The Idiot

Dostoevsky described Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin as a 'positively beautiful man' and he succeeds in making this protagonist innocent and beautiful without being too simple or boring. He is quite a contrast to Raskolnikov, but reminded me of Alyosha Karamazov in some ways. But he's less of a holy fool and more of an idiot, which is the word constantly used to bring down Prince Myshkin, who seems to be undeserving of the harsh title. Sure he's awkward and epileptic, but he's quite articulate and has lots on his mind (ie. his hilarious anti-Catholic rant). Sadly, he is reduced to idiocy at the end of the novel after the shitshow involving Nastasya Filippovna, femme fatale extraordinaire. She brings down Rogozhin and the Prince- so is show more she crazy or just in love with her fallen woman stance? The line between sanity and craziness is quite blurry in this novel, as is the line between intelligence and idiocy. We've got both extremes in us.

As usual with Dostoevsky, this had an exciting plot and was filled with memorable characters ie. pathetic Lebedev, consumptive Ippolit, and compulsive liar General Ivolgin. I loved the Nastasya/Aglaya foil and the jealousy between them was well depicted. It's always interesting when Dostoevsky draws on his own experiences- his epilepsy and his near execution- as he discusses both within the novel. There's lots of religion too, but lots of atheism and disbelief. Some good thoughts on religion vs. rationality (spirituality doesn't fit in with reason) and on how Russian passion causes such extreme conviction in religious belief or disbelief. It's amazing how he weaves these heavy and serious subjects through the novel but still makes it so damn enjoyable to read! show less

A sense of foreboding dominates this lengthy novel from the outset, yet like the best of mysteries, I suffered from misdirection throughout and assumed the main character was doomed until I reached the final pages. By his innocence and sincerity, he had provoked reactions that included envy and unreasoning hatred. I was sure he would be killed in the end; I was only unsure who would wield the knife or pistol; there were many possible candidates.
But no, Prince Myshkin (the “idiot” of the title) does not lose his life, simply his mind after spending the night shut in a room with the corpse of his runaway bride, sharing a sofa with the woman’s killer.
As many have pointed out, if one defines the novel genre based on the long tradition show more perfected in Britain and France, there is much wrong with many of the great Russian novels, including this one. It’s a fact the author slyly concedes when he has the prince discover the last book his missing bride was reading, Madame Bovary, and pocket it on his way out the door.
Earlier on, another book had served as a sign. From the opening pages, it’s clear that the prince is a Christ figure (the drunken scene as twelve guests greet the prince on his birthday—-a parody of the Last Supper—reinforced my conviction we were headed to Golgotha). But in Part Two, Chapter One, he writes a letter to one of the two women he loves, Aglaia Ivanovna. She doesn’t want to misplace the letter, so she puts it where she files anything important: her copy of Don Quixote. Aha, I said to myself, in addition to being the doomed innocent lamb, Prince Myshkin is also a knight errant. This also changed my understanding of Nastasya Filippovna, the other woman he loved. Until then, I had taken her as a Mary Magdalene, but from then on, she was also Dulcinea.
To say that the prince loved these two women puts it too simply, though the prince himself says he does. Especially toward the darkly beautiful Nastasya, love mingles with pity, fear, and hatred. She reciprocates this volatile mix of feelings, similar to what Aglaia feels toward the prince.
But love and its conventional outcome, marriage, seem to be things Prince Myshkin allows to happen to him (or not) rather than anything he initiates or is capable of consummating. In fact, not only in his relation to these two women but toward the vast cast of “strange and incredible characters” (as the narrator refers to them) that populate the book, he is open to all. The prince is a passive protagonist (he “acts” only in the sense a catalyst does); he seems incapable of distinguishing friend from foe. I have to qualify that: He seems aware throughout the book that Rogozhin is his nemesis, yet extends to him the same non-judgmental friendliness with which he encounters everyone.
Though the prince doesn’t judge, he nevertheless displays remarkable insight into those he meets, telling them guilelessly what he sees (this straightforwardness on his part is perhaps why, for all his understanding, he can’t recognize guile in others).
The book contains repeated references to “the woman question.” I suspect this was a topic in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, although I don’t know. Yet I was ambivalent about Dostoyevsky’s treatment of the key female characters. Laudably, the author seems to share the prince’s refusal to join in the general condemnation of Nastasya as a shameful woman but views her as the victim of sexual abuse instead. Yet the prince’s alacrity to conclude she is crazy hardly seems more progressive—-particularly since her counterpart, Aglaia, with her violent mood swings and irrational behavior, seems another exemplar of an alien species that confounds the author.
As with any long Russian masterpiece, keeping the characters straight is challenging. Not only are there so many, but they’re referred to interchangeably by their family surname, by given name plus patronymic, and by familiar name. For the most part, I was able to keep them apart. Still, in one scene, two families, the Eplanchins and the Igolvins, are present in full, along with assorted other characters, including a new suitor for Aglaia’s hand, Yevgeny Pavlovich. He is newly introduced into the story, and I failed to take much note of him and thought his interjections were those of General Igolvin. I had to go back over the scene again when I realized my error. It happened again in a crucial scene toward the end when Aglaia drags the prince to confront Nastasya and Rogozhin. Though only four are present, there is so much use of pronouns rather than names that I got lost.
Despite these difficulties, I enjoyed the book. Part of the pleasure was the story itself. Much of the text is dialogue, and much of what is not seems like extended stage directions; there is little interiority in the characters. I imagined what a great six-hour miniseries this would make, with nothing cut. Had I been able to film it in the 1930s, I’d have loved to cast Garbo (with dyed hair) as Nastasya and Jean Harlow (playing against type) as Aglaia. For the prince, perhaps Peter Lorre; once again, against type.
Beyond the plot, I also enjoyed technical aspects. Along with the symbolic references to key works in the novel tradition, there are several cases of twinning. Among them are the poor girl Marie, whom the prince befriended during his sanatorium stay in Switzerland, as a counterpart to Nastasya, and Ferdyshtenko, who claims for himself Prince Myshkin’s virtue of speaking the truth but does so with a vindictiveness foreign to the prince. And at times, the narrator intrudes, such as in his reflection on the employment of outrageous characters in novels rather than the ordinary people of daily life, or (also in Part 4), when he confesses to being a less than omniscient narrator.
I read the widely-available Constance Garnett translation. Apart from getting off to an inauspicious start, which due to an unclear antecedent seems to say the train is thawing—an error every other translation I checked avoided—it was readable. show less

An amazing love quadrilateral, (or really a decagon, if one considers all the suitors). Wonderfully, developed characters, mostly of the unsavory sort, and several of which are intently focused on self destruction. The characters take great pains to develop one another! The narrative is sometimes Seinfeld-esque and often full of wild diversions and the expected but fascinating discourses on religion, life and death. Make sure you have a playbill next to you. These Russian names are tough.

It seems I have a yearly Dostoevsky quota now. The last three years I've ended with one of his "great" novels - next year it will be Demons, I guess. It's a shame that that book will be the last of his "major works" as I've seen them defined, because from each of the previous I feel like I've learned something essential about what it is to be alive. In contrast to the reputation that surrounds Russian literature as being dry or difficult (something I've never found to be true, and is a stereotype more based on the imposing length of Russian classics than anything actually written in the books) I've always found reading Dostoevsky to be an almost breathless experience. We swerve from one dramatic scene to another, the reality of his show more novels often reaching a state of near hysteria, before breaking for a brief repose before the next storm comes in. What's striking about this drama is that it is almost never fixated on the points you would imagine if you simply read the plot in abstract. Murders, attacks, and feverish escapes are all left off screen - instead we are treated to long conversations and monologues of characters pushed to the edge. The classic hallmark of a Dostoevsky character, despite their vast differences in age, class, temperament, etc. is their sensitivity. These people feel everything, the most minor incident can sink into their soul and cause the most beautiful rapture, or the darkest foreboding, or the deepest humiliation. The last feeling in particular permeates so much of his work, a kind of cosmic embarrassment - when one lives life with emotional abandon as so many of his characters do, one is constantly skirting the edge of disaster, and at a certain point it becomes impossible to avoid the worst, even if one sees it coming from miles away. His heroes, whether it be Prince Myshkin here, or Dimitri Karamazov, or Raskolnikov, all repeatedly suffer the most shameful humiliations - what makes them outrageous, tragic, and interesting, is their stubborn, incredible will power to carry on.

It seems that The Idiot revolves around how we interpret the character of Prince Myshkin. While Dostoevsky's ruffians and ne'er-do-wells are more famous, his novels also often feature this kind of character, one that could be described as too good for this world. I'm thinking of Sonya in Crime and Punishment or Alyosha in Karamazov. Before anyone gets the impression that these characters are being held up by Dostoevsky as a kind of ideal to be emulated, it's important to remember that these figures also suffer the consequences of their "goodness", which might just be another word for naivety, or as this book so explicitly puts it here, idiocy. Of course you can't spend much time poking around in the world of Russian literature without coming across the phrase "holy fool", a concept our learned editors tell us is deeply embedded in Russian culture, the idea being that certain folks are so sensitive to the power of God that it actually fucks up their brain a bit. It's telling that Myshkin is never described as such in this book, whether that's because his particular situation doesn't suit the word, or if the people around him are too blind to see him that way, I'm not fit to determine. Truly great works of art always defy easy interpretation, and I don't think there is one answer to this question. Reading about Dostoevsky The Man and what he believed can feel like a kind of red herring - what are we to make of the fact that Myshkin spouts many of the beliefs that Dostoevsky counted as his own in private correspondence (pan-Slavism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Westernism) in a fit of disturbing mania? I think it's clear that we aren't meant to take what Myshkin says here as an example of well-reasoned, thoughtful argument. The reason Myshkin inspires both passionate devotion and disgust, sometimes in the same sentence, from the people around him is that we must admit the man has some kind of sacred aura around him, and yet he is easily fooled and taken advantage of. It is this same "idiocy" which makes the events leading up to the end of the book possible. We can't say that the crime that closes the book is Myshkin's fault per say, but I think it's clear that there are several stages in the book where his "goodness" actually enables the deviancy of others, and does nothing to prevent what is clearly making for a combustible situation. It's also clear that his open-heartedness brought pain to many people, where if he had just acted like a normal, self-interested person, the suffering almost certainly would have been more contained.

Here lies the heart of The Idiot's message: it's much easier to be bad than to be good. The paths towards selfishness, lust, greed are multitude - the path towards goodness is rare and vague, if it even exists at all. I think the power in the novel comes not from Dostoevsky pushing any kind of moral program or belief system; rather it stems from the depiction of the bravery and outright ignorance of reality it will take to pursue what is good, even if failure and isolation are almost certain. The failed attempt at a life of original goodness is still worth pursuing, in spite of the constant pull of base mediocrity that surrounds us at all times. show less

مدتی پیش بعد از فارغ شدن از مشکلات تصمیم گرفتم یک رمان بخونم و «جنایات و مکافات» رو انتخاب کردم اما یکی از دوستام داشت ابله رو می‌خوند و با تهدید و ترعیب من رو واداشت که ابله رو بخونم!

داستان درباره شخصی ساده‌دل و پاک‌نهاد به نام شاهزاده میشکین است که پس از معالجه امراض روانی و صرع از سوئیس به روسیه میاد و در قدم اول عاشق دختری بدنام به اسم ناستازی می‌شه. شاهزاده معصومی که میاد و کثافت‌های جامعه‌ش رو می‌بینه show more و هیچوقت نمی‌تونه خودش رو با اون وفق بده و در آخر از خودکشی صحبت می‌کنه و دستِ آخر به همون دیوونگی پناه می‌بره. نقطه‌قوت رمان به جرأت شخصیت‌پردازی اونه! شاهزاده‌ی ابله گاهی اونقدر آگاه و به هوش می‌شد که در موعد مقرر، ابله بودن اون کاملاً من رو آزار می‌داد و چقدر باورپذیر ابله بودن و آگاه بودن اون کنار هم جمع شده بود و تیشه‌ای به داستان نمی‌زد. شخصیت شاهزاده در درجه‌ی اول خیلی عجیب بود. شخصیتی که در عین قهرمان کلاسیک بودن گاهی به ضدقهرمان هم نزدیک می‌شد. شخصیتی که هر وقت در جمع قرار می‌گرفت تب می‌کرد و مریضی به سراغش می‌اومد و تحمل آدم‌ها رو نداشت. شخصیت جذاب دیگه ناستازی بود. ناستازی شخصیتی با بلاتکلیفی‌های روانی مخصوص به خودش... شخصیتی که بد نیست و بدنامه! شخصیتی که در عین حال که دوستش داری ازش متنفر هم هستی. شخصیت جذاب دیگه‌ای که برای من وجود داشت پاولیچف بود با اینکه هیچگاه به صورت مستقیم در داستان حضور نداشت و تنها در خاطرات بهش اشاره می‌شد. شخصیتی که تو ذهن شاهزاده قدرتمند و پاک بود و هربار با قسمتی از زندگیش روبه‌رو می‌شد که اون رو به تردید می‌نداخت و یا زوایای پنهان زندگیش رو به اون نشون می‌داد.
من با رمان‌های زیادی ارتباط برقرار کردم اما تنها دو رمان بود که تونستم همزادپنداری خیلی نزدیکی با شخصیت داشته باشم اولین رمان «زوربای یونانی» بود که من خیلی شخصیت خودم رو نزدیک به اربابِ زوربا می‌دونستم و این‌بار شاهزاده خیلی من رو تحت‌تأثیر قرار داد.
تعلیق‌ها نیز به نسبت مناسب و قدرتمند بود. شخصیت آگلائه و عشقی که بین شاهزاده و او وجود داره خودش کمک به تعلیق می‌کنه. اما گاهی نوع روایت فضا از رئالیسم فاصله می‌گرفت و به رمانتیک نزدیک‌تر می‌شد. فضاسازی هم کمتر در خدمت داستان بود و بیشتر بستری برای رخ دادن داستان در اون بود. تنها جایی که خیلی خوب توصیف شده بود و در خدمت داستان بود آپارتمان روگوژین بود. با این اوصاف بسیار بسیار بسیار از خوندن این رمان لذت بردم و باهاش حال کردم. show less

Like its eponymous character, the novel is a fitful jumble of thoughts and actions, inhabited mainly by a rotation of secondary characters who represent the ideals and moral degradation of nineteenth-century Russia. The multiple lust/pity/greed love stories are background to the main philosophising of what it means - and is it possible -to be a w/holy good man and the perversity of sacrificial-love and death.

The characterisations were at times profound - a thoroughly good man is a paradox as demonstrated by the Prince, Aglaya and Nastasya -, and at times confusing - when did Nastasya go from manipulative to outright crazy or Rogozhin from stupidly passionate to murderous? The best were the ones the author described in the book, page 484 show more in my Ignat Avsey, Alma Evergreens version, as the everyday people with the two classes of intelligence and the superficial upper class attendees at soiree given in the Prince's honour by the Yepanchins.

The bulk of the action often occurs off-page - such as the six months between the first and second parts - , recapped, dissected, discussed and misunderstood by either authorial interruptions or character recounts, rendering it an occasionally confusing read but very suitable for a play adaptation. The meandering plot, lacking the tighter weave of a fiction, is tedious with bursts of liveliness and melodrama in unexpected scenes, culminating in a satisfyingly and inevitably tragic ending.

Reading the novel was akin to being in an art gallery with an overgrown maze layout: enjoyable if you do not have a destination in mind - and you would benefit from having another go at it afterwards - but you probably want to check out other more trimmed and polished Dostoevsky galleries first.

Aside: I wonder if "idiot" means something different in Russian, like how honest (老實) in Mandarin can mean dumb. show less

I'd like to suggest that reading choice, at all ages, resembles a vortex. One's favourite books and authors swirl round, and are re-read (I've always been a great re-reader). New books are sucked in to join the vortex, and some of the favourites gradually sink down, just occasionally bobbing back up, possibly to be re-read for the sake of nostalgia. The core of the reading remains books I've enjoyed, or authors I've enjoyed, or books recommended as being not dissimilar to those I've enjoyed, but actual content of the core changes over time, as new interests or authors join in the swirl, often inspired by wanting to read more widely on topics raised by the old favourites. For me that would be Shakespeare. I re-read The Idiot for the show more first time recently and formed a new and rather confused opinion of the book and the Prince. The tremendous passages and themes - mortality, redemption - had a much greater impact on me this time around. At the same time, the more hysterically written sections had a greater impact too. My brain started to develop a tic from all the exclamation marks and superfluous ellipses and melodramatic plot twists. The big surprise came with the dénouement. After having first read it, I'd been catching up on my Shakespeare. When I got to the grand finale of "The Idiot" this time, I realised: 'It's bloody Othello.' The end of Othello is always heart-searing. It makes my eyes fill every time. It is truly dramatic. By comparison, the end of "The Idiot" now seems hysterically melodramatic and has no emotional effect on me at all. Unless wanting to take Prince Myshkin by the shoulders to give him a damned good shaking counts as emotional effect.

All to the good, of course. Every time we re-read one book, we're newly informed by the hundreds of other books we've read in the meantime. So I already look forward to re-rereading "The Idiot" to see what I make of it next time. show less