Dostoevsky is a writer who has long been extremely important to me. During my teens, before this blog existed, I devoured the great novels, one after another, and then over and over. The Brothers Karamazov, without exaggeration, changed my life. Ultimately, its author became the embodiment of what I took to be a distinctively Russian approach to literature – an approach that treated what I then took to be the most important questions in life directly, without encrusting them with layers of social drama and squabbling over inheritances that I associated then (as now) with fiction from my own country. In Dostoevsky’s works people said exactly what mattered to them, and did the things that showed it mattered to them – they murdered, they threw tantrums, and sometimes even took their own lives. Dostoevsky inspired me precisely because he was clumsy, lazy, and disorganised in his writing. He showed a budding writer, dangerously, that so long as characters felt sufficiently, they became real and nothing else need matter.
The Idiot, however, was never one of my favourites among Dostoevsky’s works. For one, it is Dostoevsky at his strangest. With its story of jealousy and obsession in love it is also a comparatively less interesting work, at least at first glance, to someone lusting after ideas. (At the time I was a Dostoevsky maniac I went to a boys’ school and didn’t know what a girl looked like, let alone how something like obsessive love worked.) Still, I’ve returned to this work after many years away because I believed it might be essential to a writing project of my own. The idea of the central character, a kind of Christ-like innocent, thrust into the world of scheming men and women, was what drew me back. But what turned out to be still more interesting was a kind of higher-order thematic framework here of logic and disorder, coherence and chaos.
I am obliged to you to provide a summary of the plot, but unfortunately I do not have any idea what actually happened and I’m not sure Dostoevsky did either. Or rather, I know he did not. Gary Saul Morson, among other academics, has noted that after finishing the novel’s first part Dostoevsky’s notebooks show he didn’t know where he was going. Even after finishing the novel’s penultimate part he still had not worked out whom, if anyone, the “idiot” Prince Myshkin would marry. Besides these plot uncertainties, many characters have motivations which were not merely complex and contradictory, but outright impenetrable. I also regularly found myself asking myself, for a given group of characters, how on earth they knew one another well enough to haunt one another’s living rooms. I have no answer to any of this but will do my best to at least tackle the plot’s outline.
Prince Myshkin (the name makes him kin to mice), a young man suffering from epilepsy, returns from Switzerland to Russia, somewhat cured of his ailment. On the train he meets another young man, Rogozhin, who has just inherited significant wealth. Rogozhin wants to use the money to win the heart of the beautiful Nastasya Philippovna. Nastasya is capricious and flighty and captivates the prince too, who seems to want to save her from her own self-destructive decisions. At the same time, the prince meets and falls in love with the Epanchin family, especially one of their daughters, Aglaya. Several hundred pages somehow pass and characters come in and out, but really there are few who matter. Money-mad Ganya, the drunken clerk Lebedev, and Ippolit, a young man dying of consumption, are the only others ones I discuss here.
Before the characters, the first thing I noticed about The Idiot when I came to reflect upon it was the atmosphere, which is nothing less than apocalyptic. Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Italy while escaping debts back in Russia. The home of Catholicism, a religion he has the prince describe in an outburst as being worse than atheism, no doubt caused him psychic strain that is reflected in the writing and its moods. The novel begins on a train, and as with Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, this modern conveyance is not a neutral taxi by any means. We learn much later that Lebedev, who styles himself a hobbyist interpreter of the Apocalypse, (itself not a hobby one has in a healthy age), considers “the railway network spread across Europe” as in fact the “Star Wormwood”.
Trains and musings on the Apocalypse are not the only things establishing a gloomy mood. Another relatively modern mistake freshly arrived in Russia is the newspaper. Characters are genuinely fascinated and disturbed by the news, which seems to reveal a more fallen world than had existed previously. Multiple murders in the papers are discussed to prove or disprove some speculation on human nature. Then there is illness, for the prince with his epilepsy is far from the only one suffering. Ippolit has consumption, Rogozhin’s jealousy and Ganya’s money obsession are both certainly a kind of illness, while it almost goes without saying that a vast number of characters are alcoholics too. What’s noteworthy is that the distribution of illness does not seem itself to be a moral statement about the sick as individuals. Instead, if everyone is ill, it makes their world ill.
Into this atmosphere of fragility and decay comes the prince. I had remembered, or rather imagined, that the plot involved the prince’s kindness and simpleheartedness acting to reveal the moral failings of others by providing a contrast, but that is not what happens here. Instead, he is a more directly moral person than that. In his first encounters with the Epanchin daughters he discusses the sufferings of people undergoing capital punishment without any prompting, while at another point after being slapped he refuses to fight back or consider a duel, saying to the slapper “how ashamed you’ll be of what you’ve done.” Hence, the prince is more directly and strangely a voice of conscience. He draws our attention to violence we ignore – state violence, the cyclical violence involved in honour questions – albeit a little too naively, like someone at university home for the holidays who has just learned what critical theory is but not yet how to persuade anyone it makes sense.
The prince may be the voice of conscience, but it is important to consider whether he can succeed at this within the story. While one phrase used to describe him is Christ-like, among the first words actually used in the novel is yurodivy or “holy fool.” These historical, largely Russian figures, were typically poor itinerants who had dedicated their lives to Christ without a formal role within the Church. Their behaviours were often shocking and insane, but enough of society acknowledged them as having mysterious wisdom that they were largely left alone, only occasionally brought in as quirky dinner guests by nobles. To call the prince a holy fool says that his message and concerns may be important; it also, however, provides a framework for characters to ignore him as merely raving. So, too, does the designation of “idiot” on account of his illness. In short, while he wants to save, he’s not viewed as a saviour: even his famous assertion that “beauty will save the world” is quoted back at him in mockery.
The Prince thus has the challenge of altering others’ perception of him if he wants to persuade others to do good in this world. But just as great a difficulty is the treatment of causation within the novel – the ideas of “logic” and “nature”. If we believe humans are supremely rational, The Idiot is a novel that will make no sense to us. At a key moment the Prince asks Rogozhin of Nastasya, “who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?” The Prince is expressing a viewpoint that Nastasya refutes by her own existence and repeated, free, choices that harm her wellbeing – she chooses Rogozhin over the Prince, time after time. Lebedev states this point generally: “the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.”
With Nastasya’s character, and not only, the novel makes Lebedev’s argument real. One of the murders reported in the newspapers provokes heated discussion among the characters precisely because the defence lawyer argues that the six murders committed by the man at trial were “natural”, due to his poverty. This is illogical, but perhaps at least partly true. Yet for the characters it is one more suggestion that their world is falling apart. At least for some of them. For others, they are themselves this decay. At Nastasya Philippovna’s birthday party, the highpoint of the novel’s first section, characters compete in telling the most bad things they have done. It is not a sequence to inspire hope about the human condition, but it also shows what the stakes of the lawyer’s assertion are – if we normalise the world as being illogical and morality as being a secondary concern, we enable further decline.
One of the places where this sense of the consequences of bad thinking and a bad world are most obvious is in the case of Ippolit, the young man dying of consumption. In his multi-chapter “Necessary Explanation”, he explains just what it feels and what it means, to have death hanging over him. He can hardly do anything, because so much requires time and practice – like learning an instrument. It is only with death coming that he has a sense of the value of life, while all those who are alive but with the sound of ticking fainter place no real value upon their days. At first he uses his sense of life’s remaining possibilities to do good, helping out a stranger he meets on the street. But then he becomes angry with the idea of God, specifically why he should “praise that which has eaten me” with this death sentence. Finally, he decides that the only remaining action he can take, the “only thing I still have time to begin and end of my own will”, is precisely to head off this death sentence by taking his own life first.
Dostoevsky is not an author we can easily call rational, but with these examples we can see that if human illogicity is a fact, there must be limits to our willingness to support it, or we will all end up like Ippolit or Nastasya and turn against life itself. In a letter Dostoevsky once wrote that “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” He did not say that anything else was preferrable to the truth. If irrationality is not bounded, the pathway to God gets narrower, not wider. It is into this irrational, illogical world, that the prince comes preaching goodness, only to find that it seems beyond his own redemption. The murder the novel ends with brings a sense of bleakness and total defeat that I was shocked to rediscover – it was even more horrific than the end of Demons.
Perhaps this triumph of chaos and irrationality is foreseeable from the very first words, for it is also intimately linked to Dostoevsky’s writing style as well. Dostoevsky is not a gifted stylist, but his themes are well served by his style. For one thing, there’s a layer of uncertainty and confusion built into the narration. At the end of the novel’s first part, the prince leaves for Moscow for six months, but even though it is clearly important what takes place there, the narrator declares “we can supply very little information” about what happened. (One theory is that Dostoevsky had such a miserable time living in Moscow himself that he refused to ever write about it in his fiction – itself an insane reason for sabotaging his story.) At other points, the narrator admits to an impossibility in understanding other characters’ motivations. This makes the impossibility of saving the world feel not just like it’s the prince’s fault, but somehow more general. It is such a mess that not even the narrator can keep it together.
And it is precisely the whole world that somehow feels like it needs saving here. It may have been simply because Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot while stuck in Europe, but it is as if almost nothing exists solidly in the book. There are no smells, there are very few sights, there are no noises except that of the squabbling people. And furthermore, these people do not talk like humans – they give unprompted speeches, they refuse to shut up. I had the feeling that they had to be like this, because as soon as a character stops talking, like one of Beckett’s narrators in his Trilogy, they seem to cease to exist. If Tolstoy’s characters all exist with a uniform vitality, however minor their role, due to his use of leitmotifs and physical descriptions, Dostoevsky’s characters gain all their vitality only through victory in the contest of voices and their silencing of others. This is therefore the perfect style for conveying desperation and egoism.
The Idiot is my first Dostoevsky for about five years. Coming back, what shocks me is exactly what I expected to, even in spite of that expectation – the obsessive drive of his characters towards meaningful utterances. Characters talk about what matters to them, because it matters to them. They act and live as if they are in the last days, when almost all decorum is dead. Compared to, say, Mann’s Magic Mountain, there is far less sense of the characters holding back part of themselves, or of their ideas not being immediately bindable to real-world things. The Idiot is not the reflection of the isolated upon a Swiss mountain, but a work with one attempted murder, one real murder, and an attempted suicide. Mann’s work is brilliant too, of course, but in its directness Dostoevsky’s is incomparable.
I read the novel again because I wanted to see what I might learn for my own little novel of ideas with an idiot, of a sort, at its centre. But what I see now is that I have so far not emphasised enough the desperation associated with beliefs that makes them fresh and vital to the bystanding reader, nor yet plotted enough scandals or actions where a decision is necessary, one that would make these beliefs feel like they have a real-world importance. As for Dostoevsky’s style, whether I want to take anything from that is a harder question to answer. But there are plenty more of his works out there to help me decide.