The Idiot Society and Class Quotes

The flat occupied by Ganya and his family was on the third floor of the house. It was reached by a clean light staircase, and consisted of seven rooms, a nice enough lodging, and one would have thought a little too good for a clerk on two thousand roubles a year. But it was designed to accommodate a few lodgers on board terms, and had been taken a few months since, much to the disgust of Ganya, at the urgent request of his mother and his sister, Varvara Ardalionovna, who longed to do something to increase the family income a little, and fixed their hopes upon letting lodgings. Ganya scowled and called keeping tenants an outrage; after that it was as if he began to be ashamed in society—that society in which he had been accustomed to pose up to now as a young man of rather brilliant prospects. All these concessions and rebuffs of fortune, of late, had deeply wounded his soul, and his temper had become extremely irritable, his wrath being generally quite out of proportion to the cause. (1.8.1)

"A man, look you, who has thirteen bullets on his breast! You don't believe it? Well, I can assure you it was entirely on my account that Pirogov telegraphed to Paris, and left Sebastopol at the greatest risk during the siege. Nelaton, the Tuileries surgeon, demanded a safe conduct, in the name of science, into the besieged city in order to attend my wounds. The government knows all about it. […] And yet...well...you look as if you didn't believe me.... Well now, why should I not present the son of my old friend and companion to this delightful family—General Ivolgin and Prince Myshkin? You will see a lovely girl—what am I saying—a lovely girl? No, indeed, two, three! Ornaments of this city and of society: beauty, education, culture—the woman question—poetry—everything! Added to which is the fact that each one will have a dowry of at least eighty thousand roubles. No bad thing, eh? In a word I absolutely must introduce you to them: it is a duty, an obligation. General Ivolgin and Prince Myshkin. A tableau!" (1.12.14-26)

But the silent stranger was scarcely able to understand anything: she was a traveling German lady and did not know a word of Russian, and seemed to be as stupid as she was beautiful. She was a novelty, and it was an accepted thing to invite her to certain evenings, in magnificent costumes, her hair done up as if for an exhibition, and to sit her there like a love picture to adorn the evening, just as some people, for their evenings, borrow some picture, or vase, or statue, or firescreen for one time only. (1.15.7)