The Idiot

Dostoevsky began work on The Idiot in September 1867, a month after his visit to the Basel museum, but it was some time before he finally grasped the nature of his hero. His first

*Delivered at Chernogolovka, near Moscow, on May 15, 2000.

notes show the "idiot" as a proud and violently passionate man, a villain, even an Iago, who is to undergo a complete regeneration and "finish in a divine way." After working out a number of plans, he ended his notebook on November 30 with a final resolve: "Detailed arrangement of the plan and begin work in the evening." Four days later he threw everything out and started again. A new conception of the hero had come to him. He was to be a pure and i

Dostoevsky described this new conception in a letter to his friend the poet Apollon Maikov: "For a long time now I've been tormented by a certain idea, but I've been afraid to make a novel out of it, because the thought is too difficult, and I'm not ready for it, though it's a thoroughly tempting thought and I love it. The idea is - to portray a perfectly beautiful man. Nothing, in my opinion, can be more difficult than that, especially in our time." He discussed the same idea in a letter written the next day (January 13, 1868) to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova. It is important enough to be quoted at length:

'The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There is nothing more difficult in the world and especially now. All writers, not only ours, but even all European writers, who have merely attempted to portray the positively beautiful, have always given up. Because the task is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but this ideal, whether ours or that of civilized Europe, is still far from being worked out. There is only one perfectly beautiful person -Christ - so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful person is, of course, already an infinite miracle. (That is the sense of the whole Gospel of John: it finds the whole miracle in the incarnation alone, in the manifestation of the beautiful alone.) But I've gone on too long. I will only mention that of beautiful persons in Christian literature, the most fully realized is Don Quixote; but he is beautiful solely because he is at the same time ridiculous. Dickens's

Pickwick (an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote, but an immense one all the same) is also ridiculous and succeeds only because of that. Compassion is shown for the beautiful that is ridiculed and does not know its own worth - and so sympathy appears in the readers. This arousing of compassion is the secret of humor. Jean Valjean is also a strong attempt, but he arouses sympathy by his terrible misfortune and society's injustice towards him. I have nothing like that, decidedly nothing, and that's why I'm terribly afraid it will be a positive failure.'

At that time he had written only the first seven chapters of part one. They were produced in a single burst of inspiration and sent to his publisher, Mikhail Katkov, who included them in the January 1868 issue of The Russian Messenger. The remaining nine chapters of the first part were finished by the end of February. But Dostoevsky was uncertain about what would follow, and he continued in that uncertainty all the while he was writing the novel. Only as he worked on the fourth and last part did he recognize the inevitability of the final catastrophe. And yet he could write to Sofya Ivanova in November 1868: "this fourth part and its conclusion is the most important thing in my novel, i.e., the novel was almost written and conceived for the novel's denouement."

This novel, which was to be filled with light, which was to portray the positively beautiful, ends in deeper darkness than any of Dostoevsky's other works. What happened here? Some remarks from another letter to Maikov may begin to suggest an answer. Speaking of his own poetic process, he says: "in my head and in my soul many artistic conceptions flash and make themselves felt. But they only flash; and what's needed is a full embodiment, which always comes about unexpectedly and suddenly, but it is impossible to calculate precisely when it will come about; then, once you have received the full image in your heart, you can set about its artistic realization." Dostoevsky's work was always "experimental" in the sense that, between the conception and the full embodiment, he allowed his material the greatest freedom to reveal itself "unexpectedly and suddenly." Despite his passionate convictions, he never imposed an ideological resolution on his work; he was never formulaic. But it is the special nature of The Idiot that the full

image revealed itself as if with great reluctance and only towards the end of its artistic realization. René Girard was right to say that the failure of the initial idea is the triumph of another more profound idea, and that this prolonged uncertainty gives the novel "an existential density that few works have."* Much of Dostoevsky's distinctive quality as a writer lies in this living relation to his own characters.

Part one of The Idiot introduces most of the characters of the novel - the three central figures, Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Nastasya Filippovna; the three families of the Epanchins, the Ivolgins, and the Lebedevs - and entangles them in various complex relations. Riddles and enigmas appear from the start, surrounded by rumors, gossip, attempted explanations, analyses by different characters (reasonable but usually wrong). The narrator himself is not always sure of what has happened or is going to happen. When he finished the first part, Dostoevsky still thought that the prince could go on to redeem Nastasya Filippovna and even to "regenerate" the dark Rogozhin. He wrote to Sofya Ivanova: "The first part is essentially only an introduction. One thing is necessary: to arouse a certain curiosity about what will follow ... In the second part everything must be definitively established (but will still be far from explained)." But the second part was slow to come; it was finished only five months later, in July; and in it we immediately sense a change of tone and coloration. It begins under the image of Holbein's "Dead Christ," which appears here for the first time, and of Rogozhin's gloomy, labyrinthine house, a house associated with the castrates and old Russian sectarianism. The prince's humility and compassion acquire a strange ambiguity, and before long, the epilepsy for which he had been treated in Switzerland returns with a violent attack that throws him headlong down the stairs.

Critics have found this shift abrupt and puzzling. But there are hints of it even in the first part, not only in the name Myshkin, which "can and should be found in Karamzin," but in the prince's repeated accounts of executions he has

*Dostoevsky, du double à l'unité, Paris, 1963 (in English, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground, New York, 1997).

witnessed or heard about, and above all in the story of his life in Switzerland, the befriending of the village children, and the death of poor Marie. This story, with its Edenic overtones, has deception at its center, and the deceiver is the prince himself, as he admits without quite recognizing. It is a first variation on one of the central themes of the novel: the difference between love and pity. The relation of the first part to the rest of the novel is one of question and answer, and the question was posed first of all for Dostoevsky himself, who did not know the answer when he started. It is essentially the same question implied in Holbein's painting: what if Christ were not the incarnate God but, in this case, simply a "positively beautiful man," a "moral genius," as a number of nineteenth-century biographers of Jesus chose to portray him, and as Leo Tolstoy was about to proclaim - "a Christ more romantic than Christian," in René Girard's words, sublime and ideal, but with no power to redeem fallen mankind? The prince ca