SOURCE: Miller, Robin Feuer. “The Role of the Reader in The Idiot.” The Slavic and East European Journal 23, no. 2 (summer 1979): 190-202.

[In the following essay, Miller discusses how Dostoevsky intended The Idiot to influence the reader and identifies the various levels on which the novel can be read.]

Recently, a number of literary critics have focused attention on the reader both in his role as a literary creation of the author and as a real presence; they claim to have discovered in him a figure who, as one critic laments, had previously been “excluded by legislation.”¹ Northrop Frye has praised a definition of literature which characterizes it as a “picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning.”² Meaning in the novel lies in the collision between two equally important entities: the author and the reader. V. N. Vološinov articulated this idea as early as 1930: “… there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding.”³ It is, of course, a small step from speaker and listener to author and reader, and in fact, Vološinov chooses to illustrate this very point with a quotation from Dostoevskij's Diary of a Writer. But while critics may be engaged in discovering and describing the reader, authors have never lost sight of him either in his created or actual manifestation. Cervantes, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Tolstoj—most serious novelists have written about the importance of their reader's responses. The whole of Aristotle's Poetics enumerates and scrutinizes the means by which a poet can best affect and manipulate his audience's responses.

For Dostoevskij, calculating the effect of his work upon his audience was an activity of the highest priority. His concern for maintaining his reader's interest largely determined his narrative manner. No one disputes the prosaic, even commercial reasons for Dostoevskij's preoccupation with his audience. Far more interesting, however, is the construct of the reader that emerges directly from the works.

From the outset of his career Dostoevskij viewed his audience as a group upon whom the most wily strategies should be exercised. His narration always embodied a conscious method of persuasion. As early as 1846, after he had finished Poor Folk, he wrote of his audience: “In our public there is instinct, as there is in any crowd, but there is no education. They do not understand how one can write with such a style as mine. They are accustomed to seeing the ugly mug of the author in everything; I have not shown mine. And they haven't even guessed that Devuškin is speaking and not I. …”⁴ As late as 1876 Dostoevskij was still complaining about the tendency of his readers to confuse the narrator's voice with that of the author. “… I wrote my Letters from a Dead House fifteen years ago under the name of a fictitious person, a criminal who supposedly had murdered his wife. In passing, I may add, by way of detail, that since that time many people have been under the impression, and are even now asserting, that I was exiled for the murder of my wife.”⁵

Wayne Booth has written about the difference between the real-life author and the implied author of a work. The implied author differs from the real man. The epithet implied author provides a way of speaking about the self an author becomes as he writes. Booth asserts that the real man “creates a superior version of himself, a ‘second self,’ as he creates his work …”⁶ But Dostoevskij sought to conceal the implied author's voice. This concealment continued as a basic principle of Dostoevskij's narrative technique for thirty-five years.⁷

The question of his audience's response also remained a central concern. Towards the end of his life Dostoevskij wrote, “… I am always tormented by the question: how will this be received—whether people will want to understand the essence of the matter or whether it will turn out that I shall have done more harm than good by publishing my sacred convictions,” (Pis' ma, IV, 194-95.) Though his fiction did contain his “sacred convictions” they were carefully shielded by layers of narrative fabric. That is, the reader of a work by Dostoevskij must himself uncover the meaning of that work.

In 1876 Dostoevskij ruefully asserted this truth about the necessity for indirectness:

I have never yet allowed myself, in my writings, to follow … my convictions to the end, to say the very last word. … Set up any paradox that you like, but do not take it to its end, and you will be considered witty, subtle, and comme il faut; but take some risky word to the end, suddenly say, for example: “And here is the Messiah”—directly, and not by hinting, and no one will believe you precisely because of your naiveté, precisely because you took things to the end and said your very last word. … If many of the most famous wits, like Voltaire, for example, instead of mockeries, allusions, hints and reservations, had suddenly decided to express all that they believed … then, believe me, they would not have obtained even a tenth of their former effect. Worse than that, they would only have been laughed at.

(III, 227-28.)⁸

Dostoevskij goes on to quote the famous line from Tjutčev's poem “Silentium,” “the thought spoken is a lie” (“mysl' izrečennaja est' lož'”). Thus questions of narrative are inextricably bonded to the question of the audience; an understanding of one leads to an understanding of the other.

In The Idiot Dostoevskij began to develop the figure of the narrator-chronicler which he used later in The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. He combined the techniques of first and third person narrative in the figure of the narrator-chronicler; this narrator offered the advantages of both forms. He lives in the town where the action takes place, has access to minute details of the action, but does not participate in it. He does not shrink, however, from judging or interpreting the people and events around him. The narrator-chronicler, who can, at times, express outrageous opinions, provides a subtle mask for the implied author. The reader can easily confuse this narrator's voice with that of the implied author.⁹

This discussion of the reader in The Idiot does not focus on a figure to whom the narrator directly addresses himself throughout the novel. Unlike the narrators of Puškin and Gogol', Dostoevskij's narrator in The Idiot seldom refers to his reader at all, and he never address him directly. Nevertheless, a model may be proposed for describing the reader in this novel which contributes to uncovering the intentions of the implied author. Put simply, while reading The Idiot one becomes two readers at once: the reader who responds directly to the words of the narrator-chronicler (the narrator's reader) and the reader who responds to the indirect manipulations of the implied author (the implied reader). It is the interaction between these two readers that is significant.

To use Booth's terminology, one can speak of three authors in The Idiot—the real author Dostoevskij, the implied author, and the narrator. The implied author makes, that is, creates, his implied reader. They are capable of making more disinterested judgments in fiction than in life. Just as Booth distinguished between the real author and the “superior version of himself” he becomes as he writes, so does he differentiate between the real man and the implied reader:

Of course, the same distinction must be made between myself as reader and the often very different self who goes about paying bills, repairing leaky faucets, and failing in generosity and wisdom. It is only as I read that I become the self whose beliefs must coincide with the author's.

(138.)

These two created selves, the implied author and the implied reader, are often in collusion behind the narrator's back (Booth, 304). In The Idiot though the implied author and the narrator do not coincide, they share certain ideas. But towards the end of the novel they disagree sharply. The narrator rejects Myškin, while the implied author stands staunchly behind his hero.

Booth and Wolfgang Iser have tended to concentrate on the implied reader who responds to the implied author's lofty machinations. But the experience of reading is not so clear-cut. For example, in The Idiot one can speak of three readers—the real reader, the implied reader, and the narrator's reader. On certain occasions the reader posited by the narrator lacks serious moral concern; he merely reads for plot and enjoyment. The real reader of the novel subsumes the implied reader and the narrator's reader but he does not combine them. They continue to exist separately, at times in diametric opposition within the real reader, who experiences both their responses simultaneously.¹⁰ The implied reader responds to the implied author's serious, indirect manipulation of him, while the narrator's reader, uncritical and curious, does not suspend belief in the narrator's rendition of the story. To experience the novel most fully the real reader must know in precisely what ways the two readers within him diverge.

How does this work? Several sharply contrasting modes of narration coexist within The Idiot so that the reader must constantly readjust his attitude towards the narrative texture as well as towards the characters it portrays.¹¹ In parts I and II the reader comes to expect the use of a particular voice to describe a particular character or group of characters. In the following passage we hear a voice which is ironically detached from the action and easily swayed by the current local rumors:

It was well known that General Epančin had participated in government monopolies in the past. At present he participated and had a strong voice in several substantial stock companies. He was known as a man of big money, big operations, big connections. In certain circles he knew how to render himself absolutely indispensable, among others, in his own branch of the administration. At the same time it was also well known that Ivan Fedorovič Epančin was a man of no education who had started as the son of an ordinary soldier, facts which undoubtedly reflected only the honor upon him; but the general, although an intelligent man, was also not without his petty and quite excusable weaknesses and did not enjoy allusions to certain things. But intelligent and adroit he certainly was. For example, he made it a rule not to put himself forward when it was essential to stay in the background, and many people appreciated in him precisely this ingenuousness, precisely this quality of always knowing his place. Yet if those who judged him thus could have seen what sometimes transpired in the soul of Ivan Fedorovič, who knew his place so well!¹²

The narrator-chronicler directs his sarcasm both towards General Epančin and towards the assessments about the general made by public opinion. In a manner reminiscent of Gogol', two layers of irony operate here: the narrator's irony towards the general, and, to a lesser degree, the reader's slightly ironical feelings about the narrator, who is so addicted to reporting all the gossip known about the general. The reader and the narrator find themselves in a pleasant, soothing state of collusion both against the general and against the society judging him. The reader's confidence in the narrator's perceptions solidifies. So does the reader's confidence in himself; after all, he has easily detected the presence of this ironic voice.

At times the narrator assumes a comic voice which relates a kind of novel of ill manners:

All three Epančin daughters were tall, robust young ladies, in the full bloom of youth and health, with magnificent shoulders, powerful bosoms, strong, almost masculine arms; and of course, as a result of their strength and good health, they occasionally like to eat well, a fact which they did not choose to disguise. Their mamma, Lizaveta Prokof'evna, sometimes looked askance at the honesty of their appetites, but as certain of her views, despite the outward respect they were shown by her daughters, had long since lost their former unquestioned authority among them, so much so, in fact, that the firmly established entente of the three young ladies had begun to prevail quite regularly, the general's wife, conscious of her own dignity, had found it more convenient to give in without argument.

(32; 57-58.)

The humor of this passage and, indeed, of much of the narrator's description of the Epančins' family life depends upon the reader's acquaintance with the form of the novel of manners or domestic novel. From the start the narrator plays with conventions and, as it were, bursts the seams enclosing this form. His physical portrait of the three daughters begins somewhat typically, but it rapidly goes astray. However independent and strong a typical heroine proves herself to be, she rarely first appears to the reader with such attributes as amazing shoulders, a powerful bosom, strong, almost masculine arms and a gigantic appetite. The narrator teases the reader's expectations of what three marriageable maidens of good family should be like.

The narrator even goes so far as to present Nastasja Filippovna's wretched history from Totskij's uncompassionate point of view. He writes chattily to the reader about the failure of Nastasja Filippovna's “education”:

In fact, to give an example, if Nastasja Filippovna would have suddenly displayed some kind of sweet and graceful ignorance of the fact, for instance, that peasant women could not wear fine cambric underwear as she did, then Afanasij Ivanovič, it seems, would have been extremely pleased.

(115; 156.)

Totskij's point of view has infected the narrator. Here the implied author seduces the readers into laughing, if only for a moment, inappropriately, and he thereby implicates us in Totskij's crime. In terms of the reader mechanism proposed here the reader responds to the narrator's ironies and to Totskij's point of view and finds them funny.¹³ At the end of the novel, then, when the situation has become overwhelmingly tragic, the reader must realize that he, like the narrator and Totskij, is guilty because he is capable, even if briefly, of making amoral judgments.

The effect of the narrator's choice of a detached voice serves to render comic the situation at the beginning of the novel. The reader's emotions have been kept at bay through the narrator's assumption of an amused tone. The reader, at the start of this novel, has been lured by this tone into accepting as comic certain situations in fiction which he would not smile at in life. He has given in, if you will, to a willing suspension of conscience. Later the narrator will engage the reader's emotions and make him feel these same situations to be tragic.

The narrator discards this ironical voice when he describes Myškin. In a sympathetic and omniscient manner, he enters Myškin's mind:

And still another insoluble question presented itself, one of such importance that the prince was afraid to think about it; he could not, he dared not even admit it, he was unable to formulate it, he blushed and trembled at the mere thought of it. Nonetheless, in spite of all his doubts and anxieties, he ended by entering and asking for Nastasja Filippovna.

(114; 155-56.)

Throughout the novel the narrator portrays Myškin's thoughts in a similar way: he frequently uses indefinite pronouns instead of nouns; he mystifies instead of enlightens the reader. Thus the reader expects the narrator to enter Myškin's mind with seeming directness, but he does not really expect to learn much.

In the following quotation we hear an instance of the narrator's Gothic voice which employs techniques of arbitrary disclosure and heightened terror:

And quite recently, at the Tsarskoe Selo station when he was boarding the train for Pavlovsk to see Aglaja and had suddenly seen the eyes again, for the third time that day, he had felt a terrible urge to tell him whose eyes they were! But he had run out of the station and had only come to his senses in front of the cutler's shop at the moment he was standing there estimating the cost of an object with a deer-horn handle at sixty kopecks. A strange and hideous demon held him fast and would not leave him again. This demon had whispered to him in the Summer Garden, as he sat lost in thought under a lime tree. …

(193; 251.)

Alluding to fears provokes a greater effect than fully describing them. At this point Myškin, having returned to Petersburg after a six-month absence, has just left Rogožin's house, and, followed by Rogožin, he is wandering through the city. A typical narrator in a Gothic novel seeks to interest the reader by any means whatsoever, whether by rendering things mysterious and admitting the supernatural world or by describing events in ghastly detail. Here “something” pursues Myškin, a “demon” has attached itself to him. His forebodings, in Gothic fashion, inexorably come to pass: the scene climaxes with Rogožin's attempted murder of Myškin and with Myškin's epileptic fit. The reader finds himself in a world far removed from the easy ironies of the Epančin household.

In parts I and II of the novel the reader's trust in the narrator's judgment, taste, wit, and tact has been established. At the same time the reader knows the narrator is manipulating him and withholding information. (For example, he does not tell the reader of Myškin's inheritance until the end of part I; the reader, like the other characters, thinks Myškin is a poor relation.) The reader senses that the narrator does not coincide completely with the implied author; the narrator's powers of reasoning sometimes seem mildly suspect. His reliance on rumor diminishes his stature and at times reduces him to the status of a town gossip. The narrator may not be unreliable, but he is blatantly, shamelessly manipulative.

In parts III and IV the reader's position vis à vis the narrator becomes more complex and it becomes necessary to distinguish between the responses of the implied reader and the narrator's reader. The polyphony of narrative voices in the first half of the novel collapses, at times, into cacophony in the second half. From the beginning of part III the narrator more frequently makes his presence known. He excuses himself to his reader for “digressing too far,” but he then digresses further by complaining about the lack of competent civil servants in Russia. The rapid shifts in point of view may begin to irritate the implied reader.

The narrator crams his account of climactic events even more closely together. For example, when the reader might logically expect to hear more about Ippolit on the morning after his bungled suicide attempt, the narrator instead diverts the reader's interest to the relationship between Aglaja and the prince. Aglaja reveals that Nastasja Filippovna has been writing to her. The narrator's reader, in this jumble of climactic disclosures, finds himself forgetting about Ippolit's confession and becoming immersed in the new situation. These narrative “bounces” (to use Forster's phrase) do not offer the reader a respite in the form of comic relief, as they often do in the novels of Dickens, but serve to create an air of unrelieved tension. The implied reader, who unlike the narrator's reader does not simply read along, finds himself in a world where there is no escape from extreme, difficult situations. Perhaps, like Myškin, the implied reader longs for escape, but he must delve further.

Later, the narrator displays a sudden concern with the actual business of narration. He digresses at the beginning of part IV on the question, “what is the novelist to do with absolutely ‘ordinary’ people, and how can he present them to readers so that they are at all interesting?” (383-84; 480.) The digression distances the narrator's reader from the events; it forces him to remember that he is only reading a novel. But the implied reader realizes that the narrator's new obsession with the difficulties of storytelling echoes a dominant thematic concern of the implied author and of Myškin himself: the theme of the inevitable distortion of an important idea.

When the narrator confesses his insufficient explanation of the “ordinary” people of the novel (Varja, Ganja, Pticyn), the reader does not know what to expect next in the face of the narrator's sudden nervousness. The narrator remembers Pirogov in Gogol's Nevskij prospekt:

The great writer was forced … to thrash him [Pirogov] for the sake of satisfying the reader's offended moral feelings, but, seeing that the great man only shook himself off after the ordeal and consumed a small layered pastry to fortify himself, he threw up his hands in amazement and thus left his readers to make of him what they would.

(385; 481.)

That is, the events of the work escaped “the great writer's” control. By citing Gogol''s story, the narrator is preparing the reader for his own abdication of responsibility.¹⁴ The implied reader picks up this forewarning, while the narrator's reader merely follows the flow of the humorous literary criticism about Pirogov.

To describe the Epančins' soirée (when Myškin eventually breaks the Chinese vase) the narrator employs his familiar cynical mode for depicting society. But this time, significantly, he does not exempt Myškin from a portrayal through this harsher voice. At the party the awful climaxes follow in close succession: Myškin's outburst which renders ridiculous his ideas, his breaking of the Chinese vase, and, finally, his second epileptic fit. Throughout this scene the reader undergoes contradictory responses. Or, the narrator's reader dismisses Myškin's ideas about Roman Catholicism, Russia, and the mission of the aristocracy as mad ramblings; he waits impatiently for the inevitable smashing of the vase. But the implied reader sees in Myškin's outburst the logical extension to Myškin's stated beliefs; he realizes he is witnessing Myškin's attempt to express an idea directly (to state, in Dostoevskij's words, a sacred conviction). While this attempt is doomed to failure, the reader must at least offer Myškin the same understanding that Myškin himself has extended to other characters who seek, and fail, to express their own ideas. The implied reader finds the key to the narrator's devious multivoicedness here: were the implied author simply to express his own idea directly, it too would fail. The implied author needs a mask; he needs the narrator to shoulder the burden of seemingly direct expression for him.

The narrator suddenly abdicates responsibility for his story as a whole:

Two weeks had passed since the events related in the last chapter, and the situations of the characters of our tale had changed so much that it is extremely difficult for us to continue without specific explanations. And yet we feel we must confine ourselves as much as possible to a simple account of the facts without such explanations, for a very simple reason: because we ourselves in many instances would be hard put to explain what happened. Such a preliminary statement on our part must seem exceedingly strange and obscure to the reader: how can we narrate events about which we have no clear understanding or personal opinion? To avoid putting ourselves in an even falser position, let us rather try to explain our difficulty with an example, and perhaps the kindly disposed reader will then understand what that difficulty is, especially since this example will not be a digression, but, on the contrary, an immediate and direct continuation of our story.

(475-76; 589.)

He says he has no clear understanding or personal opinion about the events of his novel. He admits that his position before the reader has become false and beseeches him to understand his predicament (475-76; 589).¹⁵ He promises a direct continuation of the story, but what follows is the reportage of a tangle of rumors. The implied reader begins to distrust the narrator.

The narrator knows no more than the rest of society about events or even about Myškin:

And now, if we were asked for an explanation—not of the nihilistic aspects of the matter, oh no!—but simply of the extent to which the proposed marriage satisfied the prince's real desires, of exactly what those desires were at the moment, of how to define the prince's state of mind at this time, and so on and so forth, we would admittedly be hard put to reply. We know only that the wedding had actually been arranged and that the prince himself had authorized Lebedev. … But beyond these very precise circumstances, a number of other facts are known to us which completely throw us off, because they directly contradict the foregoing ones. We strongly suspect, for example. …

(477; 591.)

He confesses that he would be hard put to characterize the condition of his hero's soul; he no longer even knows Myškin's real wishes.

By disclaiming knowledge of his hero and of the events and facts of the novel, the narrator illustrates his theme about the difficulty of narration, but he also places the reader in a peculiar position. It was easy for the reader to gloss over an occasional comment regarding narrative problems, but here the narrator has abruptly called the whole basis of narration into question. As the narrator's reader reads on, sympathizing with the narrator's predicament amidst the jumble of events, the implied reader begins to question the meaning of the very act of reading. What is he reading if the hitherto basically reliable narrator has disavowed both a personal opinion and a knowledge of the facts? Is he reading a collection of misrepresentations and lies? The implied author has made the narrator echo, through the formal medium of narration, Myškin's tragic inability to express his idea. But the implied reader senses that the narrator's sudden unreliability is a fictional construct, a ploy of the implied author to force his reader to work and to uncover the implied author's intent independently.

Finally, the narrator openly turns away from his hero, sharing in the general indignation at the mess Myškin has made:

In presenting all these facts and refusing to explain them, we do not in the least mean to justify our hero in the eyes of our readers. More than that, we are quite prepared to share the indignation he aroused even in his friends. Even Vera Lebedeva was for a time indignant with him, even Kolja was indignant, even Keller was indignant, until he was chosen as best man, not to speak of Lebedev himself, who actually began to intrigue against the prince, also out of an indignation which was in fact quite genuine. But of all this we shall speak later. In general we are in complete sympathy with some quite forcible and indeed psychologically profound words uttered quite plainly and unceremoniously by Evgenij Pavlovič in friendly conversation with the prince on the sixth or seventh day after the incident at Nastasja Filippovna's.

(479; 593-94.)

(At this point, two weeks have elapsed since the hysterical meeting between Aglaja and Nastasja. Because of the ensuing scandal, the Epančins have left town.) The narrator's posited reader is likewise baffled and annoyed with Myškin; he agrees with Evgenij Pavlovič Radomskij's subsequent criticisms of the prince's behavior.¹⁶ Myškin has indeed created a web of unhappiness; he has failed Aglaja; he has been overly impressionable. But the implied reader continues to respond to the implied author's manipulation of him behind the backs of the narrator and his posited reader. This more discerning reader refuses to give in to indignation at Myškin and feels instead the extreme pathos and isolation of Myškin's position. The implied reader has learned to see in a new way independently of the narrator and his reader. The implied author, then, has exploited our partial rejection of the narrator.

Of course, once again, the crucial point is that the real reader of the novel is concurrently both readers—the narrator's reader and the implied reader. He recognizes the simultaneous responses of these two readers within him at this moment of their clear divergence. That is, he simultaneously condemns and forgives Myškin.

Thus, through the mechanism of reading, the reader undergoes an experience parallel to that of the characters. Throughout, Myškin has described modern man's inevitable propensity for double thoughts. The real reader realizes, at this crucial juncture of the novel when the judgment of the hero hangs in the balance, that he too inevitably experiences these double thoughts. The method of narration has brought this notion out of the safe realm of fiction and into the reader himself. (One might add that in the remaining chapters the narrator never regains his former closeness to Myškin, although he does sympathize with him.)¹⁷

The narrator's voices in The Idiot shape the reader's response to the novel as much as do the voices of any of the characters. The kaleidoscopic mode of narration forces the reader to separate the narrator's overview of events from the events themselves; he must proceed to meaning in the novel by judiciously accepting some of the narrator's renderings while rejecting others. In all his works Dostoevskij compels his characters to accept responsibility for the consequences of their acts, acts which they have undertaken freely. By the device of his reliable, yet unreliable narrator, he has forced the real reader into a similar situation: when the real reader recognizes the coexistence of the implied reader and the narrator's reader within him, he also acknowledges the presence within himself of a heady mixture of those two Dostoevskian catchwords, responsibility and guilt. Usually the real reader's guilt consisted of no more than the tendency to slip into an easy irony and attitude of condescension, as, for example, in the moments when he shared the responses of Totskij; but at times his participation as a narrator's reader brought him to the brink of judging and condemning a suffering good man. It involved him in the same web as the characters of the novel.

Thus this admittedly cumbersome division of the reader into three unequal selves provides a way of talking about the meaning of the novel. The implied reader—who proudly responds properly to the implied author's manipulations, who learns Myškin's lessons and thus refrains from judging, forgiving instead—cannot shape the real reader's entire vision of the novel. Instead, the real reader pulls back from his collision with the narrative, from his reading, both humbled and inspired. He has recognized the simultaneous existence of good and evil within him and, for a moment, his world and Dostoevskij's “fantastic” world have become one.

Notes

1. Stanley E. Fish, “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” New Literary History, 2, no. 1 (1970), 123.

2. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), 427, quoted by Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), 30. Originally published as Der Implizite Leser (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972). This quotation, however, does not describe Frye's own conception of the reader. Frye, like Iser and Fish, has felt the need to set himself against a critical tradition. But he emphasizes the separation between the processes of criticism and of reading: “However disciplined by taste and skill, the experience of literature is, like literature itself, unable to speak. … The reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospel, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature.” (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957], 27.)

3. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), 102.

4. F. M. Dostoevskij, Pis'ma, ed. A. S. Dolinin (4 vols.; M.: GIXL, 1928-59), I, 86.

5. F. M. Dostoevskij, Polnoe sobranie xudožestvennyx proizvedenij, ed. B. V. Tomaševskij and K. I. Xalabaev (13 vols.; M.: GIXL, 1926-30), XI, 188.

6. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), 151.

7. Mixail Baxtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973), has offered a comprehensive examination of Dostoevskij's narrative technique. He has explored Dostoevskij's methods for establishing the tensions between the voices of the different characters in his novels. Baxtin has developed the now commonplace notion of Dostoevskij's “polyphonic novel” (with roots in the Socratic Dialogue and the Menippean Satire), where the voices of all the characters have equal, contrapuntal value (89-93, 108-13 et passim). This essay seeks to extend his hypothesis to include the multiple voices of the narrator: the narrative of The Idiot is in different keys that often collide with each other in wrenching counterpoint. The narrator's numerous voices serve to sustain the reader's interest as forcefully as do the characters and the sensational maneuverings of the plot. Baxtin himself has proposed that the author (Dostoevskij) and the hero are engaged in a dialectic: “The new artistic position of the author vis-à-vis the hero in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is a consequent and fully realized dialogical position. … For the author the hero is not ‘he’ and not ‘I,’ but a full-fledged ‘thou,’ that is, another full-fledged ‘I’ (‘Thou art’).” (51.) Baxtin, however, does not address himself to the narrator's own polyphony of voices except in his discussion of The Double (174-85), and here the narrator's voice is directly related to that of Goljadkin's double. It is not a separate consciousness with its own inherent contradictions as is the narrator-chronicler of Dostoevskij's later novels.

8. Numerous critics have proposed schemes for characterizing all the possible points of view or angles of vision from which an author can choose to narrate his work. See, for example, Booth, 149-69; Norman Friedman, Form and Meaning in Fiction (Athens, Ga.: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975), 134-67; Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 240-82; René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956), 212-26. Booth and Friedman have presented the most comprehensive studies of the question of point of view. Friedman offers a succinct description of the importance of point of view to every other aspect of fiction: “… the writer is torn continually between the difficulty of showing what a thing is and the ease of telling what he thinks and how he feels about it. … But literature derives its very life from this conflict—which is basic to all its forms—and the history of its aesthetic could in part be written in terms of this fundamental tension, to which the particular problem of point of view is related as part to whole.” (Friedman, 134.) Friedman goes on to provide a brief historical account of the different solutions to this conflict between showing and telling from Plato to the present. In its simplest terms the debate among novelists and critics has been over goals of objectivity versus subjectivity, of the virtues of omniscient narration (Forster) versus those of narration through a consciousness (Lubbock, James).

9. In a passage where he mentions Puškin's Belkin and “the narrator-chronicler in Dostoevsky,” Baxtin considers the reasons why and the degree to which the implied author's voice may penetrate the voice of the narrator (or narrator-chronicler). “For the author, not only the narrator's individual and typical manner of thinking, experiencing and speaking is important, but above all his manner of seeing and depicting: therein lies his immediate purpose as narrator, as surrogate for the author. … The author does not show us the narrator's word (as the objectivized word of a hero), but makes use of it from within for his own purposes, causing us to clearly [sic] feel the distance between him and this word which is foreign to him.” (158.) What makes Dostoevskij's narrator-chronicler such a fascinating figure, however, is precisely the fact that we do not always “clearly feel the distance” between him and the author.

10. This model for being a “reader” of Dostoevskij's novel derives from and shares Booth's belief that a reader must contemplate the moral aspect of any narrator's “point of view,” for point of view is always, to some degree, a matter of moral definition. It is only fair to note, however, that this stance has been criticized, and well, by Norman Friedman. Both Friedman and Booth share the notion that it is largely through point of view that the writer controls the reader's responses and impresses his vision upon the reader. But while Booth emphasizes the moral aspects of point of view and of the writer's vision, Friedman addresses the question of how the author embodies his plot in effective form (142-43). Friedman criticizes Booth for his dislike of moral ambiguity in fiction: “The writer, he says, should not leave the reader rudderless in a sea of moral ambiguities; a deadpan, noncommittal presentation of evil, for example, is both aesthetically and morally vicious. … Booth confuses … art and life rather badly: as a man, I must make up my mind about such matters … but as a writer and reader, I must be constantly experimenting and inquiring. …” (164.) But Friedman's avowedly “relativist,” “pluralist” outlook, despite its usefulness as a critical tool, deprives him of experiencing the shock of moral recognition and understanding which great fiction so often engenders in us.

11. This mixing of modes is not peculiar to Dostoevskij; it prevails in the works of most great novelists. In disagreeing with Percy Lubbock's emphasis on the point of view in a novel, E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927], 78-79, finds that for him this question resolves itself into the “power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says—a power which Mr. Lubbock admits and admires, but locates at the edge of the problem instead of at the centre. I should put it at the centre.” His example is Bleak House: “Logically, Bleak House is all to pieces, but Dickens bounces us, so that we do not mind the shiftings of the viewpoint” (79). The lack of a single consistent point of view enriches rather than diminishes the novel: the multiplicity of narrative modes in a work serves to make a novel more real. Dostoevkij takes this method of shifting viewpoint to its extreme limits, so that the reader is often rudely jolted rather than bounced.

12. F. M. Dostoevskij, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij (30 vols.; L.: INLO, 1972-), VIII, 14. My translations coincide for the most part with Henry and Olga Carlisle, trs., The Idiot (New York: The New American Library, 1969), 36. Hereafter, references to the novel will appear in the text with the English page reference following the Russian.

13. Totskij's point of view is well summed up by the narrator-chronicler's ironic first description of him: “He was a man of about fifty-five, of exquisite character and extraordinarily fine tastes. He desired to make a good marriage; he was an exceptional connoisseur of beauty.” (33-34; 59.) Yet this man of “exquisite character” and “fine tastes” has been Nastasja's seducer and has entered into a plan to “sell her” to Ganja so that he will be free to marry General Epančin's eldest daughter. After the climactic scene in which Nastasja throws Rogožin's money into the fire and rushes off with him, the “aesthetic” Totskij with a rueful smile remarks to General Epančin, “‘A rough diamond—I've said so a number of times,’ and Afansij Ivanovič sighed deeply.” (149; 196.) To find himself capable of sharing Totskij's smiles and sighs might engender in a reader a moment of self-scrutiny.

14. One might well wonder where to locate “the implied author” in this passage. After all, the introduction of literary criticism inevitably calls attention to the fact that the narrator himself is merely narrating a story. But it is the narrator, not the implied author, who resorts to the destruction of fictional illusion. The implied author, as always in this novel, continues to conceal himself. The narrator may prepare to abdicate responsibility; the implied author engineers this abdication to serve his own more serious purposes.

15. Joseph Frank, “A Reading of The Idiot,” Southern Review, 5 (1969), 328, discovers a similar pivotal change in the narrator at this point in the novel. He finds here “a significant shift in narrative point of view” which is “closely correlated with the unprecedented predicament arising from Myshkin's remarkable character.” (328.) V. A. Tunimanov, “Rasskazčik v Besax Dostoevskogo,” in Issledovanija po poètike i stilistike, ed. V. V. Vinogradov (L.: INLO, 1972), 107, has also described the narrator's increasing distance from the hero. He notes the growth of uncertainty in the voice of “the author-narrator.” Tunimanov remarks how the narrator sinks into a swamp of improbable rumors and leaves “the reader to discover the true verdict for himself” (107). Although Tunimanov's article is for the most part a study of the narrator in The Possessed, he offers an excellent analysis of the effect on the reader of the narrator's style in The Idiot (106-12).

16. Tunimanov, 109, finds that Evgenij Pavlovič has reached the highest “wordly” interpretation of the events.

17. The narrator reports that the prince seemed to look upon his approaching wedding with Nastasja as a formality; “he valued his own fate too cheaply” (490; 607). A sense that the narrator is telling things after the fact prevails. He frequently uses phrases like “these last days” and “people declared afterward.” He gives his portrayal of the wedding day in the form of what he has distilled from the accounts of other people—as though he himself had not been present: “The whole following anecdote about this wedding has been told by people who were present, and, it seems, it's correct” (491; 609). The last chapter before the conclusion is a narrative tour de force in its own right; it is a tersely dramatic rendition of the final meeting between Rogožin and Myškin and an account of their vigil beside Nastasja Filippovna's corpse. Here the narrator returns briefly to his sympathetic and straightforward voice for portraying his hero. He presents this final scene in his role of omniscient narrator-observer. Only at the very end does he interject his own voice to draw the reader out of the action and into the more manageable realms of a “concluding chapter.” He remarks that if Schneider himself had come from Switzerland he would certainly find his former patient to be “an idiot!” Finally, in the conclusion, the narrator carefully distances both himself and the reader from the novel. All the characters diminish in stature. Evgenij Pavlovič and Vera Lebedeva have entered upon a romance. They and Lizaveta Prokof'evna resemble the exhausted, unremarkable, but good men left to carry on at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies.