Arian’s Reviews > The Idiot > Status Update

A man claiming to be the rightful heir to the prince's fortune declares his 'human right, a natural one; the right of common sense and the voice of conscience, and even though this right of ours is not written down in any rotten human code of law, a decent and honest man is obliged to remain a decent and honest man even on those points that aren't written down in the law books.'

During a discussion among the Yepanchin sisters and a few others, Aglaya Ivanovna refers to a 12th-Century tradition where a knight devoted himself to a noble lady, 'that even if later she became a thief, he would still be bound to believe in her and break a lance for her pure beauty.' This comes after Koyla refers to Ganya as the 'poor knight' to (presumably) Nastasya Fillipovna.

Dostoyevsky uses an orientalist myth. 'that is the very second that was not long enough for water to be spilled from the epileptic Mahomet's overturned water-jug, though in that very second he was able to survey all the habitations of Allah' to describe the timelessness of an epileptic premotion the Prince suffers, 'freezing Rogozhin to the spot and thus saved the prince from the inevitable blow of the knife'.

Rogozhin says, 'when you're not there in front of me, I at once feel malice towards you, Lev Nikolayevich. These last three months, when I haven't seen you, I've felt bitter towards you every moment, by God, I have. I could've gone and poisoned you! It was like that. Now you've scarcely been sitting with me for quarter of an hour, yet all my malice is passing, and you're as dear to me as you used to be'.

Another on capital punishment, 'she began to shout: "Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, encore un moment!" and for that moment, perhaps, the Lord will forgive her, because a misere worse than that is impossible to imagine for a human soul. Do you know what the word misere means? Well, that is the very personification of misere'.

The narrator for Part 2 is almost a new character of its own. Our man on the ground (!) who happens to have observed the events of Part 1 and is informing the reader of what went down in the interim, but with a noticeable gap in knowledge.

An 'ephemeral, romantic, indecent, but also colourful and original' evening closes part 1, with Nastasya Filippovna riding off with Rogozhin and rejecting the prince's proposal — after he'd already rejected Ganya's on her behalf. Ganya's vanity shows when he turns away from the 100,000 roubles she throws in the fire, wanting to 'feast my eyes on your soul as you crawl into the fire for my money'. BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO!!

Ferdyshchenko has been the lone star in this extract! He seems to me an honest man (I'm reserving any conclusive judgement until the very end of the book). By his proposed petite jeu, Nastasya's turn to deliver an anecdote to her guests involved the prince in deciding for her on whether she should marry Ganya or not. The prince said no! Bravo EVERYBODY!

Prince Myshkin stands before Nastaya Filippovna’s front door for ‘business’ that the reader knows nothing of. Ganya is pretty funny!

Apologies for the hiatus. I’ve been slaving away at work and too upset about it to do anything else.