SOURCE: Tucker, Janet G. “Dostoevsky's Idiot: Defining Myshkin.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1997): 23-40.

[In the following essay, Tucker discusses the character of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, asserting that he is much more complex than most critics have defined him.]

The Idiot is not only the least debated of Dostoevsky's novels; it is also the least understood and frequently misrepresented.¹

Few of Dostoevsky's characters seem more elusive or incompletely realised than Lev Myshkin, eponymous hero of The Idiot. Critics have typically defined Myshkin as Dostoevsky's realisation of a Christlike figure and left him at that.² His slipperiness is compounded by the concomitant presence in critical writing of a “‘legendary’ Myshkin [who is] largely the creation of a group of commentators writing in the 1880s, the chief and long-discredited culprit being De Vogüé.”³ But considering Myshkin solely or even primarily in these terms strips both hero and novel of significant gradations of complexity crucial to understanding both.

Myshkin complicates the novel because he embodies the tension between the spirit world and everyday reality, between the non-rational (or, even, anti-rational) realm of Russian culture and the alien domain of Western ‘civilisation’, between the attempt to achieve good but instead bringing about a tragic end. The common factor at work here, integrating this tension to the plot, is Myshkin's overwhelming desire to manipulate the fates of the other characters. It is a desire which, as demonstrated below, appears to be derived from a sense of his own moral certainty in an uncertain world. While this exploitation is not intrinsically evil, it ensues from his rebellion in the name of good, his desire to embed the domain of the spirit within the physical world and unavoidably alter that world without a sufficient regard for consequences. As a result, Myshkin controls or attempts to control, however humbly, the outcomes of the various plot lines of the novel. His necessarily limited (human) vision circumscribes not only his fellow characters, but the work as a whole. Myshkin's attempts to engineer their fates smack of hubris (however good his intentions might be) and inevitably send them crashing into calamity.

Why has Dostoevsky undercut Myshkin? Perhaps it is because of the impossibility of creating a perfect man as opposed to the image of Christ, whom we see, for example, in The Brothers Karamazov. As Ermilova has observed, “Dostoevsky believed in the possibility of earthly harmony, of earthly prosperity. But only with Christ.”⁴ Dostoevsky weakens Myshkin not only through epilepsy (to be touched on below), an obvious device here, but also through failure. Dostoevsky may well have constructed a character with built-in negatives to produce dialogic tension in what is in many ways a static work, certainly one containing a static hero, and to underscore the complexities of the novel. The shiftiness of his narrator fits in here as well.⁵

Characters in Dostoevsky's other works are typically much more clear cut, more readily defined. Unlike Myshkin, such individuals as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazovv obviously represent strains of evil in the respective works, however complicated their motives and actions might be by conscience or outside forces. Alternatively, Alyosha and Father Zosima play an active role for good in The Brothers Karamazov, echoing but not supplanting Christ by loving even the unlovable in the form of Alyosha's father, Fyodor (Theodore, ‘beloved of God’). Yet Myshkin is hard to pin down, and this elusiveness is compounded by his periodic departures under mysterious circumstances. Dostoevsky typically associates this element of mystery with such negative or compromised characters as Svidrigailov or Stavrogin, who are eventually marginalised (and end as suicides) by the time we reach the conclusions of their respective novels. And while Myshkin is still alive at the end of the work, he has descended once more into idiocy: “But he no longer understood anything, asked about nothing, and didn't recognise the people who had come in and surrounded him.”⁶ His elusiveness permeates the work as a whole and colours it. “None of Dostoevsky's [other] novels,” notes Robert Lord, “contains quite so many contradictions, anomalies and conundrums. …”⁷ The present essay is an attempt to define Myshkin in such a way as to resolve, at least in part, his cruxes in the novel itself and in the critical writing dealing with it. By reconsidering Myshkin as a multi-dimensional figure considerably more complex than previously thought, we can thus expand our understanding and appreciation of the novel in which he plays the central role.

Myshkin is not only complex himself; he repeatedly complicates the intricately interwoven lives of his fellow characters, even retaining in the process flashes of the independent, meddlesome character first glimpsed in the ‘Notebooks’.⁸ It is well known from Dostoevsky's ‘Notebooks’ that Myshkin, in spite of Dostoevsky's urgent desire to resolve, simultaneously, a literary and philosophical dilemma in his creation of ‘the positively beautiful man’, did not begin his novelistic existence as the seemingly well-intentioned individual of the final version of the novel. In Dostoevsky's initial incarnation of Myshkin from the ‘Notebooks’ he is, as noted by Robin Feuer Miller, “hypocritical, proud, vengeful.”⁹ At this early stage, he is more closely akin to Dostoevsky's proud rebels—Raskol´nikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov—than to Sonia Marmeladova, Alyosha Karamazov or the image of Christ as seen in Ivan Karamazov's ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ from The Brothers Karamazov. (The evolution of Anna Karenina from the unappealing protagonist of the earlier drafts to the great heroine with whom Tolstoy himself became smitten is strikingly similar.)

Indeed, the Dostoevskian character who most closely embodies this sort of metamorphosis is Father Zosima. Significantly, both characters are asexual in their respective works, Zosima because of age and calling, Myshkin as a result of disease. Myshkin's inability to function sexually juxtaposes him to the sensualists Rogozhin and Totsky, Nastasya Filippovna's seducer whose actions predating the time frame of the novel shape her future and the larger plot (VIII:35-37). This contrast, which establishes the central tension in the novel over the fate of Nastasya Filippovna, is crucial. (Nor should we overlook the nexus between sexuality and power/domination which we encounter in such characters as Stavrogin, Svidrigailov and Rogozhin.) In the period just before his death, Zosima recalls the days of his youth before entering the monastery, a period marked by his great pride and at times violent anger, both traits associated with such rebellious characters as Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov. Yet, having overcome his earlier limitations (which, it is important to note, predate the action of The Brothers Karamazov). Zosima functions in the novel as a wise and a good man. Myshkin's own evolution, on the other hand, has already taken place in the early drafts or, rather, has begun in the drafts and culminated only in the final version. He is static by the time we encounter him. As Miller notes, the “portrayal of an Idiot who was evil but … finally repented would have given the novel a linear shape … [but] a constant character … creates waves around himself which intersect to make a circular pattern.”¹⁰ Dostoevsky appears to identify this constancy or lack of development—synonymous with perfection—only with Christ, and it is Myshkin's very uniformity that causes him to create the ‘waves’ which disturb the environment of the novel. (Perhaps Christ in Ivan's ‘Grand Inquisitor’ is silent because of his intrinsic perfection, following the poet Fyodor Tiutchev's dictum that ‘the uttered thought is a lie’.) Dostoevsky then undermines this perfection manifested in Myshkin as a state to which no mere person may aspire.

Furthermore, those characters in Dostoevsky's works who have achieved peace with God have typically had to endure spiritual searching, temptation, or suffering—this is certainly the case with Father Zosima, Alyosha, Mitya Karamazov, Sonia Marmeladova. Yet Myshkin's suffering (principally physical, from his epilepsy, but also psychological pain as related to Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya) does not encompass the same experiences, nor the same sort of spiritual journey.

Although Dostoevsky has transformed the proud, hypocritical and vengeful nature of Myshkin in his original incarnation into the warmth and (apparent) humility that mark the finalised version of this character, Myshkin's perpetual meddling in the lives of his fellows and his attempts to reshape the world they inhabit echoes the pride of the original version. While such characters as Father Zosima and Sonia Marmeladova can also be said to ‘meddle’, their actions never impact negatively in the way Myshkin's do. Their passivity may be the key here. Were Myshkin to avoid significant action and/or reaction, he and the women he is instrumental in affecting could stay out of trouble. It is also important to remember Joseph Frank's comment that the purpose of the Incarnation of Christ “was precisely to exercise such an awakening and quickening function: Christ was sent by God not to give mankind the peace of absolution but to stir it to struggle against the law of personality.”¹¹ Is this, in part, Dostoevsky's intention in The Idiot? Yet Myshkin's aspirations not to follow Christ meekly smack instead of pride, a leftover from his earlier incarnation and a central trait of such rebels as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov.

We might recall here that two of Dostoevsky's villains, Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov, also seem to have acted from at least partially selfless motives in their attempts to ‘stir mankind to struggle against the law of personality’. Even given that their motivations were suspect, they apparently disapproved of a world fated to endure suffering (unless this disapproval was merely an excuse for their actions). Both endeavoured—through direct action in the case of Raskolnikov, more subtly in the case of Ivan—to take God's place and remake that world. Their great flaw lay in trying to create paradise on earth, in attempting to appropriate God's/Christ's role. Both attempted to refashion society in such a way that it would more clearly coincide with their own image of perfection. They dared to restructure society even though, with their necessarily limited human view (Euclidean in Ivan Karamazov's case), they were unable to comprehend God's infinite plan and instead chose by default to revolt against it. Myshkin's actions relative to both Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya could well constitute an analogous restructuring on a smaller scale.

Yet, in spite of being a Christlike figure, Myshkin's most striking trait (as noted above) is his uncanny ability to set off shock waves among his fellow characters, the ‘waves’ that Miller notes. This trait surfaces at the very start, when Myshkin conducts an inappropriate conversation with the Yepanchins' servant. It is unseemly for Myshkin's choice of interlocutor, for the setting, and for the topic: he discusses capital punishment, specifically the execution he witnessed in the West, in Switzerland (VIII:19-21). Myshkin continues with this conversation when he encounters the four Yepanchin women, three sisters and their mother, for the first time. Miller observes that Myshkin, far from being a naïve narrator, “displays a constant concern for order, for strategy.” As a narrator, continues Miller, “[he] can even use the truth deceptively … he deliberately recasts the content of his narratives … to avoid and mislead Ganya. Myshkin shows himself to be a wily narrator who turns on and off the effects of his words at will.”¹² Myshkin's references to death and execution, while inappropriate within this social context, are entirely opportune in the plot of the novel itself. These references frame the work by foreshadowing Nastasya Filippovna's death at the end (rather like the Latin inscription linked with Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's ‘Death of Ivan Ilyich’). The knife, to be discussed below, plays, of course, the same role.

Even nature is out of harmony here, for Myshkin has come to Russia “[a]t the end of November, during a thaw, at about nine in the morning” when “the Petersburg-Warsaw train was steaming into Petersburg at full speed” (VIII:5). Spatial and temporal uncertainty coincide here. The (inexact) time of arrival, combined with foggy conditions (“it was difficult to make out much of anything from the windows of the train car”) reinforces this sense of uncertainty and inappropriateness which extends to Myshkin's very cloak, a Swiss garment out of place for the Petersburg climate (VIII:5-6). That Dostoevsky flings him into Petersburg on the Warsaw train, which is rushing along at full speed, underscores his link with apocalypse¹³ and sudden disaster and, at the very least, undermines his bond with Christ. (Dostoevsky reinforces this connection between Myshkin and discord at the beginning of the novel, in the conversations about capital punishment.) As Bethea acutely observes, “The Idiot is the first of Dostoevsky's novels … in which the railroad assumes a significant role … the train … was … viewed with anxiety and scepticism by those of a more conservative type …,”¹⁴ among whom we may surely include Dostoevsky. Although the route between Warsaw and Petersburg was part of the regular run, it is an intriguing choice for Dostoevsky. The train brings Myshkin, Rogozhin and Lebedev from a corrupt (Catholic, Western) Slavic capital to an artificial, Russian one and emphasises the link between Petersburg and the West.

It is, most notably, the train that enables Myshkin to make his sudden appearances and disappearances throughout. Taken together with Myshkin's long years spent deracinated in Switzerland—the small Western state which Dostoevsky considered to be at a polar extreme physically and culturally from Russia (as we see from his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions)—Myshkin's comings and goings underscore his uprootedness.

Myshkin's epilepsy functions initially as the cause of his earlier abandonment of his homeland, in turn a facet of a psychic homelessness connected with shifting states of consciousness.¹⁵ Nor should we forget that Dostoevsky conceived and wrote The Idiot while in the West and that his long sojourn away from Russia surely exacerbated his jingoism.¹⁶ This homelessness is the common affliction of many of Dostoevsky's protagonists from Makar Devushkin in Dostoevsky's very first work, Poor Folk, to Ivan Karamazov in his last novel, The Brothers Karamazov.¹⁷ Homelessness and wandering circumscribe and define, to greater or lesser degrees, such villains as Svidrigailov, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov. Abrupt arrivals and departures do not serve merely to enhance the shock value of Myshkin's inappropriate conversations and actions, even though these actions appear to stem from the most disinterested of motives. These sudden arrivals and departures are also temporal and spatial equivalents of both elusiveness and of ‘stepping over the threshold’ that we see in, for example, Crime and Punishment. It is a part of the larger nexus of defiance against God's dicta that defines Dostoevsky's criminals—Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov—and, most significantly, is counterposed to the sense of belonging to a larger community, to the sobornost´ that was crucial for Dostoevsky, indeed, for Russian conservatives generally in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Myshkin is unable to settle in anywhere. The only ‘home’ he inhabits is by its nature temporary—a summer house in the vicinity of Petersburg. An unheated house of course would have to be vacated at the end of the brief summer season. Here, the incipient abrupt departure is built into the very location, and it is, significantly, associated with Petersburg, Dostoevsky's ‘deracinated’ city. Homelessness ultimately couples Myshkin with Dostoevsky's Underground Man and with the ‘superfluous man’ who drifted through much of nineteenth-century Russian literature, surviving even into the twentieth century.

Separation from Russian society is typically associated in Dostoevsky's work with a concomitant and disastrous isolation from Russian Orthodoxy. Even though Myshkin is not guilty of this most heinous Dostoevskian flaw, his homelessness, especially when considered with a childhood and youth spent in Switzerland, can be seen as a related and dangerous trait. Myshkin's ‘idiocy’, his ineptness in Russian society, is perhaps tied in with the awkwardness of trying to function in a culture ‘foreign’ to him because of long years abroad. Since he spent his childhood as an emigré in Switzerland, Myshkin has always been deracinated, has always had to live in a ‘foreign’ country.

Myshkin's temporal and spatial awkwardness are compounded by the fact that he, as noted above, seems unwittingly to contribute to the terrific disasters and ultimately tragic destinies that mark the lives of two of the most important characters in The Idiot, Aglaya Yepanchina and Nastasya Filippovna.¹⁸ Myshkin's interference in the lives of Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna arouses their misplaced romantic/sexual reactions (and Nastasya Filippovna's hopes for an impossible deliverance from her tragic fate).¹⁹ Romantic love, eros, is dangerous. Father Zosima is associated with romantic love only in his earliest adult years, before he becomes a monk, and Alyosha deflects and redeems Grushenka's excessive sexuality, an underlying cause of the extreme tension between Mitya and his father Fyodor. Myshkin appears to confuse or, at the very least allows others to confuse Christian and erotic love, agape and eros, here. That Myshkin's intentions appear to be good does not protect others or save them from the wreckage he makes of their lives (and his), as he intrudes into their world.

We recall that, in The Idiot, Dostoevsky set out to depict a ‘positively beautiful man’ in the tradition of Don Quixote and Mr. Pickwick, yet devoid of the humorous elements limiting his earlier prototypes.²⁰ Hence, Dostoevsky attempts through Myshkin to link goodness with the Russian (specifically, Russian Orthodox) theme. In spite of his time spent in Switzerland and his perpetual ramblings (on the train), Myshkin possesses Russian traits that at least partially offset his limitations. Perhaps the predominance of Orthodoxy, so important in the Dostoevskian context, precludes the humorous subtext that informs Dostoevsky's Western models (and, indeed, Dostoevsky frequently presents humorous characters/buffoons who lack a religious dimension, Marmeladov being a case in point). “‘I've managed,’ states Myshkin confidently to General Yepanchin, ‘to read a lot of Russian books.’ ‘Russian books? … do you know [Russian] grammar and can you write without making any mistakes?’” (VIII:29). What Dostoevsky is emphasising here is not merely Myshkin's literacy but Russian literacy, the unsevered and unseverable tie with the culture he left behind when, because of his disease, Myshkin was taken to Switzerland. Perhaps Myshkin feels truly comfortable only with this facet of Russian society, one removed from the world of normal discourse and, as will be seen below, one distanced chronologically.

When Myshkin declares that his penmanship is excellent and he can copy texts well, he takes his example from Russian religious life, significantly, from the period predating Peter the Great and his Westernizing reforms. His choice, “The Humble Pafnuty has applied his hand here” (VIII:29), associates Myshkin with the Russian iurodivy or holy fool (who could be humble or aggressive by turns), connects him with Russian Orthodoxy and links him with the pre-Petrine tradition of a Russia not yet exposed to modern Western influences.

In this context, Orthodoxy defines and denotes Russian culture. Within the environment of General Yepanchin's home, the emphasis is on the profane world of societal rank (“Madame General,” the narrator informs us, “was jealous of her lineage” [VIII:44]) and the social manoeuvring attendant upon marrying off three eligible daughters. Myshkin's selection, like his chosen topic of conversation, is both unusual and out of place. This passage underscores the awkwardness present in the early scenes: Myshkin's arrival by train and his conversations about executions in the West (also conducted at the Yepanchins').

In this early exchange at the Yepanchins', Myshkin first notes his exposure to the sublime in the form of a waterfall, a central component of Romanticism which associates him, by extension, with the Romantic hero (typically, a rebel). “We had a small waterfall there, which fell from the mountain heights and was such a tiny thread, almost perpendicular” (VIII:50). This memory reminds Myshkin in turn of his great restlessness (linked once again with the train) and leads directly to his encounter with the condemned man who kisses the cross before execution. Again, religion intrudes and underscores death. The passage as a whole follows directly upon Myshkin's recollection of the political prisoner condemned to death (but pardoned) who planned to husband his last five minutes of life and link them with insight into the infinite (VIII:50-52), thereby echoing the waterfall. The tie with the author himself, already suggested by Myshkin's epilepsy, is stressed by the presence of the condemned man and Dostoevsky's own near execution. Here, Myshkin's complexity echoes Dostoevsky's.

While copying a text in and of itself does not literally constitute narration, Myshkin's choice of Pafnuty is a segment of a text that injects a jarring note into his discourse at the Yepanchins' and represents a counterpoint to the tales of the executed criminal and the seduced girl Marie. Together, they form a thematic whole by suggesting a world beyond the everyday socially-oriented reality of the Yepanchins. Scandalous elements in the tale about Marie plus the literal square (of execution) enable us to link these scenes with the carnival or public square. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky creates scandal by bringing the world of the carnival square inside (here, into the Yepanchins' drawing room).²¹ Significantly Myshkin, like Ivan Karamazov, attempts to dominate this scene through discourse, to take over the narration. The very activity of narration itself shapes events as well as providing the elements that constitute the novel. One senses here a certain tension between Dostoevsky's narrator and Myshkin, ‘fighting’ for control of the narrative and of the plot as well. Perhaps the apparent weakness of The Idiot is not really a deficiency at all, but rather results from Myshkin's inability to direct the plot effectively and underscores man's limited capacity for mastering fate.

Bakhtin designates Myshkin as the “carrier of the penetrative word, that is, a word capable of actively and confidently interfering in the interior dialogue of the other person, helping that person to find his own voice.” Myshkin's jarring or inopportune comments can have the same ‘penetrative’ effect and can even interfere in the other characters' interior monologues, as well as affecting their course of action. As Bakhtin remarks further, “the internal dialogism of [Myshkin's] discourse is just as great and anxiety-ridden as that of the other characters.”²² Nor is this ‘dialogue’ only verbal; it can also be expressed as a physical action. Myshkin's repeated grabbing at the knife in Rozoghin's presence, a gesture that hints at its future use as the murder weapon, is surely an example of such ‘dialogic’ action in the novel. Surely a knife can be considered a ‘penetrative object’ and as such is a non-verbal equivalent to the ‘penetrative word’. “While talking, the prince in his absent-mindedness again seized the very same knife, in his hands, from the table, and again Rogozhin pulled it out of his hands and threw it on the table. It was a simple kind of knife, with a horn handle, one that didn't fold up, with a blade about seven inches long and of corresponding width” (VIII:180). This ‘penetrative gesture’ foreshadows Rogozhin's use of the knife later when he kills Nastasya Filippovna. Myshkin is saved from Rogozhin's knife only by his epileptic fit, which is at once deus ex machina and a symbol of his other-worldliness. Myshkin's epilepsy does not merely weaken him, rendering him good but not perfect and recalling Dostoevsky's own terrible affliction, but also serves as a means of injecting mutability and an evolutionary element into what would otherwise be a static character. It is not entirely a negative marker in this context. Alternatively, epilepsy could also function as a ‘threshold’, which Myshkin could overstep at any point.

Epilepsy (‘the falling sickness’) resurfaces in Dostoevsky's work, significantly, in Smerdyakov of The Brothers Karamazov. Associated here with evil, it plays an important role (in providing Smerdyakov with an alibi for the murder of his father Fyodor). For Myshkin, epilepsy is a two-edged sword. As Harriet Murav notes, epilepsy was considered at once the “manifestation of a demonic force” and “a moment of divine revelation.”²³ By the time The Idiot was published, in 1868-69, epilepsy had come to be seen as a medical condition. Yet Dostoevsky persisted in linking the disease with the demonic, and in fact “demonic motifs are introduced into the description of … Myshkin's first epileptic attack. …”²⁴ Here, the three crucial motifs of Rogozhin's eyes, his knife, and Myshkin's seizure are all brought in. Together, they underscore the satanic element of the fit and undercut Myshkin himself, not with mere weakness, but with a weakness specifically connected to evil.

As in Myshkin's initial conversation with the Yepanchin women about the great issues of charity, sexuality, crime and execution (coupled there with the Russian theme in the form of Pafnuty's brief text and the issue of Myshkin's ability, as narrator, to assume control over the text), and his final, frenzied performance that culminates in his second fit at the end, epilepsy also underscores larger motifs. These themes take the form of death, demonism, and the dominance of the anti- or non-rational world. And throughout, Myshkin is centrally important as a figure who is identified with anti-rational ecstasy, death and the Russian theme in sacred and profane manifestations involving, perhaps, overtones of evil.

Sometimes Myshkin asserts his dominance (always suspect in Dostoevsky) by prompting, fills in a sentence, makes a suggestion, as in this brief exchange with Keller: “‘[S]econdly … secondly,’ [Keller] was confused. ‘Maybe you wanted to borrow money?’ The prince prompted, very seriously and simply, even somewhat timidly. …” (VIII:258). Here we see Dostoevsky's narrator intruding through Myshkin into the text and providing his own commentary with an observation about Keller's ‘confusion’, with the narrator himself furnishing the ‘penetrative word’. This reference to money, most notably to Myshkin as a character powerful enough to be able to loan it out, separates him from both Alyosha and Father Zosima and links him instead with the complex theme of money/dominance/sexuality running through The Idiot.

Myshkin demonstrates his desire to wrest control of the text away from the narrator by speaking for the other characters. As noted above, sometimes he finishes their thoughts for them, sometimes reduces them to silence. Thus, when Nastasya Filippovna enters at the Ivolgins' and her presence has an overwhelming effect on Ganya, the prince attempts to help him. “‘Have a drink of water,’ he whispered to Ganya. ‘And don't look like that …’ It was evident that he uttered this without any special intention, but his words had an extraordinary effect. It seemed that all of Ganya's malice was suddenly directed against the prince” (VIII:88). In this scene, where Myshkin acts as a catalyst in order to bring out, however inadvertently, the worst in the other characters, he functions in direct contrast to Sonia Marmeladova or Alyosha Karamazov.

Robert Lord contends that “[t]he one character who can see through [Myshkin's] mask—and says so—is Aglaya. … During the earlier part of the novel, Aglaya seems to be a kind of written-in commentary on the real Myshkin.”²⁵ Aglaya can be perceived as an additional narrational voice, one not only built into the plot but in fact (and here, unlike Dostoevsky's narrator in The Devils) complicating the outcome of the novel. This narratorial shift toward Myshkin complicates his otherwise static character and provides a counterpoint to his own attempts to take over the narration. That the narrator is cagey, a trait exemplified by his alternately positive and negative attitudes toward Myshkin, endows the latter with still greater complexity, and Aglaya's narrative intrusion compounds the situation. The introduction of a different narrative perspective provides Myshkin with at least some of the overtones of such bifurcated characters as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov, particularly when the narrator hints at the discredited motives not present in either Father Zosima or Alyosha.

Copying a written record, as noted above, gives Myshkin power over the language in the novel and underscores his own role as a narrator. Moreover, the very act of reproducing a line from a manuscript links Myshkin with Russian monastic tradition, with its profane echo in Gogol's Akaky Akakievich.²⁶ Myshkin's unsuitable clothing also connects him with Akaky, tying him in not only with Akaky's initial bumbling humility but also, perhaps, with his subsequent rebellion at the end of ‘The Overcoat’, rebellion which initially has a linguistic dimension—terrible cursing and oaths—out of place in the context in which they occur. (Compare with Myshkin's final scene at the Yepanchins', discussed below.) Surely Akaky, too, utters ‘penetrative words’, directed against the ‘Important Person’ but spoken in the presence of his landlady.

Myshkin's copying and the resultant link with traditional Russian culture not only underscores his self-identification with Orthodoxy but also points ahead to a crucial scene late in the novel—the Yepanchins' party, celebrating his and Aglaya's projected but aborted marriage. Here Myshkin defends Russianness and rails against Western influences, conflating socialism with Catholicism in a lengthy diatribe inappropriate for this setting. His unsuitable behaviour recalls not only Akaky's last scenes but also the Underground Man's resentful pacing at Zverkov's going-away party and is linked with the scandal and defiance typically associated with Dostoevsky's rebels. “Socialism is really the result of Catholicism and the Catholic essence” (VIII:451), Myshkin declares penetratively (echoing Dostoevsky himself) at the Yepanchins' party, addressing a most inappropriate interlocutor, the worldly Ivan Petrovich. Myshkin mouths Dostoevsky's own views, but his self-destruction (encapsulated in the shattered vase, symbolising the intrusion of the public square, of scandal, into the drawing room) sabotages his efforts. He displays traits associated with the holy fool here as well, functioning as a closing frame to the Pafnuty text. “The holy fool,” states Murav, “is a site of resistance to the ‘age of vitalism and science. …’”²⁷ Myshkin continues to pursue and hammer home his point, becoming less and less coherent and eventually concluding with his final idiocy, which coincides with Nastasya Filoppovna's murder (VIII:451-53).

Death, especially violent death, coincides with violent behaviour at the very beginning of the work, with both emerging as important themes. Right from the start, Dostoevsky links disorder and death with Myshkin: scandal and death associated with Marie, the condemned prisoner's death, the pardoned prisoner. With Nastasya Filippovna, Rozoghin and Myshkin form an unstable triangle linked with death very early in the novel. In addition, Myshkin employs abrupt contrasts between the children's early abusive (violent) behaviour toward Marie and their later charity to her subsequent to his work among them (in the story he recounts to the Yepanchins), between the condemned prisoner's criminal act (typically representing pride and dominance, albeit here of an abused innocent) and his avid kissing of the cross (symbolising submission of Christ and to God in the story about the execution [VIII:54-56]). While Alyosha behaves similarly with children in The Brothers Karamazov and children are central figures in that novel, his actions are related at first-hand by the narrator. In contrast, it is Myshkin who recounts his tale of Marie and the children to the Yepanchins, thus serving here as the narrator himself and assuming the narrator's power. His actions suggest a miracle and push him to center stage, perhaps for Aglaya's benefit. Dostoevsky may be hinting here at Myshkin's pride, a pride retained from earlier drafts.

Marie's tale of a woman seduced, abandoned and scorned by society both encapsulates the larger nexus of Nastasya Filippovna-Totsky-Rogozhin-Myshkin, the plot central to the novel as a whole and, to a certain extent, reverses it; Myshkin's role as a manipulator of fate, plus the aura of disease, plays a role here too. At this point and in this tale, Myshkin not only narrates but also determines the action, a triumph for himself. The (interpolated) tale about Marie constitutes a parable about the orchestration of human attitudes and behaviour. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky integrates Alyosha's guidance of the children with the larger plot lines of the novel, but no such synthesis occurs in The Idiot. Myshkin's successful orchestration of a small control group only leads to tragedy and disintegration when he attempts to apply it to the overwhelming forces at work in the larger sphere of the novel.

The focus on execution, specifically beheading, links this particular execution with the head-smashings of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. It also serves as a social leveller (containing overtones of rebellious behaviour), with Myshkin and the servant now able to communicate on the same level. Myshkin's apparent social rebellion, his unawareness of or inability to consider social norms, can be traced at least in part to his long sojourn abroad and to his sheltered upbringing there. But Myshkin's awkwardness in a domestic setting, as elsewhere in Dostoevsky (in The Devils, for example) functions as a marker for rebellion in the larger society. This rebellion is particularly important for a writer like Dostoevsky, for whom the domestic setting, exemplified by the drawing room and, in The Brothers Karamazov, by the monastery, is equivalent to the arena or the ‘public square’. It is here that the great metaphysical struggle between good and evil is played out. Myshkin's repeated efforts in these interior scenes to ‘save’ Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna, to engineer fate, represent on at least one level a refusal to accept God's greater plan and constitute instead a form of metaphysical revolt. In a letter to his favourite niece Sofya Ivanovna, Dostoevsky maintained that “a perfect accomplishment of the Christian ideal of love could be realized only in the afterlife of immortality, not in this world.”²⁸ That Myshkin attempts to reshape the world according to his own vision, appearing to act from the noblest of motives, nevertheless creates havoc.

The passivity typically associated with the good man, who in Russian tradition should be anchored in the routines of monastery life with the world coming to him (Father Zosima, for example), is absent here. Instead, Myshkin bounces around the secular world (central to the novel) as an active force for change. Myshkin's desire to control narration and the outcome contrasts with his limited ability to determine the action. His is the same sort of dissatisfaction that Raskolnikov exhibited in his dream about the beaten horse and that Ivan recounted to Alyosha in his tales about tormented children, which Dostoevsky gleaned faithfully from the newspapers. That both Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov rebel in the name of protecting the weak is particularly significant in the present context. These shock waves radiate from dominant episodes in the novel involving sexuality and marriage (ultimately the domain where the life/death struggle is played out) on the one hand and death on the other. As noted previously, such episodes affect two of the most significant characters: Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna. Both Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna are in the running to become Myshkin's bride. Their rivalry is played out in scenes of jealousy and passion that will be echoed later by Dmitry, Fyodor and Ivan Karamazov, Grushenka and Katerina in The Brothers Karamazov.

Aglaya's and Myshkin's ‘betrothal’ party culminates, as noted above, in Myshkin's inappropriate (for this company) monologue about the superiority of Russian culture (certainly not a negative concept to the jingoist Dostoevsky and perhaps not truly a sign of weakness). Myshkin's inevitable destruction of the Chinese vase at once represents his fragile social position, his lack of social awareness and hence rebellion against social norms, and his inability to function. This breakage, too, is a form of ‘stepping across the threshold’ discussed earlier, here the threshold of propriety that denotes the ability to function within accepted societal norms. The party should have marked the (public) high point of his relationship with Aglaya, one marred by uncertainty and jealousy. And while Aglaya does not, of course, literally ‘die’, her sudden marriage at the end to a Catholic Pole, and a fake nobleman at that, would surely be equivalent to death in Dostoevsky's Orthodox, Russian-centred universe. The daughter of a ‘king’ (literally, a general), she seemed destined to marry a true prince (Myshkin), not a false one. Myshkin's failure has instead engineered this tragic outcome.

The sisters all have names beginning with the same letter (Aleksandra, Adelaida, Aglaya), with Aglaya, the youngest, the most beautiful. They are sufficiently alike to seem to constitute three different facets of the same person, suggesting Russian oral culture with its pre-Western associations (echoing thereby the sentence from Pafnuty). Myshkin's special bond with all three, but particularly with Aglaya, underscores this Russian motif in The Idiot (along with the references to Pafnuty at the beginning and to Russian Orthodoxy [juxtaposed to Catholicism] at the end), all of which are linked to the Yepanchins. Hence, Myshkin's relationship with the sisters, along with his interpolated tales from the West, is related to the larger theme of Russianness, conflating Orthodoxy and anti-Western sentiment for Dostoevsky. The whole forms a nexus that, along with the train, is related to the underlying ethical questions central to Myshkin and to the novel in general. That Aglaya was considered (readily, by her sisters) the most beautiful of the three marks her as the grand prize—again, in the context of Russian folk tales—and hence extends her fall to her entire family, perhaps to this entire stratum of Russian society.

The abrupt but foiled elopement of Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna sets the stage for Nastasya's final scene with Rogozhin. It falls hard upon Myshkin's and Aglaya's bungled betrothal and ends in another ‘shattering’—this time Rogozhin's murder of Nastasya Filippovna. If the early tale of Marie that Myshkin recounts to the Yepanchin family constitutes an opening frame for the novel as a whole, then this is the closing frame, a bifurcated one which encompasses Myshkin's final disgrace at the Yepanchins' and Nastasya Filippovna's death, public and private variants of each other. The death bed scene with the murdered Nastasya Filippovna, Rogozhin and Myshkin is not only strikingly familiar to readers, but was, moreover, an episode of enormous power that pleased Dostoevsky tremendously.²⁹ This scene is foreshadowed in Myshkin's initial reaction to Nastasya Filippovna's portrait and his unfortunate proclivity for pointing out knives to Rogozhin (note my comment above on the ‘penetrative gesture’).³⁰

Bethea maintains that the leader of an apocalyptic cult sets himself up as one of “God's chosen agents for hastening the plot”³¹; the reader senses that God singles out such individuals. But, notes Bethea further, “only [God] knows when the plot which he supervises is to be fulfilled.”³² Myshkin would certainly seem to fit this pattern of the apocalyptic leader. His machinations, his attempts to control fate and engineer ‘perfection’, lead to the death of one character (Nastasya Filippovna), the tragic elopement of another (Aglaya), the fall of a third (Rogozhin) and the final idiocy of the hero himself. It is also important to remember that Rogozhin is fully capable of violent behaviour, even murder, yet he lacks the moral and intellectual stature we commonly associate with Dostoevsky's great villains. Myshkin possesses that status. As Bethea observes, “they [Rogozhin and Myshkin] are, as it were, metaphysical Siamese twins. …”³³ Myshkin possesses neither the dramatic appearance of Rogozhin and Stavrogin nor the flair of Dostoevsky's more obvious rebels, Raskolnikov, Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov. Yet Myshkin, through his attempts to manipulate narration and control events, by his hazardous involvement in the lives of others and in light of the tragedies he causes, ultimately proves as dangerous as his fellows.

Notes

1. Robert Lord, Dostoevsky: Essays and Perspectives, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, 81. I would like to thank Professor Sandra Sherman of the University of Arkansas for her very helpful suggestions. Obviously, all errors and lapses of judgement are my own!

2. See, for example, Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1964, 103-104; Malcolm V. Jones, Dostoevsky: The Novel of Discord, London: Paul Elek, 1976, 97, 100, 106.

3. Lord, Dostoevsky, 81-82.

4. G.G. Ermilova, Taina kniazia Myshkina, Ivanovo: Ivanovo State University, 1993, 77.

5. See Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and ‘The Idiot’, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

6. F.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Leningrad, 1972-1990; vol. 8, 1973, 507. Further references will be in the text.

7. Lord, Dostoevsky, 81.

8. Pss, ‘Idiot. Podgotovi tel'nye materialy’, 1975, vol. 9, 140-288. See also Robert Lord who observes, “even in the actual novel Prince Myshkin, far from passively accepting a slap on the face, glares at the culprit with ‘a strange, wild and reproachful look in his eyes’” (Lord, Dostoevsky, 83).

9. Miller, Dostoevsky, 47. The Idiot of the ‘Notebooks’ “… feels contempt for others and for himself. …” “[H]e acts like a despot to [Mignon]. …” “Perhaps the Idiot will kill. …” Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for ‘The Idiot’, ed. by Edward Wasiolek, trans. Katharine Strelsky, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967, 13, 43, 48-49. Here we have, partially conflated, Myshkin and Rogozhin. The importance of the Idiot's relations with women (central to all of Dostoevsky's great novels) surfaces early on. See also op. cit., Pss, vol. 9.

10. Miller, Dostoevsky, 51.

11. Joseph Frank, Dostoevskv: The Stir of Liberation. 1860-1865, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, 308.

12. Miller, Dostoevsky, 172-173. In Dostoevsky, Miller presents a masterful analysis of the narrator.

13. For a penetrating discussion of the bond between the train and the apocalypse in The Idiot, see David M. Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 62-104.

14. Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse, 73, 76.

15. Does the epilepsy function as a deus ex machina here, comparable to Anna Karenina's own fatal flaw of falling in love? That epilepsy is falling sickness in Russian underscores the component of descent or a rapid plunge. And the train, of course, is common to both.

16. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, 226-227.

17. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, 171-171. Bakhtin refers to B.M. Engelhardt's analysis of Dostoevsky's heroes as “déclassé member[s] of the intelligentsia, cut off from cultural tradition, from the soil and the earth … representative[s] of an ‘accidental tribe’.” Bakhtin, Problems, 22.

18. Perhaps Aglaya's marriage to a Pole functions as a parody of a tragic end.

19. It is extremely rare for a ‘superfluous man’ to have a fulfilling romantic relationship with a woman. Even though Raskolnikov and Sonia seem to have developed a tie in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment, it is not necessarily convincing.

20. Miller, Dostoevsky, 17. It is well known that Dostoevsky considered Mr. Pickwick to be a comic portrayal of an ideal Christian character. See Frank, Dostoevskvy: The Miraculous Years, 202.

21. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 128-129. Does Nastasya Filippovna bring a hint of Petersburg's Haymarket Square (associated with prostitution) to otherwise respectable drawing rooms, including her own?

22. Ibid., 242. Emphasis in original.

23. Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, 75.

24. Ibid., 77.

25. Lord, Dostoevsky, 83.

26. See John Schillinger, “Gogol's ‘The Overcoat’ as a Travesty of Hagiography,” Slavic and East European Journal, XVI:1 (Spring, 1971), 36-41.

27. Murav, Holy Foolishness,8.

28. As cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 254.

29. Miller, Dostoevsky, 42.

30. It is interesting that a knife, for stabbing, would have been the weapon of choice in The Idiot, rather than the bludgeoning instruments used in both Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. That Rogozhin stabs Nastasya Filippovna in the heart instead of crushing her head may also be significant. Perhaps Dostoevsky preferred a wound that would not disfigure its victim, and the fatal blows of his other novels may be tied in with the destructive force of human reason, with the chickens, so to speak, coming home to roost.

31. Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse, 146.

32. Ibid., 147.

33. Ibid., 80.