Ippolit is the consumptive boy in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot. More fully, Ippolit Terentyev is a seventeen-year-old with advanced tuberculosis, or consumption, and he becomes one of the novel's most intense secondary characters.
Ippolit is not the protagonist; that role belongs to Prince Lev Myshkin. Instead, Ippolit serves as a sharp intellectual and moral counterpoint to Myshkin's compassion and religious faith. Facing what he believes is an imminent death, Ippolit becomes obsessed with whether a person can resist nature's apparently final sentence.
His long “Essential Statement” combines philosophical argument, anger, vanity, and genuine terror. He attempts suicide in public, partly as an assertion of free will, but the attempt fails. Readers sometimes confuse him with Myshkin, Rogozhin, or Ganya because all are central to the novel's crowded social world. Ippolit's illness and rebellion, however, give the book a distinct meditation on mortality, dignity, and the human desire to keep the future open.