four houses nature will not go for anything, and with Ptitsyn matters will end there.

  Gavrila Ardalionovich’s little sister was an entirely different person. She also had strong desires, but more persistent than impulsive. There was a good deal of reasonableness in her, when things reached the final limit, but it did not abandon her before the limit either. True, she was also one of the “usual” people, who dream of originality, but she very quickly managed to realize that she did not have a drop of any particular originality, and she did not grieve over it all that much—who knows, maybe from a peculiar sort of pride. She had made her first practical step with extreme resoluteness by marrying Mr. Ptitsyn; but in marrying him she did not say to herself: “If I’m to be mean, I’ll be mean, so long as I reach my goal”—something Gavrila Ardalionovich would not have failed to say on such an occasion (and even almost did say in her presence, when approving of her decision as an older brother). Quite the contrary even: Varvara Ardalionovna got married after solidly convincing herself that her future husband was a modest, agreeable man, almost educated, who would never commit any great meanness. Varvara Ardalionovna did not look into small meannesses, as too trifling; and where are there not such trifles? No one’s looking for ideals! Besides, she knew that by marrying, she was providing a corner for her mother, her father, her brothers. Seeing her brother in misfortune, she wanted to help him, in spite of all previous family misunderstandings. Ptitsyn sometimes urged Ganya—in a friendly way, naturally—to find a job. “You despise generals and generalship,” he sometimes said to him jokingly, “but look, all of ‘them’ will end up as generals in their turn; if you live long enough, you’ll see it.” “What made them decide that I despise generals and generalship?” Ganya thought to himself sarcastically. To help her brother, Varvara Ardalionovna decided to widen the circle of her activities; she wormed her way in with the Epanchins, childhood memories contributing much to that end: both she and her brother had played with the Epanchin girls in childhood. We shall note here that if, in her visits to the Epanchins, Varvara Ardalionovna had been pursuing some extraordinary dream, she might at once have left the category of people in which she had confined herself; but she was not pursuing a dream; there was even a rather well-founded calculation here on her part: it was founded on the character of this family. Aglaya’s character she studied tirelessly. She had set herself the task of turning the two of them, her brother and Aglaya, to each other again. It may be that she actually achieved something; it may be that she fell into error, in counting too much on her brother, for instance, and expecting something from him that he could never and in no way give. In any case, she acted rather skillfully at the Epanchins’: for weeks at a time she made no mention of her brother, was always extremely truthful and candid, bore herself simply but with dignity. As for the depths of her conscience, she was not afraid of looking there and did not reproach herself for anything at all. It was this that gave her strength. There was only one thing that she sometimes noticed in herself—that she, too, was perhaps angry, that in her, too, there was a great deal of self-love and even all but pinched vanity; she noticed it especially at certain moments, almost every time she left the Epanchins’.

  And now she was returning from them and, as we have already said, in rueful pensiveness. Something bitterly mocking could also be glimpsed in this ruefulness. Ptitsyn lived in Pavlovsk in an unattractive but roomy wooden house that stood on a dusty street and which would soon come into his full possession, so that he in turn was already beginning to sell it to someone. Going up to the porch, Varvara Ardalionovna heard an extremely loud noise upstairs and could make out the voices of her brother and father shouting. Going into the drawing room and seeing Ganya, who was running up and down the r
oom, pale with fury and almost tearing his hair out, she winced and, with a weary air, lowered herself onto the sofa without taking off her hat. Knowing very well that if she kept silent for another minute and did not ask her brother why he was running like that, he would unfailingly become angry, Varya hastened, finally, to say, in the guise of a question:

  “Same as ever?”

  “As ever, hah!” exclaimed Ganya. “As ever! No, the devil knows what’s going on here now, and not as ever! The old man’s getting rabid … mother’s howling … By God, Varya, say what you will, I’ll throw him out of the house or … or leave myself,” he added, probably recalling that he really could not throw people out of a house that was not his.

  “You must be tolerant,” Varya murmured.

  “Tolerant of what? Of whom?” Ganya flared up. “Of his abominations? No, say what you will, it’s impossible like this! Impossible, impossible, impossible! And such a manner: he’s to blame and yet he swaggers even more! ‘If it won’t fit through the gate, knock the fence down!…’ Why are you sitting there like that? You don’t look yourself!”

  “I look as I look,” Varya answered with displeasure.

  Ganya studied her more intently.

  “You’ve been there?” he asked suddenly.

  “Yes.”

  “Wait, they’re shouting again! What a shame, and at such a time!”

  “Why such a time? It’s no special time.”

  Ganya looked still more intently at his sister.

  “Did you find out anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing unexpected, at least. I found out that it’s all true. My husband was more right than either of us; he predicted it from the very beginning, and so it’s turned out. Where is he?”

  “Not at home. What’s turned out?”

  “The prince is formally her fiancé, the matter’s settled. The older girls told me. Aglaya has agreed; they’ve even stopped hiding it. (It was all so mysterious there till now.) Adelaida’s wedding will be postponed again, so as to celebrate both weddings together, on the same day—how poetic! Like verse! Why don’t you go and write some verses for the nuptials instead of running up and down the room for nothing? Tonight they’ll be having old Belokonsky; she arrived just in time; there will be guests. He’ll be introduced to Belokonsky, though he’s already met her; it seems they’re going to announce it publicly. They’re only afraid he’ll drop and break something as he comes into the room in front of the guests, or just fall down himself; that would be like him.”

  Ganya listened very attentively, but, to his sister’s surprise, this striking news did not seem to make any striking effect on him.

  “Well, that was clear,” he said after some thought, “so, it’s over!” he added with a strange smile, peeking slyly into his sister’s face and still pacing up and down the room, but much more slowly now.

  “It’s good that you can take it philosophically; I’m truly glad,” said Varya.

  “It’s off our backs; off yours, at least.”

  “I believe I served you sincerely, without arguing and pestering; I never asked you what sort of happiness you wanted to look for with Aglaya.”

  “But was I … looking for happiness with Aglaya?”

  “Well, kindly don’t go getting into philosophy! Of course you were. It’s over, and enough for us—two fools. I must confess to you, I never could look seriously on this affair; I took it up ‘just in case,’ counting on her funny character, and above all to humor you; there was a ninety percent chance it would be a flop. Even now I don’t know myself what you were after.”

  “Now you and your husband will start urging me to get a job; give me lectures on persistence and willpower, on not scorning small things, and so on—I know it by heart,” Ganya laughed loudly.

  “There’s something new on his mind!” thought Varya.

  “So, what—are they glad there, the parents?” Ganya asked suddenly.

  “N-no, it seems not. However, you can judge for yourself; Ivan Fyodorovich is pleased; the mother’s afraid; before, too, she loathed seeing him as a suitor; you know why.”

  “That’s not what I mean; the suitor is impossible and unthinkable, that’s clear. I’m asking about now, how are things there now? Has she formally accepted him?”

  “She hasn’t said ‘no’ yet—that’s all, but then it couldn’t be otherwise with her. You know how preposterously shy and modest she’s been all along: as a child she used to get into the wardrobe and sit there for two or three hours, only so as not to come out to the guests; she’s grown into such a big thing, but it’s the same now. You know, for some reason I think there’s actually something serious in it, even on her part. They say she keeps laughing her head off at the prince, from morning till night, so as not to let anything show, but she must certainly manage to say something to him on the quiet every day, because he looks as though he’s walking on air, beaming … They say he’s terribly funny. I heard it from them. It also seemed to me that they were laughing in my face—the older ones, I mean.”

  Ganya finally started to scowl; maybe Varya had deliberately gone deeper into the subject in order to penetrate to his real thoughts. But again a shout came from upstairs.

  “I’ll throw him out!” Ganya simply roared, as if glad to vent his vexation.

  “And then he’ll go and disgrace us again everywhere, like yesterday.”

  “How—like yesterday? What do you mean like yesterday? Did he …” Ganya suddenly became terribly alarmed.

  “Ah, my God, don’t you know?” Varya recollected herself.

  “How … so it’s really true that he was there?” Ganya exclaimed, flushing with shame and fury. “My God, you were just there! Did you find anything out? Was the old man there? Was he or wasn’t he?”

  And Ganya rushed to the door; Varya dashed to him and seized him with both arms.

  “What is it? Where are you going?” she said. “If you let him out now, he’ll do something worse, he’ll go to everybody!…”

  “What did he do there? What did he say?”

  “They weren’t able to tell and didn’t understand themselves; he just frightened them all. He came to see Ivan Fyodorovich—he wasn’t there; he demanded to see Lizaveta Prokofyevna. First he asked her for a job, to enter the service, then he started complaining about me, my husband, and you especially … said all kinds of things.”

  “You couldn’t find out?” Ganya was trembling as if in hysterics.

  “Oh, come now! He himself barely understood what he was saying, and maybe they didn’t tell me all of it.”

  Ganya clutched his head and ran to the window; Varya sat down by the other window.

  “Aglaya’s funny,” she suddenly observed, “she stops me and says: ‘Convey my particular personal respects to your parents; one of these days I shall probably find an occasion to see your father.’ And she says it so seriously. It’s terribly odd …”

  “Not mockingly? Not mockingly?”

  “Precisely not; that’s the odd thing.”

  “Does she know about the old man or doesn’t she, what do you think?”

  “It’s not known to them in the house, I have no doubt of that; but you’ve given me an idea: maybe Aglaya does know. She alone knows, because the sisters were also surprised that she sent her greetings to father so seriously. Why on earth precisely to him? If she knows, then it’s the prince who told her!”

  “It takes no cleverness to find out who told her! A thief! Just what we needed. A thief in our family, ‘the head of the family’!”

  “Oh, nonsense!” cried Varya, becoming quite angry. “A drunken incident, nothing more. And who came up with it? Lebedev, the prince … fine ones they are; palatial minds. I don’t care a whit about it.”

  “The old man’s a thief and a drunkard,” Ganya went on biliously, “I’m a pauper, my sister’s husband is a usurer—Aglaya had something to covet! Pretty, I must say!”

  “That sister’s husband, the usurer, is your …”

&nbs
p; “Feeder, is that it? Kindly don’t mince words.”

  “Why are you angry?” Varya recollected herself. “You don’t understand anything, just like a schoolboy. Do you think all that could harm you in Aglaya’s eyes? You don’t know her character; she’d turn her back on the foremost suitor, but she’d be pleased to run to some student in a garret and starve to death—that’s her dream! You’ve never been able to understand how interesting you’d become in her eyes if you could endure our circumstances with firmness and pride. The prince caught her on his hook, first of all, because he never tried to catch her and, second, because in everybody’s eyes he’s an idiot. This one thing alone, that she’ll muddle up the whole family because of him—that’s what she likes now. Ah, none of you understands anything!”

  “Well, we’ve yet to see whether we understand or not,” Ganya muttered mysteriously, “only all the same I wouldn’t want her to find out about the old man. I thought the prince would keep it to himself and not tell. He kept Lebedev from telling, and he didn’t want to tell me everything either, when I badgered him …”