The Idiot

name is Death." His interpretation unwittingly reveals the twofold structure of reality in The Idiot.

Prince Myshkin has two loves, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya, one belonging to each "world" of the novel. He also has two doubles: Rogozhin and Ippolit. There is a deep bond between the dying consumptive nihilist thinker and the impulsive, unreflecting, passionate merchant's son, between the suicide and the murderer, and Ippolit recognizes it. "Les extrémités se touchent" he says, quoting Pascal. As late as September 1868, Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook: "Ippolit - the main axis of the novel." The young nihilist belongs among Dostoevsky's "rebels against Creation," along with Kirillov in Demons and Ivan Karamazov. His "Necessary Explanation," as Joseph Frank has observed,* contains all the elements of the prince's worldview, but with an opposite attitude. Speaking of Holbein's Christ, he says that it shows nature as "some huge machine of the newest construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being." And he wonders how Christ's disciples, seeing a corpse like that, could believe "that this sufferer would resurrect," and whether Christ himself, if he could have seen his own image on the eve of his execution, would have "gone to the cross and died as he did." Ippolit is also a man sentenced to death by the "dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power to which everything is subjected," but instead of meekly accepting his fate, instead of passing by and forgiving others their happiness, as the prince advises, he protests, weeps, revolts. If Ippolit is not finally the main axis of the novel, he poses its central question in the most radical and explicit way.

Rogozhin, on the other hand, tells the prince that he likes looking at the Holbein painting. The prince, "under the impression of an unexpected thought," replies: "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!" "Lose it he does," Rogozhin agrees. But to Rogozhin's direct question, whether he believes in God, the prince gives no direct reply. That is another significant moment of reticence

*Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, Princeton, 1995.

on Myshkin's part. Instead, he turns the conversation to "the essence of religious feeling" and says, "There are things to be done in our Russian world, believe me!" A moment later, at Rogozhin's request, they exchange crosses and become "brothers." Yet the exact nature of their brotherhood remains a mystery. From that point on, Rogozhin becomes the prince's shadow, lurking, menacing, hiding, yet inseparable from him, until the final scene finds them pressed face to face. Dostoevsky's doubles, which might seem images of personal division, are in fact images of human oneness.

The Idiot is Dostoevsky's most autobiographical novel. He gave Prince Myshkin many details of his own childhood and youth, his epilepsy, his separation from life and Russia (the author's years of hard labor and "exile" in Siberia corresponding to the prince's treatment in Switzerland), his return with a new sense of mission. More specifically, in Myshkin's story of the mock execution of an "acquaintance," Dostoevsky gives a detailed account of his own experience on the scaffold in the Semyonovsky parade ground, at the age of twenty-eight, when he thought he had only three more minutes to live. According to a memoir by another of the condemned men, Fyodor Lvov,* Dostoevsky turned to their comrade Speshnyov and said: "We will be together with Christ." And Speshnyov, with a wry smile, replied: "A handful of ashes." As Myshkin puts it: "now he exists and lives, and in three minutes there would be something, some person or thing — but who? and where?" The Idiot is built on that eschatological sense of time. It is the desolate time of Holy Saturday, when Christ is buried, the disciples are scattered and - worse than that - abandoned. "Who could believe that this sufferer would resurrect?" As it turned out, Dostoevsky had not three minutes but thirty-two years to think over Speshnyov's words and his own response to them. The Idiot marks an important step on that way.

Richard Pevear

*Published in Literaturnoe nasledstvo ("Literary Heritage"), vol. 63, p. 188; Moscow, 1956.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mikhail BAKHTIN, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Mi

Joseph frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous fears, 1865-1871, Princeton University Press, 1995. The volume of Frank's major five-volume literary-historical study that covers the period of composition of The Idiot.

bruce a. French, Dostoevsky's "Idiot": Dialogue and the Spiritually Good Life, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2001. rené Girard, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground, tr. J. Williams, Crossroads, New York, 1997. An English translation of Girard's 1963 essay Dostoïevski: du double à l'unité, indispensable for its commentary on the erotic/mimetic aspects of Dostoevsky's work. romano guardini, Der Mensch und der Glaube: Versuche iiber die religiose Existenz in Dostojewskijsgrossen Romanen, Hegner, Leipzig, 1932. (French translation: L'Univers religieux de Dostoïevski, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1947.) An important interpretation of the Christian structure of Dostoevsky's work as a whole, never translated into English. vyacheslav ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky, tr. Norman Cameron, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1968. A classic study of Dostoevsky by one of the major Russian symbolist poets.

liza knapp (éd.), Dostoevsky's "The Idiot": A Critical Companion, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1998.

olga meerson, Dostoevsky's Taboos, Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden University Press, Dresden-Munich, 1998.  study of the meta-psychology of tabooing and the meanings of the unsaid in Dostoevsky.

robin feuer miller, Dostoevsky and "The Idiot": Author, Narrator, and Reader, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981.

Konstantin mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, tr. Michael A. Minihan, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1967. The work of a distinguished émigré scholar, first published in 1947 and still the best critical biography of Dostoevsky.

Harriet murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1992. george pattison and diane OENNING Thompson, Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2001.

edward wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Notebooks for "The Idiot", tr. Katherine Strelsky, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1967. Dostoevsky's notebooks and drafts in preparation for writing The Idiot.

CHRONOLOGY

DATE

AUTHOR'S LIFE