Fragment 626

The insult is a common trope in Dostoevsky. Throughout his work, characters insult each other, pull each other by the nose, push each other out of the way, bite each other’s ears, mock each other’s loftiest ideals in public, wound each other’s amour propre, either knowingly or unknowingly, and generally trample all over each other’s human dignity.

At the end of Notes from Underground, the underground man, having egregiously insulted Liza, muses: Won’t it be better if she now carries an insult away with her forever? An insult- but this is purification; it’s the most stinging and painful consciousness… the insult will never die in her… will elevate and purify her…

For Dostoevsky, the insult is a spring board to increased consciousness. By encountering insult, the self experiences great tension between its notion of itself as a subject, and the sudden awareness of itself as another’s object, and this opens up a dizzying awareness of consciousness, a painful but necessary experience, and one that is essentially human.

Which is better, cheap happiness, or lofty suffering, well, I ask you, which is better?

"Demons" Dostoevsky

As a chronicler, I limit myself to presenting events in an exact way, exactly as they occurred, and it is not my fault if they appear incredible.

The last word of this novel is ‘insanity’ and like insanity, it is the most terrifying and at the same time the most wildly hilarious of Dostoevsky’s novels, and the most satirical. The inhabitants of a small provincial town gradually become aware that a revolutionary cell is operating in their midst. The cell operates by spreading civil disobedience at a fete and a ball organised by the wife of the Governor of the Province, by fomenting disorder among the workers of a factory located in the town, inciting riot, by setting fire to a large portion of the town itself, and then ultimately in murder.

Set against this plot is the story of 20 year friendship between the widow Varvara Stavrogina, the richest landowner in the district; and the former professor and private tutor to her ward, Stepan Verkhovensky. Her son, Nikolai Stavrogin, and his son, Pyotr Verkhovensky, have both grown up apart from their parents and return to the town at around the same time. Stavrogina tries to persuade her old friend to marry her ward, to cover up for the fact that her ward has been seduced by her son. At the same time she is trying to marry off her son to the daughter of her neighbour, a wealthy heiress.

The title and epigraphs from Pushkin and Luke 8.32-36 point to the fact that the novel is to be read as a kind of parable of contemporary concerns. Russian youth has become possessed by the three demons of European rationalism: nihilism, atheism and socialism. The small town stands for the whole of Russia. The key characters exist as a kind of double signification in which the character represents a barely disguised real person, and at the same time stands for some key trend in contemporary thought.


Part 1: Characters
In whicb is revealed who they are and what they represent

First, the elder Stepan Verkhovensky is a caricature of Granovsky, the famous professor of history at Moscow university, one of the key Westernisers of the 1840s, and at the same time represents the whole generation of ‘the men of the Forties’. One of the most lovable and amusing of Dostoevsky’s creations, Stepan Verkhovensky is also strongly influenced by Dickens, a kind of Russian Dorritt.

“Je suis un mere sponger, et rien de plus!” He sprinkles his discourse with French phrases, pours out his heart in daily letters to his friend (even though they live in the same house), is inordinately fond of passionate weeping, and nurtures the fond illusion that he is still an object of observation to the authorities due to his radical youth.

The narrator comments: but after all, gentlemen, even now, do we not at times hear all around us the same “dear”, “intelligent”, “liberal” old Russian nonsense? which can be read as Dostoevsky’s comment on the ‘superfluous’ generation of the 1840s. (Some contemporary literary gossip: Maikov told Dostoevsky in a letter that Stepan Verkhovensky was like a Turgenev hero in his old age, a remark which thoroughly delighted Dostoevsky in its accuracy.)



His son, the creepy revolutionary Pyotr Verkhovensky, is modelled on the real revolutionary Nachaev, and is at the same time a general symbol of the nihilist.

His relationship with his father – mocking indifference on both sides- is a portrait of the relationship between the ‘fathers’ and the ‘sons’, the generations of the ‘40s and the ‘60s, portrayed also in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

Nachaev was one of the most radical of the revolutionaries who sprang up in Russia during the late 1860s. Possibly the lover of Bakunin, he was the author of the still enduringly notorious Catechism of a Revolutionary, which had such a huge impact on subsequent revolutionary activity in Russia. Nachaev was the founder of a small revolutionary cell of 5 students at the Petrine Academy of Agriculture. He and three others turned on the fifth, a student named Ivanov, who had threatened to break away from the group, and murdered him, throwing his body into a lake on the grounds of the Academy.

This incident is almost exactly reproduced as the central episode of Demons, when Pyotr Verkhovensky and his companions murder the Slavophile Shatov. The real Nachaev had written: Our business is terrible, complete universal and merciless destruction. In the novel, Pyotr Verkhovensky expresses no ideology of his own except the ultimate strategy of destruction and destabilisation achieved through tactical realpolitik.

Through crafty manipulation, he engineers the social downfall of the Governor and his wife by insinuating himself into the wife’s circle and feeding her social and political ambitions. The splendid debacle of the fete is the result. He tries to enrol Stavrogin in the cell, seeing him as a potentially charismatic figure around whom a revolutionary impulse can crystallize, a false Tsarevitch.

He engineers the murder of Shatov, not to silence him as he tells his group, but to cement them together, to bind them through bloodshed. Pyotr Verkhovensky is always bustling about arranging things, seems to have his fingers in all sorts of pies and straddles the line between being a comic character, and being monstrously terrifying.



The writer Karmazinov is based on Turgenev, and at the same time stands for the aristocratic, land-owning liberals, who organise literary quadrilles and balls, who remove all their capital and take refuge abroad, and have no awareness of the real crisis facing Russia and their class.

This is another hilarious portrait, but very savage, and one from which it is difficult to rescue poor old Turgenev. Karmazinov, with the bearing of five court chamberlains, reads his farewell to literature (one of many) entitled Merci at the fete, in the same way that Turgenev read his own farewell to literature (one of many) entitled Enough.

Dostoevsky stitches together a marvellous parody of several articles by Turgenev, as well as lampooning mercilessly Turgenev’s limpid style: a tear rolled from your eye as we sat beneath the emerald tree, and you exclaimed joyfully: ‘There is no crime!’ ‘Yes,’ I said through my tears, ‘But if so, there are no righteous men.’ We wept and parted forever….. The reading is interrupted by a lonely but loud voice (that of Dostoevsky’s himself?) from the back row of the audience: “Lord what rubbish!” Karmazinov retires from the heckling that follows looking all red as if he had been boiled.




Through the character of Shigalyov, Dostoevsky lampoons socialism. Shigalyov has studied the question of how to organise the future society and written a document about it. He wants to read his document at the meeting of the revolutionaries, in one of the funniest episodes of the book. “I announce ahead of time that my system is not finished. … I got entangled in my own data, and my conclusion directly contradicts the original idea from which I start.” (academic political scientists and sociologists are surely squirming here) “Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism…”

He acknowledges that this has caused him some despair. “I suggest we vote on whether Shigalyov’s despair concerns the common cause or not”, comments one of the members of the meeting.

Another member, who has read the document, explains that Shigalyov has divided humanity into two parts: “One tenth is granted freedom of person and unlimited rights over the remaining nine tenths. These must lose their person and turn into something like a herd…” “Are you really serious?” interjects one of the other members: “This man, not knowing what to do about the people, turns nine tenths of them into slavery? I’ve long suspected him….” One of the other members declares that the best solution for dealing with the rest of the nine tenths is to “blow them up sky high, leaving just a bunch of learned people”.

Dostoevsky parodies Raskolnikov’s arguments in Crime and Punishment here, and unwittingly prophecies the kind of discussions that later took place under the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and the Maoists, and are now taking place among religious fundamentalists and other varieties of social engineers.


Part 2: Atheism versus Orthodoxy
In which we describe the philosophical debate in the novel, reveal the existence of a missing chapter! and explain why Dostoevskyists get worked up about it


In the early stages of composing the novel Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov: The fundamental idea that has tormented me, consciously and unconsciously, all my life long …is the question of the existence of God.

In Demons, the dialectic between faith and atheism takes place in conversations between Stavrogin and Kirilov, and between Stavrogin and Shatov.

Kirilov the suicidalist puts forward the argument for atheism with great cogency and force. Shatov, the Slavophile puts forward the argument for faith in Orthodoxy, expressing many of Dostoevsky’s known views. Stavrogin, the mysterious ‘strong personality’ acts as a conduit for both sides in the debate; his own position is highly enigmatic, as we shall see.



Kirilov plans to commit suicide, and thereby aid the revolutionaries by taking on himself all their crimes, admitting to them in a suicide letter. He is only waiting for a signal from Pyotr Verkhovensky.

His reasons for suicide are related to his atheism: “I can't understand how an atheist could know that there is no God and not kill himself on the spot. To recognise that there is no God and not to recognise at the same instant that one is God oneself is an absurdity, else one would certainly kill oneself. If you recognise it you are sovereign, and then you won't kill yourself but will live in the greatest glory. But one, the first, must kill himself, for else who will begin and prove it? So I must certainly kill myself, to begin and prove it.”

He then gives the strongest argument for atheism perhaps Dostoevsky had so far penned: “Listen to a great idea: there was a day on earth, and in the midst of the earth there stood three crosses. One on the Cross had such faith that he said to another, 'To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.' The day ended; both died and passed away and found neither Paradise nor resurrection. His words did not come true. Listen: that Man was the loftiest of all on earth, He was that which gave meaning to life. The whole planet, with everything on it, is mere madness without that Man. There has never been any like Him before or since, never, up to a miracle. For that is the miracle, that there never was or never will be another like Him. And if that is so, if the laws of nature did not spare even Him, have not spared even their miracle and made even Him live in a lie and die for a lie, then all the planet is a lie and rests on a lie and on mockery. So then, the very laws of the planet are a lie and the vaudeville of devils. What is there to live for?”

For Kirilov, suicide is the only freedom one has left: “I am killing myself to prove my independence and my new terrible freedom”.

Kirilov develops the same ideas expressed in Ippolit Ivolgin’s ‘Necessary Explanation’ in The Idiot, and like Ippolit, he seeks death as the price for his atheism.




Shatov asserts a belief in the Russian Christ, making explicit the link between Christianity and nationalism for the first time in Dostoevsky’s published works. “He who is not Orthodox, cannot be Russian.”

Stavrogin accuses him of reducing God to a mere “attribute of nationality”. “On the contrary”, exclaims Shatov, “I raise the nation up to God. … the nation is the body of God….If a great nation does not believe that it alone is able and called to resurrect and save everyone with its truth, then it at once ceases to be a great nation and becomes just ethnographic material.”

It is Russia’s mission to save the world: “The only god-bearing nation is the Russian nation.”

Shatov attacks Roman Catholicism in much the same terms that Prince Myshkin had in The Idiot: “Atheism is after all healthier than Catholicism”. According to Shatov, the Roman Christ succumbed to the third temptation of the devil, and was granted an earthly kingdom, “proclaimed the antichrist, and ruined the whole Western world.”

Shatov expresses his belief that a new generation will spring forth from Russia, one that renounces Western rationalism, and that embraces the Russian God through peasant labour- anticipating the ‘movement to the people’ of the summer of 1874, at the height of the Popularist movement, when young intellectuals did precisely that.





Now, we enter the realm of controversy when we try to disentangle Shatov’s ‘literary’ arguments as the novel’s representative Slavophile from the actual ‘philosophical’ arguments that Dostoevsky himself held. This is very problematic; and Dostoevskyists have thrown caution (and theoretical rigour) to the wind in their attempts to claim the character’s religious views for those of the author’s.

The text indeed warns against this, when Shatov says: Do you really regard me as such a fool who cannot even tell, whether his words now are old, decrepit rubbish, ground up in all the Slavophile mills of Moscow, or a completely new word, the last word, the word of renewal and resurrection. Many of Shatov’s ideas are standard Slavophile stuff.

Moreover, the situation is further complicated by the fact that in this conversation, Shatov is reporting a letter that he had written much earlier to Stavrogin, which Stavrogin had not bothered to read. In this letter, Shatov had attempted to remind Stavrogin of conversations they had had many years previously in Europe, and which Shatov had never forgotten. In other words, Shatov is actually quoting back at him views expressed originally by Stavrogin himself, which the latter man has come to repudiate, but which Shatov himself has come to believe in.

It is never adequately clarified in the conversation which views are actually Stavrogin’s and which are Shatov’s; it is never very clear which views either man now holds, and which views he now rejects: like real conversations, things are never tidied up, but left hanging while the dialogue digresses and circulates, while emotional storms come and go, and while each character tries to achieve a different outcome from the interview.

Shatov reminds Stavrogin of his previous view: “But wasn’t it you who told me that if someone proved to you mathematically that the truth is outside Christ, you would better agree to stay with Christ than with the truth. Did you say that?” Stavrogin neither confirms nor denies this, but raises a different point.

This view is one that Dostoevsky himself held – in fact Shatov quotes verbatim from Dostoevsky’s famous letter of 1854 to Fonvizina here. However, Stavrogin says in this conversation, that he now no longer believes in any of the things he did formerly: “If I had belief, I would no doubt repeat it now as well, I wasn’t lying, speaking as a believer.”

Stavrogin has lost his faith, while Shatov remains uncertain about his: “I believe in Russia, I believe in Orthodoxy, I believe in the body of Christ…” Shatov babbled frenziedly. Stavrogin persists in this line of questioning: “But in God? In God?” “I… I will believe in God,” Shatov equivocates. Not a muscle moved in Shatov’s face. Shatov looked at him defiantly, as if he wanted to burn him with his eyes. “But I didn’t tell you I don’t believe at all,” he hedges.

This is likely to be the position closest to Dostoevsky’s own at this time.




In 1922 a missing chapter to the novel was (re)discovered: the original Chapter 9 of Part Two, entitled At Tikhon’s.

In this chapter, Stavrogin, on the advice of Shatov, goes to see a holy man – Tikhon- in the local monastery. While there, he reads to the monk a document he has composed. This document, Stavrogin’s Confession, describes Stavrogin’s loss of faith, his youthful addiction to masturbation, his monstrous seduction of a 14- (or 10- the text is not clear on this) year-old girl, her subsequent suicide, his marriage to an unfortunate lame and mad woman of a greatly inferior social class as a kind of experimental self-inflicted punishment, his terminal boredom, and fear of insanity.

He intends to publish this document, in order to endure universal hatred from all who read it as a form of penance.

Tikhon suggests that the universal hatred might be easy for Stavrogin to endure but not the universal laughter that will resound when people read it. “Even the form of this truly great repentance has something ridiculous in it”.

Stavrogin looks for absolution, and the ability to forgive himself. Tikhon assures him that Christ will forgive him: “He will forgive you for your intention and for your great suffering.”

In spite of Dostoevsky’s ardent pleadings and frenzied reworkings of the material, the editor of the Russian Messenger, the journal in which the novel appeared, categorically refused (understandably, given the mores of the time and place) to publish this chapter; and Dostoevsky, in later years and in later editions, never took the opportunity to reinstall it.

The relationship of this chapter to the final completed work remains controversial because it significantly alters the thrust of the dialectic between atheism and faith. With it, the book seems to assert faith; without it, it doesn’t.



Part 3: The Pleasure of the Text
In which we celebrate the many marvels of the work, and meditate on the role of the narrative voice


In spite of what sounds like a dry philosophical debate, only really enjoyable with prior knowledge of contemporary issues and the development of Dostoevsky’s own views on faith and atheism, the novel is utterly compelling to read.

The characters are splendidly drawn, the dialogue blazes, there are some unforgettable, iconic images that lodge firmly in the memory, the pace never lags, the tension is masterfully handled, and the comedy is rich, subtle and cuttingly sardonic.

The description of the fete in the centre of the work is one of the most brilliant set-pieces in the whole of Russian literature.

Indeed, it is the most technically accomplished of Dostoevsky’s novels. The reason for this is mainly due to the narrative voice, which is where most of the huge pleasure of reading the book resides.




The story is narrated by one of the townsfolk, a friend and intimate of Verkhovensky pere, and a member of the town club, but formally unnamed – we are only given his name and patronymic in passing.

In the whole of the first part the narrator describes the backstory of the main characters, and this is handled in such a way that the reader can sense that things might not be what they seem, even if the narrator doesn’t. Moreover, the reader can tell that the narrator himself is not seeing things clearly at that point in his chronicle.

This is not to say that the narrator is dense. On the contrary, the narrator is perceptive, and has a great deal of insight into the characteristics of the people he knows well, and the motivations behind their complex relationships and describes this all to us with gripping relish. It’s just that the narrator is focussing on something different from what’s really going on.

This is, of course, part and parcel of the parable nature of the book: no-one in Russia understands what is really happening because they are all focussing on something else.

Through this gossipy, loquacious narrator we become completely involved in the lives of the characters of this small provincial town, so that when terrorist activity erupts amongst them, we react to it with the same indrawn breath of shock that they do.



This double vision is especially well handled in the depiction of the revolutionary organiser Pyotr Verkhovensky.

The reader understands that the image of this character as bustling, harmless, foolish, has been deliberately created by the character himself as a mask for his real revolutionary intentions; and at the same time we understand that the narrator and his friends have not seen this until much too late.

Of course, the narrator ultimately knows the truth of everything, but he withholds it, releasing it to us only slowly, recreating the gradual change in perception that he and his circle experienced at the time. Now, when everything is past, and I am writing my chronicle, we know what it was all about; but then we still knew nothing, and naturally, various things seemed strange to us.


I cannot believe in God without a God to believe in.

Fragment 615

Triads...

Hegel’s idea of history is that it moves from i) thesis, to ii) antithesis, to iii) synthesis.

Herzen’s idea of history is that it moves from i) the age of natural immediacy, to ii) the age of thought, to iii) the age of action.

Tkchaev’s notion of progress involved three elements: i) motion, ii) direction, and iii) goal.

Dostoevsky on academic prose

Why this eternal jargon, and why do simple-minded men who can only see as far as the end of their noses, so deepen and darken counsel that no one can make out what they are driving at?

'The Idiot' Dostoevsky

Beauty will save the world.

Once upon a time, there was a rich boyar who had three lovely daughters. The youngest was as radiant as the sun and as lovely as the moon. Many suitors vied for her favours, but she rejected them all. One day, a Prince from a foreign land came to seek her hand. To test his worth and the strength of his love, she put him through all manner of tests…

Nastasya Filipovna was orphaned at a tender age, and given into the care of her neighbour, an unscrupulous rogue, who set her up in a secluded dacha, far from the eyes of the world, where he groomed her for himself. When at last she came of age, she became his mistress. He brought her to St Petersburg, where her beauty astonished all who saw it. At last, tiring of her, and wishing to settle down and marry, her master sought to rid himself of her by marrying her off to the highest bidder…

Prince Myshkin returns to Russia after many years abroad in a sanatorium, where he has been treated for epilepsy and idiocy. Naïve, and socially inept, but with a freshness and humility that sees through social conventions, he tries to integrate himself into Petersburg society. He falls in love with two different women and struggles to choose between the two of them...

The Idiot weaves all these plot strands together in what may be the most diffuse, the most problematic, the most elusive of Dostoevsky’s novels. The writer himself regarded the novel as a failure, not perhaps of intention, but of execution. His notebooks reveal his struggle to choose from many ideas, and his stuttering attempts to develop them. There are several false starts and different conceptions before he hit on the final version of the story. His letters are full of his anxieties about the difficulties in the writing of it, the cancelled and destroyed drafts, the postponed and delayed deadlines and the way they effected his finances. He was tormented by worries about money, overjoyed by the birth and then devastated by the sudden death of his first child; he was suffering frequent, debilitating fits; he was battling his terrible addiction to roulette and at the same time recklessly attempting to use it as a means of financing his family; and he was in Europe and homesick for Russia.

Part of the difficulty was in the aim he had set himself. In a letter to his friend Maikov he described his aim to portray a wholly beautiful individual; then the next day, in a letter to his niece he described his aim thus: the basic idea is the representation of a truly perfect and noble man. For Dostoevsky, beauty was equated with moral nobility and perfection, or goodness. Myshkin returns to Russia, not as a miracle worker, or a social reformer or a doer of charity and good works, not as a saviour, but as a kind of savant. His chief goodness appears to lie in the way he establishes a completely genuine and authentic relationship with those he meets, a relationship that has nothing to do with conventions, polite behaviour or social mores: He was almost the only one who spoke that evening, telling many stories, he answered questions clearly gladly and in detail. However, nothing resembling polite conversation showed in his words. The thoughts were all quite serious, even quite abstruse…He has a strange effect on all who meet him, bringing forth their most genuine responses and allowing them to see their true natures. ‘You can’t be the way you pretended to be just now. It’s not possible’, the Prince suddenly cried out in deeply felt reproach… ‘He guessed right, in fact, I’m not like that,’ whispered… Nastasya Filipovna…Everyone he encounters is disconcerted by his naivety and apparent authenticity: If you are indeed the way you seem to be, it might very well be pleasant to become acquainted with you General Epanchin exclaims at their first meeting... He establishes himself on equal footing with everyone, from the servants to the most exalted personages of Petersburg society, and puts forward his views and describes his experiences with disarming candour and with complete disregard for the social proprieties: I’m going on twenty-seven, but I know I’m like a child. I don’t have the right to express my thoughts…I have no sense of measure….. His goodness works on the sphere of human relationships and on the psychological level.

The literary models for the Prince were Don Quixote and Pickwick, both, according to Dostoevsky, beautiful characters, whose beauty is derided by others who remain blind to it. However, whereas both Don Quixote and Pickwick make the reader laugh, the Prince does not. He makes others laugh, and he laughs heartily with them, and we are told that he can be witty and amusing as well as earnest and profound, but he does not make the reader laugh. Which is not to say that there is no comedy in the novel. The book abounds with a plethora of excellently drawn comic situations and characters: Mrs Epanchin, General Ivolgin and Lebedev, for example, are masterpieces of comic invention and genuinely hilarious. While the Prince himself is not funny, his presence among the other characters of the book, however, does allow the reader to see the beauty of those characters, when those around them cannot.

The book is structured around a series of static social scenes set in drawing rooms. There is very little incident, and much talking. These social scenes are masterpieces of dramatic psychology, as all the characters interact with conflicting motivations, hiding behind social masks and only intermittently revealing hints of their real intentions. The Prince is a calm centre around which the other characters dance. The greatest of these scenes is the birthday party of Nastasya Filipovna, where the guests play a version of spin-the-bottle, confessing an action that they are most ashamed of. Present is Nastasya Filipovna’s seducer; and the tension as he begins to tell his story is masterfully projected onto the reader. The novel unfolds among the summer dachas and outdoor concerts of the resort suburb of Pavolvsk, but its emphasis on interior dramatic social scenes means that descriptions of urban life are minimal; the recreation of the city and the crowd as a participant in the narrative which was such a salient feature of Crime and Punishment is absent. In this sense the novel harks back to an earlier work of Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo, which uses the same essentially static structuring devices, and has a similar type of character as the Prince as one of its twin centres.

This effects the way incident is dealt with. Plenty happens, but it all happens off stage, and is then reported by other characters as gossip or rumour. Incident is presented as conversation. The text is studded with newspaper reports of crimes, but these are also just more examples of hearsay. Even the Prince’s (and Dostoevsky’s) most famous dictum: Beauty will save the world is problematised by being reported at second or even third hand. The dictum nowhere appears directly in the novel, but is reported. Ippolit says: “Is it true, Prince, that you once declared that 'beauty would save the world'? Great Heaven! The Prince says that beauty saves the world!” But Ippolit himself is unsure whether the Prince has in fact said it: he heard that the Prince said it from someone else, and the Prince neither confirms nor contradicts him. Another character is also reported as having said something similar: I know that once when your sister Adelaida saw my portrait she said that such beauty could overthrow the world, Nastasya Filipovna writes to Aglaya. This casts doubt on the role of beauty: will beauty save the world, or overthrow it? Is the difference important? These are all questions that the narrative does little to answer.

The Idiot represents a new departure for Dostoevsky, a break with his previous method and concerns. Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, the two major works which preceded The Idiot both grow out of the writer’s ongoing polemic with the nihilists, and when they are placed next to the journalism of this time, many of the same themes and methods can be discerned. The Idiot, however, is different from his previous work in a number of important ways.

First, is the lack of a clear philosophical target against which Dostoevsky can argue. Dostoevsky’s art relies on a dialectic for its effect: his most powerful work always takes its power from the presence of two (or more) conflicting ideas, both presented with such utter cogency and commitment, that often the writer’s true point of view is difficult to discern. Dostoevsky’s gift is for negative argumentation: he puts forward his most effective arguments by trying to negate or refute a different argument. Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment achieve their effect of underlying unity by a clear refutation of a central idea: Western utilitarian rationalism. All the elements of these two books work to refute this idea. This kind of unified and focussed negative argumentation plays a much smaller role in The Idiot. Dostoevsky employs a more positive style of argumentation, presenting his ideas more positively. True, there are attacks against the Russian liberals, a refutation of the notion of ‘the right of force’, attacks on atheism and socialism, and a marvellously rancid and bitter rant against the Roman Catholic Church, but these are dispersed among different characters.

The closest the novel comes to a focussed dialectic is in the long document that Ippolit reads out at the prince’s birthday party. In this scene, it is as if the underground man has somehow escaped from his own book and gatecrashed this one. Entitled ‘My Necessary Explanation’, in it the consumptive Ippolit, who has only been given two weeks left to live, expresses all the anguish, rage and sense of futility of the conscious human being faced with the ineluctability of death. In Notes from Underground this fatum was represented by the symbol of the wall. In The Idiot, this becomes the wall of his neighbour’s house, the only view that Ippolit can see through his window: Yes, that wall of Meyer’s can tell a lot! I have written a lot on it! There is not a spot on that cursed wall that I have not learned by heart. That cursed wall! In the face of imminent death, all endeavour becomes pointless: I saw clearly that I was forbidden to study Greek grammar- “I won’t get as far as the syntax before I die” I thought at the first page, and threw the book under the table. In the face of death, everything is negated: If it had been in my power not to be born, I probably would not have accepted existence on such derisive conditions. And yet, in spite of that the human being longs for life: I did not deceive myself and understood the matter clearly. But the more clearly I understood it, the more convulsively I clung to life and wanted to live whatever the cost. Ippolit asserts that the point of life is in life itself, in discovering it constantly and eternally, and not in the discovery itself.

In ‘My Necessary Explanation’ Dostoevsky gives some of the strongest arguments for atheism in his work. Ippolit describes the painting he has seen in Rogozhin’s house, a reproduction of Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ. He says this of it: Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being! … In the face of the terrible ineluctability of natural forces, represented in the picture by the cadaver of Christ, any idea of God or salvation or resurrection becomes highly doubtful. Ippolit conceives of God as a huge tarantula devouring the world. Religion demands that we worship this tarantula, and this Ippolit rejects: Let consciousness be lit up by the will of a higher power, let it look at the world and say: ‘I am!’ and let the higher power suddenly decree its annihilation, because for some reason… that is needed: let it be so, I admit all that, but then again comes the eternal question: why is my humility needed here? Isn’t it possible to simply eat me without demanding that I praise that which has eaten me? Human dignity will not allow itself simply to be subsumed with such meekness: I am unable to submit to a dark power that assumes the shape of a tarantula. As always, Dostoevsky presents his own religious doubts with huge cogency and power, and for this modern, secular reader, his atheistic arguments have more force than his religious ones.

The novel is permeated by the sense of Dostoevsky’s distance from contemporary debates due to his self-enforced exile from Russia. In another letter to his niece, he wrote: I have been so alienated from Russian life that I find it difficult, lacking fresh Russian impressions as I do, to write anything at all… In a meeting with his rival and enemy Turgenev at the time, he sarcastically remarked to him that he should get a telescope, the better to see what was happening in Russia, a suggestion that perhaps reflected his own nagging sense of alienation from the wellsprings of his art. The Idiot was written in Europe, and in many ways this is the most European of his novels, notwithstanding the presence of elements from Russian fairy tales. At times it reads like Jane Austen, Flaubert, George Sand or Balzac, especially in its examination of human relationships, social manners and mores, family relations, sexuality, and the importance of money.

Another important difference of the book from its predecessors is the absence of a controlling consciousness through which the events of the novel are perceived. Crime and Punishment and The Gambler both foreground an individual consciousness, through which the reader perceives the story, in the former case, the criminal student Raskolnikov’s, in the second, the tutor Alexei Ivanovich’s. These foregrounded consciousnesses give those two works an intensity of emotion and a concentration of vision, resulting in a single-minded narrative drive that carries the reader and the story recklessly forward. This is lacking in The Idiot, whose impersonal narrator is not a character in the story, but outside it and unknown to the reader or the characters. This lack of a consistently foregrounded controlling vision results in a slower book, differently and less hurriedly paced.

Perhaps the most significant departure in the book, however, is the conflation of the Prince with Dostoevsky himself, a conflation of author and protagonist that hitherto in his career Dostoevsky had been utterly scrupulous to avoid. Like Dostoevsky, the Prince suffers from epilepsy, and the two fits the Prince suffers in the course of the novel are described with great detail borne of personal experience. Almost upon his very first entrance into St Petersburg society, the Prince describes his conversation with a condemned man, and relates (more secondhand reporting, note) how the man experienced his last minutes in front of the scaffold before his unexpected reprieve and pardon. This description echoes almost word for word the description of Dostoevsky’s own similar experience and thoughts in the letter he wrote to his brother the morning after his own mock execution. This is the very first public discussion of his experience; nowhere in his writing, even in Notes from the House of the Dead, the book about his imprisonment, does it appear until now. The views regarding Christianity that the Prince voices in the novel are known to be the same views Dostoevsky himself held at this time, and the same arguments and views crop up in his letters. While Christianity as a solution to the character’s dilemma is only foreshadowed in Crime and Punishment, in The Idiot it is vigorously asserted by the prince as the only solution to Russia’s problems. Only Russians’ know the true meaning of Christianity: the woman said that to me,… it was such a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as father over his own child- the main thought of Christ. Only Russian Orthodoxy is the correct version of Christianity, and Russia must vigorously bring her version to the West: Our Christ, whom we have preserved, and they have never known, must shine forth as a response to the West! Not by being slavishly caught on the Jesuit’s hook, but by bringing them our Russian civilisation, we must now confront them…

This conflation of protagonist and author gives rise to the unpleasantly tempting suggestion that the Prince/Dostoevsky is symbolic of the Christ figure. In the same letter to his niece quoted above, Dostoevsky writes of the beautiful individual: There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ, and there are subtle suggestions throughout the book that Myshkin is symbolic of Christ: No one here is worth your little finger, or your intelligence or your heart! You’re more honest that all of them, nobler than all of them, better than all of the, kinder than all of them, more intelligent than all of them! There are people here who aren’t worthy of bending down to pick up your handkerchief you’ve just dropped… exclaims Aglaya Epanchin to the Prince. (Bulgakov describes the devil’s visit to Moscow; in much the same way Dostoevsky describes Christ’s visit to St Petersburg.) Dostoevsky knows that one day, like the prince, he will return from abroad to Russia, asserting positively the supremacy of Russian Orthodoxy and confounding his detractors. At the same time, on a symbolic level, Dostoevsky is recreating his own return from Omsk with his new awareness of the religion and ways of the peasants, and the reassertion of his position after his exile. It’s this suggestion that perhaps forms the basis for Dostoevsky’s subsequent mythical status as a prophet of Russia and Orthodoxy.

In any ingenious or new human thoughts, or even simply in any serious human thought born in someone’s head, there always remains something which it is quite impossible to convey to other people - though you may fill whole volumes with writing and spend thirty-five years trying to explain your thought; there always remains something that absolutely refuses to leave your skull and will stay with you forever, you will die with it…

Compassion is the chief, perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.

Beauty is a riddle.

I’m dissatisfied with the book, for I haven’t said a tenth part of what I wanted to say. Nevertheless, I don’t repudiate it, and to this day, I love the plan that miscarried.
Letter to his niece
February 1869