Masterful Excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’.

For the Love of literature. I could not help but share this. Enjoy.

“When I got up to lock the door after him, I suddenly remembered the picture I had seen that day at Rogozhin's, in one of the gloomiest rooms of his house, above the door. He himself had shown it to me in passing; I think I stood before it for about five minutes. There was nothing good about it in the artistic respect; but it produced a strange uneasiness in me. This picture portrays Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters are usually in the habit of portraying Christ, both on the cross and taken down from the cross, as still having a shade of extraordinary beauty in his face; they seek to preserve this beauty for him even in his most horrible suffering. But in Rogozhin's picture there is not a word about beauty; this is in the fullest sense the corpse of a man who had endured infinite suffering before the cross, wounds, torture, beating by the guards, beating by the people as he carried the cross and fell down under it, and had finally suffered on the cross for six hours (at least according to my calculation). True, it is the face of a man who has only just been taken down from the cross, that is, retaining in itself a great deal of life, of warmth; nothing has had time to become rigid yet, so that the dead man's face even shows suffering as if he were feeling it now (the artist has caught that very well); but the face has not been spared in the least, it is nature alone, and truly as the dead body of any man must be after such torments. I know that in the first centuries the Christian Church already established that Christ suffered not in appearance but in reality, and that on the cross his body, therefore, was fully and completely subject to the laws of nature. In the picture this face is horribly hurt by blows, swollen, with horrible, swollen, and bloody bruises, the eyelids are open, the eyes crossed, the large, open whites have a sort of deathly, glassy shine. But, strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, a particular and curious question arises: if all his disciples, his chief future apostles, if the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who believed in him and worshipped him had seen a corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? Here the notion involuntarily occurs to you that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature are so powerful, how can they be overcome? How overcome them, if they were not even defeated now, by the one who defeated nature while he lived, whom nature obeyed, who exclaimed: "Talitha cum" and the girl arose, "Lazarus, come forth" and the dead man came out?Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily. The people who surrounded the dead man, none of whom is in the painting, must have felt horrible anguish and confusion on that evening, which at once smashed all their hopes and almost their beliets. They must have gone off in terrible fear, though each carried within himself a tremendous thought that could never be torn out of him. And if this same teacher could have seen his own image on the eve of the execution, would he have gone to the cross and died as he did? That question also comes to you involuntarily as you look at the painting.

All this came to me in fragments, perhaps indeed through delirium, sometimes even in images, for a whole hour and a half after Kolya left. Can something that has no image come as an image? But it was as if it seemed to me at moments that I could see that infinite power, that blank, dark, and dumb being, in some strange and impossible form. I remember it seemed as if someone holding a candle led me by the hand and showed me some huge and repulsive tarantula and started assuring me that this was that dark, blank, and all-powerful being, and laughed at my indignation. In my room a little lamp is always lighted before the icon at night the light is dim and negligible, but nevertheless you can see everything, and close to the lamp you can even read. I think it was already going on one o'clock; I was completely awake and lay with open eyes; suddenly the door of my room opened, and Rogozhin came in.

He came in, closed the door, silently looked at me, and quietly went to the corner, to the table that stands almost under the icon lamp. I was very surprised and watched in expectation; Rogozhin leaned his elbow on the little table and started looking at me silently. Two or three minutes passed that way, and I remember that his silence greatly offended and vexed me. Why did he not want to speak? The fact that he had come so late seemed strange to me, of course, yet I remember that I was not so greatly astonished by that in itself. Even the opposite: though I had not spoken my thought out clearly to him in the morning, I know he had understood it; and that thought was of such kind that, apropos of it, of course, one might come for another talk, even though it was very late. And so I thought he had come for that. In the morning we had parted somewhat hostilely, and I even remember him glancing at me very mockingly a couple of times. That mockery, which I could now read in his glance, was what offended me. That it actually was Rogozhin himself, and not a vision, not delirium, I at first did not doubt in the least. I did not even think of it.

Meanwhile he went on sitting and looking at me with the same smile. I turned over spitefully on my bed, also leaned my elbow on the pillow, and decided to be silent on purpose, even if we sat like that the whole time. For some reason I absolutely wanted him to begin first. I think about twenty minutes passed that way. Suddenly a thought occurred to me: what if it is not Rogozhin, but only, a vision?

Neither during my illness nor before it have I ever once seen , a single apparition; but it always seemed to me, when I was still a boy and even now, that is, recently, that if I should see an apparition just once, I would die right on the spot, even though I do not believe in apparitions. But as soon as it occurred to me that it was not Rogozhin, but only an apparition, I remember that I wasn’t frightened in the least. Not only that, but it even made me angry. Another strange thing was that the answer to the question whether it was an apparition or Rogozhin himself somehow did not interest or trouble me as much as it would seem it should have; it seems to me that I was thinking about something else then. For some reason I was much more interested in why Rogozhin, who had been wearing a dressing gown and slippers earlier, was now in a tailcoat, a white waistcoat, and a white tie. The thought also flashed: if this is an apparition, and I am not afraid of it, why not get up, go over to it, and make sure myself? It may be, however, that I didn't dare and was afraid. But I just had time to think I was afraid, when suddenly it was as if ice passed all over my body; I felt cold in my back, and my knees trembled. At that very moment, as if he had guessed that I was afraid, Rogozhin drew back the arm he had been leaning on, straightened up, and began to extend his mouth, as if getting ready to laugh; he looked at me point blank. I was so infuriated that I decidedly wanted to fall upon him, but as I had sworn that I would not begin speaking first, I stayed in bed, the more so as I was not sure whether it was Rogozhin himself or not.

I do not remember for certain how long this went on; nor do I remember for certain whether I had moments of oblivion or not. Only, in the end Rogozhin got up, looked me over as slowly and attentively as before, when he came in, but stopped grinning and quietly, almost on tiptoe, went to the door, opened it, closed it, and was gone. I did not get out of bed; I don't remember how long I lay there thinking with open eyes; God knows what I was thinking about; I also don't remember how I became oblivious. The next morning I woke up when they knocked at my door, past nine o'clock. I had arranged it so that if I myself did not open the door by nine o'clock and call for tea to be served, Matryona herself should knock for me. When I opened the door to her, the thought immediately occurred to me: how could he have come in if the door was locked? I made inquiries and became convinced that the real Rogozhin could not have come in, because all our doors are locked for the night.

This particular case, which I have described in such detail, was the reason why I became completely "resolved." Which means that what contributed to my definitive resolve was not logic, not logical conviction, but revulsion. It is impossible to remain in a life that assumes such strange, offensive forms. This apparition humiliated me. I am unable to submit to a dark power that assumes the shape of a tarantula. And it was only at twilight, when I finally sensed in myself the definitive moment of full resolution, that I felt better. That was only the first moment; for the second moment I went to Pavlovsk, but that has already been sufficiently explained.” - Ippolit

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’