The Idiot (1868)

In his novel, The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky is interested in getting closer to reality, the ground beneath our feet.  But how do we get there?  The novel’s hero, Myshkin, says, 

“I know about an actual murder over a watch, it’s in all the newspapers now.  If a writer had invented it, the critics and connoisseurs of popular life would have shouted at once that it was incredible; but reading it in the newspapers as a fact, you feel that it is precisely from such facts that you learn about Russian reality.”

True facts that no one would believe in a novel are key facts to understanding my time and place because they are the very facts I’m overlooking.  It’s the incredible-but-true facts that show me my own blindness.  Hunting out such facts allow Dostoevsky to move beyond the usual blurry truisms to shocking insight.

These buried facts often have to do with something within me that I don’t want to face.  For example, Lebedev claims that “the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind!”  This is hard to accept because it’s so unreasonable, and I like to think of myself as reasonable.  But again and again, Dostoevsky exposes me to behaviors that seem implausable on paper, but when I examine my own experience, they ring true.  Things like enjoying irritation, being ashamed of my compassion, and my resistance to accepting good fortune.  

This unreasonable side of human nature is best articulated in the novel when Keller has a thought to make a confession to Myshkin in order to help himself mend his ways.  But at the same time, he has the thought to use the confession to soften Myshkin up to borrow money from him.  Myshkin says that he has these simultaneous good and bad thoughts often, and he calls them “double thoughts.”

I’m not used to seeing myself with such complex accuracy.  Such lucidity is difficult to acheive because I often bury the bad thought with rationalizations.  So in order for me to reach clarity about reality, I must cut through these rationalizations.

Perhaps the most disturbing character of the novel is Totsky, who has nestled himself into his own flab of rationalizations.  He sexually assaulted Nastasya Filippovna when she was a child, and he constantly minimizes this to himself.  He obscures his cupability by calling it an “occurance.”  He says he can’t be blamed for his behavior because he is “an inveteret sensualist” and “not in control of himself.”  He says that “she herself was my best defense against all her accusations.  Well, who wouldn’t be captivated by this woman on occasion to the point of forgetting all reason . . . and the rest?”  When asked to confess the worst thing he ever did, he (in Natasya’s presence) self-satisfiedly tells a light anecdote about giving a woman a bouquet before someone else could. 

What renders Totsky’s rationalizations more disturbing is that the narrator participates in them.  Twice the narrator refers to Totsky as an unerring connoisseur of beauty, and he takes every opportunity to wax eloquent about how perfectly decent, dignified, and respecable Totsky is.  The narrator describes him as “an impressive, stately man” and that “one could not have enough of gazing at his plump white hands.”  The narrator calls Natasya Filippovna’s revolt against her treatment as “some sort of romantic indignation, God knows against whom or why, some insatiable feeling of contempt that leaps completely behind measure—in short, something highly ridiculous and inadmissible in decent society.”

This attitude toward Totsky is not Dostoevsky’s.  A dear childhood friend of Dostoevsky’s was abused and murdered, and he considers child molestation the worst crime possible.  The narrator’s playing up of Totsky’s rationalizations is a technique.  By going out of his way to emphasize Totsky’s respectability, Dostoevsky stokes inside me an even deeper sense of Totsky’s injustice.  Not only has Totsky wronged Nastasya, but everyone, even the narrator, is punishing her instead of him.  

This technique also brings me closer to Totsky.  If the narrator had decried him as a monster at every turn, I could distance myself from him.  But since the narrator lures me into the fleshy folds of Totsky’s minimizing, I can’t help but notice that it feels all-too-familiar.  It makes me wonder—what am I minimizing?

Of all The Idiot’s characters, Totsky is at a far end of the spectrum.  He has little sense of having double thoughts because the strength of his rationalizations has so drown out his awareness of bad thoughts.  That said, the very fact that he so regularly repeats these rationalizations indicates that he still has a conscience that he is trying to shout down.  

All of the characters vary in their awareness of their double thoughts.  Myshkin is perhaps the most aware.  When Myshkin tells Aglaya about double thoughts, she understands immediately.  “Prince Sch. and Evgeny Pavlych don’t understand anything about these two minds,” she says, and she mentions that her mother, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, understands.  

Nastasya Filippovna also has this awareness.  After she tortures Ganya by getting his father (an embarrassingly compulsive liar) to humiliate himself, Myshkin says, “You can’t be the way you pretended to be just now.”  Nastasya responds: “He guessed right, in fact, I’m not like that.”  This hints that Nastaya has two sides, and that she knows it.

The world of The Idiot is one in which every character is both good and evil, and every moment they have a choice on which thought they will act.  Or do they?  How much choice they have is unclear.  Many want to do good but feel unable.  

And this is the main tension of the novel.  Nearly every page is a pang of hunger for what might be called resurrection.  But how is it to happen?  As I read, I find myself hoping that it will happen through Myshkin.  I can’t be with him long without admiring his generosity, his readiness to forgive, and his ability to see the good in others.  When in Switzerland, he brought joy to the last days of an ostracized woman, Marie.  He has a remarkable capacity for happiness.  The way he loves Aglaya is simply by being delighted with her presence.  

I can’t help but wonder if Dostoevsky hopes for something similar.  He mentions in a letter to his niece that with Myshkin he wants to create a beautiful human being.  And years earlier, he declares that “beauty . . . is always useful.”  In the same essay, he writes:

“Suppose . . . that a certain man . . . had a look at the Apollo Belvedere and the god had imprinted himself in the young man’s soul by his majestic and infinitely beautiful image.  A seemingly unimportant fact: he stopped for a couple of minutes to admire the beautiful statue and went away. . . Perhaps a kind of internal change takes place at the impact of such beauty, at such a nervous shock, a kind of movement of particles or galvanic current that in one moment transforms what has been before into something different, a piece of ordinary iron into a magnet.  There are, of course, thousands of impressions in the world, but, surely, it is not for nothing that this sort of impression is a special one, the impression of a god.  It is surely not for nothing that such impressions remain for the rest of one’s life. . . Who knows whether among the many reasons that made him act one way and not another there was, unconsciously, his impression of the Apollo Belvedere he had seen twenty years earlier?”

Dostoevsky seems to believe, or at least to hope, that the mere image of godlike beauty can be transformative.  Halfway through The Idiot, Ippolit tells a story about a little old general who spent his life giving money and supplies to prisoners.  Ippolit speculates on what impact the old general had on the prisoners.  He says “they did not remember him all that warmly or in a very serious way.”  But some of the most hardened criminals 

“suddenly, out of the blue, at some point, and maybe only once in all of twenty years, would suddenly sigh and say: ‘And what’s with the little old general now, can he still be alive?’  He might even smile as he said it—and that was all.  But how do you know what seed has been sown forever in his soul by this ‘little old general’ whom he had not forgotten in twenty years?”

Myshkin also has a deep desire to help others—to transmit the goodness he has, or at least to plant seeds.  The question is, how effective is he?  Everyone is wondering this.  When he becomes engaged to Aglaya, her family can’t decide if he will be good for her or not. 

Even Myshkin doubts his ability to be helpful.  This must be partly why his heart sinks as he proposes to Aglaya.  Myshkin is perceptive enough to know when his efforts will acheive nothing.  Even though he knows nothing good will come from Aglaya’s confronting Nastasya Filippovna, he does little to stop it because he can perceive her determination.  Yet he doesn’t give up hope.  If he had, he would’ve left them all when he had the chance.

And indeed, at first, Myshkin’s ability to help others seems possible.  In a matter of minutes, he has a positive effect on the Epanchins’ valet.  But his biggest project is Nastasya Filippovna.  Her full name, Anastasia, means “resurrection.” Many times, the goodness in her—or as Myshkin would frame it, who she really is—seems to be getting the upper hand.  Nastasya wants to be good like Myshkin is.  She wants to stop living only and always out of hurt pride and to do something good.  Her desire to reliquish him to Aglaya seems to be an effort to “resurrect.”  She does relinquish him (though too late for him to be with Aglaya), but she immediately throws herself into the power of Rogozin, who to her can only mean despair.  As she foresees, Rogozin murders her.

When Myshkin finds her dead body, the narrator describes it in a way that makes me recall a painting that recurs throughout the novel: Hans Holbien’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb,”  in which Christ is a rotting corpse, with no hint that a resurrection is coming.  So when Nastasya is described in similar terms, I find myself longing for Nastasya to have some sort of resurrection—for her to have received Myshkin’s goodness in some way. 

But the novel ends on a Holy Saturday.  Resurrection isn’t seen, only longed for.  In a central passage in the novel, Ippolite says, 

“Columbus was happy not when he discovered America, but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew in their despair almost turned the ship back to Europe, right around!”

The Idiot encapsulates just such a moment—that despair, that death, that anticipation, right before the discovery of the New World.

But in the epilogue, Dostoevsky examines his characters to see if Myshkin managed to plant any seeds.  Most of the characters (Lebedev, Keller, Ganya, Ptitsyn, and Ippolit) remain unchanged.  Kolya, however, has “one of those impressions that remain forever and mark a permanent break in a young man’s life.”  Myshkin played a role in this change.  Aglaya, with her idealistic elopement, seems at least haunted by Myshkin’s beauty.  But most surprisingly, Evgeny Pavlovich, the confirmed cynic, the one with no awareness of his “double thoughts,” seems remarkably altered by Myshkin’s impression on him.  Myshkin may not have had the impact he hoped, but it would be hard to claim that he had zero positive impact.  What impact he has on me is harder to measure, but the fact that I keep coming back to this book suggests that that impact, too, is real.