The Idiot Read Free Page A

aesthetic purpose, which is to create a world that superficially resembles the ‘real’ world, but is much more akin to the landscape of a dream.
    Where Russian names are concerned, I have kept the forms that appear in the original Russian text, in most cases giving name and patronymic where Dostoyevsky does this: Lev Nikolayevich, Ivan Fyodorovich, Nina Alexandrovna, Afanasy Ivanovich, Darya Alexeyevna, etc. I have also preserved the contractions of the patronymic - Pavlych for Pavlovich, Ivanych for Ivanovich, etc. - which are commonly used by Russians in colloquial speech. The diminutive forms of names have also been kept where they are used in the original - Ganka (Ganya), Varya (Varvara), Kolya (Nikolai), etc., as these denote affection, and are important psychological elements in the narrative.
    The text used for this translation is that contained in F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii ν tridsati tomakh (Complete collection of works in thirty volumes), Leningrad, Nauka, 1972-90, vol. 8.
    David McDuff

PART ONE

1
    At about nine o’clock one morning, at the end of November, during a thaw, a train of the St Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching St Petersburg at full steam. Such were the damp and the fog that it was a while before daylight broke; at ten yards to the right and the left of the track it was hard to make out anything at all from the windows of the carriage. The passengers included some returning from abroad; but the third-class compartments were the most crowded, with ordinary folk and those on business, who had not travelled far. Everyone, as is usually the case, was tired, with eyes heavy after the night, everyone was cold, every face was pale yellow, the colour of the fog.
    In one of the third-class carriages, since dawn, two passengers had found themselves opposite each other close by the window - both young men, both with almost no luggage to speak of, both unostentatiously dressed, both with rather remarkable facial features, and both wishing to enter into conversation with the other. If each had known what was especially remarkable about each other at that moment, they would certainly have marvelled that chance had so strangely put them opposite each other in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw-St Petersburg train. One of them was rather short, about twenty-seven, with almost black curly hair, and small, grey, but fiery eyes. His nose was broad and flat, and he had high cheek-bones; his thin lips were constantly creased in a kind of brazen, mocking and even cruel smile; but his brow was high and well formed and did much to compensate for the ignobly developed lower part of his face. Especially striking in that face was its deathly pallor, which gave the whole of the young man’s physiognomy an emaciated look, in spite of his rather sturdy build, at the same time imparting to it something passionate, to the point of suffering, that was out of harmony with his coarse and insolent smile and his harsh, self-satisfied gaze. He was warmly dressed, in a wide, black wool-lined sheepskin overcoat, and had not felt the cold overnight, whereas his neighbour had been compelled to endure on his shivering back all the delights of a damp November Russian night, for which he was obviously not prepared. He wore a rather capacious, thick sleeveless cloak with an enormous hood, of the kind often used in winter, in such far-off places such as Switzerland or northern Italy, by travellers who do not, of course, have to reckon with the distance between points so far removed as Eidkuhnen 1 and St Petersburg. But what had been suitable and thoroughly satisfactory in Italy turned out to be not wholly so in Russia. The wearer of the cloak with the hood was a young man, also about twenty-six or twenty-seven, of slightly above-average height, with very thick, fair hair, sunken cheeks and a light, pointed, almost completely white little beard. His eyes were large, blue and fixed; in their gaze there was something