from The Idiot, Part One, Chapter V

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The late Joseph Frank described The Idiot (1868) as “the most personal of all Dostoevsky’s major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions.” It includes descriptions of some of his own intense personal ordeals, such as his chronic recurring epileptic seizures and the unforgettable experience of his mock execution; it also explores the moral, spiritual, and philosophical themes evoked by those inescapable ordeals. The twentieth-century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin regarded the structural irregularity and unpredictability of plot development, as well as the perceived “fantasticality” of the characters, not as any sort of shortcoming, but as entirely consistent with Dostoevsky’s unique and groundbreaking literary method.

First published in serial form, The Idiot tells the story of Prince Lev Myshkin who returns to Petersburg after spending several years in a Swiss sanatorium. He enters into high society where his Christ-like meekness, compassion, and integrity contrast with the vulgarity and greed of the up-and-coming aristocrats. Drawn into a web of financial and emotional intrigue, he encounters two powerful women, Aglaya Yepanchina, the proud and spoiled youngest daughter of an aristocratic family, and Nastasya Barashkova, whose enigmatic beauty soon overwhelms him. Time and again, he tries desperately to lead a good life and to influence those around him to do the same; but when that proves impossible, he departs from Petersburg unchanged, just as he arrived, and Russian society sinks further into avarice and depravity, as does all of capitalist Western Europe.

Translating The Idiot is certainly a challenging task. It has been convincingly described by a close colleague of mine as “the strangest and most elusive of the author’s major novels, with more zigzags of direction and sudden dips into the unconscious than figure in the others.” This brief excerpt from my work-in-progress is based on the author’s own near-death experience, when he was sentenced to be shot, but reprieved at the last minute by order of Tsar Nicholas I. He was sentenced to a lengthy period of exile from the capital, which he described in his Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–62).

Unlike my predecessors, I translate into standard American English for an American audience, although British readers have also expressed their appreciation for the “liveliness” of my versions. I avoid imitating Russian syntax, which often makes translations seem unnatural and cumbersome, and I generally seek to edit out excessive repetitions and to shorten extended Russian sentences that the reader might otherwise find vague and hard to follow.

—MRK

---

translated from the Russian by Michael R. Katz

Still, it’s possible to disagree about life in prison,” said the prince. “I heard the story of a man who’d spent twelve years there: he was one of my professor’s patients and was being treated. He suffered from nervous fits and was often agitated; he would burst into tears, and once he even tried to kill himself. His life in prison was very miserable, I can assure you, but of course, not without value. His only acquaintances were a spider and a little tree that was growing outside his window. . . . But it would be better if I told you the story of my other meeting with a man last year. A very strange circumstance was connected with it—strange, in that it rarely occurs. This man had once been led up toward the scaffold with some other prisoners, where his sentence was read out to him: he was to be shot for a political crime. But about twenty minutes later his reprieve was read and he was sentenced to a different form of punishment; however, in the interval between the reading of those two sentences, about twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, he lived with the absolute certainty that he would suddenly die. I desperately wanted to hear him recall his impressions at that time, and several times I asked him about that experience. He remembered everything with extraordinary clarity and used to say that he would never forget anything about those few minutes. Since there were several criminals to be executed, three posts were sunk into the ground about twenty feet in front of the scaffold. A crowd of people and some soldiers gathered around the prisoners. He watched the first three being led out and tied up to the posts; they were dressed in the special apparel (long, loose, white overalls); white caps were placed over their heads, so they couldn’t see the guns; then, up against each post they had only five minutes to live, no more. He said that those five minutes seemed like an endless span of time, an enormous gift; it seemed that in them he lived so many lives that there was no reason to think about his last instant. He had time to make several arrangements: he calculated the time he needed to say farewell to his comrades—he would allot two minutes for that; then he’d have two minutes to think about himself for the last time, and finally, to take a last look around. He recalled very well that he’d made these decisions and divided up his remaining time in just this way. He was to die at the age of twenty-seven, healthy and strong; in saying farewell to his comrades, he recalled that he’d previously posed a rather tangential question to one of them and was actually interested in his answer. Then, after he’d said farewell to them, he still had two minutes to think about himself; he knew in advance what he would reflect about: he tried to imagine how quickly and vividly he would go from being alive now, yet in a few minutes he’d be nothing, someone or something else—but who? And where? He thought he could determine all of this in those two minutes. There was a cathedral not far off in the distance and its gilded roof shone in the bright sunlight. He recalled how intently he looked at that roof and the rays of sunlight reflecting from it. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from those rays. It seemed that they constituted his new nature; he felt that in a few minutes he’d merge with those rays of light. . . . The uncertainty and the aversion to this new thing, which would come into being any moment, were terrible; but he said that what was most unbearable was the constant thought: ‘What if I didn’t have to die? What if I could return to my life? What an eternity would be mine. . . . I would make every minute last an age and would lose nothing; I would number every minute separately and waste no time at all!’ He said that this idea finally turned into such furious impatience that he even wanted to be shot as soon as possible.”

The prince suddenly fell silent; everyone waited to see if he would continue his story and arrive at some conclusion.

“Have you finished?” asked Aglaya.

“What? Yes, I have,” said the prince, emerging from his momentary musing.

“So, why did you tell us this story?”

“Just in order to . . . I happened to remember it . . . and thought it might provoke an interesting conversation.” ■

Subscribe to Read More