[In the following essay, Straus examines Dostoevsky's conception of femininity and feminism by comparing the principal female characters in The Idiot with the female characters in the author's other works.]

The Idiot exhibits an experiment in terms of “the feminine” that distinguishes it from Dostoevsky's other novels. In Notes from the Underground, The Gambler, and Crime and Punishment, traces of the turbulent 1860s transform relationships between male characters and female characters who embody “new woman” heroinisms. If Sonya and Dunya do not immediately redeem Raskolnikov, and if Liza cannot entirely change the underground man's dedication to spite, their feminine powers are nevertheless acknowledged. If Polina does not bring Alexei toward love and self-knowledge, she at least exercises the wit to escape from his sadistic ambivalence. Up until The Idiot, several of Dostoevsky's principal women characters embody a polyphonic and quasi-feminist consciousness that his heroes in part assimilate.

With his apparently favorite hero, “Prince Christ” Myshkin, Dostoevsky breaks this narrative pattern. In the denouement (for which the whole novel was written, as Dostoevsky informed his niece),¹ Myshkin is represented as having assimilated and imitated everything but having understood nothing. Despite Nastasya Filippovna's extraordinary capacity for self-dramatizations of women's sufferings and Aglaya's talk of women's emancipation, Myshkin remains at the end of the novel as he was at the beginning. Caryl Emerson argues that Myshkin is the most “monologic” of Dostoevsky's characters,² and one who monologizes others. In this chapter I suggest that this monologism is related to Dostoevsky's displacement of “the woman question” to an “answer” in anachronistic Christianity. Myshkin is offered as a solution for the second sex's problems in Russian society, as an alternative model for masculinity, as an antitype to male violence toward women personified by Rogozhin, and as an antidote to Western patriarchal rationality and secularism. Myshkin is a salve for women's psychological self-degradation, a Christ without a sword who is ready to take on more than one woman as his Magdalene. Dostoevsky's “idiot” fascinates us because he embodies tremendous confusion about gender and sexuality linked to ideas about faith and religion.

As his biographers note, Dostoevsky's period of unrest came to an end shortly after he married Anna Snitkina, and this fact (as well as his desperate need for money) influenced his writing of The Idiot. His letters indicate that he soon came to love his wife and to anticipate children with her. The Idiot registers the “split consciousness” regarding women that Dostoevsky explored in his heroes earlier, but the split is not internalized as it was in Raskolnikov. Rather, it is externalized through the “good” Myshkin and “bad” Rogozhin. Dostoevsky's need to imagine and present to his reading public an “altogether good man” was perhaps prompted by the future he faced as Snitkina's husband and the father of their children. His decision to become a better sort of man himself, felt so deeply as he stood by the bier of his first wife,³ perhaps motivated his wish to create a hero intent on saving women, rather than one whom women attempt to save. But the novel also expresses large literary-nationalistic ambitions beyond these biographically motivated impulses, and these ambitions account for the novel's chaotically narrated, structurally alogical elements.

What is possible or impossible in terms of future relations between men and women is the central problem of The Idiot, at least in its most coherent section, part 1. Yet Dostoevsky does not describe the novel in these terms, even though his first notes for the novel record anecdotes about girls and women, nor does part 2 develop the focus initiated in part 1. In The Idiot, the tale, the teller, and what is told have unusually labile narrative relations to one another. Discourse that appears initially as polyphony later verges on cacophony, with Myshkin's character remaining oddly monologic throughout. In part 1, for example, the reader may experience a pleasurable sense of collaboration with the author's irony, sharing with him a secret hidden from other characters or even readers: that Myshkin only appears to be an idiot but has come into the world to save women like the beleaguered and proud Nastasya. But this impression does not hold its focus. By part 2 the centrality of Myshkin's relation to Nastasya is dispersed by various subplots. The narration becomes increasingly allusive and paradoxical, intimating that readers are about to witness the modernized crucifixion of a Russian Christ figure but must simultaneously participate voyeuristically in the murder of a beautiful woman. The connections between sex and religion are part of the novel's often discussed “mystery.”

Mystery and obscurity are part of the total effect, as is the rivalry/brotherhood between “Prince Christ” and Rogozhin. Perhaps, as Harriet Murav puts it, Dostoevsky cannot imagine an ultimate goodness that does not involve beholding “the spectacle of our own folly.”⁴ Folly and intelligence, Christian and phallic metaphors are so compounded in The Idiot, however, that a feminist reader may suspect she is confronting a series of particularly masculinist confusions. Among them is the author's representation of his hallucinated wish to save women “through Christ,” subverted by a perhaps unconsciously dramatized apprehension of the ways Christianity makes that wish impossible to fulfill.

The novel remains the site of contested and perhaps inevitable misreadings that center around the notion of idiocy, the holy and sometimes not-so-holy foolishness Myshkin continually exhibits. Contemporary traditionalists like David Bethea who find “danger in reading Dostoevsky through Western eyes” emphasize Dostoevsky's apocalyptic vision and interpret Nastasya's death as a “tragic composite of the two temporalities.”⁵ Bethea does not imagine how apocalypse could be a danger to Dostoevsky himself. What might the novelist not have created if The Idiot had met with success? Fortunately for late twentieth-century readers, the book appears in much criticism as the most puzzling and least popular of Dostoevsky's “great” works. Even Russians at the time of the novel's publication in 1868 greeted Dostoevsky's religious intentions with skepticism. There were nineteenth-century Russians who asked how one could “value” Dostoevsky's version of “this truth” and wondered “who is interested in these pathological sensations, besides epileptics?”⁶

Interpretations of the “mystery” of Prince Myshkin reveal opposing kinds of responses, one of which moves toward Slavophilism and the other toward the at present un-Russian deconstructions of psychoanalytic and feminist theory. Recently some readers have described the “feminization” of Myshkin's character, although they have not pursued “the woman question” as the heart of Myshkin's trouble.⁷ Why Dostoevsky reserves a whole chapter for the expression of Evgeny Pavlovich's idea that Myshkin is obsessed with democracy and the woman question is the piece of the puzzle analyzed later in this chapter.

The puzzle involves the way the novel connects a universalist, supposedly timeless subject, the advent of a “Prince Christ” into decaying Russia, with the timely theme of bringing Myshkin into contact with adventurous young women and changing sexual mores. Modernist negotiations between men and women are framed so that Myshkin's intended innocence and “holy” sickness (epilepsy) subordinate issues of sexuality and women's liberation to transcendent and final liberations “in Christ.” Two ideals of liberation seduce the novel's women, and part of their quest is to decide how opposed they are: that is, whether, as Aglaya first supposes, Myshkin could be a good husband for an emancipated woman; or, as Nastasya at first imagines, Myshkin could be her savior. “Myshkin” develops as a symbol of fantastic investments through which women like Nastasya are seduced into hoping that the dangers their sexuality provokes in men will evaporate. The attempted erasure of sexual desire as part of the “love” Myshkin incarnates for both Nastasya and Aglaya is a symptom of Dostoevsky's experiment with eliminating eros and substituting caritas as the force that binds men and women together. But Myshkin's nonparticipation in sexual reality also functions as the obscurity around which all problems in the novel circulate. Moving in and out between the sacralized, desexualized heaven that is Myshkin's idea of love—which turns out to be a hell of its own—the women characters of The Idiot experience a suspension of the traditional orders of male-female relations.

Nastasya's attraction to Myshkin represents a feminist delusion that she could escape into the nonpatriarchal, nonviolent shelter of presexual innocence. He appears to embody her potential emancipation. Her delusion signals Dostoevsky's attempt to imagine a third sex that is not quite a man, a human being who loves women but not the way men in Russian society generally do. As a dream figure whose attitude to women contrasts significantly with Dostoevsky's other male figures, excepting Alyosha Karamazov, Myshkin appears as a man whom an emancipated woman might love. Yet, when Nastasya Filippovna accepts his marriage offer, the result is her death by Rogozhin's knife.

Commentaries on the novel are drawn to the murder scene that ends the novel, and I also approach its woman question by discussing its ending first. I note that Dostoevsky positions Myshkin and Rogozhin near Nastasya's dead body as if the two male characters were meant to interpret the meaning of the scene they are in. This peculiar writing-reading situation, where readers and characters meet together in a final scene that is also a stalemate, indicates how the problem of interpreting the meaning of the dead woman only begins when the novel ends. The Idiot conflates what is first and last, backward and forward, what is external and internal, what is idiotic and wise, salvational and destructive, feminine and masculine, even dead and alive. Myshkin is still breathing in the novel's last scene, but he has reverted to a stupefaction that is not exactly “life.” It should surprise no reader that at Nastasya's deathbed neither Myshkin nor Rogozhin can interpret what they have done; without Aglaya's or Nastasya's voices, they have no quasi-feminist discourse and thus no explanation available to them. The last picture in the novel's is of the dead Nastasya and the half-dead Myshkin caught in the vise of Russian culture's absolutist polarities—Christianity and sexual liberation—and resurrected by neither.

French feminism's insight that language veers toward incomprehensibility and away from the logic of (arguably male-dominated) “reason” when longings for some New Order are attempted may account for impasses in The Idiot. The novel appears utopian and unreasonable; it exhibits a flight from masculinity; it dramatizes the exaltation in depression that Suslova marked in Dostoevsky's personal temperament; it subverts its own raison d'être by compromising the patriarchal-Christian salvational structure in which Dostoevsky believes. Overtly, “Prince Christ” is the savior whom nobody recognizes and who dies to this world because he is too good for it. Covertly, Myshkin is a cultural sponge whose capacity for absorbing pain and evil sacralizes passivity. The novel thus appears to appropriate the “feminine” myth of the mater dolorosa so that the last scene is a pietà with the genders reversed. This fantasy not only disturbs canonical renderings of Golgotha, but insists upon a surrealist version that is arguably “feminist” in its semiotics because it undermines Jesus Christ's gender role and puts the woman, Nastasya, on the cross.

Provoked by Dostoevsky's comments about the novel's meaning, a feminist reader might be tempted to read this last scene in terms offered by the French feminist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva builds upon Jacques Lacan's theory of the “phallocentric symbolic order” that represents the sense of “the feminine” or “woman” and thus lays claim to “transcendental subjectivity.” Kristeva argues

that there are feminine forms of signification which cannot be contained by the rational thetic structure of the symbolic order and which therefore threaten its sovereignty and have been relegated to the margins of discourse. … [Yet for Kristeva] the feminine is a mode of language, open to male and female writers.⁸

Clare Cavanagh's claim that Kristeva's theory articulates an immature, and in Russian-Soviet terms, an ahistorical poetics is persuasive.⁹ But if Dostoevsky cannot be consigned to a “feminine mode of language,” as he invents the sublime passivity of desexualized Myshkin whose mission is to save women, what description of language suits the discourses of The Idiot? The novel's failure to deliver a savior plus the regressively “feminine” dimensions of Myshkin's character are an open target for psychoanalytically minded interpreters. But suggestions that the novel exhibits a pathological structure go only part of the way: the structure reflects a pathology in Russian society that links femininity, even sacralized femininity, with degradation. Myshkin embodies holiness because he is foolish and he is exalted because he is degraded. But while the figure of the holy fool runs through Russian literature as a whole, Dostoevsky's male and female versions of it have very different functions. Female holy fools, such as Sonya of Crime and Punishment and Maria Lebyadkina of The Possessed, expose men to what men most deeply deny. Dostoevsky associates Myshkin with “the lower body of Russian culture”¹⁰ that may embody ideas about women, birth, and sexuality, but unlike Dostoevsky's female holy fools, Myshkin can do nothing for the women he encounters. Instead, through “Prince Christ,” Dostoevsky marks the place where Christianity and sexual relations destroy each other.

Some psychoanalytic commentators have focused on the relation of Myshkin's “pathology” to the author's, reducing the fiction to autobiography in a way both insightful and incomplete. With reference to the fact that Dostoevsky's mother died when he was seventeen, Elizabeth Dalton argues that “Nastasya represents for Myshkin the abused mother, and his identification with her in her masochism is so strong that he can do nothing to prevent her from being destroyed.”¹¹ What also matters as we reread the sadomasochistic, guilt-laden sign language of the novel's last frame, with Myshkin and Rogozhin embracing as they lie near Nastasya's dead body, is that images of nineteenth-century Christian suffering have shifted for Dostoevsky from the masculine to the feminine spheres: from Christ and his Father to the Mother and Son, with the son left paralyzed by the shift.

Dostoevsky's intensely religious impulse, represented by Myshkin's wish to transform his mother country and reconcile “all things,” finds its expression through a carnal hermeneutics, a staging of bodies intended to speak more, or differently, than words. This staging is configured throughout the text by many moments of speechless gesture and “marginalized” or even incoherent phrases that make Kristeva's remarks about a “feminine mode of language” less implausible. Dostoevsky first foreshadows the final death-stupefaction scene in part 1, when Nastasya is struck dumb (the characters say she has become insane) by Myshkin's marriage proposal. The foreshadowing continues each time Myshkin is stricken after his epileptic seizures, and on the several occasions when he is able to do nothing but repeat the words of others like a stuck record. Freud remarks in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that repetitions occur when the patient cannot remember what is repressed, and that what he cannot remember is most essential to his cure.¹² Dostoevsky's repetitive discourse throughout The Idiot is the condition of the novel's theme, a condition that parallels Myshkin's psychic structure expressed most obviously in the least readable sections of part 2. Repetition, like ritual, produces the novel's trance-like effect, but it also symbolizes Dostoevsky's attempt to work through anxiety about men's and women's relations in a transitional and quickly changing society.

Readers invariably note the part played in the novel by the print of Holbein's Dead Christ, with its extremely realistic portrayal of a body from a morgue. Myshkin and Rogozhin are bound by this deadly Christ image as they are bound by their “love” for Nastasya, and perhaps as Dostoevsky was bound imaginatively by composite fantasies of dead wife, dead mother, and the symbolically dead “new” woman (perhaps Suslova) he once loved. “I've seen this [Holbein Christ] painting abroad and I can't forget it,” says Myshkin to Rogozhin, noting that it's a painting “that might make some people lose their faith” (I 238). The resemblance between the positioning of the Holbein Christ (with feet pointed toward the viewer's face) and the description of Nastasya's dead body with its “tip of a bare foot” protruding from the sheet reinforces the effect, suggesting exactly how faith is lost. Lying upon the bed murdered, it is Nastasya and not Myshkin who now resembles Christ, a figure de-feminized, de-eroticized, and neutered. “All that could be seen was that a human figure lay stretched out at full length” (I 623). The reduction of her once desirable body to this kto-to, literally a “something” deprived of gender, may strike readers cognizant of the history of death and eros in many nineteenth-century novels as an aberration. Instead of the sexual arousal that haunts Thomas Hardy's description of the beautiful hanged body of Tess Durbeyfield, in contrast to the sexual innuendos of Flaubert's Emma Bovary's death (with dark blood like menstrual fluid coming from her mouth), and in particular contrast to Tolstoy's description of Anna Karenina's feminine gestures as she, “with a light movement,” plunges under the train to her death¹³—Dostoevsky's female corpse is depicted as altogether sexless. The Nastasya whose “beauty” has acted so demoniacally upon men throughout the novel, providing them with the opportunities for rivalry, madness, and murder, now appears to be de-fetishized. Her transfiguration in death is the opportunity for Myshkin's and Rogozhin's final male bonding, revealing how she has served as “traffic” between them.¹⁴ Her absent femininity suggests a point where the concepts of “good” and “bad” men, the sacred and profane, the personal and the (sexual) political, cancel each other out.

In contrast to this moment of revelation, the living, desirable, fetishized body of Nastasya has appeared as the primum mobile of the novel's beginning and middle text. Nastasya has been the main reason for Prince Christ's being in time, the main opportunity for his experiment with redeeming the world. Fantasies about “the feminine” thus frame Dostoevsky's notion of the exact time of Christ's symbolic second coming. Descriptions of physically expressed apocalyptic human emotions also parody symptoms of female hysteria connected to certain ideas about how woman's organs influence their emotions. Simone de Beauvoir's theory of genderized binary oppositions—the way femininity is mythologized as immanence and masculinity as transcendence—throws light on the disturbing compound Dostoevsky invents in The Idiot. In this most strained of his novels, to understand Christ is to become immersed in something like feminine hysteria, feminine “weakness,” and feminine lack of control. It is to imitate a passive succumbing to a violating, entering God-force, a Spirit that penetrates, possesses, and epilepsizes. The passage in The Idiot that articulates this fantasy is often quoted:

Thinking about the [epileptic] moment afterward … he often told himself that all these gleams and flashes of superior self-awareness and, hence, of a “higher state of being” were nothing other than sickness. … And yet he came finally to an extremely paradoxical conclusion. … “What does it matter if it is abnormal intensity, if the result … turns out to be the height of harmony and beauty … of reconciliation, an ecstatic and prayerlike union in the highest synthesis of life?”

Myshkin concludes that “one might give one's whole life for such a moment!” (I 245-46). The fusion of orgiastic madness with religious ecstasy, of entry into the “demoniacal beauty” of Nastasya as into the frenzy of the “epileptic” moment, is completely symbolized only in the still life of the denouement. Here Christ's body and Nastasya's become one, echoing the gender fusion Nastasya experiences when she enters psychologically into Myshkin's idiocy also coded as a “higher” level of consciousness. Nastasya's quest is for a terminal experience—like epilepsy and like dying—that would cancel her former degraded identity as Totsky's whore: “I always imagined someone like you,” Nastasya tells Myshkin just before she throws Rogozhin's hundred thousand rubles into the fire, “kind, honest, and good, and so stupid he would suddenly appear and say, ‘You are not to blame, Nastasya Filippovna, and I adore you!’” (I 192).

What Myshkin is for Nastasya, epilepsy is for Myshkin: a flight into completion and ultimate suspension of the all-too-human and ambivalent self. In both cases these flights involve extraordinary states: the one a brain seizure, racking the whole body; the other a penetration into disembodied other consciousness. When Myshkin declares himself willing to marry her, Nastasya appears to lose her mind:

She continued to sit there and for some time gazed at everyone with a strange, wondering expression, as if she could not understand what had happened and was trying to make sense of it. Then she suddenly turned to the prince and glared at him with a menacing frown, but for only a moment. …

Nastasya's temptation, to identify herself as somebody worthy of “pure” love, is dramatized as a loss of reason that links her consciousness to Myshkin's. If initially, in her role as a “fallen woman,” she is capable of irony, a realistic assessment of men's motivations concerning her and even a dangerous playfulness with them, her “pure” self is expressed as a lapse into silence. If Myshkin's epilepsy is a surrogate for Nastasya's erotic passion, her madness is a displaced form of the Idiot's eventual insensibility. Her “insane” physical movements carry the text's style, constricting or enlarging its coherence. Only when she inspires love in Myshkin does his emotional life begin. Only her death certifies that the meaning of The Idiot has concluded. Her bodily responses are clues to be intensely watched and interpreted, signaled by the most important scene in part 1 in which men are assembled to watch her every move and to interpret her choices. As the text's visual fetish, she performs its eruptions, gaps, and closures:

perhaps she had imagined for an instant that it was all a joke, a deception; but the sight of the prince's face told her at once that it was not. She reflected a moment, then smiled again, as if she herself did not really know what she was smiling at.

(I 187)

Nastasya's body does things and she says things that “she herself did not really know.” Writing to Aglaya, Nastasya coaxes her to marry Myshkin, but also declares that she is in love with Aglaya, that “every day she looks for an occasion to see [her], even from a distance” (I 454). As Myshkin's Heraclitean flux, Nastasya embodies a ceaseless movement. She is his reminder that he cannot escape from a “fallen” world symbolized by a woman's sex-exploited, “fallen” history that he has come to redeem. This is a rather large prospect for an epileptic who has no theory as to why women are so often subjected and degraded in the first place. In this sense Dostoevsky comes close to writing a tragic comedy, but as I suggested earlier, no consistent tone or choice of literary genre sustains his discourse.

While Myshkin's identity as a redeemer is associated with his ability to remain statically monologic, to merely observe and witness, Nastasya's identity is marked by her compulsion to keep moving. She takes flight toward and away from Myshkin, toward and away from Rogozhin's “knife,” toward and away from her “good” and “bad woman” identities, and toward and away from hatred and love of Aglaya. As such, the text imitates a kind of tragic carnival of the feminine body, a movement both toward and away from archetypal images of women that duplicate Dostoevsky's construction of Myshkin as an archetypal saint moving upward and a diseased idiot moving downward in desacralized history. Part of the tragicomedy of Myshkin's failed (sexual) masculinity is that he imitates the various stereotypically coded feminine rhythms—hysteria, indecision, marginality, undecidability, and self-degradation—that are Nastasya's forte. Through Nastasya's fainting, running back and forth, flashing of eyes, through the “two spots of color … on [her] cheeks” (I 163), and her suffering eyes, Myshkin is “pierced” into a resemblance of life. What binds him to women is the physical experience of being pierced or stabbed by excess of feeling. Confronted with Nastasya, he “speaks in a trembling voice” (I 182); in front of Aglaya even his “lips tremble” (I 454). He laughs hysterically and inappropriately when he hears how a man burns his finger in a candle at Aglaya's provocation, then “bursts into tears” (I 593). After the furious scene between Aglaya and Nastasya, he is found “stroking” Nastasya's head and face “with both hands as if she were a little child … laugh[ing] when she laughed and ready to cry when she cried” (I 589).

The relation of Myshkin's holy foolishness to socially constructed femininity is dramatized by his inability to make up his mind (or as his not having a mind to make up). What Michael Holquist calls the novel's “failure to express the holy”¹⁵ is linked to Myshkin's disintegrative bodily and speech rhythms, to a holy foolishness that saves no one, and to the way feminine hysteria and the Prince's epilepsy move along the same discursive continuum in the novel. This brings us to the question of why, at this point in Dostoevsky's artistic career, he was compelled to imagine such a continuum: to create a text whose rhetoric seems to imitate a male's imagining of the movements of a woman's body, perhaps a Suslovian body desired and betrayed. Myshkin's epilepsy appears as a pathological equivalent of, if not exactly orgasm, as Elizabeth Dalton suggests, then the climactic emotional frenzies to which “fallen,” “passionate,” or “new” women are supposedly driven. Like mythologies of femininity that embrace the idea of “woman” as “the body” or “nature,” a “tempest” or a “swamp of feeling,”¹⁶The Idiot deploys its repertoire of gestures to suggest that “Prince Christ” can embody the transfiguring “Beyond” only by figuring himself as female.

Is Dostoevsky hinting that the true Christ is anima, a female soul? Are we to understand Myshkin as suffused not with his Father's spirit but with Sophia (divine wisdom)? Dostoevsky insists on epilepsy as the transcendental marker, but that marker is also associated with Nastasya's being driven into epileptic-like frenzies and stupors as she is objectified by Rogozhin as a female commodity. Epilepsy may be the symbol of the Son's connection to his eternal Father, but it is also the sign of Myshkin's hysterical identity with degraded femininity. No attachment to the Father can ensure his efficacy in this world; yet his feminized soul does not ensure his transcendence into the other world either.

Nastasya's and Myshkin's identities are further analogized by violent physical experiences and through the trope of penetration. Dostoevsky brings together strange ideas about woman's biological vulnerability and fantasies about Christ's experience of embodiment so that Christian and feminine subjectivities are allied through the trope of knives and piercing. While Nastasya's madness is linked to her fear of being penetrated by Rogozhin's knife, the movement of the image of the knife structures the text itself. The image of a knife floats within Rogozhin's, Nastasya's, and the Idiot's consciousness. The knife floats “outside” too, in the shopwindow Myshkin sees, and throughout the surrealist atmosphere of the novel that penetrates the reader's consciousness. The Russian verb pronzat' (to pierce) is repeated throughout the text in various ways, forming a leitmotif that connects the piercing of Christ by soldiers to the “piercing” eyes following Myshkin in his hallucination, to the way Nastasya's face “had pierced [Myshkin's] heart forever” (I 588), and to Rogozhin's knife piercing Nastasya's body. The “piercing” the characters experience is part of The Idiot's narrative coding of sex and violence as the crucifixion of the Spirit, closely allied to fantasies about the phallus and its destructive potentials.

Christ the male warrior, whose emblem is the sword and not the plowshare, is completely absent from Dostoevsky's conceptualization, as is Christ the church organizer absent from Ivan Karamazov's conception of Jesus in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor: The Idiot foreshadows The Legend's analysis of the problem of Christian (feminine) gentleness as politically impotent, in contrast to tyrannical (male) aggressiveness as ecclesiastical power incarnated in the patriarchal Inquisitor himself. If Rogozhin plays the part of inquisitor-prosecutor in The Idiot, Myshkin plays the part of Jesus, with the “new woman” Nastasya caught between them, her tragically ambivalent position foreshadowing “the new man” Ivan's intellectual struggles.

In other ways too The Idiot reads like a rehearsal for themes more successfully realized in Dostoevsky's later work. But the novel remains particularly interesting in terms of the woman question because it displays in its own narrative structure a confusion about one part's relation to another, about orders and hierarchies, and about subordinations and dominations that have gendered connotations. It is significant that part 4, in which Myshkin becomes the erotic-spiritual fetish literally “fought over” by Nastasya and Aglaya, is a narrative inversion of part 1, in which Nastasya is surrounded by men and is offered the choice between Myshkin and Rogozhin. In the scandalous scene of part 4, women who were pursued by men become a man's pursuer, and the man who once pursued women becomes the object of female rivalry. In this world of shifting gender roles that leads toward the wedding day and Nastasya's death, Myshkin plays out with Nastasya and Aglaya the role that Nastasya played out earlier with Rogozhin and Myshkin. Instead of men's rubles thrown into the fire, we have letters between the female rivals (that Myshkin hopes will disappear). Instead of Rogozhin exultantly running off with Nastasya, we have a scene in which Aglaya runs out after watching Myshkin run after Nastasya. The gender reversals inscribed in these scenes, the fact that Nastasya chooses the “wrong” man (Rogozhin) in the first scene and Myshkin chooses the “wrong” woman (Nastasya) in the last, suggests that choice, sexual and otherwise, is completely de-centered in this novel.

While part 1 (chapters 13-16) dramatizes a fantasy in which all the men desire and literally “play for” Nastasya with money and promises, part 4 (chapter 8) expresses a man's desire to be fought over by two beautiful women and to win reconciliation with his “world” through love of both of them. What Myshkin discovers, however, is that women cannot be pulled into his synthesis, nor can they accept traditional ideals of Christian reconciliation. Neither Aglaya nor Nastasya serves the patriarchal religious fantasy, even if they are the objects of it and the test cases for Dostoevsky's version of it. Nastasya and Aglaya together, like Grushenka and Katerina Ivanovna in The Brothers Karamazov, appear to incarnate forces for dispersal and negation of much that is sanctioned by masculine versions of religious goodness. In The Idiot neither woman allows herself to be a vehicle for Myshkin's choice between the two different ideas he believes they represent.

What Mochulsky describes as Myshkin's struggle with an “idea of beauty … embodied in the two images of his heroines, Nastasya and Aglaya,”¹⁷ involves a choice between a “new” woman and a “fallen” woman. That both images of women are “beautiful,” that both draw Myshkin toward the split that paralyzes him, has been persuasively described by Louis Breger.¹⁸ While Aglaya offers Myshkin the sort of risk that would bring him into a new world of emancipated men and women, Nastasya bonds him to the Christian allegory of forgiveness for sexual sins that throws him back to the past. But Myshkin cannot and does not choose between these versions of the world, between past and future. Nor is he, ultimately, the only object of their quarrel. The scene between Nastasya and Aglaya suggests a quarrel that is also about the identity of “woman,” for which “Myshkin” is an excuse. It is a quarrel between feminism and traditionalism that Katerina Ivanovna and Grushenka will also experience in the chapter called “Lacerations in the Drawing Room” in The Brothers Karamazov.

Like Katerina Ivanovna, Aglaya symbolizes ideas about feminine freedom and modernity and naive self-expansion. Olga Matich argues that “Nastasya's incipient and inclusive revolt against the female role … characterizes the behavior of her rival Aglaya, whose portrayal is clearly influenced by political considerations.” Aglaya reads banned books, wants to become a teacher, and desires a relationship with a man that will defy social conventions. She chooses the “idiot” Myshkin, whom Matich describes as “a man with female attributes” as she describes Aglaya and Nastasya as “nascently masculinized women.”¹⁹ While Nastasya's fallen identity is reinforced by the way she succumbs to both Myshkin and Rogozhin, Aglaya acts upon feminist impulses and flies from men's intimidations. Her hope, like Nastasya's initial but undermined fantasy, is that Prince Christ will understand her desire for freedom.

“I've been thinking about it over a long time [she tells Myshkin], and I've finally chosen you. … I don't want them to laugh at me at home. I don't want to be taken for a little fool, I don't want to be teased. I realized all this at once and I refused Evgeny Pavlovich point-blank because I don't want them always marrying me off! … I want to run away from home, and I've chosen you to help me!”

(I 448)

Myshkin's ambivalent repudiation of Aglaya, dramatized as a symptom of his infinite “pity” for Nastasya, is the sign that he cannot go forward with the woman question. He reaches an impasse like the Gambler's forgetting of Polina, and like Raskolnikov's fall into “oblivion” after he kills the female pawnbroker. Myshkin's way out is to vow that he wants to love both women. But as Evgeny Pavlovich rightly observes, this may be an excuse for his loving neither, an intuition that drives both women to enact their disgust with Myshkin's passivity by attacking each other:

Finally Aglaya looked firmly straight into Nastasya Filippovna's eyes and at once read clearly all the malice gathering in her rival's look. Woman understood woman. … “Ah! So then you have come to ‘fight’ me? Just imagine, I thought you were—cleverer.”

They looked at each other no longer concealing their malice. One was the woman who had been writing such incredible letters to the other. And here all that had vanished into thin air at their first encounter and their first words. … However extravagant the other was with her disturbed mind and her sick soul no predetermined intention of hers could, it seemed, stand against the venomous, purely feminine contempt of her rival. The prince felt certain that Nastasya Filippovna would not mention the letters herself …—and he would have given half his life if Aglaya would not mention them either.

(I 582-83)

Positioned precisely between the two women in a way that mirrors the way Nastasya is positioned between her “rivals” Myshkin and Rogozhin, Myshkin's “goodness” appears as a failure of self-recognition and a failure to recognize the larger subject of the women's quarrel. The narrator speaks of “purely feminine contempt” much as Losnitsky in Suslova's The Stranger and Her Lover speaks of “perfectly feminine traits.” But the narrator cannot control the feminist theme Dostoevsky has set in motion or the reader's reaction to Myshkin's inability to respond to it.

Dostoevsky's strong impulse to create a thoroughly “good” man who will appeal to women's love, as if in penance for his narcissistic rebel figures, operates at last to reveal certain delusions that his other novels have obscured. While Raskolnikov can at least control Sonya to the extent that she is addicted to bringing him to God, Myshkin has no control over either Nastasya or Aglaya as the novel draws to its close. The wish for a termination of the deepest conflicts about women leads to the most intense rendition of confused masculine consciousness that Dostoevsky has yet imagined. While his “kind” and “good” Prince Christ appears initially as a penitential fantasy, by the end “a pattern of sadistic feeling shapes all the principle erotic relationships in The Idiot.”²⁰ The act of writing through the idea of a “pure” male holiness to discover the sadistic component in patriarchal constructions of “the holy” is a purgation for Dostoevsky: it released him toward the critiques of patriarchy and Übermensch culture to be inscribed in his last and greatest works The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. In The Idiot Dostoevsky dissolves the sublimity he first constructs, leaving in its wake questions about the “purely feminine” and about masculine motivations for Evgeny Pavlovich to decipher.

Evgeny Pavlovich's voice interrupts the narrative precisely the way Porfiry's intercedes in Raskolnikov's rationalizing thought processes in Crime and Punishment. Piercing an increasingly muddy metaphysics, Evgeny's voice articulates a skeptical modern perspective. As various convincing interpretations for Myshkin's behavior are being offered in the narration, Evgeny ushers the woman question to the forefront of the conversation. The question of why and how Myshkin became involved with Nastasya is at last addressed.

“You must admit, Prince” [says Evgeny] “that in your relations with Nastasya Filippovna there was from the very start something conventionally democratic (I put it this way for the sake of brevity), the fascination, so to speak, of the ‘woman question’ (to put it still more briefly).”

In part 4, chapter 10, Evgeny Pavlovich is described as “sensibly and clearly, and we repeat, with extraordinary psychological insight,” drawing for Myshkin “a vivid picture of all the prince's past relations with Nastasya Filippovna.” This man “rose to positive eloquence,” the narrator tells us, when he asserts that “there were lies between [the man and the woman] and whatever begins with lies must end with lies, for that is a law of nature.” Arguing that “the fundamental cause of all that has happened is … [Myshkin's] innate experience,” Evgeny argues that Myshkin's relations with women were grounded in nothing but “intellectual convictions.”

“For you see I knew all about the curious and scandalous scene that took place at Nastasya Filippovna's when Rogozhin brought his money. If you like I shall give you a systematic analysis of yourself, I shall show you yourself in a mirror.”

Evgeny's mirror shows Myshkin a naive but benignly ambitious young man who has read too many books, who has “longed for Russia as for a land which is unknown but full of promise,” but who is finally “seized” in the “heat of enthusiasm” with the idea of saving some women. Evgeny's rational enlightenment discourse, with its denigration of enthusiasm and seizures, glances ironically toward Myshkin's own valuation of his epilepsy as a sign of spiritual depths. Evgeny's conviction that “everything is perfectly clear” is a bit suspect, however, considering that his own motivation to analyze Myshkin comes from his disappointment at Aglaya's refusing him. He is nevertheless persuasive in describing how, after meeting the “fantastic, demonical beauty,” Nastasya, Myshkin

seized the opportunity to declare publicly the magnanimous notion that [he], a prince and a man whose life is pure, does not consider a woman dishonored who has been put to shame not through her own fault but through the fault of a revolting aristocratic libertine.

Shifting the blame to the revolting Totsky is the smallest part of Evgeny's analysis. The point he wishes to emphasize, and with which Myshkin agrees, is that Myshkin's own feeling may not be “genuine.” Evgeny reveals to Myshkin that the Prince himself cannot tell the difference between “intellectual” and “genuine” feelings, between a “fascination (so to speak)” with “the woman question” and a genuine commitment actually to improve the concrete life of a particular woman.

“The point is, was this the truth, was your feeling genuine, was it a natural feeling or merely intellectual enthusiasm? In the temple a woman was forgiven, but do you think she was told that she had done well, that she was deserving of all honor and respect?”

Evgeny moves swiftly through difficult questions about the motives of the woman “chosen,” the idea of a man like Myshkin choosing a woman to save, and the problem of men's relations with women in general. He may need to degrade Myshkin to console himself, but Myshkin has no response to Evgeny's interpretation except to repeat, “Yes, yes, you are right. Oh, I do feel I am to blame!” Unable to resist or answer Evgeny's skepticism, he can work up no self-transformative dialogical energy that would enable him, as it enables Raskolnikov, to break through to more authentic relations with women. Myshkin ratifies, in effect, Evgeny's diagnosis that his trouble has been some sort of “bad faith” regarding them: what Dalton calls the Prince's passive-aggressive psychology and lack of “genuine” or “natural” feeling.

Myshkin's identity as a failed savior devoted to the beautiful image but not to the efficacy or dialogic potential of Christ suggests that Dostoevsky might be moving at this late point in his novel toward the redemptive laughter of carnival described by Bakhtin. There is much in The Idiot to suggest “the reversal of the hierarchic levels,” the toppling of official authority, even some parody of official religion and the figure of Christ himself. But this potentially modernist element is aborted by certain blockings of the “as yet unpredetermined new word.” What Bakhtin claims Dostoevsky to be incapable of, a “monosemantic seriousness,”²¹ shows up in The Idiot as a defense against the revelation that there is nothing funny about Christianity's inability to save women. If any sort of liberation is expressed in the novel, it is achieved at the expense of the author's monologic Christian ideology. The “articulate” Evgeny Pavlovich voices a dangerously modern clearance in his novel: a moment when the text's official myth of Myshkin's identity collapses and no laughter emerges.

Evgeny suggests that Myshkin has exploited the role of savior for his own regressive and delusive purposes. He has “seized the opportunity to declare publicly” his “magnanimous notion” that fallen women should be forgiven and exalted. Myshkin's acts of “love” have been a public spectacle, Evgeny intimates, and Myshkin has misunderstood his relation to the woman question. Playing an inquisitorial role that is markedly like Porfiry's, Evgeny elicits a response from Myshkin (“you are right”) that echoes Raskolnikov's admission that he is “no Napoleon.” What binds the profane hero of Crime and Punishment to the sacred hero of The Idiot is the “fall” from a superman status.

Bound by conflict, burdened by a traditionalist Christian mythology that strangles men rather than channels them toward new possibilities with women, Myshkin allows Evgeny to destroy his illusions just as surely as he allows Rogozhin to destroy Nastasya. Shadowing the last chapters that lead to Myshkin's ultimate stupor is a covert idea that connects feminist to religious utopian thinking: If the true Christ came to Russia, his mission would be to allow women to save themselves from the masculinist erotic culture that confuses love either with the phallic knife or the castrated phallus.

In The Idiot, the narrator's flights, loops, plunges into intertextual interpretation, obscurity, and paradox suggest what Bakhtin calls an “internally dialogic dissociation.” Dostoevsky is in love with the freedoms released by the rhetoric of idiocy and the poetics of epilepsy. But this same discourse involves him in regressive Christian delusions of grandeur that the figure of Myshkin cannot realize. Myshkin's relation to “the feminine” serves mainly to defend him against his unresolved feelings about masculine power. Explaining himself to Evgeny Pavlovich, Myshkin says: “If only Aglaya knew, if she knew everything—I mean absolutely everything. For in this matter, you have to know everything about another person, when we have to, when that other person is at fault.” This incoherent statement, which the Prince knows is incoherent, ends in further mystification. “There's something here I can't explain to you,” he insists, even when Evgeny insists that “most likely, you never loved either one of them” (I 599-600). Between the Prince's idea that there is “something here” that cannot be explained and Evgeny's notion that women are the clue to Myshkin's whole identity, the suppressed “feminine” emerges as the “mystery” of the novel. This mysterious “something” may be related to what Mochulsky and Robert Hingley have described as the germ from which The Idiot grew:

An entirely different figure [from Myshkin] had obsessed Dostoevsky from the beginning: a tempestuous woman with a huge sense of grievance, the eventual Nastasya Filippovna. Somehow this image arose out of a real-life court case involving a teen-age Moscow girl, Olga Umetskaya, who had four times set fire to her family home after being savagely misused by her neglectful and sadistic parents.

Hingley concludes that finally “there is far more of Miss Suslova in the finished Nastasya Filippovna” than Umetskaya; and he suggests Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya as the model for Aglaya.²² But the connection Hingley makes between feminine imagery and the early notes for The Idiot is more interesting than finding the exact biographical sources for Dostoevsky's women characters. More suggestive is the link between images of abused femininity and the idea of a feminized male savior figure. The close identification of Myshkin with women points the late-twentieth-century reader to the transformations in the novel that are now becoming more obvious to us,²³ for “it is impossible to dissociate the questions of art, style and truth from the question of women”: “One can no longer seek her, no more than one could search for woman's femininity or female sexuality. And she is certainly not to be found in any of the familiar modes of concept or knowledge. Yet it is impossible to resist looking for her.”²⁴

In The Idiot two of Dostoevsky's favorite personas, the idiot-saint and the sexist criminal, cannot help looking for Nastasya. Bakhtin notes that Nastasya is “reduced to a search for herself and for her own undivided voice beneath the two voices that have made their home in her.”²⁵ But two male voices may not be enough to create even one woman's identity. Dostoevsky's male characters continue this quest in The Eternal Husband, a short novel that replicates as it revises those scenes of male rivalry and knife/razor play that haunt The Idiot. The Eternal Husband returns to the psychological realism of Notes from the Underground and The Gambler in which modernist uncertainty, men's impulses to tyrannize women, and questions about otherness predominate. As a corrective to The Idiot's finally exploded fantasy that an asexual Prince Christ could save the world, The Eternal Husband offers mocking youthful feminist voices convinced that only authentic respect for women's sexuality can transform the future.

Notes

1. “Almost the whole novel,” Dostoevsky informed his niece in a letter, “was thought and written for the sake of the denouement.” See 28.2:318; October 26/November 7, 1868.

2. Caryl Emerson, “Problems with Baxtin's Poetics,” Slavic and East European Journal 32 (1988): 503-25.

3. See Dostoevsky's letters and his various biographers' descriptions of this event.

4. Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 174.

5. David M. Bethea, The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 101.

6. See Murav's description of Dostoevsky's dissatisfactions with the novel and her analysis of the “two tendencies”—including Burenin's as cited above (Holy Foolishness, pp. 73-74).

7. See, for example, the commentaries of Konstantin Mochulsky (Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. and introd. Michael A. Minihan [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967]), and Tamira Pachmuss (F. M. Dostoevsky: Dualism and Synthesis of the Human Soul [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963]) supporting the religious interpretation in contrast to the more skeptical commentaries of Richard Peace (Dostoevsky: An Examination of the Major Novels [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971]) and Michael Holquist (Dostoevsky and the Novel [reprint; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986]).

8. Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 69.

9. Clare Cavanagh argues in “Pseudo-Revolution in Poetic Language: Julia Kristeva and the Russian Avant-Garde,” Slavic Review 52 (1993): 283-97, that in Julia Kristeva's work the “‘Symbolic Order,’ the ‘Father’ or the ‘Law’ … all seem to mean simply society as such with no regard as to whether the particular ‘society’ is democratic or tyrannical” (29).

10. Murav, Holy Foolishness, 6.

11. Elizabeth Dalton, Unconscious Structure in “The Idiot”: A Study in Literature and Psychoanalysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 173.

12. Sigmud Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), part 3.

13. The description of Anna's last moment conforms to a stereotyped vision of femininity, including the accoutrement of the “red hand-bag” that is flung aside before she jumps. See Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. Joel Carmichael (New York: Bantam, 1960, 1988), 816.

14. Again, I refer the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's discussion, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), of women as intermediate objects or “traffic” between men who cannot otherwise establish their (homosexual or homosocial) bonds.

15. Holquist, Dostoevsky and the Novel, 196ff.

16. See the chapter “Myths,” in Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1952).

17. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, 380.

18. See Louis Breger's chapter on The Idiot in Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst (New York: New York University Press, 1989).

19. Olga Matich, “The Idiot: A Feminist Reading,” in Dostoevsky and the Human Condition After a Century, ed. Alexej Ugrinsky, Frank S. Lambasa, and Valija K. Ozolins (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 55-56.

20. Dalton, Unconscious Structure, 97.

21. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, introd. Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 165-66. Also see Bakhtin's discussion of the carnivalesque in Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 303.

22. Ronald Hingley, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work (New York: Scribner, 1978), 414ff.

23. In the early 1990s, two male-authored feminist novels received much attention: Norman Rush's Mating (New York: Random House, 1991) and Peter Haug's Smilla's Sense of Snow (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993). Both novels, though authored by men, explore feminist questions and are narrated by women's voices.

24. Jacques Derrida, “Becoming Woman,” Semiotexte 3 (1978): 130.

25. Bakhtin, Problems, 235.

Quotations are from The Idiot, trans. Henry and Olga Carlisle (New York, NAL, 1962). Cited in text as I.