The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Unlike some other existentialist writings, which were exhaustive and convoluted, Dostoevsky’s longer novels never disappoint, never. I always appreciate his narrative more than the plaintive cry of Sartre.
“Place” has little importance in The Idiot.
Petersburg and the residential suburb of Pavlovsk, where most of the action occurs, are barely described. The contrast is eminently palpable if we compare this novel to its preceding novel, Crime and Punishment (1866), which is so saturated in place, in the streets, buildings, squares, and bridges of Petersburg, that the city becomes a living participant in events.
As a result, some would make a mistake to think that this lack of an objective “world” makes The Idiot an abstract ideological treatise. On the contrary, this book is perhaps the most physical and even physiological of Dostoevsky’s novels. There is little sense of a surrounding world or a wider human community. Yet, Russia is present in the novel not as a place but as a question— The essence of Russia, the role of Russia and the Russian Christ in Europe and in the world.
With the exclusion of almost all else, the dualities of interior and exterior, subjective and objective, place and community, Dostoevsky was able to concentrate on the important psychological modes of experience. With the exclusion of almost all else, the world of feelings was brought searingly to life.
The Idiot is a book that manages like no other to plunge fearlessly into suffering while at the same time illuminating the enduring, almost unspeakable tenderness of the human—The body is a site of tenderness, but also a problem that can’t be solved, a fraught place of ongoing crises, wars, injustices, failures. The desire for comfort and the reality of isolation and are unresolved.
The narrative starts with a young, epileptic man, Prince Myshkin, returning to St. Petersburg after years away for treatment in a sanitarium in Switzerland. The train windows are covered with fog—already there is an indication of the limits of human seeing. This initial scene, with the frail, displaced stranger returning home to a city in many ways now unfamiliar, haunts and informs the entire book. Every aspect of the novel, even its structure, conveys a sense of precariousness and instability much like the epilepsy that alternately tightens and loosens its grip on Prince Myshkin but never lets go. It is his body’s truth, this thrashing and upheaval he experiences in his deepest being and can never fully decode. His illness instills in him an intuitive awareness of others’ suffering, and a certain apartness anchored in shame and a built-in mistrust of stability. But this sense of apartness derives also from an aspect of the epilepsy less dark but no less troubling or difficult—the lightning-flash of ecstasy, almost unbearable, that seizes him in the few seconds before the convulsion. This flood of sudden joy and ultimate well-being exists utterly apart from the civic, ordered world, its freedom like no other…. Though indelible, it lasts only a few seconds before the brutal, excruciating swerve into seizure.
Reading this novel can feel like experiencing one long seizure or series of seizures. Fills with sudden, almost unbearable light and beauty. Trembles again—its whole world contingent, in doubt, a body of oscillations, restiveness, and vulnerability. This instability leads to an odd radiance, an almost-wild breaking free from the strictures of received categories and dichotomous thinking. As the book progresses, received notions of the real are thrashed, bruised, stunned, knocked down, changed. And so what is unsafe and crumbling also shines with lacerated promise.
To be honest, I didn’t like Prince Myshkin… the supposedly good, childlike Christ figure. All the other characters were wonderful: Aglaia, Kolya… even Rogozhin, blinded by passion but capable of sincere feeling and fidelity, he is a true lover, yet driven to madness and criminal behaviour. He admits to his crimes and accepts the following punishment.
But the protagonist Myshkin… is a religious fanatic, whose conviction is so narrow-minded that he hates other variations of Christian dogma even more than atheists. Is a Russian nationalist, believing in expanding Russian dogma to the West. Is an elitest, openly rejecting equality and democracy in favour of his own, idle class. Is utterly afraid of female sexuality and almost pathological in his attempt to ignore the fact that it exists, admiring childlike behaviour and the inexperienced virgins. What I did see in him is tenderness. He is in fact an idiot.
For me, part of the particular uncanniness of Dostoyevsky’s work lies in how even as he delves without hesitation or pity into the miserable, cruel, violent, extreme, his books enact a kind of tender holding of those who suffer and live on the margins, each cruel or violent act backlit by the human capacity for tenderness and wonder.
Every time I read his work, I’ll be reminded of how all great books destabilize both reader and writer in one way or another. Dostoyevsky’s unprotected tenderness of the margin, for one, demands of itself nothing less than a radical re-seeing of the world.
