SOURCE: Knapp, Liza. “Introduction to The Idiot, Part 2: The Novel.” In Dostoevsky's The Idiot: A Critical Companion, edited by Liza Knapp, pp. 27-50. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Knapp presents a general survey of The Idiot, discussing the significance of the major characters' names, the work's artistic and literary sources, and the novel's shifting geographic setting.]

1. HEROES, HEROINES, AND THEIR RELATIONS

The major characters of The Idiot are discussed below with respect to the meaning of their names and their family affiliation. In this novel, Dostoevsky appears to emphasize his characters' identities—who they are. (Plot—what the characters end up doing—becomes less crucial.) The names a person acquires at birth and the family she is born into seem to give that person a ready-made identity or, rather, a set of expectations about life. These are expectations, not fixed determinations.

Dostoevsky was a master at playing on the expectations his characters' names and their family structures create. Dostoevsky's nameplay often adds a symbolic level to the reader's understanding of a given character's identity. When Dostoevsky gives a character a meaningful name, he does so in order to evoke a set of questions about this character, not to define him or create an allegory or fixed correspondence. On a broader level, Dostoevsky rejected the notion of the “genetic” family, based entirely on blood and name, in favor of the “accidental” family, a structure where chance and love bind.¹ In this sphere as well, Dostoevsky creates a tension between what seems predetermined and what is not.

The meanings and associations that inhere in the names of the major characters of the novel are discussed below.² The characters are grouped by family, but, given that Dostoevsky deals in “accidental” family units, the groupings become fluid.

The case of Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is especially complex. As a “prince” he belongs to an old aristocratic line, but in his case one that now has little wealth or power. His last name is said in the novel to be found in Nikolai Karamzin's History of Russia, a fact that lends the aura of historical authority. And yet its Russian root is the same as that for “mouse.” Hence it is associated with meekness and lack of power. His first name, Lev, means “lion.” Lev combined with Myshkin makes an oxymoronic menagerie of lion and mouse—suggesting a fable with a moral, on the order of Aesop's “The Lion and the Mouse.” His patronymic Nikolaevich (son of Nikolai, meaning “victory over the people” in Greek) further suggests that he was born with heroic expectations. But as an orphan, Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin was left on his own to interpret his legacy without the biological parents to whom he owes the names.

The combination “Lev Nikolaevich” also belongs to Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, whose War and Peace had already started to be published in serial form. As Dostoevsky wrote his major novels, he was quite aware of Tolstoy's presence as a writer. It has been the fate of the two authors to be compared constantly to one another. Dostoevsky was forever gauging himself against Tolstoy and, of course, trying to outdo him. The fact that Nikolai Strakhov, Dostoevsky's old friend, later became increasingly devoted to Tolstoy served to divide rather than bring together the two writers.

Myshkin is an orphan and an “idiot” (the original Greek word ἰδιώτης ranging in meaning from private person—someone who stands apart from social structures—to an ill-informed man). Yet in the course of the novel, he discovers and develops various kinds of familial relationships with many of the families or individuals in the novel. As the orphaned outsider Myshkin affiliates himself with various families, we see Dostoevsky challenging the notion that family is exclusively a genetic unit.

After the death of his parents, Myshkin had been under the guardianship of Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev (evoking Russian pavlin, “peacock”). Pavlishchev eventually entrusted Myshkin to the medical care of the Swiss doctor Schneider (from German schneiden, “to cut”). To what extent are these men responsible for Myshkin? Are they surrogate fathers? Do they fail Myshkin? What does fatherhood mean? Dostoevsky seems to be searching for new definitions here.

When a relative of his mother's dies, Myshkin inherits money. Again Dostoevsky asks what “family” means—Myshkin gets money from a distant relative he never knew simply because of a genetic relation. Further, Dostoevsky dramatizes the undeniable role that financial interdependence plays in binding families together. (Certainly money was central in Dostoevsky's relations with various family members.) The subplot involving “Pavlishchev's Son” further highlights the question of paternity (or relatedness in general) and what it means: a group of young nihilists try to con Myshkin out of part of his inheritance when one of them, Antip Burdovsky, claims (falsely, it turns out) to be the illegitimate son of Pavlishchev. (“Burdovsky,” incidentally, has the same root as the Russian word for the slops that pigs eat. It suggests swinishness and, possibly, in an ironic twist, Dostoevsky's beloved parable of the Prodigal Son: the son, having demanded his inheritance of his father, squanders it and ends up sharing the swine's food, before returning, repentant, to his father.) The rationale for Burdovsky's claim is that Myshkin was getting money from Pavlishchev in the past that, by natural rights, should have gone to Pavlishchev's biological son. Now that Myshkin has money, he is duty-bound to reimburse Pavlishchev's biological son. The irony here is that these nihilists are touting family values simply in an attempt to take advantage of Myshkin and to make money.

Myshkin is distantly related to Lizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchin, who was a princess Myshkin (that is, from an old aristocratic family) before her marriage to Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin, who advanced from humble origins to the rank of general. They have three unmarried daughters: Alexandra, Adelaida, and Aglaya. The Epanchin parents have just recently abandoned their system of not pushing their daughters into marriage as they realize that Alexandra has “suddenly and almost unexpectedly” turned twenty-five. Aglaya, later in the novel, rebels against being married off.

The Epanchin daughters' names all begin with the letter A and have Greek etymologies. The three sisters have been likened to the Three Graces. “Alexandra” comes from the Greek for “defend,” “Adelaida” comes from the Greek for “obscure” (she is a painter who ends up marrying Prince Shch.—for whom a cipher-like initial takes the place of a name, a detail that makes him a good match for “obscure” Adelaida). “Aglaya” comes from the Greek, meaning “radiance.” The symbolism of light becomes important later in the novel when Myshkin's love for her brings him the promise of a “new, radiant life.” But, by the end of the novel, she has associated herself with the forces of darkness rather than life by cutting herself off from her family, marrying a Pole, and becoming a Catholic—in the Dostoevskian system these actions suggest that she has turned away from the light and is not living up to the promise of her name. A possible link has been suggested between her name and Blanche (from the French for “white”), for whose sake Marguerite forfeits her happiness in La Dame aux camélias (by Dumas the Younger).

When Myshkin first arrives with his bundle on the Epanchins' doorstep, the General wants to send him away. In his initial conversation with Myshkin, he reveals his fears that Myshkin has come to sponge off of his relatives. Myshkin, however, disarms him. Eventually Epanchin relents and introduces him to the women of the family, his blood relations, who feel naturally drawn to him. Here Dostoevsky seems in fact to be suggesting that affinities are sometimes genetically determined.

The Epanchin family is often cited as one of the few families in Dostoevsky's fiction where the nuclear family is intact (two parents and their shared offspring live under the same roof) and relatively happy. We are told that Epanchin never regretted his early marriage, that he “respected his wife and sometimes feared her to such an extent that he even loved her.” If examined more carefully, this intact family may not be so perfect even at the beginning of the novel: Epanchin, for example, buys Nastasya Filippovna expensive pearls for her birthday (which she returns, telling him: “Take these pearls and give them to your wife”), and he has developed a scheme for marrying Alexandra off to Totsky.

Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky is a womanizer in his fifties. He has been, since the death of her parents, the guardian—and surrogate father—of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov. (Her mother died in a fire; her shaken father died soon thereafter; her sister died of whooping cough while under Totsky's care.) Totsky kept her living with various caretakers and eventually a Swiss governess in a country place called Otradnoe (a name shared with the Rostovs' beloved estate in War and Peace). The name of that estate, approximately “felicity” in Russian, evokes a pastoral idyll. But here when Nastasya was still quite young, Totsky seduced her. Thus the Totsky-Barashkov “accidental” grouping becomes a perversion of family and demonstrates the possibly disastrous outcome of the demise of a genetic family.

When the action of the novel begins, Totsky is trying to marry Nastasya Filippovna to Gavrily (Ganya) Ivolgin, Epanchin's secretary, so that he, Totsky, can marry Alexandra Epanchin without being encumbered by Nastasya Filippovna. This plan to marry off Nastasya Filippovna is presented from Totsky's point of view as an attempt to regenerate and “resurrect” this fallen woman through “love and family” life (8:40-41). Here again, family values are touted, but with false motives.

Nastasya Filippovna would rather free herself from all connections to Totsky, who has been supporting her. Here again we see the interaction of family relations and financial dependence. On her birthday she declares: “I am the nameday girl and on my own for the first time in my whole life.”³ She declares that she will let Myshkin decide her fate, refuses to marry Ganya Ivolgin, and then runs off with Rogozhin.

Perhaps Dostoevsky intended Nastasya Filippovna's birthday celebration, the culmination of the first part of the novel, to contrast with the nameday celebration at the Rostovs' that occurs early in War and Peace, in a section Dostoevsky would have read before he wrote his opening to The Idiot. Tolstoy had used his party scene to show his Rostovs in all their glory; for Dostoevsky, these Rostovs are the “genetic” family par excellence. Even their name in Russian evokes the notion of biological growth. The celebration in War and Peace honors two generations of Rostov women named Natalya (meaning “birth”). It celebrates generational continuity and clan loyalty. On any number of levels, Dostoevsky opposes Nastasya Filippovna's birthday celebration to the nameday celebration for the two Natalya Rostovs, using the contrast to suggest, among other things, the very different set of familial circumstances from which these two heroines, Natasha Rostov and Nastasya Filippovna, spring.

All three of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov's names have rich symbolism. Her last name, “Barashkov,” comes from the Russian word for “lamb” and possibly evokes all of the Gospel sheep and Old Testament sacrificial lambs. Her patronymic, from the Greek for “lover of horses,” evokes the horses of Revelation, which become a subject of discussion between her and Lebedev and others in the novel. Her first name, in its long form “Anastasiia,” comes from the Greek word for “resurrection.” (Its meaning is thus opposed to that of Natalya, meaning “birth.”) The name “Anastasiia” is linked to the idea of the resurrection of the dead, which also becomes a topic of debate later in the novel. (Ippolit argues that looking at Holbein's painting of the dead Christ, it is impossible to believe that Christ was resurrected.) As a fallen woman, Nastasya is metaphorically “dead.” When Myshkin comes offering the hope of rehabilitation and regeneration, Dostoevsky presents this in the text and in the Notebooks as a “resurrection.” Thus he suggests that the drama of Nastasya is whether or not the potential in her name will be realized. As it happens, she ends up murdered rather than resurrected or rehabilitated through Myshkin's love. The scene at which Rogozhin and Myshkin hold vigil over her murdered body evokes the death of Christ where the Marys held vigil. Jesus' shroud has been replaced by sturdy American oilcloth, and the ointment the Marys brought with them has been replaced by the “Zhdanov liquid” that Rogozhin uses, along with the oilcloth, to counter the smell of decay. “How can you call this [the Anastasiia under the oilcloth] Resurrection?” is the question this tableau poses.

Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, like Nastasya Filippovna, has a richly evocative name. His first name comes from the Greek word meaning “virgin.” This name would seem not to fit, since Rogozhin represents a dark erotic force. Again, as with the first name “Anastasiia,” the name goes counter to the reality but still evokes some sense of an ideal image of the person that has been violated. The last name “Rogozhin” comes from rogozha, the Russian word for “bast” or “bast mat,” by metaphorical extension, something a bit shoddy. Curiously, the word is used in a proverb that invokes another family of The Idiot: “ne k rozhe rogozha, ne k litsu epancha” (a mat's not for the mug, a cloak's not for the face).⁴ Dostoevsky may also have based the name “Rogozhin” on the name of a cemetery in Moscow associated with the Old Believers.

Rogozhin's family is from the merchant class and linked to Russian sectarianism.⁵ Rogozhin's father has died, leaving him money; again money and heritage are interconnected. Rogozhin's family lives in a creepy old house in Saint Petersburg that is windowless, with thick walls. There in her separate quarters Rogozhin's mother reads the Chet'i-Minei, a compendium of devotional literature, including saints' lives, arranged according to the calendar. In Rogozhin's quarters, Myshkin and Ippolit view the copy of Hans Holbein's Dead Christ. It is there that Myshkin notices a garden knife Rogozhin is using to cut the pages of a book.

Rogozhin and Myshkin become “brothers” when they exchange crosses, an act that blurs the boundary between victimizer and victim. Rogozhin also at one point makes an attempt to murder Myshkin, stopped only when Myshkin has an epileptic attack. Yet Myshkin's devotion to his “brother” Rogozhin continues, surviving the attempted murder, the rivalry for Nastasya Filippovna, and even the murder of Nastasya Filippovna. At the price of his own sanity, perhaps, Myshkin stays with Rogozhin, stroking his cheek and caring for him after Nastasya Filippovna's death.

Myshkin met Gavrily (Ganya) Ivolgin, the older son of the Ivolgin family, at the Epanchins and comes to them as their boarder, thus entering their family life. By showing the Ivolgins forced by finances to take in boarders, Dostoevsky again shows the boundaries of the family being redefined in response to external factors. Myshkin joins Ferdyshchenko (whose name hints at German Pferd, “horse”) as a boarder. General Ivolgin, the head of this household, has gone to seed and remains obsessed with Napoleon, whom he claims to have served in his childhood during the siege of Moscow. A “Napoleon complex” may have been part of his patrimony to his son Ganya: when Ganya is first introduced at the Epanchins, he is said to have a “small, Napoleonic beard” (8:21). But the “Napoleonic beard” in question was a beard like that of Napoleon III, Napoleon's nephew who was the emperor of France at the time of the novel. Thus Ganya's Napoleonicism is a shoddier or diminished version of his father's. And Dostoevsky is suggesting that here, contrary to Darwin's theory, the sons (and nephews) are not an improvement over the fathers.

Ganya, describing to Myshkin his scheme to get rich, shares his dream of how in the future people will say, “Behold, Ivolgin, King of the Jews,” in imitation of the inscription on Jesus' cross. In addition, Dostoevsky draws here on Heinrich Heine's depiction of James Rothschild as the “King of the Jews.” Alexander Herzen, in his Past and Thoughts, likewise had used the term “King of the Jews” for Rothschild in the context of a discussion of how money brings power and independence.⁶ Dostoevsky thus presents Ganya as involved in an imitation of the wrong “King of the Jews.” (Myshkin, on the other hand, imitates the correct King of the Jews.)

Dostoevsky uses Ganya as an example of an “ordinary” person who wants desperately to be extraordinary. Ganya, along with his sister Varya (short for “Varvara,” from Greek, “foreigner, barbarian”) and the man she marries, Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn (Russian ptitsa, “bird”), are the subject of the long discourse on “ordinary” people with which part 4 of the novel begins.

The adolescent Kolya (short for “Nikolai”) Ivolgin develops a close relationship with Myshkin. He nurses Myshkin after his epileptic attack, defends and protects Myshkin from the group of young nihilists, and seems to act under the influence of Myshkin when he helps the dying Ippolit.

Myshkin is first introduced to Ippolit Terentiev, a boy dying of consumption, when General Ivolgin takes Myshkin to visit Ippolit's mother, Ivolgin's mistress. Ippolit later turns up as part of the band of nihilists who try to extract money from Myshkin. He reads his “Confession” at Prince Myshkin's birthday party at the Lebedev dacha. Ippolit eventually moves out to Pavlovsk, where he is cared for by Mrs. Ivolgin and Kolya.

The name “Ippolit,” meaning “looser of horses,” may relate to the Horses of the Apocalypse that are discussed in the novel.⁷ The fact that he and Nastasya Filippovna both have names containing the Greek root meaning “horse” links these two characters. Both show an active interest in the Apocalypse. Both are dead by the end of the novel.

Dostoevsky's Ippolit may be related to Flaubert's Hippolyte in Madame Bovary.⁸ Hippolyte is the clubfooted youth whom Charles Bovary operates on, at Emma's urging. This newfangled operation was to have made Charles a famous doctor, bringing glory to their banal life. Charles, however, bungles the operation, making it necessary to amputate the whole leg. Both Hippolyte in Madame Bovary and Ippolit in The Idiot, living in their prematurely defective young bodies, must forgive (or envy) the happiness of other people, whose healthy bodies allow them perhaps to forget the mortality of their own flesh.

One of Dostoevsky's more “transparent” names is Kislorodov (from Russian kislorod, “oxygen”), Ippolit's materialist friend who informs him with scientific certainty that he will die.

The Lebedevs are another family who become increasingly important to the ideology and symbolism of the novel. Their last name is from the Russian word for “swan.” It evokes the idea of a swan song, in keeping with Lukian Timofeich Lebedev's role as herald of the Apocalypse. He interprets the Apocalypse and declares the “railroad age” and all it represents to be the sign of the coming end. He rejects modernism in all its manifestations and yearns for a “binding idea” (more simply, faith that would inspire human life).

This family has suffered the recent death of Lebedev's wife. The grieving and drinking widower Lukian Timofeich is devoted to her memory. The now motherless children are a son, Konstantin, and a grown daughter, Vera (“faith” in Russian), who always appears carrying Lyubov (meaning “love”), her baby sister, to whom she becomes a surrogate mother. Also living in the Lebedev household is the son of Lebedev's dead sister. His name is Vladimir Doktorenko. In response to the death of Lebedev's sister, this family has welcomed into its midst Doktorenko (despite their obvious antipathy for his nihilist politics and manners). After the death of Lebedev's wife and sister, roles in the Lebedev family have been redefined (sister becomes mother, nephew becomes son). In the Lebedevs, Dostoevsky provides us with another example of a family forced by circumstances to constitute itself anew. It becomes a positive version of the “accidental family” that Dostoevsky felt was so crucial to the survival of Russian society.

Joseph Frank suggests that there is a similarity between Dostoevsky's attitude toward his stepson, Pasha (Pavel Isaev), and Lebedev's attitude toward his nephew Doktorenko: the common denominator is loyalty to and tolerance of the young men, entrusted to them by a dying loved one, despite an increasing antipathy toward the lives these young men lead.⁹

When Lebedev introduces his nephew to Myshkin, he says: “And so this is the actual murderer of the Zhemarin family.” When Myshkin is befuddled, Lebedev elaborates: “That is, allegorically speaking, this is the future second murderer of the Zhemarin family, if there ever is such a thing” (8:161). (Frank points out that Dostoevsky saw in Pasha the makings of Raskolnikov or Gorsky, the man who murdered the Zhemarins.)¹⁰ According to the news reports of this murder, the youth Gorsky, a Polish Catholic by birth, murdered in cold blood six members of the Zhemarin household, where he tutored one of the children. He had fashioned a special murder weapon for the crime. During his trial, Gorsky admitted to being an atheist. For Dostoevsky this murder was further evidence that nihilist and atheist ideology lead to crime. As his remark about Pasha suggests, Dostoevsky in fact saw a connection between Raskolnikov and Gorsky, although probably Dostoevsky would have considered Gorsky, with his Polish Catholic heritage, not as redeemable as Raskolnikov. The Zhemarin murder crops up at various points in the novel. Myshkin distinguishes between the cold-blooded, calculating murderer of the Zhemarins and a murderer such as Rogozhin or the Russian peasant who coveted his friend's watch and, no longer able to control himself, crossed himself, asked God's forgiveness in the name of Christ, knifed his friend, and took the watch (8:183).

The Lebedev family becomes peripherally more involved in the central drama of the novel because Myshkin moves into their dacha in Pavlovsk after his epileptic attack in part 2. (In this way Myshkin enters the life of yet another family.) There are hints of some sympathy developing between Vera Lebedev and Myshkin. Some readers have suggested that Myshkin, caught between Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna, overlooks Vera.

At the end of the novel, an attachment, by letter, develops between Vera and Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky (whose name evokes the Polish city of Radom). Radomsky has been dubbed the raisonneur of the novel.

2. THE TEXTS IN THE NOVEL

Below are discussed some of the literary works and one painting that figure in The Idiot.¹¹ Although all authors do this to some extent, Dostoevsky has been particularly known and studied for the ways in which he “copies, imitates, quotes, uses, parodies, or reacts in other ways” to various materials.¹²

In many of the cases discussed below, the texts actually appear as props in the novel. For example, Lebedev quotes “To be or not to be …”; a copy of Holbein's Dead Christ hangs on Rogozhin's wall. In The Idiot, Dostoevsky explores how his heroes read and shows that some of them are at risk of developing “le bovarysme.” Dostoevsky and his reading public may not yet have known the term, but they did know the disease. (And Dostoevsky had just finished reading Madame Bovary, the first case history.) “Le bovarysme” consists of “imitating hero[in]es of novels,” even to the point of destroying one's life.¹³ “Le bovarysme” and imitatio Christi are very different, but they share the imitation of a model. Each of these very different types of imitation, of course, can be practiced in many different ways and to varying degrees. What is important is how the imitation differs from the original.

HOLBEIN'S CHRIST IN THE TOMB (1521)

Dostoevsky first read a description of Hans Holbein's (1497-1543) painting Christ in the Tomb in Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler, where Karamzin notes that in Holbein's Christ “there is nothing divine, but as a dead man he is portrayed extremely naturalistically.” Karamzin reports that the work was painted from an actual corpse.

Dostoevsky saw this painting in Basel on August 11/23, 1867, just before settling in Geneva. His wife describes their visit to the museum in both her diary and her reminiscences (composed years after), with some differences in the story she tells. For example, in her (later) reminiscences, she reports that she was worried that Dostoevsky would have an epileptic attack from seeing the picture; earlier in her diary, she had reported being worried that Dostoevsky would be fined for standing up on a chair in order to see the painting better (“because they give you fines for everything here”).

In her diary description, she notes that, whereas Christ is ordinarily painted with his face expressing suffering, the body usually “is not at all tortured or distorted, as in reality. Here [in Holbein's painting], however, he is presented with an emaciated body, the bones and ribs visible, the hands and feet pierced with wounds, swollen and quite blue, the way they are on a corpse that has already begun to decay. The face also was horribly tortured, with half-closed eyes, but that already see nothing and express nothing. The nose, mouth, and chin had turned blue; all in all it resembled an actual corpse to such a degree that I really thought I was not going to be able to convince myself to stay in the same room with it. Maybe it was strikingly true, but, it was not at all aesthetic and really it aroused in me only repulsion and a certain horror; Fedya was quite taken with the picture, however.”¹⁴ In Anna Grigoryevna's expectation that there should be an aesthetic component to art, rather than just a depiction of naturalistic reality, she echoes some of the aesthetic views expressed in Dostoevsky's writings.¹⁵

Within The Idiot, this painting serves as the antithesis to the Gospels (another important subtext). Whereas the Gospels proclaim the “good news” that Christ is risen, this painting depicts the bad news that Christ did not rise. As is the case with whoever hears the Gospels, the viewer can choose how to respond to the “news” the painting proclaims. A copy of this painting hangs in Rogozhin's house, where Myshkin and Ippolit both see it. Ippolit takes its news as truth.

HUGO'S THE LAST DAY OF A MAN CONDEMNED TO DEATH (1829)

When Dostoevsky faced his own death on December 22, 1849, he compared his experience to that described in Victor Hugo's novel Le Dernier jour d'un condamné à mort (The last day of a man condemned to death). This gripping work is part treatise against capital punishment, part epistemological and narrative experiment: it is the “diary” of a man describing his last hours up until his head is chopped off by the guillotine. In Myshkin's descriptions of the execution he witnessed in France, echoes of Hugo's work can be seen. In general, Dostoevsky considered Hugo (especially as the author of this work) to be one of his precursors in developing an innovative type of realism that embraces a fantastic realm.

HUGO'S NOTRE DAME DE PARIS (1830)

Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris was published in Russian translation in the Dostoevsky brothers' journal in 1862. In introducing the novel, Dostoevsky identifies Victor Hugo as the first to embody “the fundamental idea of all of the art of the nineteenth century.” That idea, according to Dostoevsky, is “a Christian and highly moral” one, consisting of “the restoration of a ruined man” and of “the justification of the pariahs of society, humiliated and rejected by all” (20:28-29). Dostoevsky refers to Notre Dame's protagonist Quasimodo in the Notebooks to The Idiot. No overt references to Notre Dame have been discerned within The Idiot, but its presence is felt nonetheless. One of the questions Hugo poses in his novel is whether the faith that built cathedrals such as Notre Dame is possible in the modern world, which began, according to Hugo, with the invention of the printing press. (Further, in the plot of the novel, one of his characters asks whether it is possible for a mother whose child has died to still have faith in God; this theme was of personal concern to Dostoevsky, who had lost his daughter.)

Fundamental to Hugo's novel is the Cathedral of Notre Dame itself. Dostoevsky extends Hugo's vision by exploring the ways in which indeed in a post-printing press world, faith is challenged: as already seen, focal to The Idiot is the copy of Holbein's Christ in the Tomb that hangs in Rogozhin's house. This painting (a symbol of how faith is undermined in the modern age) is symbolically juxtaposed to the Cathedral of Notre Dame (a symbol of the faith of the Middle Ages) in multiple ways: one is the work of an individual, graphically depicting a dead male God; the other is the collective work of thousands, symbolically honoring a living female intermediary between man and God.

ROUSSEAU'S CONFESSIONS (1782-89)

The whole petit jeu played at Nastasya Filippovna's birthday party, whereby confession becomes a game and is devoid of all repentance, is meant to recall Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, where Rousseau engages in sordid confessions but seems to feel little remorse for all he has done. Ferdyshchenko, when he takes his turn at the petit jeu, tells a story of a theft he committed but for which a servant girl was blamed; the incident is a borrowing from Rousseau's Confessions.¹⁶

TYUTCHEV'S “SILENTIUM” (1830)

Fyodor Tyutchev was the superior of Dostoevsky's close friend Maikov in the censorship department at the time Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot. In a famous line of this influential poem of eighteen lines, the poet declares “the word spoken out” to be “a lie.” The soul is “a whole world” unto itself; therefore there is no point in attempting to reach out to another. The poet gives the advice to “be silent” in the face of the impossibility of expressing in words what is in the heart and in the face of the impossibility of another ever understanding.

Echoes of this poem may be found in Ippolit's declarations before he reads his confession that “in every brilliant or new human idea, or simply even in every serious human idea, arising in somebody's head, there always remains something that simply cannot be communicated to other people, even if you were to write whole volumes and explicate it for thirty-five years” (8:328). The possible applications of this poem to Dostoevsky's thinking are very rich.

DUMAS'S THE LADY WITH CAMELLIAS

La Dame aux camélias was a novel (1848), rewritten as a play (1852), by Alexandre Dumas the Younger. This work comes up directly in the petit jeu played at Nastasya Filippovna's birthday party, where each player is invited to relate the worst thing he has done in his life. Totsky tells a story that involves camellias, which were the rage because of the popularity of the novel. In Dumas's novel, Marguérite Gautier is asked by her lover to sacrifice her happiness with him and renounce him so that his sister, Blanche, can make a socially acceptable marriage that could not take place if her brother were associated with a “fallen” woman like Marguérite. Nastasya Filippovna is being asked, similarly, to remove herself so that Totsky can marry Alexandra. Later on, Nastasya Filippovna must again get out of the way if Myshkin is to marry Aglaya (who plays the role of Blanche).

THE NEW TESTAMENT

While he was on his way to prison in Siberia in 1849, Dostoevsky was given a copy of the New Testament by the Decembrist wives, who had followed their exiled husbands and settled there a quarter of a century before. He kept this copy throughout the rest of his life and marked passages as he read. Dostoevsky's marginalia from his copy of the New Testament have been published in English translation, providing clues as to how Dostoevsky responded to what he read.¹⁷

The Gospels function as an important subtext throughout The Idiot, especially since Myshkin was modeled, in some way or another, on Christ.¹⁸ Radomsky accuses Myshkin of being even more lenient on Nastasya Filippovna than Christ was in forgiving the woman taken in adultery.

Relevant to the discussion of the crucifixion in Ippolit's confession are the passages discussing the Resurrection of Jesus. The discussion in Saint Paul, the locus classicus for the holy fool (notably 1 Cor. 4:9-10), is relevant to Myshkin, termed a holy fool early in the novel. The Revelation of Saint John is also the subject of much discussion, with Lebedev and Nastasya Filippovna interpreting it.

RENAN'S LIFE OF JESUS (1863)

In Vie de Jésus Ernest Renan attempted to apply “cold analysis” to his subject matter. In general, Renan denied Christ's divinity and set forth rational, scientific explanations for what have been perceived as miracles. Although there are crucial differences between Dostoevsky's Jesus and Renan's (divinity, for example), it is still probable that some traits of Renan's Jesus worked their way into the depiction of Myshkin.¹⁹ This work is frequently mentioned in Dostoevsky's writings.

The Idiot could be regarded as the reverse of Vie de Jésus: Renan depicts Jesus in Jesus' own time and setting but from a modern, scientific perspective, while Dostoevsky depicts a Jesus-like man in a contemporary, modern time and setting, but from a New Testament perspective.

PUSHKIN'S “THE POOR KNIGHT” (1835)

Alexander Pushkin's poem is read in the novel by Aglaya to poke fun at Myshkin. Apparently Aglaya identifies Myshkin with the poor knight. Of interest here is not so much the extent to which Myshkin does or does not fit, but that the poem poses certain questions relevant to Myshkin and the enigma of who he is.

This poem is known in two versions. Aglaya reads the version that omits a stanza in which the “poor knight” travels to Geneva, where he sees Mary, the Mother of God, at the cross. This stanza explains that the knight devotes himself to the Virgin Mary, eschewing earthly women. This particular stanza was the subject of discussion in an 1866 article in The Contemporary that Dostoevsky may have read (9:403). The author of the article took the view that ideal devotion, such as that fitting for the Virgin Mary, is inappropriate when applied to fleshly women.

Aglaya alters the poem she reads: blasphemously, she substitutes Nastasya Filippovna's initials NFB for AMD—standing for “Ave, Mater Dei” (Hail, Mother of God). By modifying the poem, she tries to make it apply more directly to Myshkin and tease him about his devotion to Nastasya Filippovna. When Aglaya substitutes initials, she creates questions, among them the question of how much Aglaya herself understands of this whole process. The poem is like one of the “meaningful” names Dostoevsky applies to his characters. Though the reader may yearn for a neat allegorical interpretation, Aglaya's play with initials creates a kind of chaos out of which some new and perhaps very partial truth emerges about the situation and/or character at hand.

SHAKESPEARE'S HAMLET (1600)

When Myshkin arrives on his birthday back at the Lebedev dacha, Lebedev, Ippolit, and many others greet him. Myshkin is informed by Lebedev that they have been discussing “To be or not to be” (8:305). (This opening to Hamlet's most famous speech is also quoted in the Notebooks [9:380].) Lebedev says, “It's a contemporary topic, very contemporary! Questions and answers.” Ippolit, who reads his confession, which is supposed to culminate in his own suicide, would like to imitate Hamlet and become a tragic hero.

DICKENS'S PICKWICK PAPERS (1837)

Mentions of Pickwick both in his letter to his niece (Letter 332, January 1/13, 1868, in Primary Sources) and in the Notebooks for the novel reveal that Dostoevsky regarded Pickwick as one of the few literary incarnations of “positively good men.” But Pickwick, like Don Quixote, aroused sympathy in the reader because he was comical. And Dostoevsky wanted Myshkin to be more innocent than comical.

Still, some aspects of Pickwick have been traced in the unfunny Myshkin, notably his “deficient sense of reality.”²⁰

GOGOL'S GETTING MARRIED (1842)

Podkolyosin, the hero of Nikolai Gogol's play Getting Married (or, Marriage), is discussed at length in the digression with which part 4 opens. The narrator is remarking about the difficulties of presenting “ordinary” people in an interesting way. At issue is the typicality of the hero of Gogol's play, who jumps out of the window at his wedding. The narrator admits that, while few grooms actually jump out of the window (and in this regard, his “typicality” has been exaggerated), many people still identify with him and did even before Podkolyosin existed. Here, as elsewhere, Dostoevsky is schooling his readers not to seek a perfect fit and to pay attention to differences as well as similarities.

The subject matter of Gogol's play is in fact quite relevant. Myshkin is a somewhat unlikely groom, like Gogol's groom in that respect; furthermore, like Gogol's play, The Idiot is about getting married—or rather planning on getting married and then not getting married (there are lots of marriages that fall through at various points along the way to the altar); the ultimate example is when Nastasya Filippovna flees at the very last moment.

FLAUBERT'S MADAME BOVARY (1857)

Madame Bovary appears directly in The Idiot as Nastasya Filippovna's reading material in the last days of her life. (On how Dostoevsky came to read this book, see my “Introduction to The Idiot, Part I.”) Nastasya Filippovna, accused of having been damaged by too much reading (a trait she shares with Aglaya) proves to be the ultimate victim of “le bovarysme,” for she dies after/from reading Madame Bovary. She accepts death, in imitation of Emma.

The scene from Madame Bovary in which Charles, Homais, and the priest hold vigil over Emma's corpse anticipates the scene in The Idiot in which Rogozhin and Myshkin hold vigil over Nastasya Filippovna's corpse.²¹ Furthermore, iron, associated in The Idiot with the Apocalypse and the “railroad/iron road age,”²² is likewise a recurrent, sinister motif in Madame Bovary. When Emma, in a crucial scene, becomes lost in thought outside the convent where she spent some time as a girl, she is brought back from her reverie by the sound of iron clanging. On another occasion, at a restaurant with Léon, Emma's maternal thoughts are interrupted as “a cart full of long strips of iron passed, casting against the walls of the houses a deafening metallic vibration.” Iron is also associated with French hell (enfer). And Flaubert at one point likens language to a laminoir, a machine that flattens metal; within the novel even a curling iron takes on sinister associations by emitting a disturbing smell.

Thus iron is a symbol of industrialization and modernity in Madame Bovary, as it is also in The Idiot. But the symbol could also be a borrowing from Don Quixote (discussed below), an acknowledged subtext of both Madame Bovary and The Idiot. On a more profound level, the three texts could be said to share an interest in the possibility of nonrational knowledge.²³

CERVANTES' DON QUIXOTE (1605)

In his letter to his niece in which he describes the idea of The Idiot as being “to depict a positively beautiful man,” Dostoevsky cites Don Quixote as an example of a previous attempt. But Dostoevsky argued that he wanted to avoid the comicality of Don Quixote, used to evoke sympathy in the reader.

Don Quixote, made topical in Russian literature by Turgenev's essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” was one of Dostoevsky's beloved heroes. In a detailed discussion in his Diary of a Writer for September 1877, Dostoevsky lauds Don Quixote's positive qualities, but then goes on to note that “not seldom (alas, so often)” all these good qualities fail to achieve any results, because, despite all the gifts, one gift is lacking: “the genius” for guiding and directing all this power onto a course of action that is “not fantastic and mad” but “a true path, for the benefit of mankind.”

Aglaya, on receiving a letter from Myshkin, written from the heart of Russia, places it in a book, her copy of Don Quixote. Aglaya marvels at how fitting this book was for a letter from Myshkin. And indeed, Myshkin has many of the same qualities and behaves like Don Quixote. For example, Don Quixote treats some prostitutes he meets as maidens, restoring to them a measure of dignity, for which they mock him. The dynamic between Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna is a tragic imitation of the comic scene from Don Quixote.

It will be remembered that Don Quixote declared his quest and dream to bring back the Age of Gold to replace the Age of Iron in which he found himself living. These associations come into play when Lebedev announces that the railroad—or rather, that which the railroad stands for as an image—was a sign of an age that lacks a binding idea, a sign of the Apocalypse.²⁴

3. THE SETTING OF THE NOVEL: SAINT PETERSBURG, PAVLOVSK, THE HEART OF RUSSIA

The action of the novel is mostly divided between Saint Petersburg, the great imperial capital city built by Peter the Great, and Pavlovsk, one of its satellites, where the Epanchins, the Lebedevs, and Ivolgins spend the summer months in dachas. Switzerland figures in Myshkin's tales of his past and in the very end of the novel, which finds Myshkin back in his Swiss asylum. In the mysterious six-month hiatus between part 1 and part 2, Myshkin was in Moscow and elsewhere in the heart of Russia, getting to know the Russian people, as well as Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin.

Parts 1 and 2 both begin with Prince Myshkin arriving by train in Saint Petersburg. There is a long tradition of Russian literature, including that of Pushkin and Gogol, that comments on Saint Petersburg, on the drama of the individual man confronting the legacy of Peter (modernity, Westernization). When Myshkin returns in part 2 to Saint Petersburg during White Nights, after having been in the heart and bowels of Russia, perhaps he better understands the violation of the Russian way of life that Saint Petersburg represents. Peter's city threatens the individual in his pursuit of happiness: Evgeny, the hero of Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, meekly pursues happiness in the form of his beloved, only to end up mad, pursued through a flooded city by the Bronze Horseman himself. As Sidney Monas suggests in his discussion of The Idiot as a “Petersburg tale,”²⁵ Myshkin the idiot becomes another victim of Saint Petersburg. Possibly one can see in the novel Dostoevsky's veiled criticism of the tsarist regime. The novel also contains Dostoevsky's criticism of social change, of the new generation of opportunists.

Pavlovsk, with its trees and hedgehogs, provides a contrast to the urban Saint Petersburg. (Dostoevsky was familiar with Pavlovsk; Dostoevsky's brother's family and Maikov's family spent summer months there.) And yet it turns out to be not simply the setting of a pastoral idyll. The social atmosphere of Pavlovsk seems more vicious and petty than that of Petersburg society. Gossip develops great momentum in the artificial atmosphere of the summer resort.

Pavlovsk was also the terminus of the first railroad in Russia. Because concerts were often held in stations²⁶—Dostoevsky and his wife also, during their stay in Germany, attended concerts at various German train stations—the railroad is curiously linked to music. The Dionysian combination of trains and music that comes out at the end of the novel later becomes a modernist theme, further explored by Osip Mandelshtam (in his “Concert at the Train Station”).²⁷

Although the uniqueness of Dostoevsky's novelistic realm is often emphasized, it should always be remembered that Dostoevsky consistently responds to and develops the various cultural associations of the raw material—names, places, and texts—that he uses. Although his novels may sometimes seem unconventional, Dostoevsky actively engages traditions. This introduction has been intended as an overview of some of the associations and traditions Dostoevsky works with in The Idiot.

The critical essays that follow explore different aspects of the novel and have been chosen not only for the information they offer but for the way in which they suggest to the reader new approaches to the novel. Robin Feuer Miller's essay on the Notebooks of the novel documents and interprets how The Idiot evolved in Dostoevsky's mind. David Bethea's essay shows the intricate relationship between narrative and Dostoevsky's perception of time and history, with particular attention to the theme of apocalypse. Nina Pelikan Straus reads the novel through the prism of feminist theory and challenges readers to approach the novel actively and critically. Liza Knapp's essay suggests ways in which, far from being the “failure” many have held it to be, The Idiot embodies Dostoevsky's most sacred beliefs.

Notes

1. Gary Rosenshield also sees chaos in the family to be one of the manifestations of chaos in this novel. “All the families in Idiot—noble and commoner alike—are in disarray, although, to be sure, every disintegrating family is disintegrating in its own way.” “Chaos, Apocalypse, the Laws of Nature: Autonomy and ‘Unity’ in Dostoevskii's Idiot,” Slavic Review 50 (1991): 880.

2. In addition to the notes to the edition of Dostoevsky's works (F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Pss), ed. V. G. Bazanov et al. [Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90]), I have drawn on the following: Charles E. Passage, Character Names in Dostoevsky's Fiction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1982), and Ervin C. Brody, “Meaning and Symbolism in the Names of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Idiot,” Names: Journal of the American Name Society 27 (1979): 117-40.

3. Although it is actually her birthday, Nastasya applies the term to a woman celebrating her nameday, the day honoring the saint whose name she bears. For Orthodox Russians, nameday celebrations were more important than birthday celebrations. Russian has no word for “birthday girl,” hence it was natural for Nastasya to borrow the ready-made term for “nameday girl.” However, given the meaning of her name (resurrection), this term reminds us that Nastasya's birthday is potentially a rebirth-day or resurrection day for her. At least that is what she is attempting to make it.

4. Vladimir Dal', Tolkovyi slovar' zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka Vladimira Dalia, 4th ed., ed. I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay (Saint Petersburg and Moscow: M. O. Vol'f, 1912), s.v. “rogozha.”

5. William Comer, “Rogozhin and the ‘Castrates’: Russian Religious Traditions in Dostoevsky's The Idiot,” Slavic and East European Journal 40 (1996): 85-99.

6. For further discussion, see the commentary in 9:399-400.

7. See David M. Bethea's essay, this volume.

8. I am grateful to Anne Hruska for this suggestion.

9. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 295.

10. Ibid., 295.

11. For information about the subtexts of the novel, I have drawn on the commentary for the novel (9:334-469) in Pss. Victor Terras includes discussion of “The Literary Subtext” in “The Idiot.” An Interpretation (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 36-40.

12. For discussion of how Dostoevsky transformed his reading into his own works, see Robert Belknap, The Genesis of “The Brothers Karamazov”: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Making a Text (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990). The list of ways in which Dostoevsky uses the texts of others in his own is taken from page 1 of Belknap's book.

13. On “le bovarysme,” see I. I. Lapshin, Estetika Dostoevskogo (Berlin: Obelisk, 1923), 55.

14. A. G. Dostoevskaia, Dnevnik 1867 goda, ed. S. V. Zhitomirskaia (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 234.

15. For discussion of Dostoevsky's understanding of this painting, see Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 65-70. For commentary on the painting, see Julia Kristeva, “Holbein's Dead Christ,” Zone 3 (1989): 238-69.

16. For a full discussion of the role of Rousseau's Confessions in the petit jeu and novel, see Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and “The Idiot.” Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 178-82.

17. Geir Kjetsaa, Dostoevsky and His New Testament (Oslo: Solum, 1984).

18. See my “Myshkin Through a Murky Glass, Guessingly” in this volume.

19. G. G. Ermilova, Taina kniazia Myshkina: O romane Dostoevskogo “Idiot” (Ivanovo: Ivanovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1993); Natalie Nikolaevna Minihan, “O vliianii Evangeliia na zamysel i na osnovnye literaturnye istochniki romana ‘Idiot,’” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1989).

20. For discussion of multiple sources in Dickens for characters in The Idiot, see N. M. Lary, Dostoevsky and Dickens: A Study of Literary Influence (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 51-105. For a briefer discussion, see Michael Futrell, “Dostoevskii and Dickens,” in Dostoevskii and Britain, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 83-122.

21. Miller, Dostoevsky and “The Idiot,” 157-58.

22. See Bethea's essay, this volume.

23. Anthony J. Cascardi, The Bounds of Reason: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

24. See especially Bethea's essay, this volume.

25. On Petersburg and The Idiot, see Sidney Monas, “Across the Threshold: The Idiot as a Petersburg Tale,” in New Essays on Dostoyevsky, ed. Malcolm Jones and Garth Terry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 67-93.

26. See Stephen Baehr, “The Troika and the Train: Dialogues between Tradition and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,” in Issues in Russian Literature before 1917: Proceedings from the III International Congress on Soviet and East European Studies, ed. Douglas Clayton (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1989), 85-106.

27. O. Ronen, An Approach to Mandel'štam (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983).