Abstract
“Just what does it mean, this face …?” Evgenii Pavlovich asks himself in the last pages of Idiot (p. 485). Evgenii Pavlovich has just come away from a last meeting with Prince Myshkin, to whom he has given an exhaustive, and gratuitous, accounting of the prince’s misconduct. The prince, of course, is more than willing to accept the blame. All he can plead in his defense is the face of Nastas’ia Filipovna. “But there was something else,” he urges, “something which you left out because you don’t know it: I had looked upon her face! Even that first morning in the portrait I could not withstand it” (p. 484). Such extraordinary susceptibility to the human face puzzles Evgenii Pavlovich. For all his perspicuity, this self-appointed raisonneur has a blind spot—even though he soon laughs off the prince’s words as the raving of a “poor idiot!” (p. 485). His baffled question, however, only serves to reiterate an issue that the entire novel in one way or another has posed from the opening pages: What is the meaning of the human face?
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