Selected Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky — The Idiot (Book One of a Two Books Novel)

The Idiot
(Book One of a Two Books Novel)

Translated by
Julius Katzer

Series Editor
Roli Jain

….. While Dostoyevsky was giving thought to his predecessors’ attempts to create an image of a positively good person, he discovered that such a thing had been achieved by writers–including Cervantes and Dickens–who had been able to blend the ideal with the comical, thus reducing the pathos, making the characters more likable and bringing them closer to the reader. In The Idiot Dostoyevsky blended the tragic and the comical in his own way. He protects, or almost protects, Myshkin from mockery by showing how those who would ridicule him are won over by his naive goodness of heart, but he also gives extensive play to the comical element.

No other work of his prior to The Idiot contained such a blend of the tragic and the comical. No blood is spilt in Dostoyevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo or My Uncle’s Dream (1859); there is almost nothing comical in Crime and Punishment (1866). But in The Idiot the tragic and comical are fused to create an impact that is quite Shakespearean. The Bard of Avon was among the paragons of world culture whose works provided the “substratum” of the plot in the novel, paragons who are mentioned in it or are present there below the surface, as it were, in oblique associations.

The two inveterate clowns in the story, Lebedev and General Ivolgin, provide an ironical touch to the plot with a sweep that again is truly Shakespearean. The fantastic and inspired nonsense invented by the general somehow relieves the lowering clouds heralding the storm. Lebedev’s comical interpretations of the gloomy prophecies in the Apocalypse suggest the presence, in the ocean of the commonplace, of omens and premonitions of the catastrophe looming in the future if the Bedlam of reality cannot put its house in order.

By showing the buffoonery of his almost wholly comical characters as indicative of the decline of morals in Russia of the second half of the nineteenth century and the disintegration of the old order there, the writer did not thereby deny to the “fathers of chance families” (as he was to call certain persons in his future novels) his sympathy with them in the drama of their own lives.

Marked by keen and even morbid sympathy in the novel is the image of Ippolit Terentyev, a philosopher aged 17, who is doomed by his consumption and has summed up in his “Essential Clarification” the most burning problems of human existence, which were also of vital concern to the writer himself.
Ippolit’s “Clarification” expresses the quintessence of Dostoyevsky’s own doubts of the religious significance of the world-order, and also his rejection of the beast in man, the “blank wall” that shuts out his vista of a better future.

It is not only Ippolit’s “Clarification”, that philosophical poem coming from a doubt-ridden mind, that participates in the search for a moral law; also active in that search is the fate of the young man which so interests Myshkin himself. Though Dostoyevsky stripped of any attractiveness the young “nihilist”, who served as a vehicle for his creator’s hateful doubts, the latter extended to the sufferer his own boundless compassion for one of the most inexorably doomed characters in the story.
Ippolit dies a fortnight after the murder of Nastasia Philippovna, who only suspects what her future may be, while he is fully aware of what awaits him, and suffers boundless anguish from the prospect. Almost all the talk in The Idiot about executions of criminals–and there are many instances of such talk there–has a direct bearing on the young atheist’s fate, which so acutely poses the question of the meaning of human life and death.

Dostoyevsky, who had experienced the horror of being sentenced to death, and brutal humiliation, had the moral right to affirm, through all his writings and in The Idiot in particular, the value of every second of living life, whatever its content: the happiness from the simple contemplation of a green tree, or a premonition of the imminence of death. But, while affirming that value, Dostoyevsky was continually and insistently reiterating the question: why is it that all of us, who realise the brevity of human life and our inevitable end, are not indifferent to whether we are good or bad, or whether our souls are empty or full? That is the puzzling question propounded by Dostoyevsky through the story of the sick lad.

As we get to know Ippolit better, we begin to see in him another mirror reflection of Myshkin, but from such an angle that the reflection is a partial one, yet throws light on a problem that is probably the most important in the novel.

Ippolit dies, wounded to the quick by the absurdity of life, which has been so unjust to him. Unable to bear the burden of human suffering and overflowing with compassion for people, to whom he has wholly sacrificed himself, Prince Myshkin disappears from the human scene. The two have shared a common fate. Since that lot has been inescapable, it may well be asked: whose example is the more laudable and credible from the lofty moral viewpoint that Dostoyevsky had brought forward as a model? Can he have wished, citing the example set by the novel and the fate of its central figure, to show that love and loving-kindness are useless in this world? No, he never wished to say that, and has not said anything to that effect.

To the “good man”, who brings kindliness into the world both in life and in the novel, Dostoyevsky has contraposed both insulted human dignity, which cries out for vengeance, and spilt blood that should be avenged, as well as that expectation of inevitable death which makes for an attitude of unconcern. Dostoyevsky, who never offered comfort through some idyll or utopia but, on the contrary, revealed to mankind the yawning chasm so tragically facing it, yet conveyed that idea through the finale of the novel in the words addressed to Myshkin by one of his friends: “…It’s hard to achieve an earthly paradise, though you do harbour certain hopes of finding one. Paradise is a difficult business, Prince, far more difficult than it seems to your kindly heart.”…