Myshkin imaginatively reexperiences the universal and ineluctable tragedy of death with the full range of his conscious sensibilities, but this does not prevent him, at the same time, from marveling in ecstasy before the joy and wonder of existence. Indeed, the dialectic of this unity is the point of the story about the man reprieved from execution—the story that embodies the most decisive event in Dostoevsky’s own life. Most dreadful of all in those last moments, Myshkin says, was the regret of the poor victim over a wasted life and his frantic desire to be given another chance. “What if I were not to die? . . . I would turn every minute into an age; . . . I would not waste one!” But on being asked what happened to this man after his reprieve, Myshkin ruefully admits that his frenzied resolution was not carried out in practice:
“So it seems it’s impossible really to live ‘counting each moment,’ ” says Alexandra Epanchina. “For some reason it’s impossible.”
“Yes, for some reason it’s impossible,” repeated Myshkin. “So it seemed to me also . . . and yet somehow I can’t believe it.” (8: 52–53)
Here is the point at which Myshkin’s love of life fuses with his death-haunted imagination into the singular unity of his character. For Myshkin feels the miracle and wonder of life so strongly precisely because he lives “counting each moment” as if it were the last. Both his joyous discovery of life and his profound intuition of death combine to make him feel each moment as one of absolute and immeasurable ethical choice and responsibility. The Prince, in other words, lives in the eschatological tension that was (and is) the soul of the primitive Christian ethic, whose doctrine of totally selfless agape was conceived in the same perspective of the imminent end of time.4
There is a constant play of allusion around the Prince that places him in such a Christian context. Rogozhin, the merchant’s son still close to the religious roots of Russian life, labels him a yurodivy, a holy fool, and though the gentlemanly and well-educated prince bears no external resemblance to these eccentric figures, he does possess their traditional gift of spiritual insight, which operates instinctively, below any level of conscious awareness or doctrinal commitment. The idyllic New Testament note is struck strongly in the Prince’s story of the poor, abused, consumptive Swiss peasant girl Marie, who had been reviled as a fallen woman and whose last days the Prince and his band of children brighten with the light of an all-forgiving love. In this way the figure of the Prince is surrounded with a pervasive Christian penumbra that continually illuminates his character and serves to locate the exalted nature of his moral and spiritual aspirations.
The story concerning Marie also brings sharply to the foreground another leitmotif, one that may be called the “two loves”—the one Christian, compassionate, nonpossessive, and universal, the other secular, ego-gratifying, possessive, and particular. Alexandra Epanchina’s suggestion that the Prince must have been “in love” prompts him to tell the story of Marie. But while the young woman was referring to the second kind of normal, worldly love, the Prince’s “love,” as he explains, was only of the first type. Even the children clustered around the Prince were confused by this difference and happily believed that the Prince was “in love” with Marie when they saw him kissing her. But “I kissed her,” he explains, “not because I was in love with her but because I was sorry for her” (8: 60). The confusion of the children (and Myshkin is also a good bit of a child) will anticipate his own entrapment in the “two loves,” whose mutually incompatible feelings and obligations will later result in the Prince’s disastrous inability to choose between Nastasya and Aglaya.
The world into which the Prince is plunged upon his unexpected arrival in St. Petersburg is locked in the grip of conflicting egoisms, a world in which the desire for wealth and social advantage, for sexual satisfaction, for power over others, dominates and sweeps away all other humane feelings. All these motives are given full play in the intrigue, which in Part I revolves around the drama of Nastasya Filippovna (who, in retrospect, will survive as Dostoevsky’s major female protagonist) and her fatal entanglement with Prince Myshkin.
Her appearance has been preceded by a narrative of her past as a destitute but aristocratic orphan, sequestered and violated at sixteen and kept in sexual bondage by Totsky. In contrast to the conventional literary type of the betrayed, fallen, but ultimately redeemable woman—like the heroine of La dame aux camelias, a novel by Dumas the Younger that Totsky naturally admired—Nastasya is cast by Dostoevsky as degraded in the eyes of society but blamelessly pure, not unlike Clarissa Harlowe. At age twenty she descends on Petersburg as a self-avenger, determined to assert herself against the terrorized Totsky’s self-protective scheme to pawn her off with a dowry on the greedy Ganya Ivolgin. This would clear the way for Totsky’s own marriage to one of the two older Epanchin daughters. Facing the insurmountable contradiction of inner purity and her outward disgrace, Nastasya Filippovna as a character is irremediably doomed, and she will function to bring down “her savior,” the Prince, in her own tragic end. Prince Myshkin first hears her name in the opening train scene. He is immediately spellbound by her haunting portrait displayed at the Ivolgins, which he kisses surreptitiously, and finally meets her (as does the reader) there.
Nastasya’s fate is presumably to be sealed in the tumultuous birthday-party scene at her dwelling that climaxes Part I. At that time, she is supposedly to decide whether or not to marry Ganya, although her previous behavior makes it highly unlikely that she would be ready to accept Totsky’s scheme. On the contrary, after indirectly exposing the ridicule and venality of her assembled guests, Nastasya is finally given full voice to evoke her past subjection and forced debauchery (quite graphic for its time, but with enough suspension points to gratify the censors) as well as her suicidal urges. Nastasya seemingly turns to the Prince to decide the question of her marriage to Ganya because, as she says, the Prince “believed in me at first sight and I in him” (8: 131). But when the tenderhearted smitten Prince proclaims his belief in her purity and offers her his hand in marriage, and a fortune, she rejects him as well, refusing to emulate Totsky as a violator of “innocence,” and a “a cradle-snatcher,” even though Myshkin is the miraculous realization of her hopeless adolescent dreams. Through her own rejection of Myshkin, she has now internalized her outward stigmata of shame and repeatedly claims a streetwalker-slut identity as she runs off with the passionate Rogozhin to certain self-destruction, after defiantly throwing the purchase money (wrapped in the Stock Exchange News) into the fire. The satisfaction of humiliating and thus of symbolically debasing Totsky and all her respectable “admirers” at the same time proves stronger than the Prince’s appeal to her need for disinterested compassion and his recognition of her essential purity.
Although no longer an active protagonist, her half-demented, shadowy persona haunts and indirectly sets in motion all the subsequent peripeties of the plot, from Myshkin’s following her to Pavlovsk to the pantomime reenactment of the aborted wedding. Finally, there is the suicidal flight with Rogozhin. A mysterious coda to her tragic destiny is provided by Myshkin’s finding a copy of Madame Bovary in her abandoned rooms, the tale of another hopeless suicide but in this case of an adulteress betrayed by Romantic fantasies.
From the beginning of Part II, the Prince is cast in a tragic (or at least self-sacrificial) role; and the inner logic of his character now requires that the absolute of Christian love should conflict irreconcilably with the inescapable demands of normal human life. This altered projection of the Prince also leads to the introduction of a new thematic motif, which first appears in the strange dialogue between Myshkin and Rogozhin about religious faith. Somewhat improbably, a copy of Holbein’s Dead Christ turns up in Rogozhin’s living room, and, with no transition whatever, the erstwhile drunken rowdy of Part I is shown as tormented not only by Nastasya but also by a crisis of religious doubt. We learn here that “a painting of our Savior who had just been taken from the Cross” has begun to undermine Rogozhin’s religious faith, and Myshki
n attempts to allay Rogozhin’s disquietude in a lengthy and crucial speech.
This speech consists of four anecdotes, grouped in pairs, that illustrate that the human need for faith and for the moral values of conscience based on faith transcend both the plane of rational reflection and that of empirical evidence. On the one hand, there is the learned atheist whose arguments Myshkin cannot refute; on the other, there is the murderer who utters a prayer for forgiveness before slitting his victim’s throat. The point of these stories is to exhibit religious faith and moral conscience existing as an ineradicable attribute in the Russian people independent of reason, or even of any sort of conventional social morality. “The essence of religious feeling,” Myshkin explains, “does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. . . . But the chief thing is that you will notice it more clearly and quickly in the Russian heart than anywhere else” (8: 184).
This thematic motif is of key importance for understanding the remainder of the book. For in depicting religious faith and the stirrings of conscience as the irrational and instinctive needs of “the Russian heart,” whose existence shines forth in the midst of everything that seems to deny or negate its presence, Dostoevsky is surely indicating the proper interpretation of Myshkin’s ultimate failure and tragic collapse. The values of Christian love and religious faith that Myshkin embodies are too deep a necessity of the Russian spirit to be negated by his practical failure, any more than they are negated by reason, murder, or sacrilege. If Holbein’s picture and Myshkin’s tirade are introduced so awkwardly and abruptly at this point, it is probably because Dostoevsky wished immediately to establish the framework within which the catastrophic destiny awaiting the prince would be rightly understood.
The thematic motif of religious faith is also what saves the episodes involving Myshkin’s encounter with the group of so-called Young Nihilists from becoming merely an acrid satire against the radicals of the mid-1860s. Dostoevsky wisely focuses the spotlight on the dying young consumptive Ippolit Terentyev, who detaches himself from the group to rise to major heights and become the first in the remarkable gallery of metaphysical rebels that Dostoevsky created. For Ippolit is revolting not against the iniquities of a social order but, anticipating Kirillov in Demons and Ivan Karamazov, against a world in which death, and hence immitigable human suffering, is an inescapable reality. Ippolit is another quasi-double for Myshkin—one who shares his obsession with death and his ecstatic sense of life, yet lacks the Prince’s sustaining religious faith in an ultimate world-harmony. For this reason, Ippolit cannot achieve the self-transcendence that is the secret of the prince’s moral effulgence and the response he evokes in others.
Ippolit’s semihysterical “Necessary Explanation” is composed to contain all the main features of Myshkin’s Weltanschauung—the reverence for the infinite beauty and value of life—but combined with an opposite human attitude. His preoccupation with death does not lessen but strengthens his self-concern, and turns it into a pathetic megalomania, as can be seen from the touchingly incongruous epigraph, “après moi le deluge!” that he appends to his “Necessary Explanation” (8: 321). Instinctively, Ippolit’s feelings are on the side of the victims of social injustice; and when he is carried on the current of such benevolent feelings, he admits “that I forgot my death sentence, or rather did not come to think of it and even did work” (8: 328). Only such concern with others can ease the tragedy of Ippolit’s last days, but he finally abandons all such endeavors to brood over his own condition. Death, the universal portion, he comes to regard as a personal insult and “humiliation” aimed at him by “nature,” or rather by the creator of a world that requires the individual’s consent to the indignity and injustice of being destroyed.
The thematic contrast between Ippolit and the Prince is brought out most forcefully in their differing reactions to the key religious symbol of the book, Holbein’s Dead Christ. Holbein’s picture, as we have seen, had led Myshkin to affirm the irrational “essence of religious feeling” as an ineradicable component of the human spirit; but for the Young Nihilist, it is only a confirmation of his own sense of the cruel meaninglessness of life. To Ippolit, the picture conveys a sense of nature “in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction,” which “has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all of nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the advent of that Being” (8: 339). Ippolit simply cannot grasp how the first disciples of Christ, who witnessed in reality what he sees only at the remove of art, could still have continued to believe in the triumph over death that Christ proclaimed, but this is precisely the mystery of faith to which Ippolit is closed, and whose absence poisons his last days with bitterness and despair.
Ippolit, like the other characters, instinctively regards the Prince as the standard for his own conscience. The Prince’s “humility,” however, is the ideological antithesis of Ippolit’s “revolt,” and it is Myshkin who must bear the brunt of the Young Nihilist’s vituperative shifts of feeling. “Can’t I simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?” Ippolit asks caustically, in rejecting the Prince’s “Christian meekness” (8: 343). This question comes from such a depth of suffering in Ippolit that no offense on his part can lessen his right to an absolute claim on the indulgence of the other characters. The Prince understands that, for Ippolit, the untroubled possession of life by others is a supreme injustice, which should burden them with guilt and a sense of moral obligation.
Hence the Prince’s moving reply to Ippolit’s question on how best to die: “Pass by us and forgive us our happiness,” says Myshkin in a low voice (8: 433). Hence, too, the macabre quality of gallows humor in several of the scenes with Ippolit, the grating callousness that some of the characters display toward his plight. No pages of Dostoevsky are more original than those in which he tries to combine the utmost sympathy for Ippolit with a pitiless portrayal of what may be called “the egoism of dying.” Dostoevsky wishes to show how the egocentricity that inspired Ippolit’s “revolt” also impels him to a behavior that cuts off the very sympathy and love he so desperately craves. By turns pathetic and febrilely malignant, the unfortunate boy dies offstage, unconsoled and inconsolable, “in a state of terrible agitation” (8: 508).
In addition to Ippolit, The Idiot is filled with all sorts of minor characters related to the main plot lines only by the most tenuous of threads. But it is not too difficult to see the thematic rationale of most of these episodes even if, structurally, they come and go with very little motivation. Many of them have the function of the comic interludes in medieval mystery plays, which parody the holy events with reverent humor and illustrate the universality of their influence. Others serve to bring out facets of the prince that Dostoevsky was unable to develop from the central romantic intrigue.
Lebedyev, General Ivolgin, and the “boxer” Keller make up a group with common characteristics—a group that affirms, sometimes in a grotesquely comic form, that the inner moral struggle precipitated by the Prince in the major figures also can be found among the smaller fry. To be sure, Dostoevsky abandons all attempts to maintain any psychological verisimilitude in the case of Lebedyev and Keller; their mechanical shuttling between devotion to the Prince and petty swindling and skullduggery sometimes reaches the point of self-parody. This is particularly true of Lebedyev, transformed from the randy scrounger of Part I into the compassionate figure who shares Myshkin’s horror of capital punishment ands prays for the soul of the guillotined Mme Du Barry.
Without ceasing to be an unscrupulous scoundrel, ready to sell his soul for a ruble, Lebedyev also piously interprets the Apocalypse and rails against the “materialism” of the modern world in drunken tirades. His long mock-serious historical “anecdote” on the famines of the Middle Ages is manifestly a burlesque exemplum of the significance of his character and that of others like him. Similar to the starving
medieval “cannibal”—who devoured sixty fat juicy monks in the course of his life and then, despite the prospect of the most horrible tortures, voluntarily confessed his crimes—the behavior of Lebedyev and his ilk testifies to the miraculous existence of conscience in the most unlikely places.
Another exemplum is the broken-down Falstaffian General Ivolgin, whom Dostoevsky uses very effectively in Part I to parody the “decorum” surrounding Nastasya’s life, and whose colossal mythomania is a protection against the sordid reality of his moral and social decline. The general dies of a stroke brought on by his torments over having stolen Lebedyev’s wallet, torments caused not so much by the theft itself—he returned the wallet untouched—but by the fear that he would henceforth be regarded as a thief in his own family. The completely fictitious narrative of how, as a young boy, the general served as a page to Napoleon and used his influence to motivate the French retreat from Moscow in 1812 is an irresistible example of Dostoevsky’s too little used talent for high-flying comic extravagance.
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