Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot. 1869; 1915. Translated by Eva Martin, Produced by Martin Adamson et al., Project Gutenberg, 13 May 2017.
Dostoyevsky is probably my favorite novelist. The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, and The Possessed are three of the best novels ever written. Notes from Underground, White Nights, and other works by him are not bad either. I was a little put off when I started reading The Idiot. It did not seem up to his usual effect at first.
Unlike most of the works mentioned, the story begins with much less intensity. There is more of a narrative detachment than what we are used to with Dostoyevsky. I felt like I was reading something by Chekhov—who is also very good, but not in the way of Dostoyevsky.
Indeed, it reminded me a lot of Chekhov’s The Duel. There are a multiplicity of characters who are somewhat similar to one another. They are all either minor aristocracy or upper middle class Russians. There is an element of social climbing with all of them. Many of them are young. Much of the plot revolves around who will end up marrying whom—and why. Is it for love, for status, for social acceptance, for pleasing the parents?
Into this Petersburg society arrives the Prince Lef Nicolaievitch Muishkin, a.k.a. the idiot. There are two important features of this young man of twenty-six. One, he is a prince, the last of his family line, but his family has long ago lost its lands and fortune. All he has, then, is his title. Second, he has led a very sheltered life and is relatively naïve. This makes him incredibly honest. He is hard to dislike for that reason. He seems to have something good to say about everyone.
He is sometimes called an idiot because of his naïveté. He has a history of epilepsy. That is the reason he grew up apart from any society. The last four years he has been at a sanitarium in Switzerland receiving treatment for his affliction. In fact, in the novel, which covers about a year, he only has one seizure, and that is at a time when he has been unduly and unjustly distressed. The Swiss treatments have helped.
To appreciate the story, then, we have to consider a couple of traditions. First, there is the tradition of the “royal disease.” Julius Caesar was epileptic. That certainly did not stop him from rising to the top of Roman government. Shakespeare’s Macbeth has an apparent fit of madness. Lady Macbeth explains it away as a seizure, but, after all, he is a king, so, if anything, epilepsy is a sign of royalty. The epilepsy no doubt keeps the Prince from reaching his full potential though some would argue his honesty and goodness indicate he has a personal character that most people do not even try to attain. In that sense, he is royal also.
Second, in Russia there is the tradition of the village idiot. In that context the idiot was usually someone who was mentally retarded in some way but seen to be a kind of simple prophet. He would be tolerated and mocked, but occasionally he would say something that people took seriously. Parallels in literature might be Pip the cabin boy in Moby-Dick or the Fool in King Lear.
Still, the Prince is what Twain would call straightforward. He is a fool only because of his lack of worldliness. One might even be tempted to call him a Christ figure, except that Jesus of Nazareth was not naïve. Christ’s biographer asserts, “He himself knew what was in man” (John 2:25).
Having introduced our main character, much of the story resembles Chekhov because there is lots of dialogue. Most of what happens occurs in social settings, either a visit or a party of some kind. This reviewer would recommend the reader getting a list of characters such as this one. I had a little trouble distinguishing between two men who were both generals and often simply referred to as “the general.” There are two generals? Is this one Epanchin or Ivolgin?
In broad strokes, the Prince falls in love with two women. One, Nastasia Philipovna is a true beauty. She was orphaned but raised by a wealthy aristocrat Totski who takes her as his mistress when she is old enough. Even though she is beautiful and cultured, because she has been a “kept woman,” she is at best on the fringes of society. The Prince’s attraction to her comes more from compassion for her situation than any physical desire.
The other is Aglaia, the youngest of three daughters of General Epanchin. The General’s wife is a distant relative of the Prince who recalls seeing him once when he was a boy. They are the last two members of the once prominent Muishkin family. Aglaia is also quite attractive and would be considered strong and independent by the standards of her day.
On one very basic level, we can say that The Idiot has elements of a romance. In this case, though, it is the male protagonist who is faced with a choice. Perhaps because of his simplicity and honesty, the Prince does not even see this as a choice. He really seems to like everyone, even some men who lie to him and try to take advantage of him. Why can’t he be friends with both?
When he first arrives from Switzerland, he is penniless (kopekless?), and he does depend on the kindness of others, especially his cousin Lizaveta, Mrs. Epanchin. Soon, however, he learns that he has inherited a million rubles from a rich family friend. Now he is both titled and wealthy. This does not change his character at all, even though others will change in the way they treat him.
The Prince may be an “idiot” but he is a thinker. At one point he seems to be speaking for Dostoyevsky himself, who faced a firing squad only to be reprieved right before the men were to fire on him:
Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards. Our Lord Christ spoke of this anguish and dread. No! no! no! No man should be treated so, no man, no man! (326)
Elsewhere, Hippolyte, a youth of eighteen dying of tuberculosis says:
…they may consider me a madman, or a schoolboy, or, more likely, a man condemned to die, who thought it only natural to conclude that all men, excepting himself, esteem life far too lightly, live it far too carelessly and lazily, and are, therefore, one and all, unworthy of it. (6225)
Isn’t there truth to that? Why does the commonplace play Our Town continue to cause its audiences to weep? As Garrison Keillor says, “Thank you, Dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.” (125)
Totski resembles Svidrigailov from Crime and Punishment. Both men treat defenseless women and grils abominably. Svidrigailov’s “excuse” comes down to “God made me this way.” Don’t blame him, blame God. Totksi makes himself sound cultured and au courant:
At that time Dumas-fils’ beautiful work, La Dame aux Camélias—a novel which I consider imperishable—had just come into fashion. In the provinces all the ladies were in raptures over it, those who had read it, at least. Camellias were all the fashion. Everyone inquired for them, everybody wanted them; and a grand lot of camellias are to be got in a country town—as you all know—and two balls to provide for! (2361)
In other words, a lovely and popular novel romanticizes an affair with a courtesan. Everyone loved the story. I am living it out. What’s wrong with that?
Without going into too much detail, it is suggested that another person of questionable character is inspired by Madame Bovary.
There are some types we still see with us today. Lebedeff, who acts as a friend to the Prince but only to take advantage of him, sees himself as a scholar of Bible prophecy, trying to apply current events to the Book of Revelation:
Now for fifteen years at least I have studied the Apocalypse, and she agrees with me in thinking that the present is the epoch represented by the third horse, the black one whose rider holds a measure in his hand. It seems to me that everything is ruled by measure in our century; all men are clamouring for their rights; ‘a measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny.’ But, added to this, men desire freedom of mind and body, a pure heart, a healthy life, and all God’s good gifts. Now by pleading their rights alone, they will never attain all this, so the white horse, with his rider Death, comes next, and is followed by Hell. (3111)
One political rant sounds a lot like it could have been spoken in contemporary America:
I have often noticed that our Liberals never allow other people to have an opinion of their own, and immediately answer their opponents with abuse, if they do not have recourse to arguments of a still more unpleasant nature. (4609)
He will go on:
Russian liberalism is not an attack upon the existing order of things, but an attack upon the very essence of things themselves—indeed, on the things themselves; not an attack on the Russian order of things, but on Russia itself. My Russian liberal goes so far as to reject Russia; that is, he hates and strikes his own mother. Every misfortune and mishap of the mother-country fills him with mirth, and even with ecstasy. He hates the national customs, Russian history, and everything. If he has a justification, it is that he does not know what he is doing, and believes that his hatred of Russia is the grandest and most profitable kind of liberalism. (You will often find a liberal who is applauded and esteemed by his fellows, but who is in reality the dreariest, blindest, dullest of conservatives, and is not aware of the fact.) This hatred for Russia has been mistaken by some of our ‘Russian liberals’ for sincere love of their country, and they boast that they see better than their neighbours what real love of one’s country should consist in. But of late they have grown, more candid and are ashamed of the expression ‘love of country,’ and have annihilated the very spirit of the words as something injurious and petty and undignified. (5194-5199)
Simply substitute Russia and Russian for America and American, and a lot people would nod in assent right now. Patriotism is so deplorably bourgeois!
Prince Muishkin himself has one rant. But like the village idiot, no one really listens even though he is prophesying truly about Russia. It is not as politically detailed as similar observations in The Possessed, but it does reflect Russian culture. Indeed, he notes that the atheist is found primarily in the upper classes. When found among the “masses of people” it is “out of fanaticism.” (8067)
This fanaticism, which in the political context the Prince relates to socialism, opposes religion. He does see things as a Russian Orthodox believer, but the truth he speaks is broader.
Why, Socialism is the progeny of Romanism and of the Romanistic spirit. It and its brother Atheism proceed from Despair in opposition to Catholicism. It seeks to replace in itself the moral power of religion, in order to appease the spiritual thirst of parched humanity and save it; not by Christ, but by force. ‘Don’t dare to believe in God, don’t dare to possess any individuality, any property! Fraternité ou la Mort;1 two million heads. ‘By their works ye shall know them’—we are told. (8675)
There is a lot more. Like Dostoyevsky’s other great novels, the end is dynamic. It is worth wading through some of the dialogue and social pettiness to reach it. I am not going to give any of it away. As its end approaches, the novel reveals the big picture.
Let me leave the reader with one more thought on The Idiot. The Prince, the “idiot,” is like Roderick Usher in Poe’s famous tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” No, Lev Muishkin is not crazy, but on the symbolic level the two chracters are similar. Both represent the passing of the aristocracy. At one time, nobility cared for their country or their domains and protected the people and supported the arts.
Both Roderick and Lev are the last of their line. Poe’s story suggests that their time is past. A republic like America represents the future of mankind. Dostoyevsky suggests that the Russian aristocracy’s time is up also. They are more petty. An honest and sensitive prince like Muishkin is a throwback as well as an idiot. The question is, what will replace them? The ruthless military people and the ambitious businesspeople and the fanatical socialists all have major flaws. The prince seems to understand this. What can work? Can you pass him off as a moron, or is he really speaking as a prophet? Read The Idiot and see what he says.
N.B. References, except for from the Keillor book, are Kindle locations, not page numbers. Note also that Russian names are often transliterated differently by different translators. We are using the spellings from the translation we read by Eva Martin.
1 Brotherhood or death!
Keillor, Garrison. “State Fair.” Leaving Home. Penguin, 1989.