Idiot - Translation Famous Library (007)

Author: Dostoevsky
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: Late in November, the snow had melted with the warming weather. At around nine in the morning, a train was speeding towards St. Petersburg on the St. Petersburg–Warsaw railway line. The air was extremely damp, and thick fog enveloped everything. It was hard to see how the sky had become so bright, and it was quite a feat to see anything outside the train window more than ten steps to the left or right of the tracks. Among the passengers were some who had returned from abroad, but the third-class carriage was the most crowded, filled mostly with petty bourgeoisie busy with their livelihoods, who usually boarded the train from nearby places. After a night of travel, everyone was naturally very tired, with heavy eyelids that couldn’t be lifted, a chill all over their bodies, and pale faces that had taken on a slight yellowish hue, almost like the color of the fog. In a window seat in a third-class carriage, two passengers had been sitting facing each other since dawn. Both were young, with extremely simple luggage and not particularly fashionable attire, yet both had striking appearances and showed a strong desire to talk. If they had known what made them particularly unusual at that moment, they would have been astonished at how fate had so strangely placed them face to face in the third-class carriage of the St. Petersburg–Warsaw train. One of the two was of short stature, around twenty-seven years old, with almost entirely black curly hair and small, but bright, gray eyes. His nose was large and flat, his cheekbones prominent, and his thin lips were always slightly turned up...