The Idiot

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The Idiot

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

with an Introduction by Richard Pevear

Copyright © 2001

ISBN: 1857152549

CONTENTS

Introduction xi

Select Bibliography xxiv

Chronology xxvi

Translators' Notes xxxii

THE IDIOT

Part One 3

Part Two 177

Part Three 323

Part Four 459

Notes 617

INTRODUCTION

On a house near the Pitti Palace in Florence there is a plaque that reads: "In this neighborhood between 1868 and 1869 F. M. Dostoevsky completed his novel The Idiot." It is strange to think of this most Russian of writers working on this most Russian of novels while living in the city of Dante. In fact the author's absence from Russia can be felt in the book, if we compare it with his 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. Place has little importance in The Idiot. Petersburg and the residential suburb of Pavlovsk, where most of the action occurs, are barely described. There is little sense of a surrounding world or a wider human community. 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. It was precisely during the four years he spent abroad, from 1867 to 1871, that Dostoevsky brooded most intensely on the fate of Russia, as the exiled Dante brooded on the fate of Florence.

But it would be a mistake to think that this lack of an objective "world" makes The Idiot an abstract ideological treatise. On the contrary, it is perhaps the most physical and even physiological of Dostoevsky's novels. Its events seem to take place internally, not in a spiritual inwardness but within the body, within a body, rendered more by sensation than by depiction. With Crime and Punishment, as the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff wrote recently,* Dostoevsky buried the descriptive novel; in The Idiot he arrived at a new form, expressive of "the inobjective body," which overcomes the dualities of interior and exterior, subjective and objective, physical and psychological. It is given in certain modes of

*In L'Expression du corps chez Dostoevsky ("The Expression of the Body in Dostoevsky"), Paris, 2000.

experience: sickness, for instance, is as much subjective as objective; so is violence, and so is life with others, the "invasive" presence of the other (hence the privileged place Dostoevsky gives to doorways and thresholds, to sudden entrances and unexpected meetings). And so, finally, are words spoken and heard, written and read aloud. Dostoevsky concentrates on these modes of experience in The Idiot to the exclusion of almost all else. The novel, broadly speaking, is an exploration of what it means to be flesh.

The idea of the "Russian Christ" is important in The Idiot (and was certainly important to his creator, who repeated Myshkin's words on the subject almost verbatim nine years later in his Diary of a Writer), but a much stronger presence in the novel is the painting that Dostoevsky significantly calls "The Dead Christ" (the actual title is Christ's Body in the Tomb), a work by Hans Holbein the Younger that hangs in the museum of Basel. Dostoevsky places a copy of the painting in the house of the young merchant millionaire Rogozhin. It is discussed twice in the novel, the second time at length and in a key passage. The shape of the painting is unusual: the narrator describes it as being "around six feet wide and no more than ten inches high." It is, in other words, totally lacking in vertical dimension.

Dostoevsky first read about Holbein's painting in Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler (1801), an account of the young author's travels in Europe, modeled on Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey. In a letter written from Basel, Karamzin mentions that he has been to the picture gallery there and "looked with great attention and pleasure at the paintings of the illustrious Holbein, a native of Basel and friend of Erasmus." Of this painting in particular (giving it yet another title) he observes: "In 'Christ Taken Down from the Cross' one doesn't see anything of God. As a dead man he is portrayed quite naturally. According to legend, Holbein painted it from a drowned Jew." That is all. But these few words must have made a strong impression on Dostoevsky. In August 1867, on their way from Baden-Baden to Geneva, he and his young wife made a special stop in Basel to see the painting.

Dostoevsky's wife, A

'On the way to Geneva we stopped for a day in Basel, with the purpose of seeing a painting in the museum there that my husband had heard about from someone.

This painting, from the brush of Hans Holbein, portrays Jesus Christ, who has suffered inhuman torture, has been taken down from the cross and given over to corruption. His swollen face is covered with bloody wounds, and he looks terrible. The painting made an overwhelming impression on my husband, and he stood before it as if dumbstruck.. .

When I returned some fifteen or twenty minutes later, I found my husband still standing in front of the painting as if riveted to it. There was in his agitated face that expression as of fright which I had seen more than once in the first moments of an epileptic fit. I quietly took him under the arm, brought him to another room, and sat him down on a bench, expecting a fit to come at any moment. Fortunately that did not happen.'

In a stenographic diary kept at the time of the visit itself, she noted: "generally, it looked so much like an actual dead man that I really think I wouldn't dare stay in the same room with it. But F. admired this painting. Wishing to have a closer look at it, he stood on a chair, and I was very afraid he'd be asked to pay a fine, because here one gets fined for everything."

Each of the three main male characters of the novel — the saintly "idiot" Myshkin, the passionate, earthbound Rogozhin, and the consumptive nihilist Ippolit - defines himself in relation to this painting. The question it poses hangs over the whole novel: what if Christ was only a man? What if he suffered, died, and was left a bruised, lifeless corpse, as Holbein shows him? It is, in other words, the question of the Resurrection. Dostoevsky, who was very careful about the names he gave his characters, calls the heroine of The Idiot Nastasya, a shortened form of Anastasia: anastasis is "resurrection" in Greek. Her last name, Barashkov, comes from the Russian word for "lamb."

The name of the novel's hero, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, is also worth considering. It draws a pointed and

oddly insistent comment from the clerk Lebedev on its first mention at the start of the novel: "the name's historical, it can and should be found in Karamzin's History." Karamzin's History of the Russian State was one of the most popular books of nineteenth-century Russia. In his Diary of a Writer (1873), Dostoevsky recalls: "I was only ten when I already knew virtually all the principal episodes of Russian history - from Karamzin whom, in the evenings, father used to read aloud to us." He could assume a similar knowledge among his contemporaries. But, as the literary scholar Tatiana Kasatkina pointed out in a recent lecture,* later commentators on The Idiot have generally failed to follow Lebedev's suggestion. Looking in Karamzin's History, we do indeed find the name Myshkin; it belonged not to a prince but to an architect. In 1471 Metropolitan Filipp of Moscow decided to build a new stone Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and Myshkin was one of the two architects called in to build it. It was to be modeled on the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, the biggest in Russia. The architects went to Vladimir, took measurements, and promised to build an even bigger cathedral in Moscow. By 1474 the walls had reached vault level when the addition of a monumental stairway caused the entire structure to collapse. Dostoevsky twice wrote the words "Prince-Christ" in his notebooks for The Idiot. Readers have taken this to be an equation and, like Romano Guardini in Der Mensch und der Glaube (Man and Faith, subtitled "a study of religious existence in Dostoevsky's major novels"), have seen Prince Myshkin as a "symbol of Christ" or, in Tatiana Kasatkina's words, as a man upon whom "the radiance of Christ somehow rests," one who is "meant to stand for, or in some way even replace, the person of Christ for us." Karamzin's account of the architect Myshkin suggests a more ambiguous reading — as indeed does the prince's name itself, which is compounded of "lion" (lev) and "mouse" (mysh).