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Lukyan Timofeevich Lebedev
Ippolit is a 17-year-old boy who is dying of tuberculosis. An ardent nihilist, he yearns to be taken seriously and attempts to dramatically leave the world. He delivers rambling, self-absorbed, nihilistic speech entitled “A Necessary Explanation” to Myshkin, Nastasya, and Rogozhin, and many others at a party at Lebedev’s dacha. After this, he attempts to commit suicide by shooting himself with the gun he’s had since he was a child. This entire plan backfires, as everyone grows bored with his speech, and when it comes time to kill himself he fails to do so because there is no cap in the gun. After this incident, Ippolit’s illness progress and he eventually dies.
Ippolit Terentyev Quotes in The Idiot
The The Idiot quotes below are all either spoken by Ippolit Terentyev or refer to Ippolit Terentyev . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part Three, Chapter Five
Quotes
He is either a doctor or indeed of an extraordinary intelligence and able to guess a great many things. (But that he is ultimately an “idiot” there can be no doubt at all.)
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Part Three, Chapter Six
Quotes
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.
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Ippolit Terentyev Quotes in The Idiot
The The Idiot quotes below are all either spoken by Ippolit Terentyev or refer to Ippolit Terentyev . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part Three, Chapter Five
Quotes
He is either a doctor or indeed of an extraordinary intelligence and able to guess a great many things. (But that he is ultimately an “idiot” there can be no doubt at all.)
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Part Three, Chapter Six
Quotes
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.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
