I first read this book when I was a teenager, during a phase when I was ripping through a lot of nineteenth century Russian literature. I enjoyed it then, but probably did not understand it very well. I say that because when I read it this time, I don’t think I understood it very well and I’d hate to think I’ve lost ground in the interim. Now, as then, I read the decades-old David Magarshack (Penguin) translation. Janet Malcolm has convinced me to avoid those fashionable new translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
I can say that it’s a remarkable book, full of extravagant characters and events. It’s also a crowded book, largely devoid of “social distancing”: in essence a series of large gatherings of up to 20 people, all talking excitedly and typically culminating in some dramatic flourish, such as a woman throwing 100,000 rubles onto a fire and suggesting that one of her suitors pull it out before it burns. One character or another laughs on every page, but it’s usually hysterical laughter; there is profuse trembling and there are frequent mentions of writhing lips. If you don’t like your fiction high strung, then Dostoyevsky is probably not for you.
The title character, Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin, is very central to the story—if this were a movie, we’d say that he’s in every nearly every scene. So why is he called an “idiot”? Well, he isn’t an idiot, in fact. He’s actually very perceptive and intelligent. I think the word “idiot,” somewhat like the word “moron,” used to be more a clinical description and less an insult. As science and medicine have abandoned these terms, they have become mere terms of abuse. Obviously, that’s not how Dostoyevsky intended to present his title character.
But back to Myshkin, he’s also an epileptic subject to breakdowns when things become too intense. He has just returned from five years in Switzerland, where, under the care of a Dr. Schneider, he has made great progress and has stabilized to the point where he is ready to lead a normal life in Russia. He’s an orphan who was brought up by a pair of aunts, one of whom abused him. He is unworldly in the extreme: innocent, idealistic, trusting. Just about any description of The Idiot describes him as “Christlike” or “an idealized Christian,” but those characterizations do not help me understand him. He's seems to me like a real person, not an avatar or a concept, and he is far from perfect: he’s naïve, indecisive, and timid. Perhaps because Dostoyevsky is a superb novelist, our impression of Myshkin, as of other characters, changes with every chance we get to observe him. Towards the end of the book, one of the other characters, a decent fellow by the name of Radomsky, delivers this assessment to the prince:
I don’t agree – indeed, I feel positively indignant – when someone – oh, whoever it is – calls you an idiot. You’re much too intelligent to be called that. But you must admit you’re also so strange that the fundamental cause of all that’s happened is due to your, as it were, inherent inexperience …, as well as to your extraordinary simplicity; furthermore, to your phenomenal lack of a sense of proportion …, and finally, to the enormously great mass of intellectual convictions which you, with that extraordinary honesty of yours, have hitherto taken for true, natural, spontaneous, and sincere convictions.
By the way, Myshkin is not the only prince in this book, and this title should not be taken as indicating any kind of connection to the royal family. Nineteenth century Russia was apparently full of princes, and some, like Myshkin, may not have been particularly wealthy or influential. Similarly, there are two generals in The Idiot, but neither is a military man: the term denoted a high-ranking civil servant.
Most of the other major characters in the book have as good a claim to a clinical diagnosis as Myshkin: consumed with self loathing, repressed rage, or sheer perversity, they rarely say what they mean. Conspiracies are alluded to; one character or another comes to the prince to divulge some scheme or other, but then goes off and invents some new intrigue. The reader is in the same position as poor Prince Myshkin, trying to figure out who’s up to what and why.
There is a plot, but it’s too complex for me to summarize and besides seems somehow beside the point. The reader is in danger of being overwhelmed, just like poor innocent Myshkin. If you squint a bit and look at the book from a certain perspective, you could say that The Idiot is the story of a young man trying to decide between two possible women. You could go one step further and say that one of the women is a “bad” girl—that is, a fallen woman—and the other is a “good” girl, the youngest daughter of a prominent and reputable family. The bad girl isn’t so much bad as self-damned. She has been ruined, as they used to say, and no longer believes herself worthy of love or even respect.
In one scene, the “good” girl, Aglaya Yepanchin, daughter of General Yepanchin, asks Myshkin to meet her at a park bench early one morning. Is romance in the offing between the prince and this general’s daughter? She begins by telling him how much she admires him:
‘Now listen,’ she began again. ‘I’ve been waiting a long time to tell you all this—I’ve been waiting ever since you wrote me that letter and even before that. Half of it I told you yesterday: I think you’re the most honest and truthful man I know—more honest and truthful than anyone, and if people say about you that your mind—I mean that you sometimes suffer from mental illness, it’s unfair. I’m quite sure about it and I’ve been arguing about it, for although you really are ill mentally (you will not, of course, be angry with me for saying this, for I don’t mean it at all derogatively), yet the most essential part of your mind is much better than in any of them. Indeed, it’s something they never dreamed of. For there are two sorts of minds—one that is essential and on that isn’t. Isn’t that so? It is, isn’t it?’
It would seem that the young woman is well disposed to the prince. Perhaps they have a future together? But as the conversation continues, her intentions become less clear. First she asks him to help her “run away from home.” When he declares this plan “absurd,” she says that she will instead marry one of her other suitors (the son of the other general). She goes on to say: “I’m sure you came here because you thought I was in love with you and that I had made an assignation with you.” The prince replies “I really was afraid of that yesterday.” Aglaya is enraged by this response.
The conversation continues for several pages. Aglaya reveals that she has received letters from the “bad” woman, Natasya Fillippovna, urging her to marry the prince. The prince is just trying to sort through all the protestations, denunciations, hints, and revelations that Aglaya hurls at him. At this point I might take a page from Aglaya and propose that there are two kinds of readers of The Idiot: those who take the things these characters say more or less at face value, like the prince, and become less and less certain of exactly what is going on as the novel progresses, and those who intuit the emotional truth behind all the drama and have at least a sense of where motives ends and sheer perversity takes up. Because in Dostoyevsky novels there is always the impulse, in certain characters, to self-destruction. Prince Myshkin swims against this tide of perversity, and I, a naïve reader of the first type, am rooting for him to come out right and find his equilibrium, and maybe even true love. This objective seems within reach as the novel winds down. I recalled that Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s previous novel, has a happy ending, though many critics found that ending unconvincing.
I imagine that the second type of reader will be less shocked by the ending of The Idiot than I was. I hope the critics were happy.
