[In the following essay, Hollander argues that critics who have commented on the aesthetic failure of The Idiot have not considered that a thematic interpretation of the novel based on the Book of Revelation does indeed bring the characters and events together.]

The Idiot¹ is frequently described as being an aesthetic failure. One major complaint is that, formally at least, the parts do not constitute a whole. The problem is well expressed by one of Dostoevsky's most schooled and intelligent readers: “The first part of The Idiot was conceived and written as a self-contained unity, which may perhaps best be read as an independent novella. After this point, however, it is clear from Dostoevsky's notebooks and letters that he had no satisfactory idea of how to continue the action. This uncertainty persists all through the middle sections of the book (Parts II and III), where Dostoevsky is obviously writing from scene to scene with only the loosest thread of any central narrative line.”² While it is probably fair to accuse Dostoevsky of novelistic uncertainty, and also just to claim that the narrative line of the continuation of the novel is impromptu in character, it is also important to understand that Dostoevsky himself was aware of these problems, and that he tried to do something about them. The Notebooks of The Idiot³ reveal Dostoevsky's concern, for instance, with his mismanagement of such major characters as Aglaia and Ganya. More importantly, the Notebooks, as will be demonstrated in what follows, make plain that Dostoevsky did develop a thematic framework for Parts Two through Four, while the text of the novel offers convincing evidence that his new plan became functional in the finished work. In short, while I do not assert that The Idiot is aesthetically resolved, I do hold that there is a major and continuing new thematic element present in its last three parts which, though it may not resolve the looseness of the narrative line, does implicitly bring together what may otherwise not seem to be thematically related characters and events. This new element is a direct result of Dostoevsky's renewed interest in the Book of Revelation.

The Notebooks for The Idiot reveal that the first seven drafts of Part One occupied Dostoevsky from September to November of 1867. It is only in the last of these that he decided on an attempt to develop a totally positive hero. The last week of November and the first week of December were then devoted to a total rethinking of Part One, and the next three weeks, ending on December 30, to a feverish rewriting of the first seven chapters; the final nine would cost him another month of rewriting. Part Two caused him still greater difficulty. For more than a month after he had completed Part One he did not even make notes toward a continuation of the novel. Once these are begun, in late February, they show little relationship to the final form the beginning of Part Two will eventually take, until on February 29, 1868⁴ the figures of Lebedyev and Ippolit first begin to take on major importance. The notes and actual writing of Part Two occupy Dostoevsky for an additional five months (from late February to July of 1868). Where the actual writing of the final version of Part One had taken the inspired author little more than a month (after three months of false starts), and where the planning and execution of Parts Three and Four would take him a little less than five months (August 1868 to January 1869), the planning and writing of Part Two cost him more than six months. The reason for this is clear enough: Dostoevsky himself did not know how his novel was to proceed from the climactic conclusion of Part One.

Before examining the major new elements that enter the novel in Part Two, I should like briefly to consider the role of the novel's hero in Part One. From the very first pages we witness a series of characters manifest changing responses to Myshkin: first Rogozhin on the train, then the inhabitants of the Epanchin household (from Footman⁵ to General), then those of the Ivolgin apartment (including the visiting Nastasya and Rogozhin), Ippolit, and finally the members of the party assembled at Nastasya's. Almost all who come in contact with him are strangely moved by him. While some may respond with scorn (General Epanchin, Ganya, Ippolit), most find themselves temporarily freed from the self-interest which has given their lives their prime motivation. In almost all of them Myshkin has raised, at least temporarily, some hope in the possibility that they might change their lives. What his actions demonstrate is an advocacy—usually expressed in ways that are not immediately clear—of brotherhood in Christian humility. Myshkin's acceptance of the slap Ganya at first intended for Varya and then for him (p. 109) is significant, not only because the passive gesture is surely reminiscent of Christ's suggestion that we turn the other cheek,⁶ but even more because it displays Dostoevsky's concern for the breaking of the chain of human viciousness, of hate returned for hate, and his hopes for the substitution of a chain of brotherhood in which each is tied to each by recognition of a common sinfulness before God. One thinks of the phrase of Father Zossima, “All men are guilty for all and everyone,” which will bear so much weight in The Brothers Karamazov.

However, it is clear, not only from evidence afforded by Dostoevsky's notes and letters,⁷ but from the text of the novel itself, that there are iconographic connections between Myshkin and Jesus. We have already noted the accepted slap. The scenes in the novel which may most likely be said to yield parallels with the life of Jesus are to be found in Chapter Six of Part One, when Myshkin tells the Epanchin ladies about his life in Switzerland. There we find obvious parallels to the Magdalen in the pointedly named Marie, as well as a fellowship of children united under Myshkin in Christian brotherhood.⁸ These children, who have been pharisaic doubters and stoners, are suffered by Myshkin to come unto him, and end by being converted to his unnamed religion of brotherhood; they even overturn the pharisaic Calvinism of the village schoolmaster and pastor, establishing a kind of children's moral republic of their own. It is at a waterfall that Myshkin would meet with his “converts,” some of them, like the early Christians, “even coming secretly” (p. 66). (The waterfall, which is possibly reminiscent of the Gospel's water of life [John 4:10-11] will be remembered in Part Three of the novel in the phrase “the springs of life.”) For Myshkin the waterfall is a mystical natural force; for Dostoevsky—a highly conscious Christian where his character, just now emerging from idiocy, is an only partially conscious one—it is probably iconographically significant. Of likely Christian iconographic significance is the ass which Myshkin hears braying just as he arrives in Switzerland, at Basel. During his voyage from Russia through Germany Myshkin remained shattered by his epilepsy. Everything seemed strange to him. Then, hearing the ass bray, he felt that “suddenly everything seemed to clear up in my head” (p. 51). Of this moment Joseph Frank has written: “The image of the donkey is no doubt used partially to stress the Prince's innocence and naïveté; but it also, and more profoundly, conveys the lack of hierarchy in his ecstatic apprehension of the wonder of life.”⁹ Yet it seems difficult not to be aware as well of the Gospel ass (Matthew 21:4-9; John 12:12-16) upon which Jesus is seated when he enters Jerusalem, in accord with the prophecy in Zachariah 9:9. When the Prince sees the ass he is suddenly transformed into a man who will take upon himself a Christian mission to the world. To underline the probable identification we have the detail that this epiphany occurred in Basel, the same city in which Dostoevsky (and Myshkin) saw Hans Holbein the Younger's Christ in the Tomb—that painting which used a cadaver as its model¹⁰ and which, according to Dostoevsky and his porte-parole Myshkin, could make a man lose his faith. The braying ass is possibly Dostoevsky's answer to Holbein's painting. Each object points to Jesus, the first iconographically and with faith, the second literally and without it.

The main characteristic of Myshkin's Christianity is radical innocence. Unable to make cognitive sense of his longings, Myshkin responds mainly to an inner urge toward discipleship in the service of an all-embracing charity. It is for this reason that Dostoevsky, in the letters and notebooks, so firmly associates Myshkin with Quixote and Pickwick—as a sort of reminder to himself of the limitations of the Christian parallel. As Mochulsky has it, Dostoevsky “overcame his temptation to write ‘a novel about Christ.’”¹¹ In Part One of the novel the parallel to Jesus is a great deal more vivid than it will later be. The sort of active Christian career that Alyosha has begun by the end of The Brothers Karamazov was, however, a part of Dostoevsky's plan for Myshkin's development. In the notebook entries for the month of March of 1868—the crucial period of gestation for the as yet totally unwritten Part Two—there are six entries which point to Myshkin's founding of a children's club in St. Petersburg. We can only imagine what the organization would have been like, and since we have the model of that group of once sinful youths which Myshkin has brought to goodness around the fallen Marie, we may be glad the boys' club stayed in the notes. Yet I think that Dostoevsky discarded the plan for thematic as much as for aesthetic reasons. The last chapter of Part One left Dostoevsky with a central character who must inevitably fail. Myshkin may offer charity to Nastasya Filippovna, but she is not compelled to accept it. Indeed, she seems more compelled to deny it. The first fifteen chapters of Part One show Myshkin's mission as essentially successful, but the great dénouement makes further success seem at least unlikely. Assuming the burden of Nastasya's guilt is in itself an impossible task, for she will insist on keeping her shame to herself. It is the only identity she fully maintains, as Aglaia points out (p. 541). And if that were not impossibility enough, Myshkin will try also to “save” Aglaia. Myshkin, in attempting to love all, in attempting to love them both, takes away any chance of “saving” either, for each of them is willing even to flirt with the possibility of accepting Myshkin's love only if it belong to her alone. With the last chapter of Part One Dostoevsky created an impasse for the continuance of Myshkin's positive career. Living in a Geneva he despises; suffering from his usual self-inflicted poverty and thus distressed when his first child, Sonia, is born amidst squalid surroundings on 24 February 1868; agitated by the events chronicled in the Russian newspapers he so avidly read; disgusted with the political activities of the emigré Russian leftists also gathered in Geneva; Dostoevsky suddenly saw an entirely new dimension for his novel: Russia is to be conceived of as having entered the Time of Tribulation. The Apocalypse became the major resource for his continuation of the novel.

Not every critic of Dostoevsky has been blind to the resonance of John's vision on the Island of Patmos in The Idiot.¹² But Konstantin Mochulsky is the only one who has at least appreciated the sweeping relevance of the Book of Revelation to the work, which he calls “Dostoevsky's Apocalypse.”¹³ Discussing the relevance of Mazurin's murder of Kalmykov (referred to in the novel on pp. 153 and 433), Mochulsky says, “Once again the legal chronicle bursts in on the novel. The author constructed his apocalyptic vision of the world on the facts of ‘the current moment.’”¹⁴ Part Two begins with a chapter that is both epilogue (to Part One, now six months distant) and introduction. The action of Part Two begins in Lebedyev's house in Petersburg. We discover, to our amazement, that the venal buffoon of Part One is now not only a venal buffoon, but also a lawyer of sorts, a “philosopher” (thus to some degree sharing Myshkin's own role—see p. 54), and, most surprising of all, a commentator of the Apocalypse. In what follows I shall try to show, in concert with Mochulsky's more general appreciation, the extent to which Dostoevsky has grounded this novel in the Apocalypse. In Parts Two and Three two characters who were of little importance in Part One—Lebedyev and Ippolit—become vastly more important. I suggest that this is so because Dostoevsky has reformulated the novel's subject, and that these two characters are among the primary agents within the novel of that reformulation. Where he had set out to portray a truly beautiful soul,¹⁵ he now decided to accomplish that portrait against a background of impending doom. The Apocalypse does not serve as a framework for Part One. Indeed, reference to it is entirely lacking, and the Biblical references found there are to the Gospels. But where in Crime and Punishment and The Devils, the novels which Dostoevsky respectively wrote before and after he wrote The Idiot, the Gospels are used to focus the varied conflicts of the novels against a single statement of Christian truth (Sonia's reading of the Lazarus passage from John to Raskolnikov, Sofya Matveyevna's reading of the devils passage from Luke to Stepan Trofimovitch)—in The Idiot the central Biblical passages are from the Book of Revelation.

When did Dostoevsky first think of the Apocalypse in relation to his novel? His letters and notebook entries suggest an answer. The notebook entry for 29 February 1868 yields the first mention of Lebedyev in the written plans for Part Two (p. 171):

(Lebedyev and the Prince) (Lebedyev's family)

Lebedyev is a philosopher. He continually deceives the Prince. His characteristic. Lebedyev's children.

The Prince says of sinful persons: ‘All sick people have to be taken care of.’

Cannibal.

At N. F.'s house. The Apocalypse, prayers, about Christ.

Then the notes return to Lebedyev some twenty lines later (p. 172):

A warped man.

The star Wormwood.

He ate sixty monks, people were stronger in those times than in ours, he ate and ate and confessed and for this he was burned.

The jottings then move on to a lengthy sketch of the dying Ippolit—present in the notes for the first time (pp. 172-174). The decisions to make Lebedyev and Ippolit major characters in the continuation of the novel seem to have been simultaneous; it would further seem that they both enter Dostoevsky's mind as major characters in conjunction with the Book of Revelation.

Dostoevsky himself believed in the propinquity of the Apocalypse. Berdyaev quotes him as writing in a notebook “The end of the world is coming.”¹⁶ Mochulsky adds further documentation: In the Citizen in 1873 Dostoevsky wrote, “The world will be saved only after its visitation by the evil spirit … And the evil spirit is near: our children, perhaps, will look upon him.”¹⁷ Mochulsky, citing the same notebook entry from which Berdyaev quotes, gives from it the following pertinent phrase, “The end of the century will be marked by a calamity, the likes of which has never yet occurred.”¹⁸ And referring to Dostoevsky's morbid interest in the criminal trials reported in the Russian newspapers, he connects this interest to Dostoevsky's apocalypticism: “We know with what agitation Dostoevsky watched all that happened from abroad, how somberly he looked at reality, how he attempted to find in the legal chronicles threatening signs of the near end.”¹⁹

In a letter to the poet A. N. Maikov, written from Geneva 20 March 1868 (letter 284), Dostoevsky congratulates Maikov for having completed his verse translation of the Apocalypse. A later letter to Maikov (letter 289) of 18 May 1868, reporting the death of the Dostoevskys' first child, Sonia, concludes by saluting the magnificence of Maikov's work, which Dostoevsky says he has read in the April Russian Messenger. Between these two letters Dostoevsky had written and published the first two chapters of Part Two, which also appeared, by a happy coincidence, in the April Russian Messenger. (In light of Dostoevsky's rekindled interest in the Apocalypse, apparent in Chapter Two, his silence to Maikov on the subject almost seems strange. But then Dostoevsky was generally silent about the intellectual strategies that lay behind his fictions, usually preferring to discuss, in his letters at least, their moral significance, or, far more often, their hoped-for popular and financial success.) While it is true that Dostoevsky would have required no external stimulus to return to thoughts of a text with which he was familiar, one that was so much in the air of the 1860's and of which he had made previous use,²⁰ it is at least possible that his knowledge of Maikov's project renewed his own interest in the Apocalypse.²¹ It had been the Apocalypse that informed his vision of London in 1862, during his first journey outside of Russia. Chapter Five of his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions is entitled “Baal”: London

is like a Biblical picture, something out of Babylon, a prophecy from the Apocalypse coming to pass before your eyes. You sense that it would require great and everlasting spiritual denial and fortitude in order not to submit, not to capitulate before the impression, not to bow to what is, and not to deify Baal, that is, not to accept the material world as your ideal. …²²

Of this passage Mochulsky says: “Dostoevsky is inspired by the Apocalypse, a work with which all his work is mystically joined.” And he adds, “The author here [discussing the Crystal Palace] touches upon his most profound idea regarding the Anti-christ's earthly kingdom: criticism of the bourgeois order in the spirit of Herzen suddenly grows into an apocalyptic vision.”²³ What Dostoevsky felt about London in 1862 he has now, in 1868, come to feel about Russia, also ruled by the spirit of Baal, her daily life governed by mercantilism and murder, the one the result of the old order's sterile leap forward into the age of the machine, the other connected with the new political activism of the 1860's, especially that of the outer fringes of the Nihilists.

It is Lebedyev who establishes the novel's first clear point of contact with the Book of Revelation when he informs the startled Myshkin that he has been trying to calm Nastasya by reading to her from the Apocalypse, and that she agrees with him that “we are living in the age of the third horse, the black one …” (p. 189). Lebedyev's quotation of this text (Revelation 6:5-6) stands as a kind of epigraph to The Idiot. His interpretation makes of this time an age of outrageous mercantilism and political madness—a madness that leads to murder. While his commentary is idiosyncratic at best (the traditional interpretation of the third horse is that it represents a devastating famine), it does point to the two major social ills documented by The Idiot, and thus receives the confirmation of the text itself. These are mercantilism and murder, of which the two most frequently recurring examples are the new railway system and the murder of the Zhemarin family.

Dostoevsky read about the Zhemarin murders in the Voice for 10 March, and thus after the notebook entries had already introduced the notion of the Apocalypse, and some time well before the last weeks of April, when he sent the second chapter of Part Two, with its reference to the Zhemarins (p. 182), to the Russian Messenger. The murders, committed by the young student Gorsky, took the lives of six members of the family. The murders themselves and the ensuing trial fascinated Dostoevsky, as the seven notebook entries concerning them testify. The entry²⁴ that points specifically to the murderer (rather than to his victims) draws together Gorsky, Lebedyev, the Apocalypse, Burdovsky's plot against Myshkin, and the famine year, this last possibly a reference to the traditional interpretation of the black horse in the Apocalypse.²⁵ Danilov (the murderer of the money-lender Popov and his maid in January 1866, whose deed so closely recreated Raskolnikov's, thus proving to Dostoevsky the rightness of his “psychology”), Balabanov (who, while praying God's forgiveness, cut the throat of Susslov to steal his friend's new watch in October 1867), Mazurin (who slit the throat of Kalmyko the jeweller in November 1867), and Gorsky (who killed the Zhemarins 1 March 1868)—all these provided Dostoevsky with an almanac of Russian murderers who prowl the consciousness of the characters of The Idiot.

The new railways, also, serve Dostoevsky as an apocalyptic symptom of the times. His concern with the railways has a curious history. Three letters to Maikov (surely the most interesting of Dostoevsky's correspondents at this time insofar as he received so many letters which shed light on the thematic components of the novel) written between August and October of 1867 (nos. 260, 261, and 266) give vent to ardent hopes for the future of Russian railroading. In the last of these we read: “My heart stood still with joy when I read that the railway was to be extended as far as Kursk. Ah, faster! And hurrah for Russia!” This jingoistic zeal was entirely absent from the following passage in The Diary of a Writer for 1876:

All through Russia we see railways stretching out—almost twenty thousand versts of them—and everywhere along them even the lowest functionary appears as a propagandist of this idea [‘Get rich, and everything is yours, and you may do as you please.’ No more demoralizing idea can exist. And yet it soars everywhere and gradually penetrates everything].²⁶

This volte-face had already been accomplished some eight years before. Indeed it occurred some time between Dostoevsky's first work on Part One and the period in which he was struggling with the unwritten Part Two. On March 20, 1868 he wrote to Maikov²⁷ that he has read in the Voice (perhaps in the same issue that brought news of the Zhemarin murders) that the new railways were in very poor shape, commenting that new men are needed to administer them. This disillusionment with the railway,²⁸ occurring in conjunction with the early stages of his new apocalyptic design for The Idiot, was quickly joined to that design.

Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Lebedyev arrive in St. Petersburg on the Warsaw train on 27 November 1867. Thus begins the novel. At this point Dostoevsky seems to have nothing against this form of transportation beyond its physical discomfort. (Myshkin seems to have been just about as cold as was his author when he travelled on a gambling expedition to Homburg via Swiss and German railways while he was preparing to write The Idiot.) In Part Two the railways begin to be associated with mercantilism and the general spirit of political corruption. On the first page of Part Two we learn the relatively innocuous fact that Myshkin has travelled to Moscow by train to collect his inheritance, but then, shortly later (p. 175) that the liberal Prince S., Adelaïda's fiancé, has helped improve the plan for a new railway line. And this emblem of the new technology is present as a backdrop for many scenes in the rest of the novel, helping to create a sense of doom. At Lebedyev's house we discover that Doktorenko, having abandoned his studies, has just taken a job on the railway and is trying to cadge some money from Uncle Lebedyev in order to get himself properly outfitted for his new post (p. 183).²⁹ In Chapter Four Myshkin tells Rogozhin of a conversation he has had with an atheist on the new railway (p. 207). This railway motif is continued in several later passages. Among these two of the more important are the narrator's diatribe against the inefficiency of the railways with which Part Three opens and the remarks made by Mme. Epanchin—so often given speeches that veil Dostoevsky's own views behind the character's comic crankiness—³⁰ when she makes idle conversation by abusing the railways in Part Four (p. 489). We are, however, offered a central explication of the significance of the railroads. It is not surprising, in light of what has been said before, that this comes to us from Lebedyev. In Chapter Eleven of Part Two his young son explains to Myshkin that his father interprets the star that is called Wormwood in the Apocalypse as “the network of railways spread over Europe” (p. 288). Myshkin does not believe Lebedyev actually maintains this position, and resolves to question him about it. His opportunity comes in Part Three, Chapter Four, when Ippolit asks the Prince the meaning of the phrase “springs of life” in the Apocalypse, and also asks whether Myshkin has heard of “the star called Wormwood” (p. 354). Myshkin turns the question to Lebedyev, who gives a drunken and full interpretation of the relevance of the Apocalypse to contemporary Russian history.

“The springs of life” is Constance Garnett's rendering of the Russian “istochniky zhizny.” The phrase winds through pages 354-360, from Ippolit to Lebedyev, to Ganya, and back to Lebedyev, while Myshkin listens intently and others scoff. The phrase, as Ippolit's opening remark makes plain (we shall see shortly why he is so interested in bringing the Book of Revelation into the discussion), is from the Apocalypse. Dostoevsky refers to the “fountains of waters” of Rev. 8:10, upon which Wormwood falls, or to the “living fountains of waters” of Rev. 7:17, to which the Lamb shall lead the 144,000 saved at the end of the Tribulation, or to God's words to John in Rev. 21:6, “I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.”³¹ The entire six-page passage centers in the Apocalypse and allows Dostoevsky, through the drunken Lebedyev, to make his message clear: Russia, having become Godless in her pursuit of Baal and her political madness, has entered her Time of Tribulation, a time when the Apocalypse itself is rightly interpreted only by drunken buffoons (Lebedyev is contrasted with the “real” interpreter Burmistrov, who wore medals and made people faint, by the drunk and ridiculous General Ivolgin—p. 361). It is a time when even Christ's name has become confounded: for Ganya the phrase “King of the Jews” refers to Rothschild—his idol—not to Jesus (p. 116, and see pp. 374, 440, 443). That we are to take Lebedyev's interpretations seriously is drawn to our attention by Myshkin's seriousness about them while all the rest are laughing (p. 359). For in Lebedyev's clarification, or at any rate exposition, of the way in which the railways are “the artistic pictorial expression” (p. 357) of the emptiness of mercantilism and liberalism, we find the core of Dostoevsky's beliefs concerning the impending threat to Russia. The famine that Myshkin knows is the true portent of the third horse has been satisfactorily explained by Lebedyev as glut. For to seek material plenty is to find spiritual starvation; men seek to live by bread alone and therefore starve for God. This thought is underlined by the outrageous, uproarious, and apparently senseless tale Lebedyev goes on to tell (pp. 359-360), which concerns one of the many medieval Russian famines and a cannibal (it was he who accompanied Lebedyev's birth as a “philosopher” in that notebook entry of 29 February 1868). At the end of his life this cannibal confessed he had consumed sixty monks and six infants. The tale even manages to offend the credulity of one of literature's great offenders of credulity, General Ivolgin. Lebedyev brings us to see the point: even that cannibal, who had at least the urge to repent his sins, had more godliness in him than the men of the nineteenth century. There must have existed then, Lebedyev concludes, an idea that bound men together, “guided their hearts, and fructified the ‘springs of life.’ Show me anything like such a force in our age of vices and railways … I should say steamers and railways, but I say vices and railways, because I'm drunk but truthful.” And for once he is. Possibly no one but Goethe (whom Dostoevsky did not perhaps greatly admire³²) and Shakespeare (whom he worshipped) were as brilliant in their employment of comic scenes to recapitulate the central thematic elements in their works.

Lebedyev's cannibal consumes an interesting number of victims. Sixty-six. If this novel is centrally concerned with the Apocalypse we should expect it to contain some reference to the number of the Beast, the 666 of Rev. 13:18. The sixty-six cannibalized medievals may not in themselves be convincing proof of Dostoevsky's numerological underscoring of his point. When, however, we contemplate Ippolit's anecdote concerning the philanthropic “general” who “spent his whole life visiting prisons and prisoners” we find the brief description (p. 385) of a prisoner who had “murdered a dozen people and slaughtered six children,” and we may begin to put all these sixes together. Further, we may remember that Ippolit once amused himself by imagining that he might murder “a dozen people at once” (p. 392), that Lebedyev claims that these new fringe Nihilists would “do for half a dozen people” to gain their ends (p. 244), and that Myshkin, in an argument with Prince S., refers to terrible criminals, “men who have committed a dozen murders” (p. 322). And then there is, at the root of all these multiples of six, the historical Gorsky with his six victims, whose murder is referred to directly at least nine times in the text of the novel. It is likely that Dostoevsky created this list of six sets of victims with a sense of their “sixness” in order to point to the spirit of Antichrist. That is evidently the spirit he saw lurking behind the impulse to murder in this novel that is so occupied with murder and murderers.

A notebook entry for Part Three (September 1868),³³ reads: “Ippolit—the main axis for the whole novel.” No character in the work, not even Lebedyev, is more receptive to the Apocalypse. His anguish is nourished on his faithless recapitulation of John's vision. Where Lebedyev is pleased to be an apocalyptic critic of Russian reality, Ippolit turns his own life into an Apocalypse. He becomes Dostoevsky's exemplar of the failed younger generation of political liberals, as Lebedyev with his incessant cheating is a buffoonish exemplar of the older generation's deification of money. The dying Ippolit, lying in wait for over half the novel, suddenly explodes into a major character on Myshkin's birthday. His confession, “An Essential Explanation,” resembles, in outward form at least, the seven seals of the documents in the Apocalypse; it is contained in “a large envelope sealed with a large seal” (p. 364). Shortly after producing the document, Ippolit, asked by Myshkin to defer his reading to the next day, answers, “To-morrow there will be ‘no more time’” citing Rev. 10:6—out of context. For Myshkin, who has used the phrase earlier (p. 214) to describe the eternal moment he experiences at the onset of his epileptic seizures, the phrase expresses the passing into the eternity of God's eventual kingdom, while for Ippolit it expresses a self-lacerating surrender to the forces of death and points to his planned suicide that dawn. There may also be a touch of apocalypticism in the epigraph Ippolit has chosen for himself: “Après moi le déluge.”³⁴ James Billington points out³⁵ that men of the late imperial period in Russia were fond of thinking of the Apocalypse in terms of flood. And to inhabitants of St. Petersburg, the city built on marshland which had suffered major floods in 1725 and 1825, the image was particularly potent.

Where the structure of parts in Crime and Punishment seems to be based on a series of dreams (Raskolnikov has one in each of the first three parts; the fourth and fifth parts contain none; but the sixth describes three of Svidrigailov's, which are more or less exact counterparts to Raskolnikov's three; Raskolnikov has a final dream in the Epilogue which is in some sense an answer to the demonic visions of the first six), The Idiot, although mentioning and briefly reporting the content of several dreams (a dozen and a half passages in the novel refer to dreaming), presents only one full-scale Dostoevskian dream. It is as though the author, one of literature's great masters of the dream, had wanted Ippolit's dream to stand out from the novel. And if Dostoevsky at one point thought of Ippolit as the “main axis of the whole novel” it is his dream, the expression of a soul that is without faith, that most forcefully establishes the relevance of the Apocalypse to The Idiot. Myshkin, Ippolit tells us, has forecast that a removal to Pavlovsk will calm his “excitement and dreams” (p. 370). The one he has had about an hour before Myshkin's visit—as though expressly for the Prince, a sort of faithless plea for help—shows the rightness of Myshkin's intuition of Ippolit's inner state. He was in a room in which he saw “an awful animal, a sort of monster. It was like a scorpion, but was not a scorpion … there was nothing like it in nature … it had come expressly to me … there seemed to be something mysterious in that” (p. 370). In the Apocalypse the locusts (which are declared to be like scorpions while not being scorpions) that arise from the bottomless pit at the command of Apollyon, the destroyer, are sent forth to hurt only those men who have not the seal of God on their foreheads. Just this much recapitulation of Rev. 9 shows us that it is the major source for Ippolit's dream.³⁶ Ippolit, who has been tormented by his hatred of Myshkin for five months (p. 368) and who seeks death without finding it, discovers that the beast has crawled up the wall behind him and is touching his hair. Since it could have struck him from that distance, we may conclude that its office was torment and not death.

The horrible scene is interrupted by the entrance of Ippolit's mother, Marfa Borissovna “with some friend of hers” (p. 371).³⁷ These two, while unafraid (like certain untroubled characters in Kafka, they are unconscious of the metaphysical drama which contains them), are ineffective against the beast. Marfa Borissovna opens the door, allowing Norma, the huge black dog which has been dead for five years, to enter the room and, despite her fear, to confront the beast. In the ensuing dream action, in which she will seize the reptile in her huge jaws and destroy it, Norma will shriek with pain when the beast, its head in her mouth, bites her on the tongue. It seems to me that this perplexing action is meant to convey Ippolit's version of the struggle between Christ and Antichrist. In this version the reborn savior, while having the power to defeat its adversary, is at the same time mortally vulnerable to that adversary (Norma is, after all, dead in Ippolit's account of her). Ippolit's savior, like Holbein's Christ in the Tomb, is conquered by nature and death. Norma,³⁸ come back from the dead in an attempt to save Ippolit, destroys the dream's version of Antichrist, but only at cost to herself. That Ippolit's locust-scorpion should also be identified with Antichrist rests not only on its relationship to Apollyon, but in its shape, which Dostoevsky gives us in such painstaking detail. Its two legs go out from the body at 45-degree angles; it has the shape of a trident when it is seen from above (p. 370). The unnaturalness of the creature, which has only two legs, calls our attention to its symbolic valence: [and] is, among other things, the ancient sign of Antichrist, originating, at least according to some scholars, in Nero's crucifixion of Peter, head down, on a broken cross. It is that sign which Dostoevsky has placed at what to many might well seem to be the moral center of his novel.

Ippolit's dream contains, implicitly at least, a denial of Christ's last words to his Apostles as these are recorded by Mark (16:17-18):

And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Ippolit's dream of Norma's self-sacrifice and vulnerability is dedicated as a kind of challenge to the healer Myshkin, self-sacrificing and vulnerable, who is about to visit him; it is a foreshadowing of Myshkin's eventual defeat, with which the novel concludes, despite Lebedyev's assurance that Myshkin, the “babe” of Matthew 11:25 and Luke 10:21, has been saved from the “bottomless pit” of the Apocalypse (p. 568). Ippolit, like Nastasya, is a lost soul. For that soul two forces strive, the forces of light and darkness, of Christ and Antichrist. In the novel's cast of characters two figures rise above the rest as representatives of these two forces: Myshkin and Rogozhin. We should remember that both Nastasya and Ippolit finally succumb to the attraction of the latter.

Myshkin, in Chapter Three of Part Two, visits Rogozhin in that house which Ippolit will describe (later in the novel's action but actually two or three days before Myshkin's visit) as being “like a graveyard” (p. 387).³⁹ “You are living here in darkness,” says Myshkin, perhaps to put us in mind of John 12:46: “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.” Myshkin (if not a “figure of Christ,” he is the embodiment of the novel's Christian values), who seeks the light for others as well as for himself, will fail to bring that light to Rogozhin, to Ippolit, to Nastasya, to Aglaia, and will find it for himself only in his two epileptic fits. All, including himself, will end in darkness, in the “bottomless pit.” In Part One, and during the six-month lacuna in the action between Parts One and Two, Rogozhin seems at least open to the temptation held out to him by Myshkin. It is the temptation which goodness, humility, holds out to Satanic pride in the “mutual trespass of belief and unbelief” (the phrase is R. P. Blackmur's). But even as Rogozhin rehearses the Moscow moments with Myshkin for the last time in the darkness of that dirty green⁴⁰ house, even during the exchange of crosses and during his mother's speechless blessing of Myshkin, he is no longer open to that temptation. The tin cross he puts on represents the cynicism of the drunken soldier who sold it to Myshkin, not the Christian forgiveness of Myshkin the buyer. In only five hours he will be waiting in the darkness of Myshkin's hotel to murder him. That the Rogozhin who reappears in Part Two has become the representative of Antichrist is reflected in his habitual cynical laughter, in his resolution of all human possibility into murder or suicide (in this he is much like the Svidrigailov of Crime and Punishment). The notebook entry that introduces the Apocalypse in the working drafts of the novel (29 February 1868) is the very entry which contains the first working out of the novel's final scene—Rogozhin's murder of Nastasya. It would seem that Dostoevsky's initial vision of Rogozhin's character was itself in major respects modified by the writer's new apocalyptic plan for the continuation of the novel. Although it is true even in Part One that the action towards which all others in the novel lead is Rogozhin's murder of Nastasya,⁴¹ the murder itself assumes a different tonality because of its association with the Zhemarin murders, from which several of its details (e.g., the American leather, Zhdanov's disinfectant) are appropriated. It is the climactic event of the novel and points to the victory of Antichrist, whose spirit is the spirit that governs the darkness of Rogozhin's house.

Holbein's Christ in the Tomb, alluded to by Myshkin in Part One, is seen by him at Rogozhin's in Part Two. We are only briefly given his response to the painting: “Why, that picture might make some people lose their faith” (p. 206). A full description of the painting must wait for Part Three, when we are given Ippolit's detailed reaction to it. Ippolit, “the main axis of the whole novel,” has lost his faith. His chain of associations in response to the Holbein is instructive. It shows him Jesus as conquered by nature, not as its conqueror. He reformulates this notion to make nature “an immense, merciless dumb beast …, a huge machine of the most modern construction …” (p. 389). We think back to the guillotine Myshkin has seen in operation in Lyons (pp. 19, 58f.); the machine and the cross are the two great antithetical objects of that scene. (We should note that the story of the Lyons execution is told to the Epanchin ladies in lieu of Myshkin's promised description of the Holbein—pp. 58, 61). And we remember Dostoevsky's own harrowing experience before the Czar's firing squad in 1849⁴² which Myshkin is permitted to describe (pp. 54-55), the light flashing from the gilt roof of the church the only living force against the certain fact of death. The three scenes—the dead, battered body of Jesus, the man awaiting certain death, the man undergoing that death—are brought together to give a composite picture of life without hope, a life shut away from the possibility of change, of rebirth. In all three scenes Christ is present as the answer: Christians believe He rose from that death; the light gleaming from the church roof points to another, better life; the cross promises life against the certain death of the guillotine. None of these is true for Ippolit. When his thread of thought continues from that “huge machine of the most modern construction” he wonders, “Can anything that has no shape appear in a shape? But I seemed to fancy at times that I saw in some strange, incredible form that infinite Power, that dull, dark, dumb force,” and then he equates a “huge and loathesome spider” with that force, now referred to as a “dark, dumb and almighty Power” (p. 389). At this point he imagines that Rogozhin has entered his room (the scene is similar in some respects to Ivan's tête-à-tête with the Devil in The Brothers Karamazov). Careful reading of the text makes it clear that Rogozhin was not there. Rogozhin has become, in Ippolit's stream of associations that has its cause in the Holbein (the ikon of Rogozhin's house), the representative of the godless spirit of death. He is the Russian servant of Antichrist, the spirit Myshkin will later attack in his uncharacteristically polemical outburst in Chapter Seven of Part Four, when he claims that the Roman Church “preaches the Antichrist” (p. 518), and is thus responsible for the growth of atheism and socialism. Ippolit will later dream (p. 535) that Rogozhin will smother him with a wet cloth. He will murder Nastasya Filippovna with a garden knife. By their fruits ye shall know them.

When Myshkin finds that knife on a table at Rogozhin's at the end of Chapter Three of Part Two, he twice absent-mindedly toys with it. Rogozhin, angered, takes it from him, puts it in a book, and throws the book to another table (p. 205). The blade of the knife is described as being “about three and a half vershka long” in the Russian text. The book into which Rogozhin puts the knife is a volume of Solovyev's history of Russian (p. 202). Rogozhin tells Myshkin that when Nastasya found that book in his room and promised to make him up a list for further reading, “I was positively amazed. For the first time I breathed like a living man” (p. 203). In his small gesture of putting the knife in the book, a gesture which could be said to deny the hopes for life revived in him by Nastasya's kindly promise, we have an emblem of Dostoevsky's apocalyptic sense of the Russian present and future. The knife in that book⁴³ is the sign of Antichrist. It is metaphorically the last and as yet unwritten chapter of the history of Russia, as it is literally to be the instrument of Nastasya's death. And that murder is the novel's eventual and total expression of all those murders, historical and imagined, which dot its pages, and which are so frequently identified with the number of the Beast from the Apocalypse.

The knife, in measurement perhaps and certainly in moral effect, has a counterpart in the novel. Again I translate from the Russian, for Constance Garnett makes both these objects seven inches long, and Dostoevsky has them only approximately equal in length. “About four vershka long.” This describes that “crawling reptile” in Ippolit's dream that has the shape of Antichrist's sign (p. 370). The knife in the book, the creature in Ippolit's dream, the notion of Jesus conquered by nature, the picture of a man the moment before the machine-monster executes him: all these have become for Dostoevsky the hopeless portents of the triumph of Antichrist.

Myshkin's last form of expression is weeping. His tears flow down the insentient Rogozhin's cheeks, and the two characters fuse in madness and hopelessness, as they were joined as opposites in the frame of a train window of the Warsaw-Petersburg express in the foggy morning light of 27 November 1867. One might be tempted to see the whole novel as a kind of psychomachia, in which the forces of good and evil contend in the soul of Russia, with the latter emerging the stronger. In that struggle the “idiot” who is a fool in Christ becomes the lump of insentient idiocy who, in Dostoevsky's last paragraph, is so present before us in his changed state that most readers do not even see him there. Mme Epanchin speaks of Europeans: “‘They can't make decent bread anywhere; in winter they are frozen like mice in a cellar,’ she said; ‘here, at any rate, I've had a good Russian cry over this poor fellow,’ she added pointing to Myshkin, who did not even recognize her.” Not even that other great retrograde novel, Flaubert's Education sentimentale, ends so dishearteningly.

Notes

1. My English text has been Constance Garnett's (New York: The Modern Library, 1935). Page references in the text of the paper are to this edition. I should like to record here my gratitude to four colleagues at Princeton who have been generous in responding to my requests for help concerning matters both large and small: James Billington, Clarence Brown, Georges Florovsky, Joseph Frank.

2. Joseph Frank, “A Reading of The Idiot,” Southern Review, V (1969), 313-314.

3. Edward Wasiolek, ed., The Notebooks for The Idiot, tr. K. Strelsky (Chicago, 1967).

4. For all dates I have given those of the Russian calendar of the time. I have followed this course, even though it necessitated recasting the dates of some of Dostoevsky's European records, in order to maintain a time sequence that is readily ascertainable by the reader. The recorded date for this notebook entry, for example, is 12 March 1868.

5. Alexey, the Epanchin footman, offers a kind of paradigm of possible reactions to Myshkin: 1) First he is suspicious of an ulterior motive in Myshkin's strange behaviour, 2) then relieved to find Myshkin innocent and inoffensive; 3) next he is aware of the young man's impossible social behaviour; 4) he finally feels sympathy with him. While not all of the other characters move through all of these stages (General Epanchin, for instance, is primarily interested in Myshkin for selfish reasons), many of them do.

6. Romano Guardini (“Dostoyevsky's Idiot, a Symbol of Christ,” tr. F. X. Quinn, Cross Currents, VI [1956], 359-382) sees Myshkin as “The Lamb” in the slapping scene (p. 370). Both he and Franco Zoppo (Dostojevskij, il Dio russo e il Cristo russo [Taranto: Athena, 1959]) insist that Myshkin is “a symbol of Christ.” While I do not totally disagree with it, I find this particular formulation of the Christian parallel rather more limiting than enlightening, and tend to agree instead with Mochulsky (see footnote 11).

7. For instance, the “Yurodivyi” of the Notebooks (ed. Wasiolek, p. 69). For a brief discussion of the “fool in Christ” in Dostoevsky see the section entitled “The Holy Lunatic” in G. Gibian, “Dostoevskij's Use of Russian Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore, LXIX (1956), 239-253. See also K. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, tr. M. A. Minihan (Princeton, 1967 [1942]), p. 570, for the reminder that in the preliminary notes for The Brothers Karamazov Alyosha is referred to as “the Idiot.”

8. R. P. Blackmur has discussed the continuing relevance in Dostoevsky's fiction of the figure of the Magdalen as well as of what he calls the “childishness of Christ”—“A Rage of Goodness: The Idiot of Dostoevsky,” Accent, III (1942), 30-45.

9. “A Reading of The Idiot,” p. 307.

10. According to Z. Malenko and J. J. Gebhard, “The Artistic Use of Portraits in Dostoevskij's Idiot,” Slavic and East European Journal, V (1961), 243-254, who also reproduce the words of the second Mrs. Dostoevsky that when her husband saw this painting he exhibited the same frightened look she was accustomed to seeing at the onset of his epileptic fits (p. 250).

11. Dostoevsky, p. 349. My colleague Theodore Ziolkowski, in his Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (Princeton, 1972), after noting that The Idiot is one of many modern works that is sometimes referred to, virtually meaninglessly, as being “christological” (p. 28), implicitly but nonetheless clearly denies that Myshkin is a “fictional transfiguration of Jesus” (pp. 104-105). Ziolkowski's definition of this term requires that a novel's action be “specifically based on the life of the historical Jesus as depicted in the Gospels” (p. 29). While I agree with Ziolkowski's estimate as it applies to the novel as a whole, I am also of the opinion that The Idiot is a work which would have fitted his definition had Dostoevsky continued as he began: at least Myshkin's Swiss idyll conforms in major ways to the pattern of the Gospels. And I would further maintain, in a slight adjustment of Mochulsky's remark, that Dostoevsky overcame his temptation to write “a novel about Christ” only after he had at first succumbed to that temptation.

12. After I had completed this article Joseph Frank pointed out to me that I had neglected the chapter on The Idiot in Roger L. Cox, Between Earth and Heaven (New York, 1969). While I am both impressed and depressed to find a number of my juxtapositions of the Apocalypse and the novel in Cox (there are others present in only one or another of the two studies), my sense is that we disagree strongly as to the use Dostoevsky makes of the Biblical text in the novel. For Cox, Myshkin is a Johannine seer who serves to give the novel a positive Christian focus. For the present writer, as will be seen below, Dostoevsky's references to the Apocalypse seem rather to be put to the service of delineating the elements of a “time of trouble” that the novelist sees as emergent in the Russia of the 1860's.

13. Dostoevsky, p. 357.

14. Dostoevsky, p. 356. The comments of N. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, tr. D. Attwater (New York, 1957 [1934]), pp. 170-177 are also interesting, though they are less precise: “Dostoevsky … belonged to a new era that was sensible of change and looked for its religion in the Book of the Apocalypse”; “Dostoevsky discerned the division brought about in the movement of his day by the appearance of Antichrist therein better than did anyone else. …”

15. So Dostoevsky thought two days after he had completed the seventh chapter of Part One. Cf. his well known letter to his niece S. A. Ivanova—Letter 275 of 1 January 1868. Here and elsewhere references to the letters are to Correspondance de Dostoievski, tr. N. Gourfinkel (Paris, 1960), Vol. III.

16. N. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, p. 135.

17. K. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, p. 481.

18. Ibid., p. 652.

19. Ibid., p. 352.

20. Cf. discussions referred to in notes 16-19, above, and in notes 22 and 35, below.

21. G. M. Fridlender, in a note to his edition of The Idiot (Moscow, 1957, p. 727), asserts that “reading Maikov's translations intensified Dostoevsky's interests in the symbolic images of this Book.” However, Dostoevsky's renewed interest in the Apocalypse predates by at least two months his reading of the translations. In the letter written to Maikov on 2 March 1868, that is, two days after the Apocalypse first entered the working plans for the continuation of The Idiot, Dostoevsky reports that he has just now changed the whole plan for Part Two for the third time (this corresponds to the actual condition of the notes of 29 February-1 March [12-13 March new style] in relation to the two preceding false starts), and now requires three days to think about the new composition which is evolving (there are no further notebook entries for four days, in fact). He continues by asking Maikov to announce his opinion of the last nine chapters of Part One, published in the February Russian Messenger, adding the words, “Believe me, your words are a fountain of living water to me” (Letter 282, tr. N. Gourfinkel, Vol. III, p. 204). The citation of the Apocalypse (21:6) may indicate that something in an earlier letter from Maikov had moved Dostoevsky's mind in the direction of the Book of Revelation. At any rate it shows Dostoevsky's involvement with that text at this time.

22. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, tr. R. L. Renfield (New York, 1955), p. 91.

23. Dostoevsky, p. 233.

24. The Notebooks for The Idiot, p. 228.

25. During the winter of 1868 there was a terrible famine in Central Russia; it is alluded to by Dostoevsky in a letter to Maikov—Letter 277 of 18 February 1868, p. 185. It is at least possible that Dostoevsky looked upon this famine as another apocalyptic sign.

26. The Diary of a Writer, tr. Boris Brazol (New York, 1949), Vol. I, Chapter III, i, 188.

27. Letter 284, tr. Gourfinkel, Vol. III, 214.

28. J. H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe (New York, 1968), pp. 382-385, offers a brief discussion of the moral impact of the new railway on the men of the 1860's.

29. Doktorenko is aligned with the Zhemarin murders as well. It is as though he were born in Dostoevsky's mind along with the new “apocalyptic” Lebedyev. (His only “upstage scene” in The Idiot occurs in that second chapter of Part Two, which introduces the Apocalypse to the novel.) The details that contrive to give him novelistic life reveal him as an epitome of his author's apocalyptic concerns. The first thing that Lebedyev says of him is that he is “the actual second murderer of the Zhemarin family … that is, allegorically speaking, the future second murderer of a future Zhemarin family, if such there be. He is preparing himself for it …” (p. 182). He is further joined to the Book of Revelation when he advises Myshkin to seek Kolya at the hotel called “The Pair of Scales.” We should be reminded of Lebedyev's discussion, two pages later (p. 189), of the rider of the black horse who holds the balance in his hand, “seeing that everything in the present age is weighed in the scales …” (Rev. 6:6). We might further speculate on the fact that in Letter 289, of 18 May 1868, to Maikov, Dostoevsky refers to his step-son, Pasha, as a potential Gorsky or Raskolnikov (p. 238). In at least some respects Pasha seems to be a model for Doktorenko, both in his “modern” convictions and in his inability to hold down a job.

30. Cf., inter alia, her anti-European, Russophile remarks with which the novel concludes.

31. In Russian the three phrases are, respectively, “na istochniky vod,” “na zhivy istochniky vod,” and “istochnika vody zhivoy.”

32. “The Prologue in Heaven” of Faust is invoked rather nastily by Ippolit at the beginning of his huge outburst (p. 354).

33. The Notebooks for The Idiot, p. 236.

34. In two passages of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, tr. Renfield, pp. 102, 105, Dostoevsky puts the phrase into the mouth of a cartoonistic exemplar of the money-grubbing and complacent French bourgeoisie. This might suggest that, in Dostoevsky's mind at least, Ippolit's lineage is not to be traced from the royal Louis, but from Jacques Bonhomme.

35. The Icon and the Axe, p. 368.

36. The full text of verses 4-6 follows:

    And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

    And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: And their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.

    And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

37. In the Russian the friend has the masculine gender. The dream probably reflects the familiar household presence of General Ivolgin, Marfa Borissovna's lover.

38. The name of the dog is puzzling. Bellini's Norma, according to advice given me in conversation by Father Georges Florovsky, had a great vogue in the Russia of the 1860's. Is Dostoevsky thinking of the self-sacrificing heroine of that opera, who destroys herself with her lover, thus saving their children? If so, Ippolit's version of a Redeemer is of a flawed and mortal one.

39. In a conversation James Billington has pointed out to me that the Old Believers' cemetery in Moscow was called “Rogozh Cemetery.”

40. Page 195. In the novel the color green seems to be associated in particular with sexual jealousy and generically with the sense of doom which pervades the book at least from the beginning of Part Two. It is perhaps a remnant of the Iago theme—the “green-eyed monster”—prominent in the early drafts of Part One. We find it on Rogozhin's scarf, which is bright red and green, when he comes to Nastasya's party (p. 151); Kolya has borrowed Ganya's new green scarf to deliver Myshkin's note to Aglaia (p. 179); Lebedyev's yard in Petersburg contains a “green wooden seat by a green table” (p. 188); the villa Myshkin rents from Lebedyev at Pavlovsk is green (p. 191); the seat in the park at Pavlovsk on which so much of the love intrigue involving Aglaia takes place in Part Three is green (p. 328 and ff.); there is “the jaunty pale green necktie of the apparition” that is Rogozhin just before the whipping scene in the park (p. 331); Ippolit's bed, in his dream, is covered with “a green silk quilted counterpane” (p. 370); and of course the room-divider that separates the bed, on which the dead Nastasya lies, from the rest of Rogozhin's apartment is a “heavy green silk curtain” (p. 577).

41. “Dostoevsky's intention seems to be to suggest so often and so openly that Rogojin will end by murdering Nastasia that it becomes the one thing that nobody expects because everybody says it”—Edwin Muir, The Structure of the Novel (London, 1960 [1928]), p. 77.

42. Ippolit's experience of the last stages of consumption is obviously related in some way to Dostoevsky's own torment in the face of certain death before the rifles of the Czar's firing squad. A small detail underlines the commonality of their experiences. Where Ippolit longs to die heroically, like Glyebov, he believes that Myshkin thinks he is more likely to die like Osterman (pp. 497-498). Count Andrei Ivanovich Osterman (1686-1747), who served four Czars and rose to the height of personal power, was imprisoned by the Tsarevna Elizabeth in the coup d'état of 6 December 1741. Sentenced to death, he was reprieved on the scaffold and banished to Siberia. A familiar tale.

43. Myshkin's “brotherly” letter to Aglaia, which is so important to the love intrigue of Parts Two through Four, is unconsciously placed by Aglaia in her copy of Don Quixote (p. 178). There results a possible parallelism between apparently very different objects. The letter, however, like the knife, will later come back into play; and like the knife it will also have disastrous results.