Dostyevsky's most powerful passage

Let's check off some of the totally weird and amazing things that happen in Part 2 of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot," elements of the novel that no other writer could imagine, bring off, or get away with, depending on how you read Dostoyevsky (and novels): after Myshkin visits Rogozhin and learns from R. that R., cannot ever marry Nastasya because N. loves Myshkin: R bring M through the long, dark corridors of his grim house and M stops and marvels at a gruesome painting of Christ taken down from the cross - the painting is very long and narrow, much like a coffin?. R. takes M. into a dark room where a strange old lady blesses M - the lady is R's mother, senile and blind possibly. M. and R. discuss atheism: M. recounts, I think, 4 incidents that happened to him since his return to Petersburg, among them an old derelict who sells him a cross, claiming it was silver when it is obviously tin, at an inflated price of 20 roubles; a mother nursing a baby tells M. that the baby smiles at her just as God smiles on a repenting sinner - god loves humankind as a baby loves its mother. (Odd, we would think of the dependency and the relationship the other way usually). M. sees that R. is carrying a sharp knife, and recalls N's saying she will go by either the knife or by water. Myshkin then embarks on a long ramble through Petersburg, trying to track down N., eventually learning that she has left for a dacha, perhaps for some time - during this long ramble he senses an epileptic fit coming on; D.'s vivid account of the feelings an epileptic undergoes is one of the most strikes passages D. ever wrote and completely strange and peculiar to most readers. The entire long chapter is jumpy and broken and disordered, much like an epileptic's mind pre-seizure, and the kind of writing that would become very familiar in the 20th century but was completely original in ca. 1867. Myskhin eventually gets back to his dreary hotel, which he hates, and has a vision of a set of eyes that have been following him throughout the day and evening. He climbs a scary stone staircase; at the landing, R. confronts him, or so it appears, and stabs him with the knife (M. had also looked at a similar - or the same? - knife in a store window during his rambles) - and M. has a seizure and falls down the stairs, striking his head. One would think he'd be seriously injured, but that doesn't appear to be the case; but what about the stabbing? Did it happen - or was it part of the hallucinatory frenzy of M.'s troubled mind? Sometimes what makes novels great is their heightening and intensifying of the familiar; sometimes, the opposite: their exploration of realms that are totally dark and obscure, as in Dostoyevsky. I also think that all great works have at least some elements that are strange, unsettling, unexpected - Dostoyevsky's novels, without being surreal or experimental in form, are more or less built on such elements, the entire works are strange and unsettling.