SOURCE: Burgin, Diana L. “Prince Myshkin, the True Lover and ‘Impossible Bridegroom’: A Problem in Dostoevskian Narrative.” The Slavic and East European Journal 27, no. 2 (summer 1983): 158-75.

[In the following essay, Burgin analyzes the ambivalent nature of Myshkin's love for Nastasya Filippovna, arguing that it is not so much a character defect as it is “a problem of Dostoevskian narrative and the limitations of the novelistic genre as a vehicle of Dostoevskian truth.”]

“The truth … very often seems impossible.”

—General Ivolgin to Prince Myškin

I

The Idiot's statement on love, human and divine, hinges on the true perception of its hero, Prince Myškin, as a lover in every sense of the word. Yet, ironically, no aspect of Myškin's “problematic” character has created more critical controversy than the apparently ambiguous nature of his loving. While few readers and critics have doubted the Prince's unbounded (and therefore possibly suspect) capacity to love compassionately, like a true Christian, many have believed, and sought to prove him incapable of “normal” (sexual) love. Such readers conclude that he is an implausible, if not impossible lover. Others have suggested that Myškin is completely asexual, not fully-realized as a “human” character, at best a lover only in the symbolic sense, at worst an artistic failure.

Critical doubts about the Prince's manhood appear to go back to Vjačeslav Ivanov, who interpreted Myškin symbolically as “a spirit that assumes flesh [rather] than a man who rises to the spiritual,” and argued that the Prince's loving leads to suffering which “arises from the incompleteness of his incarnation.”¹ Pursuing Ivanov's line of argument, Berdjaev went further and concluded that the Prince “has not got the sensibility of a healthy man; … his love is without flesh and blood, … and he loves Nastasja Filippovna with an excessive compassion that is itself destructive.”² More recently, in her thought-provoking Freudian study of The Idiot, Elisabeth Dalton concurs with the implications of much earlier criticism in stating that “the Prince is asexual, … evidently impotent, … and even apparently without sexual feelings.”³ Rene Girard seems to summarize the majority opinion on Myškin when he concludes:

Prince Myškin is not without desires but his dreams pass far over the heads of the other characters in The Idiot. … The ‘normal’ young people are unable to decide between two conflicting opinions of him—they wonder whether he is an idiot or a consummate tactitian. … The author himself seems to have doubts. Myškin is not truly incarnate. The character remains problematic.⁴

A different interpretation of Myškin has been offered by Joseph Frank, who considers the Prince a well-rounded, completely “human” character and demonstrates convincingly that his love for Aglaja (if not for Nastasja Filippovna) shows him capable of normal sexual feelings for a woman: “He is … a man, not a supernatural being—a man who has himself fallen in love with a woman [Aglaja] as a creature of flesh and blood.”⁵ Frank believes that in The Idiot Dostoevskij juxtaposes Myškin's “two loves”: the normal “secular” and sexual love he has for Aglaja vs. the “eschatological, Christian, and compassionate” love he bears Nastasja Filippovna.

Frank's interpretation of Myškin is persuasive for a number of reasons. It avoids the pitfalls of the excessively symbolic and mystical approaches of Ivanov and Berdjaev which seem at odds with Dostoevskij's intention to create a truly beautiful man, a character which may indeed have symbolic significance, but which must be convincing in human terms, if only to provide a foundation for its symbolism. Frank's view also resolves the discrepancy between the asexuality alleged to Myškin by many critics and his impassioned love experiences with women in the novel. Finally, Frank's interpretation appreciates the tragedy of the Prince's failures in love without casting unwarranted suspicion on the essential goodness of the man. Critics who resort to maligning Myškin's character in an effort to explain his and others' suffering risk aligning themselves with the most morally suspect and banal characters in the novel. When carried to its logical extreme, this “blame-the-victim” mentality (epitomized by Radomskij's implied reading of the Prince's love stories) results in a kind of Manichean heresy that Myškin is really a demon in saint's clothing.⁶

Frank's assumption that the Prince is a man fully capable of loving women is the most fruitful approach to his “problematic” character. It alone offers a basis for explaining Myškin's active involvement in two complex and intense love triangles (Myškin-Nastasja-Rogožin; Nastasja-Myškin-Aglaja), both of which evolve from his desire for Nastasja Filippovna in Part I of the novel. Unlike Frank, I do not believe that Myškin's love for Nastasja is wholly a model of compassionate, non-sexual, Christian love. On the contrary, Nastasja Filippovna is the woman who first arouses Myškin's sexual feelings. Initially he desires and falls in love with her in much the same way, although without the same intensity, that he later is attracted to Aglaja.

In this study I shall analyze Myškin's role as lover in the novel in an attempt to clarify the nature of his initial love for Nastasja Filippovna and other sources of ambiguity in his loving; his sexuality; the relationship between his two loves; and the reasons for their failure. My ultimate aim is to suggest a new solution to the Myškin puzzle by showing that the source of the “problem” lies not within his character, but in the strange, almost manipulative way he is presented to the reader. To my mind the problem of Prince Myškin boils down to a problem of Dostoevskian narrative and the limitations of the novelistic genre as a vehicle of Dostoevskian truth.

His conclusions about Myškin notwithstanding, Girard's insights into triangular desire and internal mediation are extremely useful in analyzing the inner dynamics of Myškin's romantic entanglements and the relationship between them. The Nastasja-Myškin-Aglaja triangle, for example, reveals that the Prince's “dreams” of happiness, far from “passing far over the heads” of the two women, in fact, answer each one's deepest yearnings. Myškin is Nastasja's “Prince Charming,” the only man who can fulfill the dream she has lost faith in (“Haven't I dreamed of you myself? … You were quite right, I dreamed of you long ago” 203/144).⁷ At the same time, the Prince uniquely possesses the nobility of soul that Aglaja seeks in a man, although she finds it potentially embarrassing (“Never in my life have I met a man like him for noble simplicity and boundless trustfulness … and that is why I fell in love with him.” 611/471). While each of the women wants the Prince only for herself, Myškin wants and needs them both. He enters the novel as the externally mediated hero in search of beauty and truth, falls in love, is drawn into the snares of triangular desire foreign to his nature, and is ultimately victimized by it.

The more closely we examine Myškin's love relationships, the more convinced we become that the problematic nature of his loving does not lie in his incomplete manhood. Rather it develops from the ironic and ambiguous manner in which Myškin is presented as a lover by the narrator and perceived in this role by himself and the other characters in the novel. The Prince's discreet, yet triangularly interrelated loves, as well as the nature of his sexuality, are deliberately rendered strange through multilayered ironies, half-truths, misunderstandings, mishaps, purposeful and unconscious misinterpretations. Everyone contributes to the narrative confusion surrounding the Prince. The characters with whom he is involved are often “readers” of his love affairs. Aglaja, for example, offers a parodic reading of Myškin's suit of Nastasja Filippovna as itself a parody of Puškin's “Poor Knight.” Later, Radomskij gives an oral “psychological” analysis of both Myškin's loves in an effort to elucidate the contemporary “moral” of his experience. Although partially correct, these (and other) apparently convincing explanations of the Prince in fact miss the point. Like those readers who are “usually convinced of [their] own spontaneity,” Aglaja and Radomskij apply to the Prince “the meanings they already apply to the world.”⁸ This is particularly detrimental to the reputation of a man who, if he lacks anything, lacks worldliness.

Since there is not a single character in the novel, Myškin included, who sees the Prince impartially enough to be dependable as a voice of truth, and since even the narrator is more a hindrance than a help to understanding him, the reader must assume the often frustrating task of ferreting out the truth about Myškin that lies embedded in others' sometimes intelligent, often conflicting, but always only partially correct interpretations. The reader can, and I believe, should be guided in this task by the authorial caveat implied in the liar Ivolgin's ironic, yet true comment, “The truth … very often seems impossible,” as well as its unstated corollary that “the thought articulated is a lie.”⁹ In attempting to understand the Prince as lover, the reader must maintain a healthy suspiciousness of words, explanations, and innuendoes, and attune himself to the implied meanings of actions, gestures, and silence.

II

“Sex is not the only object of sexual passion.”¹⁰

Mistrust about the Prince as a true lover is shown by the doubts characters in the novel have about his sexual capacity. One of the first and most apparently “extraordinary” facts we learn about Myškin is that he is still a virgin.¹¹ Realizing how strange he must seem in this regard, Myškin explains his lack of experience with “the ladies” by saying that he has been ill most of his life. He also cites his illness (epilepsy) as the reason he cannot marry: “I can't marry anyone, I'm not well” (62/32). Some critics, notably Dalton, have read into this statement an implicit acknowledgment of sexual inadequacy and have argued that it supports the idea that Myškin is asexual. One cannot deny that the Prince connects his epilepsy with his unmarriageability, but the link between the two does not necessarily imply a sexual problem. A 19th century epileptic could just as naturally believe himself unmarriageable because he feared or had been told that his disease was hereditary.¹² More important, we know that the condition of semi-idiocy in which the Prince has spent most of his boyhood and adolescence has robbed him of the conventional experiences of growing up. We can assume that it has also deprived him of a normal social life and psychosexual development. Myškin's illness helps to explain his fear of marriage and his innocence of the world without in any way suggesting that it has deprived him of sexual desire.

The Prince's innocence causes a great deal of comment and concern in a society where it is an exception and experience the rule. Explanations of his virginity vary, but none of them should be accepted at face value because each character's interpretation reveals at least as much about his or her own attitudes to sexuality as it tells us about Myškin. Thus, Rogožin, a man imprisoned by his own lusts, interprets the Prince's virginity as a sign of God's grace: “You're a regular holy fool, Prince. And such as you God loves” (38/14). Mme Epančina, who tends to view all young men as potential husbands for her daughters, likes Myškin, but is disappointed by his apparent lack of interest in getting married. Therefore, she concludes that the Prince is “a good man, but an impossible bridegroom.” Her words prove both ironic and prophetic.

General Epančin gives the most vulgar explanation for Myškin's virginity. When the Prince finally asks for Aglaja's hand, Epančin is bewildered and makes it rather obvious that he thinks him impotent: “You see, my boy, it's not your money, … but—what I'm worried about is my daughter's happiness … I mean—are you capable of making her—er—as it were—happy?” (556/427). Clearly General Epančin's inferences reflect the surmise about the Prince in Petersburg society. But before leaping on his words as additional, if not final proof of Myškin's sexual incapacity, one must ask if Dostoevskij wants the conventional viewpoints expressed in the novel to represent the truth. Obviously he does not, but the narrator does little to make the author's intentions on this issue clear. He manipulates the reader's opinions on Myškin's virginity in such a way that s/he wants to agree with the perceptions of “ordinary” people whose other banalities s/he scorns. The real puzzle of the Prince's sexuality involves the question of why the reader is so tempted to side with General Epančin's reading of it at the expense of Myškin's.

On the surface the narrator confirms the other characters' doubts about Myškin as a normal lover. In Part III, chapter 3, for example, he offers the following commentary on the Prince's perception of his feelings for Aglaja:

If anyone had told him at that moment that he was in love, that he was passionately in love, he would have rejected the idea with surprise, and perhaps even with indignation … He would have been ashamed of such a thought! He would have thought it monstrous that anyone could be in love … with ‘a man like him.’

(399/301)

At first glance this passage appears to suggest that Myškin is unable to be in love because he is such a queer sort of man. A closer reading shows, however, that this is not the case at all. It is not that Myškin can't fall in love, but that he can't conceive of himself as a man in love or as a man who is desirable. In other words, Myškin's feelings for Aglaja (and hers for him) contradict his self-image. The passage conveys ironically the opposite of what it purports to say: with a man like the Prince no greater proof of his being in love exists than his rejection of the whole “shameful” idea. While appearing to confirm what proves to be untrue, the narrator at first misleads the reader, but his irony reveals an underlying truth illustrated throughout the novel: often a person's self-image contradicts his true self.

Unlike most “ordinary” people Myškin has little if any consciousness of his own sexuality. Consequently he manifests anxiety about his sexual feelings and tends to repress them. Part of his anxiety stems from his lack of experience, which in turn has resulted in at best a poorly developed image of himself as a lover in the sexual sense. The case of Nastasja Filippovna (who is apparently different from but basically similar to Myškin) also demonstrates how important experience is in developing a sexual self-image. Both Myškin and Nastasja are victims of conventional misinterpretations of their sexuality which they have internalized (Nastasja consciously and Myškin unconsciously). As Myškin perceives to the general consternation, Nastasja is far more innocent than her affair with Totskij leads her and other people to believe. Myškin, as the two women and the man who love and want him sense, is far more sensual than his innocence suggests. It is telling that while Myškin cannot recognize his true feelings for Aglaja, his “double” Rogožin can: “But haven't you, Prince, got into the clutches of just such a woman yourself? … I can see for myself now that it's true. Well, when have you talked like this before?” (402-3/303).

The psychological relationship between self-image and true self in The Idiot is analogous to the narrative relationship in the novel between interpretations of the Prince and the Prince himself, between reading and reality, words and silence. The former seem to belie the latter, especially with regard to Myškin's sexuality and his loving. If the reader would simply accept Myškin's virginity and resist interpreting it as some special sign, positive or negative, s/he would realize that Myškin is neither a holy fool who shuns the flesh, nor an “incomplete” man. He is what he says he is: a man who, for good reasons beyond his control, is a virgin. Therefore he seems and acts sexually young for his age. Both women know this is true although they resist the truth for different reasons. Nastasja values Myškin's innocence above all else, but hates him (or wants to hate him) for being a “belated” Prince Charming. Aglaja loves Myškin for his simplicity but is annoyed by his lack of social polish and adolescent mannerisms, for example, her irritation at his schoolboy expressions (IV/6/567).

Myškin expresses his sexuality indirectly through an appreciation of beauty in nature and particularly in women that is truly extraordinary. In his essay, The Sense of Beauty, Santayana describes the sexual impulses underlying the esthetic sensibility of what he calls the “modest and inexperienced mind,” a mind which bears a striking resemblance to Myškin's:

The whole sentimental side of our esthetic sensibility … is due to our sexual organization remotely stirred. … The color, the grace, the form, which become the stimuli of sexual passion … acquire, before they can fulfill that office, a certain intrinsic charm. … Not, of course, that any specifically sexual ideas are connected with these feelings; such ideas are absent in a modest and inexperienced mind even in the obviously sexual passions of love and jealousy.¹³

Dostoevskij shows that Myškin falls in love with Nastasja Filippovna by detailing his response to her portrait, i.e. to her beautiful image. The Prince's first impression of Nastasja's face is esthetic and sensual: “‘So this is Nastasja Filippovna,’ he murmured. ‘She's wonderfully beautifule,’ he added at once with ardor” (56/27). By the end of part one, chapter three, Myškin has become engrossed in Nastasja Filippovna's image. He conveys his impression to the uncomprehending Ganja and General Epančin (who, like the “ordinary people” they are, are primarily interested in whether he would “marry a woman like that”):

A remarkable face! And I'm sure her life has not been an ordinary one [sic!]. Her face looks cheerful, but she has suffered a lot, hasn't she? It's a proud face, a terribly proud face, but what I can't tell is whether she is kind-hearted or not. Oh, if she were! That would make everything right for her!

(62/31)

By now Nastasja's beauty has aroused Myškin's curiosity about her character. In wishing to understand her soul, in registering concern for her fate, he expresses his yearning for union with her. It is as if the Prince has, to use a Platonic image, “impregnated himself” with the image of his ideal beloved, seeking for her and himself “to be born into the beautiful.”¹⁴

Myškin's third and most profound reading of Nastasja Filippovna's face climaxes in a physical gesture expressing his desire for her—he kisses her portrait:

He seemed anxious to solve some mystery that was hidden in that face and that had struck him before … There was a sort of immense pride and scorn, almost hatred, in that face, and at the same time, also something trusting, something wonderfully goodnatured; this striking contrast seemed almost to arouse in him a feeling of compassion as he looked at it. That dazzling beauty! The prince gazed at it for a minute … looked around nervously, quickly put the portrait to his lips and kissed it.

(107-8/68)

This passage shows that Myškin's attraction to Nastasja Filippovna cannot in any sense be called merely compassionate. An intense and complex feeling, it encompasses awe, confusion, compassion for her ambivalence (it is the “striking contrast” that moves him to compassion), a desire to know her (to solve her mystery) and to embrace her. Nastasja's beauty attracts, confounds, challenges, and enthralls the Prince as it does many other, less worthy men—Totskij, Rogožin, General Epančin, even Ganja. It demands action and resolution. Rogožin's recognition of the Prince as his most potent rival confirms that they are both possessed by their passion for this woman. Whereas Rogožin's lust—devoid of compassion—illustrates a kind of demonic possession, Myškin's love recalls Plato's description of the best “… of all forms of divine possession, both for the subject himself and for his associate, … when he is touched with this madness, the man whose love is aroused by beauty in others is called a lover.”¹⁵

Although made to appear ambiguous to other characters, Prince Myškin's consternation at his own sexual responses, and inability to express them in a desire solely for sexual gratification, are viewed positively by Dostoevskij, who often associates sex with cruelty and the self-destructive desire to dominate.¹⁶ They are also psychologically credible in the light of Myškin's previous experience of love. Prior to Nastasja, the Prince's most profound emotional attachment was his relationship with Marie in Switzerland. That sexless and wholly compassionate love brought him “a different kind of happiness.” It is understandable that he would want to duplicate it, and tragic that he cannot.

Myškin's lack of experience in sex on one hand and his great understanding of love on the other are rare, but they appear even more extraordinary in the novel than they may be in life because they are exactly the reverse of the experience in sex and love of all the “ordinary” people whom he meets in Petersburg. While everyone else in this society wants to possess, own, and dominate the object of his or her desire, Myškin wants, and is able to love passionately. While everyone else wishes selfishly to gratify his or her ego, Myškin receives ego-gratification through realizing the other's happiness. Rather than deny sex, Myškin's compassionate heart strives to neutralize the cruelty in lust which seeks domination, not love. Rogožin's love for Nastasja Filippovna turns to hate precisely because it lacks the equilibrating force of compassion. That is why he needs the Prince and is torn, as Girard would say, by his metaphysical desire for him.

Myškin's idiosyncratic sexuality, his capacity to temper his desire with compassion, and most of all his profound will to be happy—all these things mark him as a most unconventionally novelistic, but at the same time very “real” lover. In a way Myškin is used as an ironic foil to his own truth. On the surface he appears too good a hero to be a true lover, whereas in reality he is too true a lover to be a good (novelistic) hero. The irony is directed at Myškin's readers, both within and outside of the novel, who, alienated from real life, mistakenly seek analogies for Myškin's loving in books, conventions, and social theories when his prototype is more discernible in real life.

III

At this moment I feel that I particularly need (apart from the absolutely extraordinary that is uniquely yours) something else which you alone of all the world can give me: a woman's love, a woman's. It is our future that I am thinking about: to share … thoughts, feelings, to be one soul, full of compassion—and all that is given only on one condition—marriage.

—Aleksandr Blok to Ljubov' Dmitrievna¹⁷

Blok's lines to Ljubov´ Dmitrievna provide one “real-life” echo of Prince Myškin's desire for his “beautiful lady,” Nastasja Filippovna, which culminates in his proposal to her at the end of part one. We have already noted how the Prince falls in love with the image of his ideal woman. Unsure of how to proceed after first meeting her at the Ivolgins, yet totally captivated by her, Myškin decides spontaneously to go to her birthday party uninvited. In his suit he behaves exactly like a young man in love for the first time. As he ascends the stairs to her apartment, the narrator notes that he is “greatly troubled in his mind,” and agitated by “another unsolved problem, a problem so important that [he] was even afraid to think of it, could not, indeed, dared not admit its existence, did not know how to formulate it and blushed and trembled at the very thought of it” (165-66/114). By not stating what this problem is the narrator again leaves Myškin's motives and behavior open to misinterpretation. If the reader already doubts the normalcy of Myškin's desires, that is, if s/he has been swayed by conventional opinion, s/he could read the Prince's agitation in this context as additional proof of his asexuality. On the other hand, the absence of sexual feeling would hardly cause a man such shame. It is, I think, far more likely in terms of what has actually transpired, that Myškin's anxiety stems from his having to cope with his unfamiliar, sexual feelings for Nastasja, feelings, moreover, which have led him to pursue her in spite of his conviction that he is unmarriageable and that another man, Rogožin, whom he likes very much, is madly in love with her.

The “unsolved problem” troubling Myškin is the narrator's way of expressing the Prince's inner awareness of the triangular situation his desire for Nastasja will involve him in. Although on one hand Myškin is “passionate” in Girard's sense of the term—“distinguished by his emotional autonomy, by the spontaneity of his desires, and by his absolute indifference to the opinions of others”—on the other he is vulnerable to triangular desire because he wants Nastasja as a beautiful woman, wants her more than his vaguely formulated ideal of beauty and compassionate love.¹⁸ “As soon as there is really desire, even in the passionate characters, we find the mediator. … In the birth of desire, the third person is always present.”¹⁹ The third person in Myškin's case is Rogožin, whom he has witnessed in action at the Ivolgins. In going to Nastasja's birthday party uninvited Myškin acts in a Rogožinesque way, and in proposing to her on the spot, in making her an offer that outdoes Rogožin's (spiritually, if not materialistically), he enters into direct competition for her favors. Thus Rogožin acquires the potential for replacing Myškin's externally mediating ideal of truth and beauty. At the same time the Prince triggers the destructive force of Rogožin's metaphysical desire for him. The difference between Myškin and conventional novelistic lovers is that he consciously fights against internal mediation. He attaches as much importance to not being Rogožin's rival as he does to winning Nastasja's love, but initially, the latter is his sole aim.

When he sees his beautiful lady, Myškin is “dazzled and fascinated” (170/118). He idolizes her and tells her so straight out: “Everything about you is perfection—one wouldn't wish to imagine you different—I wanted so much to come and see you” (170/118). At this point Nastasja Filippovna responds with her characteristic perversity: “‘So you think I'm a paragon of perfection, do you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘… This time you're mistaken. I'll remind you of it tonight.’” Heedless of her warning, and unaware that she has already come up with a plan to overcome this unforeseen obstacle to self-destruction, Myškin continues his suit. Nastasja mockingly tests his devotion: “‘Who'll take me without anything?’ [i.e. who will make the highest bid] ‘… The Prince will.’ ‘Is it true?’ ‘It is.’ ‘You'll take me without anything?’ ‘I will, Nastasja Filippovna.’” (195/138). Finally, Myškin declares his love and proposes to the “fallen woman”:

I think you'll be doing me an honor and not I you … What … are you ashamed of? … I love you, Nastasja Filippovna. I'm ready to die for you, Nastasja Filippovna. I won't let anyone say a bad word against you, Nastasja Filippovna!

(196/138)

It is hardly excessive compassion that makes Myškin's declaration of love for Nastasja so unusual. What strikes us is the passionate, youthful chivalry of his intentions and the truly obsessional force of his desire, heedless of the risks such a match entails for himself. His threefold repetition of her name leaves no doubt that Myškin's love is “particular” (Frank argues that it is not)—it is she, Nastasja Filippovna, whom he wants. Such passion, however, has become totally alien to St. Petersburg society where money and lust have priced chivalry and love out of the market. Alone among the guests, Nastasja Filippovna, herself an outcast and a dreamer, recognizes Myškin as the true lover, the “Prince Charming” of her dreams.

Tragically, Nastasja Filippovna's life, as Myškin could see, “has not been an easy one.” What he could not imagine is the degree to which she has already defended herself against shattered dreams and impossible truths by becoming ironic. It is precisely because Myškin can realize her happiness that she must destroy him. In rejecting Myškin Nastasja Filippovna blasphemes her true self in order to fulfill her image. She destroys herself, but, as it were, creates a novel which will ultimately demand the sacrifice of her unnovelistic hero. She commences “authorship” of the Prince's romantic future during the scandalous finale of part one by doing more than anyone to foster the impression that the Prince is a strange, unlikely suitor and to confirm our doubts about his capacity to fall in love. Her self-mocking and cruel indictment of the Prince as a kind, but silly child who “needs a nurse himself to look after him” (a perfect example of projection if ever there was one) encourages the reader's assessment of him as an undesirable lover. Nastasja Filippovna's consummate acting and irony seem so much more convincing than Myškin's reality and fairytale truth that it is difficult for the reader to view the Prince at this point apart from his novelistic preconceptions of the world. Her sarcastic exit-line, “Prince, you ought to marry Aglaja Epančina,” (202/143) sets Myškin up as the hero of a new triangle and foretells her victorious defeat in its resolution. Myškin probably misses the irony in Nastasja Filippovna's taunt, but he unconsciously absorbs her suggestion.

The next time we meet the Prince, he is no longer a man in love, but a rejected lover enduring an agony of pity for his lost beloved. The reader tends to forget that Myškin's feelings Nastasja did change from love to pity because his change-of-heart is not narrated directly. It is a crucial, but deliberately underplayed moment in the “off-stage” action between parts one and two, the month Myškin spends with Rogožin and Nastasja in Moscow. During that time as well the Prince suddenly “remembers” and turns to Aglaja for sisterly support. Eventually he falls in love with her, but his far more passive suit of his “second-most-beautiful lady” suggests a love on the rebound as Aglaja's wounded vanity appreciates to the full.

IV

‘But she is beautiful, Prince, isn't she?’ ‘Extremely!’ the prince replied warmly, looking entranced at Aglaja, ‘Almost as beautiful as Nastasja Filippovna …’

(105/66)

The Prince was first attracted to Aglaja as to a younger sister. This, combined with Mme Epančina's maternal attitude towards him and her nervousness about his alleged idiocy, makes it difficult for any of the Epančins to view him as a prospective son-in-law. Aglaja, however, likes the Prince immediately and reveals her attraction with childlike perversity through her sarcastic attitude to him at the luncheon (see I/5). Her hostility increases when the Prince makes the faux pas of complimenting her by comparing her to his ideal beauty. Myškin tells the truth here (as he is wont to do) at the expense of Aglaja's vanity. She suffers the entirely understandable jealousy of a proud and pampered child-woman, accustomed to being first, who is the second choice of the man she desires.

From the fraternal “love-letter” he writes her initiating a new relationship to his “non-proposal” of marriage, every stage of Myškin's relationship with Aglaja seems more a parody of romantic love than the real thing, and Myškin seems always like the proverbial character from another opera. More important, although not so obvious, every critical moment in Myškin's second love is presided over, and perhaps even directed by Nastasja Filippovna's increasingly malignant will. The impression of Myškin as a fool is precisely the one she wants to create. Her motive is revenge and her tactics are demonic. While keeping Myškin in thrall to her now merciless beauty, Nastasja Filippovna seduces Aglaja into the trap of triangular desire.

Nastasja Filippovna plays up society's view of her as a fallen woman because at heart she conceives of herself as a fallen angel. She wants to be Myškin's one-and-only beloved, the innocent child whom she pictures in one of her love letters to Aglaja as the sole companion of a solitary and compassionate Christ. Deeply-rooted feelings of self-hate and unworthiness cause her to reject Myškin while yearning for him. Her ambivalence leads her to create an obstacle—another woman—and she projects her desire for Myškin onto this rival: “You are innocent, and in your innocence lies all your perfection. … What do you care for my passion for you? You are mine already now, I shall be all my life beside you … I shall be dead soon” (495/380, emphases mine, D.L.B.). To employ Girard's terminology, Nastasja Filippovna, the “fallen woman,” wants Aglaja, the innocent, as the mediatrix of her own desire for the Prince. Her success in getting Aglaja to play her game is proved by the degree to which the latter derides Myškin as a suitor. If in his spontaneous suit of Nastasja Myškin he would have truly fulfilled the chivalric role of Prince Charming, in his awkward courtship of Aglaja he emerges as a “poor knight,” or even a parody thereof. Like her mother's, Aglaja's reading of Myškin the lover is both ironic and prophetic. He is forced into the role with her that she perceived him to be playing in his quest for her rival's love.

The full extent of Nastasja's demonic, “authorial” power over Myškin and Aglaja is illustrated in the crucial rendezvous between them in the park (III/8). This scene initiates the tragic denouement of the novel's second major triangle which has been contrived and perpetuated by Nastasja herself. Prior to his meeting with Aglaja, Myškin has been up all night (at his birthday celebration!) witnessing Ippolit's self-laceration. He goes to the park and falls asleep, only to be tormented by visions of a more awesome martyrdom, incarnate in the Medusa-like face of his former beautiful lady. The situation does not bode well for a “new dawn” as both Aglaja and Myškin sense in their initial exchange:

‘Asleep! You were asleep!’ she cried with disdainful surprise. ‘It's you!’ murmured the prince, still not quite awake … ‘Why yes! I was to meet you here—’ ‘I'm afraid I fell asleep.’ ‘I saw you.’ ‘Did no one wake me except you? There was no one here except you, was there? I thought—I thought there was another woman here.’ ‘There was another woman here?’

(463/352)

Myškin's dream of Nastasja Filippovna is as real to him as Aglaja's actual presence. Yet Myškin takes steps to counter Nastasja's power over him. He loves Aglaja and wants to be happy with her; thus, in an attempt to soothe her jealousy and to exorcise the demon of Nastasja Filippovna, he speaks straightforwardly for the first and only time of his past love. He tries to convince Aglaja of the truth, that he no longer loves Nastasja, that his feelings for her changed long ago from love to pity:

Oh, I loved her, I loved her very much, but later … she guessed everything … That I was only sorry for her, (…) and that I no longer loved her.

(474/362)

Myškin goes on to confess his strong doubts about Nastasja's love for him: “You say she loves me, but is this love? Can there be such a love after what I've been through? No, it's something else, not love!” (475/363).

Myškin believes (rightly) that the generous child in Aglaja can accept his continuing pity for the ailing Nastasja, just as the children in Switzerland ultimately overcame their resentment and accepted his compassionate love for Marie. What he doesn't realize yet is the degree to which the mad woman's claim on his pity threatens Aglaja's “double”—the proud beauty who finds pleasure in self-laceration. This is the side of Aglaja (and Myškin certainly cannot be blamed for its existence) who resists her sympathy with the Prince's anxiety over the other woman, who refuses to comprehend why he has “come back for Nastasja's sake” if he no longer loves her, and who is unconsciously conspiring with her rival to bring about Nastasja's desired destruction, her own defeat, and the final victimization of Myškin.

After they have become engaged, Myškin tries once again to talk with Aglaja about Nastasja, but she refuses to listen:

‘You do look very gloomy sometimes, Aglaja. You never looked like that before. I know why it is …’ ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ ‘No, I'd better say it. I've said it already, but—that's not enough, because you didn't believe me. Between us two there still stands—one person—‘Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!’ Aglaja interrupted him …

(568/437)

So in the grip of internal mediation is Aglaja that she resists hearing anything that might make it impossible to act with the same perversity as her model and rival. At this point she wants to be the star of her own scandal, to infect the Prince with her own power of suggestion and negative prophecy. When the social debacle she has feared and predicted for Myškin has come to pass at their engagement party, Aglaja takes the offensive in her rivalry with Nastasja. She sets up a meeting with her rival to give Myškin one last chance. For her now, as for Nastasja Filippovna, he has to choose one or the other of them. Myškin dreads the meeting in which he senses Nastasja's evil power over him and Aglaja:

And again—‘that woman’! Why did it always seem to him that that woman would make an appearance at the very last moment and snap his life in two like a rotten thread? … If he had tried to forget her lately, it was solely because he was afraid of her. Well? Did he love that woman or did he hate her?

(606/467)

The Prince, in consciously recognizing that his pity for Nastasja is tinged with his own fear and perhaps even hatred, comes as close to blaming her for his unhappiness as it is possible for him to do. His dread and “double thoughts” prophesy his own doom. They also convince one that it is not Myškin's spirit of compassion but Nastasja Filippovna's “demon of irony” that is the destructive force behind his tragedy.²⁰

V

Myškin's suffering is so great that the other characters and the reader seek some justification for it. Just as his extraordinary innocence was the subject of gossip and mistrust in part one, so, ironically, in part four his extraordinary loves for two women become the focus of talk and censure. Once again Myškin's loving is subjected to a reading (Radomskij's) that makes it appear almost the opposite of what it is. In offering a most plausible explanation of the Prince that turns out to be totally misleading, Dostoevskij is employing irony for his own “higher purposes.” He is testing the reader's faith in the Prince and in silence as a vehicle of truth.

Radomskij's attempt to explain the Prince and the meaning of his loves provides a classic example of probable logic that is truly impossible. On the surface the narrator appears to support Radomskij's view, describing it as “clear, sensible, psychologically insightful and positively eloquent” (623/481). The rub lies in Radomskij's eloquence, however. The more he talks, the more blatant become the incorrectness of his assumptions and the faultiness of his knowledge of the facts. In order to reveal the truth of his unconventional hero Dostoevskij undermines the validity of a conventional assessment of him by having its absurdity speak for itself. At the same time he demonstrates how easily words belie truth, and justifies Myškin's much distrusted silence.

The reader possesses the knowledge that discredits every one of Radomskij's arguments. He charges that Myškin's attraction to Nastasja was “a fantasy … the result of something conventionally democratic, some fascination of the woman question” (623/481). We know, however, that Myškin had no notions whatsoever about the woman question, that his politics are neither conventional, nor democratic, and that his understanding of Nastasja (of her ambivalence, suffering, mystery) was no fantasy—if anything it turned out to be too real. Radomskij says Nastasja's demonic beauty bewitched Myškin. Here he is partially correct (Nastasja's beauty did enthrall the Prince), but his view is nonetheless misleading: the demonic side of Nastasja's beauty caused him to fear her, it repelled him. Radomskij concludes that Myškin's passion for Nastasja was “nothing but an intellectual enthusiasm” for saving the “fallen woman.” Again he approaches the truth, but his lack of knowledge leads him astray. Myškin did want to save Nastasja, but not because he viewed her as a fallen woman. Rather, he wanted to save her from her own image of herself as a fallen woman. Thus he answers Radomskij by saying that the latter “does not know her.”

Radomskij's most serious accusation pertains to Myškin's alleged mistreatment of Aglaja. He says the Prince deliberately humiliated Aglaja and ignored her suffering by not running after her and staying behind to comfort Nastasja. The reader, who actually witnessed the scene, knows, or should know that when Aglaja ran out, Myškin's first impulse was to follow her. He was about to do so when Nastasja literally held him back by falling into a faint:

[Aglaja] ran out of the room followed by Rogožin, who went out to unbolt the front door for her. The prince too ran, but in the doorway he was clasped by a pair of hands. The distracted, distorted face of Nastasja Filippovna was staring at him, and her lips, which had turned blue, moved, asking: ‘After her? After her?’ She fell unconscious in his arms.

(615/475)

It is true that Myškin stayed to comfort Nastasja, but in doing so he was not making a conscious choice for her or rejecting Aglaja. He was acting spontaneously to help the one who needed him most. Myškin could not choose between the two women because for him there was no choice; his feelings for them are entirely different and mutually inclusive, he “knows whom he loves” (Aglaja) and whom “he must care for” (Nastasja). Moreover, only by not choosing, by “not realizing the force of the challenge” (615) issued him by the two women, can the Prince remain true to himself, to his conviction that love implies caring and the end of romantic love is not the end of a relationship. It is such nobility of soul that made Aglaja fall in love with the Prince and that identifies him as a true lover, but apparently, an impossible bridegroom.

The final indication that Radomskij has not fully understood the Prince comes from Myškin himself (whose comment, “in this one must know everything” draws our attention to Radomskij's lack of knowledge), and from the narrator whose note that Radomskij “went away with strange convictions” and more questions than answers undercuts the validity of his eloquent explanation. Radomskij began by telling the Prince that “[he'd] show him himself as in a looking-glass,” but his mirror returns a reflection of his own doubts: “And what was the meaning of the face he was so afraid of and loved so much? … And how can one love two persons at once? With two different kinds of love? … And what would become of him now?” (627/485). Radomskij's befuddlement underscores the limitations of his own “psychology” and implied reading. Its irony guides the reader to the truth expressed in the Prince's unarticulated inner thoughts, true convictions, and real but unnovelistic experience.

Ultimately, Myškin the true lover must be seen as both a sacrifice to and active champion of Dostoevskij's idea that words cannot convey truth. The Prince refuses to banalize his feelings and knowledge by talking about them. His reticence isolates him, causes him to be misunderstood, indeed, renders him idiotic; it creates frightful ambiguities which are turned against him with such a vengeance that they seem to defeat the purpose for which Myškin was created. Rather than indicate Dostoevskij's uncertainly about his hero, however, I would suggest that these ambiguities are designed deliberately to test the reader in an effort to certify only those believers in the Prince whose “hosannah [has been] tested in the crucible of doubt.”²¹ Like the declassé gentleman ironist who so torments Ivan Karamazov, the creator of The Idiot is a materialist “in the higher sense” who believes the ends justify the means. He tempts us to accept the conventional wisdom which puts the validity of his hero in doubt. Yet by separating truth from convention and novels he enhances its status as the supreme moral value. The very silence that helped to create Myškin's tragedy of worldly and wordy misunderstanding is used at the very end to reveal his transcendent Truth.

Exhausted by the ravages of his “secular” loves (Aglaja and Nastasja Filippovna), in which the Christian happiness he attained with Marie eludes him, Myškin returns to Rogožin, his rival in desire and potential brother in Christ, who now needs and wants him most: “Lev Nikolaevič, come along with me, old man; I want you” (648/500). This starkly ambivalent relationship issues the greatest challenge to the Prince to overcome the temptations of internal mediation, to return love for hate, to effect harmony amidst dissonance, that is, to love like Christ. Horrifying, eerie, and sinister as it is, the final embrace of Myškin and Rogožin in front of Nastasja Filippovna's corpse leaves, to my mind, an impression of peace and ineffable beauty. Crucial to this effect is the fact—and a fact of “fantastic reality” it may be—that the Prince's final encounter with two of his loves culminates in the achievement of a moment of earthly harmony. Before he lapses into total idiocy Myškin succeeds in binding his Christian brother to himself through a wordless gesture of love:

When Rogožin grew quiet … the prince bent over him gently, sat down beside him, and began looking at him closely with a violently beating heart, breathing heavily. … Now and again Rogožin began to mutter suddenly, loudly, harshly, and incoherently … ; then the prince stretched out his trembling hand and gently touched his head and his hair, stroking them and stroking his cheeks—he could do nothing more! … At last he lay down on the cushion, as though in utter exhaustion and despair, and pressed his face against Rogožin's pale and motionless face; tears flowed from his eyes on Rogožin's cheeks, but perhaps he no longer noticed his own tears and knew nothing about them …

(656-57/506)

The pulse of this final tableau moves from passion (“violently beating heart”) to compassion (“gently touched his head … and stroked his cheeks”) to cathartic union (“pressed his face against Rogožin's face”). Two become one and the self-gratifying and self-pitying “I” loses itself in the Other. The symbolism of the Prince's unambiguous gesture of love and compassion is Christian and archetypal: the Lamb, as it were, has lain down with the Lion; the Mother forgives the murderer of “her” child.²² The price of such universal harmony is indeed terrible, but its silent reality is more awe-inspiring still, and it is the Dostoevskian lover who leads us to this “impossible truth.” The narrative ambiguity, equivocation, and silence surrounding the meaning of the lover-hero isolates him and causes him to be misunderstood, but preserves the Truth, unsullied by imperfect expression, in a noisy, ironical, and novelistic world.

Notes

1. Vjačeslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life (New York: Noonday, 1960), 90, 91.

2. Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky (New York: Meridian, 1957), 119.

3. Elisabeth Dalton, Unconscious Structure In The Idiot. A Study in Literature and Psychoanalysis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979).

4. Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and The Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1966), 164.

5. Joseph Frank, “A Reading of the The Idiot,” Southern Review 5, 2 (1959), 309, 327.

6. See Murray Krieger, “Dostoevskij's ‘Idiot’: The Curse of Saintliness,” in Dostoevsky, A Collection of Critical Essays, Edited by Rene Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962). Krieger bases his interpretation of Myškin on the implications of Radomskij's point of view within the novel (Part IV, Chapter 9) and thus fails to recognize the irony in that character's remarks (see pages 22-25 of this analysis).

7. Quotations from The Idiot are given in the English translation of David Magarshack (New York: Penguin, 1977) and are indicated in the text by the first page number in the parentheses after the quotation. The second page number in the parentheses refers to the Russian text in Volume VIII of the ongoing Soviet edition of Dostoevskij's complete works, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v tridcati tomax (Leningrad, 1978).

8. Girard, 16.

9. See Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), 224.

10. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Dover, 1955), 40.

11. One of the ways in which Dostoevskij emphasizes important ideas in the verbal texture of his novels is through the simple and often striking repetition of one word-root. In Brat´ja Karamazovy, for example, the words “istuplenie,” “istuplennyj,” and “istuplenno” recur with noticeable frequency. In Idiot, where the contrast between “ordinary” and “extraordinary” people is constantly brought to the reader's attention, I have observed a similar kind of repetition with regard to the modifiers “črezvyčajno” and “črezvyčajnyj.” A rough count of these two forms in the first 24 chapters of the novel (I/1 through II/8) yields 102 occurrences in 230 pages of text (as per the Soviet edition). Certain sections of the narrative are saturated with a verbal emphasis on “extraordinariness”: in part one, chapter four, which relates Nastasja Filippovna's affair with Totskij, the two modifiers occur ten times.

12. Descriptions of the causes and effects of epilepsy in a variety of encyclopedias, both contemporary and early twentieth century, do not mention impotence or sexual adequacy in connection with the disease. All accounts, however, take note of the hereditary aspect of epilepsy, although contemporary medical opinion seems to consider it of less account. Compare: “The influence of hereditary predisposition in epilepsy is very marked” (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910-11, Vol. IX, 691-92) and “Epilepsy is to a minor extent a heredo-familial disorder and medical advice should be sought as to the propriety of marriage and parenthood” (Chambers Encyclopedia, 1967, Vol. 5, 353).

13. Santayana, 38, 39.

14. See Plato, The Symposium: “Love is not for the beautiful, as you think … It is for begetting and birth in the beautiful” (translated by W. H. D. Rouse, in Great Dialogues Of Plato, Mentor Books, 1956, 101). The Platonic overtones of the treatment of love and beauty in The Idiot are sufficiently numerous and complex to deserve separate investigation. While a detailed exploration of them is outside the scope of this paper, I do make reference to some of the more obvious Platonic aspects of Myškin's role as a lover.

15. See Plato, “Phaedrus,” Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters, translated by Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 1973), 56.

16. Thus I disagree with Berdjaev's comment on page 115 that “Dostoevskij's human being was not androgynous, he was male.” If anything, Dostoevskij's too narrowly “male” heroes are victimized by a cruel lust that degrades their human capacity to love. For Dostoevskij real human love must transcend the selfish will to dominate; thus it is always based on compassion. Aside from Myškin and Aleša Karamazov, most of the true lovers and fully realized human beings in Dostoevskij are women. His model human being was Christ.

17. Quoted by Avril Pyman, The Life Of Aleksandr Blok (Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), I, 121.

18. Girard, 21.

19. Girard, 19.

20. The demon of irony (“demon ironii”) is the way Stepan Verxovenskij describes Stavrogin's form of possession in Besy (I/5/6).

21. The words of the Devil to Ivan Karamazov: “… nado, čtoby ‘osanna’ … perexodila čerez gornilo somnenij …” (Brat´ja Karamazovy, kn 11, gl 9).

22. Myškin and Rogožin's embrace brings to my mind Ivan Karamazov's impassioned words: “‘Ja xoču videt’ svoimi glazami, kak lan' ljažet podle l'va …’” (Brat´ja Karamazovy, kn 5, gl 4).