Upon reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, I took a few days to digest my thoughts before scribbling them out haphazardly, after which, I decided to engage with other opinions to deepen my understanding and analysis before finally sitting down to write this exploration. Yet, I can’t help but be struck by the fact that analyses—at least, in English—of the story appear often to miss the mark; there seems to be a focus on psychoanalytical readings, sentimentality without depth, and Freudian symbolism. That isn’t to say that there isn’t something of merit within these interpretations, nor that the analyses are fundamentally flawed; rather, it feels more like there is something missing from them: possibly a sense of nuance, context, an ability to look outside one’s native or contemporary framework? Perhaps. It would be simplest, I suppose, to say I find many points whereon I have a different perspective.
Before I continue, I think it important to lay some groundwork. To begin, I’d like to examine the title of the novel: The Idiot, or Идиот in its native Russian. The word has its roots in the Greek idiotes which means something akin to a private person, one who withdraws from public life and doesn’t participate in civic affairs, which already provides quite a different frame than the commonly understood meaning: a fool. Arguably, this is a truer description of Myshkin as someone inherently liberated from social games.
Most importantly, Dostoyevsky at this point in his life had turned to Orthodox Christianity and grown his faith to central importance in his worldview. It would do Dostoyevsky’s narrative and complex character development a disservice to reduce it to mere psychological diagnosis in lieu of receiving it with its inherent spiritual and moral architecture—not least the concept in Orthodox Christianity that sin is fundamentally a choice, and not merely a condition. As tempting as it is, we can’t apply modern life philosophy retrospectively without changing the intention and bones of the work entirely. In the writings of Dostoyevsky, characters are more than their circumstances, more than their behaviour divorced from their mind, spirit, or character; they are real people, and in many ways, these characters write the story themselves. No single character is merely a mouthpiece, and no voice overwhelms the others, but instead dialogues with the others to expose the mechanics of Dostoyevsky’s experience.
Around him at this time, as noted across his Diary of a Writer, was growing atheism and Nihilism, and Dostoyevsky found himself believing the Petersburg intelligentsia—his contemporaries and peers—to be spiritually hollowed by Western liberal thought. He saw them as merely performing progressive values, while in reality being, in essence, incapable of genuine love and sacrifice. Within him, an aversion was growing to the romanticisation of suffering (wherein his coevals would write poetically of illness, peasant poverty, and idealised despair), which was fundamentally, to him, dishonesty and cowardice among his class (and something he appeared to challenge directly through The Idiot’s character Ippolit). They were aestheticising what they would never endure.
In a letter to his niece in 1868, Dostoyevsky had explicitly written to her that his goal with The Idiot was to portray a “positively beautiful person,” a Gospel man, so to speak; someone who represents a goodness of which the world will not accommodate, though he immediately reflected that the task would be near-impossible as “there is only one positively beautiful person—Christ”. Impossible as it may be, Dostoyevsky conceived of Prince Myshkin, a character inarguably pure and innocent of heart beyond what we expect from the average person. Myshkin is childlike in naïveté, always seeking the best in others and applying compassion to each person and situation he encounters. He doesn’t judge, but chooses to see good intentions even when others treat him poorly, inwardly scolding himself for his fleeting moments of doubt, and choosing the most charitable course of action even when he is aware of being deceived. And yet, in all his childlike innocence and purity, Myshkin is a sharp intuitive of character, seeing straight to the person beneath the veneer. This intuition is a kind of intelligence that others in the story lack. What makes Myshkin so good-natured, however, is unfortunately also what prevents there being a place for him among the society of intelligentsia and aristocracy of Petersburg. Dostoyevsky further wrote in the aforementioned letter, that “among the beautiful figures in Christian literature, Don Quixote stands as the most complete. But he is beautiful solely because he is at the same time ridiculous.” The upper echelons think first of themselves, receiving gladly Myshkin’s compassion, mercy, love, and charity, though rarely, if ever, reflecting it back, but they are quick to paint him as a child and an idiot incapable of higher thought or social mobility.
One of the core reasons for considering Prince Myshkin an idiot was his epilepsy, though what we find in the story is that he has his most spiritual clarity right before his seizure. Dostoyevsky, an epileptic himself, claimed that the moments before an epileptic fit were his most enlightening, writing to Doctor Yanovsky that he experienced “complete harmony in himself and in the world.” The writer expressed that the sense of completeness he experienced from these pre-seizure moments were worth the suffering that followed. It would be dishonest and rather reductionist to read the character’s epilepsy through a purely psychological or medical lens knowing this.
Nastasya, it can be said, mirrors the prince in many regards. She, too, is not cut out for the world into which she was thrust, and ultimately, it broke her. Like Myshkin, she was an orphan taken in by a man with resources and a desire to provide a better life for such a pitiable creature. Totsky provided Nastasya with all he thought she could ever want materially, while neglecting her emotionally for much of her residence with him; he was a product himself of vanity and pride, bestowing staged charity without the heart behind it. Myshkin, instead, was given what he needed: education, healthcare, support, a loving parental figure whom he could respect and trust. Nastasya was prized for her beauty and intelligence, while Myshkin was appreciated by his mentor for simply being, without expectation. Myshkin’s past kept him outside the framework that cultivates pride and shame, while Nastasya was raised the centre thereof. Perhaps that is the underlying commentary: normalising a social behaviour perpetuates said behaviour, which can be used as a powerful shield for society, or a weapon against it. Against culture, against goodness. The behaviour wherein Nastasya was grown was one that oxymoronically cultivated self-focus without self-awareness, and the young woman found herself fighting against this formation of her core, this prison of expectation, yet inevitably building her entire personality around it.
In this composition, I repeatedly use the word “pride”, neglecting the Orthodox theological framing of much of Dostoyevsky’s work. It would be apter to say specifically gordost, a destructive spiritual force rather than a mere personality trait. After all, the modern understanding of “pride” can at times construe it as something ostensively good, akin to dignity or self-respect. Gordost, though, is an inward turning towards the self and away from God and others. Nastasya’s gordost is seen in her performance of self-humiliation, which itself is a form of spiritual pride in Orthodox moral philosophy. True humility doesn’t seek an audience, and Nastasya’s rendition of exaggerated self-abasement and loud proclamations of unworthiness belie a motive to be seen as humble, merely a form of covert vainglory. Gordost is more than merely “pride” though; it encompasses the refusal of dependence, the insistence on self-sufficiency, an intense self-obsession, placing the self in the centre of everything. It’s not just a symptom to be treated, not merely a behaviour or attitude, but a fundamental orientation of the spirit towards the self. And so, the counterintuitive point to keep in mind is that, theologically, self-loathing is also an expression of gordost as it places the self, obsessively, at the centre of all. A person consumed by their self-loathing is still, in essence, consumed by themselves. Humility, the antidote to gordost, therefore, is neither self-deprecation nor self-loathing, but freedom from preoccupation with the self entirely. After all, someone oriented towards God and others, plainly, doesn’t spend time measuring themselves. This humility is embodied in the character of Myshkin, a trait that disarms and disorients those he encounters. Nastasya, meanwhile, enacts vociferous self-humiliation, while simultaneously refusing to accept love on any but her own terms.
Ippolit mirrors Nastasya in this interesting way, as both characters demand an audience for their suffering, yet Ippolit attempts to frame his own suffering as philosophical and noble. This romanticisation of suffering is something Dostoyevsky appears to challenge more directly through Ippolit than any other character, a young man who theatrically performs his dying with self-conscious histrionics and expects there to be an audience for it. What’s compelling is that, despite his dying, he is difficult to sympathise with, and that itself is part of the point—there is no romanticism in death, no beauty in pain, and death does not necessarily change the character of a person. Suffering is not something to be viewed though rose-tinted lenses.
Returning to Nastasya, she, like Myshkin, is pitiable. She is broken and unable to receive love, but it is her gordost that prevents her from doing so. She allows her insecurity and self-loathing to become more than covert grandiosity, but to abuse the affection of two men who—in their own separate ways—love her unconditionally. Yet, she was never given the opportunity or guidance to find another framework for participating in the world. She was forced into a box already shaped for her, one wherein she never fit, and inevitably she rebelled. It is almost as though Nastasya wants to be loved but doesn’t know how, and the most tragic element of that story is that she never develops the awareness of the fact she was her only obstacle to real love. We often see this in the modern world, when a person lives for so long under great pressure and tremendous stress, they become unable to function in peace.
But like all people, Nastasya was responsible for herself when she had grown. Dostoyevsky himself writes in his Diary of a Writer, “By making a person dependent on every flaw in the social order, the teaching of ‘environment’ reduces a person to complete impersonhood, to complete liberation from all personal moral duty, from all independence—and leads to the most vile slavery imaginable.” She could have chosen to change, yet didn’t. Her suffering does not remove her agency and responsibility. It is true she is a victim of her circumstances and culture, but victimhood does not exonerate in totality. In every action, she decided herself and made a point thereof. She threatened to run away and give up her fortune, to become a poor dishwasher, which she claimed she would be happy to do. Instead, she flitted erratically between dependence on two men with both means and status, never claiming the independence she so sought, afraid of social suicide, preferring to be mad than an idiot and unable to breathe without attention. (Of course, to be fair, it was not as simple as emancipating oneself entirely for women of her era.) Ultimately in life, everyone is responsible, in spite of being broken. That’s not to undercut the formative power of Totsky and his abuse of her. In actuality, this very fact reinforces the point that we are all responsible, for he never took true responsibility for the girl or her formative years beyond what would bolster his self-image. Individuals have moral self-sovereignty, but the corruption of a soul during its most vulnerable years creates damage that is much harder to overcome than that sustained in adulthood. While it doesn’t diminish Nastasya’s responsibility for herself, it helps us to understand why her spiritual fight may have felt much harder than Myshkin’s.
Being a pitiable character, none has more compassion for Nastasya than Prince Myshkin, and to him—to the Christian—compassion is a form of love, which is something the other characters find difficult to comprehend. It is different from Rogozhin’s obsessive love, which is merely a passion to possess, and different too to Aglaya’s selfish love, which is based on a desire to rebel for the sake of autonomy. Aglaya loves the idea of Myshkin, exactly the kind of person that goes against everything her parents initially wanted for her. She wants what she can’t have and disposes what she’s given. Nothing solidifies her characterisation stronger than her ending: eloping with a Polish knight that her parents resented. Only later, she discovered his wealth to be fabricated and his debts considerable.
Myshkin loved Nastasya, but he loved her like a child, like a broken human, feeling sadness for her pain, instead of condemning her for her sin. In this lies an important conflict: Myshkin understands he loves Nastasya with pity and compassion, while he ostensibly loves Aglaya romantically. This again brings up the theology of Orthodox Christianity, wherein there is a distinction between agape (that is, unconditional and self-emptying love) and eros (desire, implying want and therefore lack). Myshkin’s love for Nastasya is agape, selfless, self-emptying, driven by empathy and compassion, while his love for Aglaya could be said to be closer to eros. The world from which Aglaya comes can’t understand the distinction—a world in which love is a commodity to be bought and sold, earned and lost; a world in which love has terms and conditions. So it would be unfair to say, as I have seen in places, that Myshkin was unable to choose between the women; there was no choice for him in the first place. It is not simply that Myshkin freezes in Nastasya’s living room with Aglaya; he is certain Aglaya will understand if he can just explain to her. He chose compassion to the broken and unhappy soul, but Aglaya, focused on herself, flees without giving him a chance. Aglaya’s feelings are understandable (they’re very human in many regards), but she never stops to understand the prince and who he is, and so fails to remember that he has never been a person who clearly understands emotional games or implications. He is sincere in every action and word. Instead, the girl becomes self-indulgent in her feelings of jealousy and envy, in her indignation, and she becomes lost in her own games that she was ever playing. Agape, in the prideful world, is most often mistaken as weakness, insult, or typically in Myshkin’s case, stupidity.
And it is not that Myshkin can’t be faulted: his childlike interpretation of the world and ability to see only the good in others has led him to make decisions which hurt others and perhaps had less empathy than he intended—his strange decision to marry Nastasya out of pity, believing his current fiancée will certainly understand, is one such decision whereon we can question his judgment. But while those around him condemned him an idiot and a child when he pleased them, they didn’t extend this merciful judgement when he displeased them. Aglaya couldn’t—or wouldn’t—reconcile her understanding of love to Myshkin’s understanding. To Aglaya, love is about reciprocity and being chosen over another, and Myshkin’s simple compassion for Nastasya is a betrayal in the lowest form. But as aforementioned, to Myshkin, love is unconditional, compassionate, it extends to all people of all circumstances, and withholding love from a fractured soul wouldn’t be love at all. Meanwhile, Aglaya can represent here the people in the story who all wished for unconditional love, yet couldn’t provide it in turn.
As a representation of goodness, Myshkin should theoretically be a character to emulate. Yet, during the prince’s Petersburg life, no single character attempts this because it was socially costly to do so. Despite praising the prince to his face, speculating he was more intelligent than for what others gave him credit, these same people were afraid of the social implications of being like him. Dostoyevsky himself rejected Nihilism, and believed that goodness was possible and that Christ was living proof thereof, but this did not curtail his ruthless honesty about how it is vanity, pride, and social cowardice which drives humans to choose to destroy, or at least turn a blind eye to, goodness rather than emulating it. And so the ending of the story is not a defeat of goodness, but an indictment of refusing it. Goodness is not inevitably, in The Idiot, triumphed over by evil, and holiness is not crushed underfoot of self-centredness, rather the text explored our choice to avoid it, our tendency to make decisions that lead to the destruction of good, simply because—unconsciously or not—we see goodness as socially embarrassing, economically inconvenient, and possibly even emotionally petrifying. (In my writing on moral neutrality I explore the idea that it’s not enough to simply not be evil.)
Myshkin’s outcome is neither tragic defeat nor merciful release—though I know of both sides being argued. Instead, Myshkin is a Christ-like figure, not defeated by the world, by the material, by the selfish, but instead unable to be yet received. This is further illustrated through dialogues involving the Holbein painting of Christ being removed from the cross. He is depicted as realistically dead, without luminosity or impressions of transcendence, but as a body without life, and Dostoyevsky uses this both through Rogozhin and Ippolit to challenge one of the hardest questions of his own faith: if this is the reality of death, how can anyone believe in the Resurrection? In itself, we can find a question of hope versus despair, alluded to in the story’s close. Yet, in the same house, Rogozhin, a man who owns a painting that removes transcendence from Christ’s death, that forcefully questions a core tenet of his wavering faith, exchanges his cross, his burden, with Myshkin, showing us that even those who can’t answer the question are not left without grace.
The book’s conclusion breaks the romanticism popular in literature at the time, and instead gives us the most realistic ending, not the most idealistic or consoling one. We as readers are forced to sit in discomfort and contemplation, instead of escaping with a happy ending, a satisfying resolution, or closure. It is an open wound, begging to be investigated. Yet, we see Evgeny, a character consistently cynical, sarcastic, distant, and self-focused, turn to befriend Myshkin after his intellectual regression. This simple act itself, being by his side and remaining with him, functions as a subtle signal of hope amongst the darkness. It shows us that proximity to goodness leaves traces on even the most hardened heart, and that through this proximity, we can learn to be good. But, this shouldn’t take irreversible destruction for us to realise.
In this vein, Dostoyevsky has inadvertently handed us a mirror. But he is not saying, “behold: goodness is impossible,” through Myshkin’s finale. Instead, he is holding it to us and saying, “behold your refusal to even attempt it.” Perhaps that is ascribing more authorial assertion than is fair, as Dostoyevsky’s talent lies in exploration rather than instruction. The mirror may not have been deliberately designed by Dostoyevsky’s intention, but fortuitously created through the nature of humanity. And this apparent mirror implicates us: if we see deeply enough, into the characters and into ourselves, we find people who may choose Aglaya’s wounded pride, Gavrila’s social climbing, Ippolit’s self-aggrandising pity, Nastasya’s phobia of inexistence without an audience, or perhaps Evgeny’s detached sarcasm. We relate precisely not to the hero of our piece because living as Myshkin is vulnerable. It’s humiliating, terrifying. And so, the mirror does not intend to condemn us, but prompt our confession. Confession itself in Orthodox Theology is considered a reorientation towards God and others from the self, and encourages moral responsibility. It further illustrates that the sorrow of The Idiot does not appertain to Myshkin himself, but to the world that can’t accept him.