THE IDIOT & THE GAMBLER. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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impertinence of some of his misplaced and idle questions. He told him he had been a long while, over four years, away from Russia, that he had been sent abroad for his health on account of a strange nervous disease, something of the nature of epilepsy or St. Vitus’s dance, attacks of twitching and trembling. The dark man smiled several times as he listened, and laughed, especially when, in answer to his inquiry, “Well, have they cured you?” his companion answered, “No, they haven’t.”
“Ha! You must have wasted a lot of money over it, and we believe in them over here,” the dark man observed sarcastically.
“Perfectly true!” interposed a badly dressed, heavily built man of about forty, with a red nose and pimpled face, sitting beside them.
He seemed to be some sort of petty official, with the typical failings of his class. “Perfectly true, they only absorb all the resources of Russia for nothing!”
“Oh, you are quite mistaken in my case!” the patient from Switzerland replied in a gentle and conciliatory voice. “I can’t dispute your opinion, of course, because I don’t know all about it, but my doctor shared his last penny with me for the journey here; and he’s been keeping me for nearly two years at his expense.”
“Why, had you no one to pay for you?” asked the dark man.
“No; Mr. Pavlishtchev, who used to pay for me there, died two years ago. I’ve written since to Petersburg, to Madame Epanchin, a distant relation of mine, but I’ve had no answer. So I’ve come… .”
“Where are you going then?”
“You mean, where am I going to stay? … I really don’t know yet… . Somewhere… .”
“You’ve not made up your mind yet?” And both his listeners laughed again.
“And I shouldn’t wonder if that bundle is all you’ve got in the world?” queried the dark man.
“I wouldn’t mind betting it is,” chimed in the red-nosed official with a gleeful air, “and that he’s nothing else in the luggage van, though poverty is no vice, one must admit.”
It appeared that this was the case; the fair-haired young man acknowledged it at once with peculiar readiness.
“Your bundle has some value, anyway,” the petty official went on, when they had laughed to their heart’s content (strange to say, the owner of the bundle began to laugh too, looking at them, and that increased their mirth), “and though one may safely bet there is no gold in it, neither French, German, nor Dutch — one may be sure of that, if only from the gaiters you have got on over your foreign shoes — yet if you can add to your bundle a relation such as Madame Epanchin, the general’s lady, the bundle acquires a very different value, that is if Madame Epanchin really is related to you, and you are not labouring under a delusion, a mistake that often happens … through excess of imagination.”
“Ah, you’ve guessed right again,” the fair young man assented. “It really is almost a mistake, that’s to say, she is almost no relation; so much so that I really was not at all surprised at getting no answer. It was what I expected.”
“You simply wasted the money for the stamps. H’m! … anyway you are straightforward and simplehearted, and that’s to your credit. H’m! … I know General Epanchin, for he is a man every one knows; and I used to know Mr. Pavlishtchev, too, who paid your expenses in Switzerland, that is if it was Nikolay Andreyevitch Pavlishtchev, for there were two of them, cousins. The other lives in the Crimea. The late Nikolay Andreyevitch was a worthy man and well connected, and he’d four thousand serfs in his day. .
“That’s right, Nikolay Andreyevitch was his name.” And as he answered, the young man looked intently and searchingly at the omniscient gentleman.
Such omniscient gentlemen are to be found pretty often in a certain stratum of society. They know everything. All the restless curiosity and faculties of their mind are irresistibly bent in one direction, no doubt from lack of more important ideas and interests in life, as the critic of to-day would explain. But the words, “they know everything,” must be taken in a rather limited sense: in what department so-and-so serves, who are his friends, what his income is, where he was governor, who his wife is and what dowry she brought him, who are his first cousins and who are his second cousins, and everything of that sort. For the most part these omniscient gentlemen are out at elbow, and receive a salary of seventeen roubles a month. The people of whose lives they know every detail would be at a loss to imagine their motives. Yet many of them get positive consolation out of this knowledge, which amounts to a complete science, and derive from it self-respect and their highest spiritual gratification. And indeed it is a fascinating science. I have seen learned men, literary men, poets, politicians, who sought and found in that science their loftiest comfort and their ultimate goal, and have indeed made their career only by means of it.
During this part of the conversation the dark young man had been yawning and looking aimlessly out of the window, impatiently expecting the end of the journey. He was preoccupied, extremely so, in fact, almost agitated. His behaviour indeed was somewhat strange; sometimes he seemed to be listening without hearing, and looking without seeing. He would laugh sometimes not knowing, or forgetting, what he was laughing at.
“Excuse me, whom have I the honour” … the pimply gentleman said suddenly, addressing the fair young man with the bundle.
“Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin is my name,” the latter replied with prompt and unhesitating readiness.
“Prince Myshkin? Lyov Nikolayevitch? I don’t know it. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it,” the official responded thoughtfully. “I don’t mean the surname, it’s an historical name, it’s to be found in Karamazin’s History, and with good reason; I mean you personally, and indeed there are no Prince Myshkins to be met anywhere, one never hears of them.”
“I should think not,” Myshkin answered at once, “there are no Prince Myshkins now except me; I believe I am the last of them. And as for our fathers and grandfathers, some of them were no more than peasant proprietors. My father was a sublieutenant in the army, yet General Epanchin’s wife was somehow Princess Myshkin; she was the last of her lot, too… .”
“He-he-he! The last of her lot! He-he! how funnily you put it,” chuckled the official.
The dark man grinned too. Myshkin was rather surprised that he had perpetrated a joke, and indeed it was a feeble one.
“Believe me, I said it without thinking,” he explained at last, wondering.
“To be sure, to be sure you did,” the official assented goodhumouredly.
“And have you been studying, too, with the professor out there, prince?” asked the dark man suddenly.
“Yes … I have.”
“But I’ve never studied anything.”
“Well, I only did a little, you know,” added Myshkin almost apologetically. “I couldn’t be taught systematically, because of my illness.”
“Do you know the Rogozhins?” the dark man asked quickly.
“No, I don’t know them at all. I know very few people in Russia. Are you a Rogozhin?”
“Yes, my name is Rogozhin, Parfyon.”
“Parfyon? One of those Rogozhins . . ,” the official began, with increased gravity.
“Yes, one of those, one of the same,” the dark man interrupted quickly, with uncivil impatience. He had not once addressed the pimply gentleman indeed, but from the beginning had spoken only to Myshkin.
“But … how is that?” The official was petrified with amazement, and his eyes seemed almost starting out of his head. His whole face immediately assumed an expression of reverence and servility, almost of awe. “Related to the Semyon Parfenovitch Rogozhin, who died a month ago and left a fortune of two and a half million roubles?”
“And