The Idiot (5 page)

Part One of
The Idiot
represents Dostoyevsky’s writing at its best. But he concluded it not really knowing where to proceed from the concluding scandalous scene, and the flurry of ‘plans’ in his notebooks did not immediately help him. He did not have an instalment for the March issue of
The Russian Herald,
and the plotting of the novel moves fitfully forward through the next two parts. Two of the novel’s most intriguing and powerful characters, Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna, the characters who best understand the prince, are absent from most of these central sections, and remain in the reader’s mind largely through rumour and letters.

In his desperation to continue, Dostoyevsky hit upon a mode of narration that he would develop further in
The Devils
and in
The Brothers Karamazov.
Although the narrator occasionally has the power of omniscience, the power to enter the minds of the characters, for the most part the story is told by a chronicler-narrator who follows closely upon the events, reporting them in terms of the characters’ own understanding of them. He sometimes learns of events long after they happen, and he registers material that he does not analyse: rumours, visits, letters. This technique forces the reader to try to see beyond the narrator, who, as becomes clear from his rather wordy and inappropriate digression on the ‘practical man’ at the opening of Part Three, becomes progressively inadequate to the complexity of the situation. The narrator opts out of explaining the really difficult matters, pontificating instead on things he can comprehend, such as the social types of his time. He would be adequate to a standard Victorian novel of manners, perhaps, or to a newspaper column on contemporary life, but his limited understanding is not adequate to these characters and situations. In his confusion the narrator often gives us the illusion of plottedness - he refers to meetings of characters we never see, such as the meetings between Ippolit and Rogozhin. But we often do not learn what happens and are left with a vague sense of suspense. Of the six months that elapse between Part One and Part Two, we learn of only a few events, and these from rumours or from brief reminiscences of the characters in their conversations. Readers are compelled to speculate, infer and, increasingly, explain and piece together the novel for themselves. This mode of narration constitutes a daring risk on the author’s part, but it is a brilliant solution to his problems with the plot, a way of getting his readers to share the burden of putting all of these characters and incidents together. He asks his readers to reach back hundreds of pages to recall details, scenes and important dialogue, a difficult enough task for the modern reader of this one-volume edition. Imagine the burden that it placed upon the or
iginal readers of the serialized version, who had to read the novel over the course of a year!

Dostoyevsky picked up the threads of his novel not so much through conventional plotting as through the introduction of a few new characters and new themes, as he underscores the sickness of the novel’s world with reference to two different diseases: epilepsy (Part Two) and consumption (Part Three). Confrontations between the prince and Rogozhin (Part Two) and between the prince and Ippolit (Part Three) bring themes and illness into sharp focus. Both serve to take
The Idiot
outside the bounds of the family novel that it becomes when it centres on the prince’s growing intimacy with the Yepanchins, with Aglaya in particular. Ippolit and Rogozhin are similar to each other in several ways that make them ideal figures for the discussion of ultimate issues. Both live outside polite society and lack Radomsky’s polished irony and Mrs Yepanchin’s common sense. Each lives on the brink of death, madness and destruction, like the prince himself. Rogozhin’s negation of life by violent passion and murder parallels Ippolit’s negation of life by blasphemy and attempted suicide. They give us two visions of ugliness set against the prince’s ecstatic sense of beauty and life: Rogozhin’s dark house, haunted by the sect of Castrates, Ippolit’s excruciatingly terrifying monster. Each character is developed in connection with a reproduction of Holbein’s 1522 painting ‘Christ in the Tomb’.

To Rogozhin the prince speaks, Christ-like, in parables, which he does not interpret. It becomes clear that his is a religion of ecstasy or rejoicing, not of rituals, institutions or formalized precepts. As the prince’s epileptic seizure is about to begin, he faces the possibility that his sense of joy, hope and higher understanding might be nothing more than a fleeting product of his illness, like the mental darkness and idiocy that threatened him in its wake (Part Two, chapter 5). Here and elsewhere, he does not succumb to the possibility.

More intellectual than Rogozhin, Ippolit represents the spirit of negation on a conscious, premeditated, rational level. It is Ippolit, whose consumption dooms him to a life of endless contemplation, who draws the most negative meaning from Holbein’s portrait. Rogozhin owns the reproduction and is aware that it is special, but cannot analyse its effect. Ippolit, the former student, understands the full horror of the portrait’s message, that even the most perfect and beautiful of men is subject to the impersonal, monstrous laws of nature. The painting would seem even more terrifying to Ippolit because its Christ looks so consumptive, so pained and wasted.

Dostoyevsky arranges Ippolit’s confrontation with the prince with an elegance and symmetry that are rare in this novel. The two of them are each on the brink of death. Each has an illness which can eventuate in madness, each has had doubts about the justice of God’s world, and each has felt alienated from nature’s ‘feast’ (Part Three, chapter 7). Yet
they respond very differently. The prince embraces nature in a leap of faith, while Ippolit perceives himself apart from nature and hates the prince for his love of life. The prince sees compassion as the only law of existence; the pronoun ‘I’ appears infrequently in his discourse, while Ippolit sees suicide as the only meaningful act he can complete, and his discourse is replete with the first-person pronoun. The prince suffers from the sacred illness; his is the psychology of epilepsy. Ippolit’s consumption - a slow, painful wasting disease - drives him to irritability, and, by the end of the novel, he has become insufferable.

Ippolit’s reading of his ‘Necessary Explanation’ is a savage scene. Everyone is drunk, including the prince and Ippolit, who have each had three glasses of champagne in quick succession. Everyone is exhausted and has been awake for many hours. The raucous and generally uninvited guests are waiting to see Ippolit die and mock him. He is abandoned by his family. The narrative stresses his bad luck, and the prince can only ask his forgiveness, not provide a counter-argument. Meanwhile, Part Three’s argument in favour of a ‘binding idea’ is delivered by Lebedev. His critique of modern secular civilization is presented as a parody of a modern legal defence, that is, Dostoyevsky shows us one institution (the church) through the rhetoric of another (the legal system), in the words and intonations of a drunkard. Life and joy are a matter of forgiving absurdity. Christ’s promise of redemption is as yet unfulfilled, and the Holbein portrait remains the very image of this unfulfilment.

Problems of understanding, truth and falsehood dominate Part Four, and the reader must face them with even less help from the chronicler-narrator than in Parts Two and Three. The sequence of events becomes more difficult to follow, their significance even harder to comprehend. The narrator gives up, devoting his attention to secondary characters and allowing that ‘sometimes it is best for the narrator to confine himself to a simple exposition of events’ (Part Four, chapter 1). By chapter 9 he has abdicated the authority to explain the prince’s failure with Aglaya to Radomsky, whose understanding is, by this time, more limited than the reader’s and grounded in a series of inadequate determinist propositions (nerves, epilepsy, the St Petersburg weather, etc.). Aglaya, too, has failed to understand him, grounding her sense of his extraordinary nature in a series of conventionally heroic poses: knight, duelist, judge.

Aglaya’s treatment of the prince in Part Four is one of the most salient of a series of misunderstandings and rejections, rejections which call to mind Nastasya Filippovna’s insightful comment in a letter to Aglaya that Christ should be painted alone, with a child. The plot has not made it easy for these other characters, as the prince is generally presented in terms of negatives or symbols. He is not moralistic or judgemental and does not make conscious choices, acting, instead, compassionately and intuitively. Nor is he formal or ritualistic. He is not conscious of institutions but is vaguely communitarian in his desire to reconcile the characters, u
niting them in brotherhood. This makes him particularly vulnerable to the rituals of politeness at the Yepanchin’s party; he can read the faces of children and of characters, such as Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna, who are marginal to society, but he cannot read the faces of those who are trained to dissemble. The prince’s values, if we may use so formal a term, centre on beauty, broadly understood to comprise physical and spiritual beauty, natural beauty, the innocence of children and brotherly (not egotistical) love. These are values that the others will not try to grasp and that he cannot express in a logically coherent fashion, only through parable-like narratives. Aglaya specifically forbids him to speak of beauty at her family’s party.

The ending brings together Nastasya Filippovna, Rogozhin and the prince in tragic symmetry. Lying near her, they represent the two aspects of her potential that the prince recognized at first glance, destructively passionate and compassionately gentle. The ending, in turn, leaves the reader with two vexing questions. What has been the prince’s effect on the world of the novel? What has been the world’s effect on the prince? The novel gives many answers to these questions. Ultimately the prince is seen to have ‘fallen’ (the Russian term for epilepsy is the ‘falling sickness’) into a world which expects no Messiah, which cannot understand him and which mistrusts the gifts he brings it, gifts which may themselves become tarnished in this corrosive atmosphere. His passionately ideological speech at the Yepanchins’ party may be just such a tarnished gift.

Whatever Dostoyevsky’s intentions to create a ‘completely beautiful human being’, he did not make the world of
The Idiot
the world of the Gospels. The corrupt, fearful officials and lawyers of the Gospels seem rather tame beside the characters of this novel. And Christ never had to deal simultaneously with the likes of Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna. The Christ of the Gospels performed miracles, but always in connection with the faith of those around Him. The world of this novel is very different: a world of cynicism, greed and rampant egocentricity. Its sense of beauty is superficial, not spiritual, and, in the final analysis, it extends the prince no understanding. And he can bring it no miracles.

1
Emile Hennequin,
Etudes de critique scientifique: Ecrivains francisés: Dickens, Heine, Tourguenef, Poe, Dostoiewski, Tolstoi
(Paris: Perrin et Cie., 1889), pp. 181-2.

2
John Coetzee,
The Master of St Petersburg
(London: Seeker and Warburg, 1994); Leonid Tsypkin,
Summer in Baden-Baden,
translated by Roger and Angela Keys (New York: New Directions, 2001).

3
James L. Rice,
Dostoevsky and the Healing Art: An Essay in Literary and Medical History
(Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), pp. xiii-xiv.

4
Rice,
Dostoevsky and the Healing
Art, p. 77.

5
Quoted in Charles A. Ruud,
Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804-1906
(Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1982), p. 186.

6
Aleksandr Nikitenko,
The Diary of a Russian Censor,
abridged, edited and translated by H. S. Jacobson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975), p. 30.

7
S. S. Shashkov, ‘Literaturnyi trud v Rossii’, Delo 8 (1876), p. 43.

8
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions,
trans. David Patterson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 8.

9
F. M. Dostoevsky,
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh
(Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90) 29:i.19, letter of 28 February 1869 to N. N. Strakhov. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in parentheses in the text.

10
Vladimir Nabokov,
Lectures on Russian Literature
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 103.

11
Jacques Catteau,
Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 178.

12
Dates are given according to the Gregorian Calendar, in use in Western Europe. The Russian Empire used the Julian Calendar, which was twelve days behind the Gregorian one. Thus the January issue of
The Russian Herald
came out on 3 1 January according to the Russian calendar, but on 12 February according to the calendar in use in Western Europe.

Bakhtin, Mikhail,
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,
ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Berdyaev, Nicholas,
Dostoevsky
(Sheed & Ward, 1934). Not a biography in the strict sense, but rather a philosophical study of Dostoyevsky’s world view and aesthetics by a major Christian existentialist thinker.

Catteau, Jacques,
Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation
(Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Coetzee, J. M.,
The Master of Petersburg
(Seeker and Warburg, 1994).

Dalton, Elizabeth,
Unconscious Structure in
The Idiot:
A Study in Literature and Psychoanalysis
(Princeton University Press, 1979).

Dostoevskaya, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina,
Dostoevsky: Reminiscences
(Liveright, 1975).