The Idiot (4 page)

More remarkable still, however, is the extent to which the notes and plans show novelistic dead ends, character traits and events rejected from the final version, as Dostoyevsky discards possibilities both extremely sensational and novelistically conventional. The future Prince Myshkin in early versions rapes his adopted sister (the future Nastasya Filippovna), sets fire to their house, is a figure of proud self-mastery, a figure based on Shakespeare’s Iago and a wife-murderer. Nastasya Filippovna herself and her rival for the affections of Prince Myshkin, Aglaya Yepanchin, show similar instability, the former - as rape victim (in one version by the Idiot, in another by his handsome brother, cut from the final text) who marries the prince and runs off to a brothel, the latter in vacillating relationships with the prince, with Nastasya Filippovna and with Ganya Ivolgin.

Dostoyevsky struggled with these possibilities throughout the a
utumn of 1867, eventually rejecting the biographical development of his future hero’
s oppressive past, the most brutal events and a number of the h
ero’s family entanglements. The novel became, thereby, much less a Gothic thri
ller or a work of social Romanticism, in which the characters a
re crushed by the circumstances of their milieu. He discarded one false start to the
novel before starting anew in early December. By 18 December a
new novel had taken shape from these confused beginnings, and
by 5 January 1868 be was able to send off the first five chapters of Part One to
The Russian Herald;
two more chapters followed on 11 January, and the first journa
l instalment was complete; he had written nearly a hundred page
s in less than a month.
¹²
The remainder of Part One constituted th
e second, February, instalment. As was often the case in his years as a serial novelist, Dostoyevsky met his deadline, but allowed himself no time to correct the proofs of the instalment. Living abroad further limited his opportunity to make last-minute changes.

Discarding the bric-à-brac of conventionally sensational fiction opened the way for Dostoyevsky to undertake the radical novelistic gamble that lies at the centre of the finished novel. In a letter to his friend Apollon Maikov, Dostoyevsky spelled out the direction that his writing had taken him:

With the privilege of hindsight we can look back over the notebooks and see this solution taking shape, as the hero becomes a prince and a holy fool (a type of Eastern Orthodox saint, particularly prevalent in Russia, who imitates Christ in extreme humility and who speaks truth to the powerful of the world) and, finally, in a cryptic notebook entry from 10April: ‘Prince Christ’ (9:253).

Dostoyevsky well understood the problem of depicting positive characters, as he had witnessed Gogol’s failure with the sequel to
Dead Souls
(usually published as Part Two of the novel in English translation), the exemplary landowners of which he had himself mocked. Chernyshevsky’s no less exemplary and no less wooden ‘new people’ in
What Is to Be Done?
had won acceptance, but on ideological, not aesthetic grounds, and Dostoyevsky knew that a Christ-like hero would win him little praise from the radical intelligentsia. To place such a character at the centre of his novel was, indeed, a gamble, probably the greatest of Dostoyevsky’s career, more even than the theodicy that is part and parcel of
The Brothers Karamazov,
which also ran counter to the prevailing scepticism of the intelligentsia, but was undertaken at a time when he held a much more secure place in public opinion.

Dostoyevsky was gambling, moreover, not only with his finances and with his literary future, but with his most sacred beliefs. Well before he immersed himself in Orthodox theology and the history of Orthodoxy, before he became friendly with Orthodox thinkers and clerics in the 1870s, he had developed an image of Christ that was inextricably joined in his mind with beauty, truth, brotherhood and Russia. He did not stake this image and these beliefs lightly. Nor did he turn to personal experience - epilepsy, near-execution - for plot material in any simple or straightforward fashion. Like his faith and his image of Christ these experiences are worked into intricate, non-obvious and non-didactic elements of plot and characterization. Cherished ideas - such as the fear that the modern world lacks a positive guiding idea - appear in the mouths of buffoons, such as the corrupt schemer Lebedev. Truth becomes something a character tells by accident, as another buffoon, General Ivolgin, does with Aglaya. A consumptive fourteen-year-old, Ippolit, will make a mockery of the beauty and harmony of God’s world, and, as the other characters mock him, the prince will be rendered silent.

Dostoyevsky’s inclination to make Prince Myshkin an ‘innocent’ , not primarily a figure of comic excess, might have entailed a particular treatment, one which goes back to the philosophical tales of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire’s
Candide
(1759), in which the innocent character becomes a satiric instrument for revealing
the corruption of society, the inadequacy of its value systems or the stultifying nature of its institutions. Certainly the novel uses him to this end, as he is confronted with calculating capitalists, scheming members of high society, corrupt bureaucrats and other denizens of the nineteenth-century novel’s St Petersburg. But he far exceeds this satiric role, as soon becomes apparent in the novel’s quickly paced, dazzlingly comprehensive first part.

Readers familiar with nineteenth-century Russian novels will be struck by the intensity of the novel’s opening: not in a carriage, but in a railway car, not on a warm summer day, but in cold, foggy November. Thrown together in a third-class compartment, a dissolute merchant’s son (Rogozhin), a know-it-all bureaucrat (Lebedev) and an ethereal young man (Prince Myshkin) immediately begin telling the most intimate details of their lives. There is no escape from the crowded, uncomfortable situation, and the prince can recall the beauty of Switzerland only as an ecstatic act, for there is no relieving view of the countryside through the opaque windows. This scene uses the techniques for which Dostoyevsky has become justly famous: dramatic confrontations, developed in fragments of conversation, with relatively little background biographical development of the characters. The time spanned by the first part will only be fifteen hours; there are only ten days’ worth of narrated action over the whole course of the novel. Compressing the action of the novel into such a brief time span allows the author to rub their psyches raw. Rogozhin by the end of the first part will not have slept for forty-eight hours; the third part will keep the prince and many of the other characters awake through the night, which culminates in Ippolit’s failed attempt at suicide.

Part One takes familiar novelistic structures and sets them spinning. The wealth which differentiates characters is no longer hereditary and based in agriculture. It is measured by money, unprecedentedly large sums gained and lost with hyperbolic speed. The narrator and many of the characters are obsessed with it. Ptitsyn and the Terentyev widow are loan sharks; General Ivolgin and Ferdyshchenko are spongers; General Yepanchin rents almost all of his house and is caught up in his enterprises; Ganya believes that money will buy him talent and lend him the ‘originality’ he sadly lacks. Family groupings are introduced only to show their fragility; as an institution the family is nowhere in Dostoyevsky’s fiction so vulnerable. The family as a traditional centre of patriarchal life becomes, instead, the locus of greed, falsehood and contention. The Rogozhins cheat each other, and one brother cuts the gold tassels from their father’s coffin. The Myshkins are dying out. Ganya Ivolgin is ashamed of his father and makes him use the back staircase; his younger brother, Kolya, wants to disown his family. Totsky raises his ward, Nastasya Filippovna, only to make her his adolescent concubine. The Yepanchins are the most conventionally stable of the families, yet even here the three headstrong girls control their parents, and, as the novel opens, General Yepanchin is hoping to purchase Nastasya Filippovna’s favours with a very exp
ensive necklace. The individual characters dream of, and achieve, extremes of mobility. The two generals cross paths as they ascend and descend the social hierarchy: General Yepanchin, a private’s son, has become a wealthy investor, while General Ivolgin has become a drunkard and buffoon who maintains his status only in his hyperbolic lies.

Already in this opening part Dostoyevsky develops the extreme egocentricity of his characters, both major and minor, and contrasts it with that of the prince. These other characters, in seeking to define themselves and realize their ambitions, resist patterns and definitions imposed on them by others, lashing out verbally and physically. Dostoyevsky introduces the theme of illness in this part - epilepsy (the Prince), consumption (the Swiss girl, Marie and Ippolit) and self-destructiveness (‘hara-kiri’, Nastasya Filippovna). These three illnesses will come to dominate Parts Two, Three and Four of the novel, respectively, as physical, psychological and philosophical problems.

Among these unusual characters the prince stands out as the most unusual, precisely because he eludes the understanding of the others. Unashamedly ignorant of social conventions, he turns immediately to large, ultimate issues, indecorously talking of a seduced girl and executions in the Yepanchin drawing room. Ungoverned by a sense of shame, he is the only character in the novel who can laugh at himself. He is, without trying to be, unsystematic, and this frustrates his interlocutors, who see him as someone to distrust (as a sponger, a fraud), an ideologue, an object of mockery, a cause of irritation and an easy dupe. His approach to art captures his artlessness when he tells Adelaida: ‘I think one simply looks and paints’ (Part One, chapter 5). The Prince calls forth a ‘dialectical’ pattern, as the narrator calls it (Part Two, chapter 5), or ‘double thoughts’, as the Prince calls them (Part Two, chapter 11) in the adult characters throughout the novel, bringing out the worst in them, the best, and again the worst. Thus Rogozhin will call him a ‘holy fool’, offer him clothes, exchange crosses with him, only to try to slit his throat; General Yepanchin will suspect him, welcome him with money, then plan to trap him. Ganya will become irritated with him, slap him, beg forgiveness, and then try to exploit him. The Yepanchin girls will mock him, accept him and confide in him, but ultimately turn away.

It becomes clear early on that the prince has a special part to play among the characters of the novel. Because he will not be offended, does not compete with people and does not judge them, he has the ability to defuse tense situations and quarrels, if only the other characters will respond to this in a positive fashion, appreciating his gentleness and sharing his ecstatic sense of joy, as in the passage on the donkey or in his story about the mother taking delight in her child. It is his tragedy that very few characters, such as the Swiss children, can accept him in these terms. The others fit him into their own patterns of distrust, self-hatred, lying and fraud
. They project their corruption and tortuous psychology on to him. Totsky, the most corrupt, will suspect that the Prince is also on the make.

All of the failed interpretations and poisoned relationships come together in the final four chapters of Part One, at Nastasya Filippovna’s party, which, together with the epileptic seizure in Part Two, Ippolit’s rebellion in Part Three and Aglaya’s meeting with with Nastasya Filippovna in Part Four, provides some of Dostoyevsky’s most intense writing. Here at Nastasya Filippovna’s not only do we have the relationships and themes gathered around the fireplace, we have almost all of the characters, except the Yepanchin women, together with the hatreds and resentments that have been brewing for nine years and 200 pages. The ‘scandalous scene’
(skandal
in Russian) is a favourite compositional device in Dostoyevsky’s mature fiction. This one, like others, has four moments: (1) the characters come together in a fever pitch of excitement, already resenting and fearing each other; (2) some explosion occurs on various psychological, social, political or religious levels; (3) the characters challenge and expose each other, uttering extreme statements and wounding each other psychologically and even physically; (4) the characters then fly off in different directions and configurations, to prepare for the next ‘scandalous scene’. The Dostoyevskian scandalous scene joins the subjective, selfish motivations of the individual characters to the broader philosophical issues. Thus the principal one in Part Two with Burdovsky and the ‘post-nihilists’ involves economics and politics; the one in Part Three with Ippolit involves philosophy and religion. But this first great scandalous scene keeps to the social, economic and moral issues of the first part of the novel, including the themes of illness and love.

At the centre of this confrontation is the breathtakingly beautiful Nastasya Filippovna, whose anger burns white hot from the narratives told for Ferdyshchenko’s game. Totsky and General Yepanchin have each promised to tell the truth for the novelty of it, and each has come up with a highly ‘literary’ and ultimately self-flattering piece of trivia. Meanwhile, Totsky has refused to admit that his violation of the teenaged Nastasya Filippovna was an unbelievably shameful act. The narrator shows her listening to his account with flashing eyes, and we know she will make him pay. Surrounded by the three men who love her in terms of the three kinds of love that Dostoyevsky outlined in his notebooks, vain (Ganya), passionate (Rogozhin) and Christ-like (the prince), each offering more money than the one before, Nastasya Filippovna snaps. Why can she not accept the prince’s love? The answer shows once again the working of Dostoyevskian psychology, as she vacillates between her role as victim (which implicates Totsky) and her role as moral agent (which implicates herself). By rejecting the offers she makes it impossible for Totsky to be free to make an advantageous marriage with the oldest Yepanchin girl, thereby taking vengeance on her molester. By rejecting the prince’s title and fortune, she can rise above all of society’s values, showing that
she is not for sale. The prince has compassionately negated her declaration of independence, that she is ‘in charge’ (Part One, chapter 14) by declaring her ill, ‘in a fever’ (Part One, chapter 16), and not responsible for her situation. She retaliates by calling him ill in return, and she rejects the opportunity to break out of her five-year cycle of humiliating herself and others. A bystander aptly compares her act to the Japanese ritual of hara-kiri.