The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Over the door to the next room hung a painting rather strange in form, around fix feet wide and no more than ten inches high. It portrayed the Savior just taken down from the cross. The prince glanced fleetingly at it, as if recalling something, not dropping, however, waiting to fo on through the door. He felt very oppressed and wanted to be out of this house quickly. But Rogozhin suddenly stopped in front of the painting.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Lev Nikolaich; do you believe in God or not?”

“How strangely you ask and stare!” the prince observed involuntarily.

“But I like looking at that painting,” Rogozhin muttered after a silence, as if again forgetting his question.

“At that painting!” the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. “At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!”

“Lose it he does,” Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly.

The Idiot opens on a train, where the protagonist, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man fresh from a years-long treatment of his epilepsy in Switzerland, is returning to Russia to seek family and to restart his life. He is, in Dostoevsky’s words, “a perfect man”, a man uniquely unsuited for life in modern Russia. His fellow passengers include the mercurial and chaotic Parfyon Rogozhin, who has just come into possession of a large fortune, Lukyan Lebedev, a gossipy know-it-all clerk. In conversation with the pair, Myshkin is directed to the household he has come to visit, that of his distant relatives the Epanchins. He also learns of Nastasya Fillipovna, who was orphaned as a child and is now a kept (and “fallen”) woman, with whom Rogozhin is obsessed.

Upon arrival at the house, a long conversation ensues, typical of Dostoevsky, during which most of the additional principles of the novel--disgraced General Ivolgin, his passionate son Gavrily,the Epanchin daughters, including the beautiful Aglaya--appear. By the time the gathering ends, all the crucial conflicts of the novel have been established, and Rogozhin has offered to, well, buy Nastasya Fillipovna from her benefactor, and Myshkin has come, surprisingly and suddenly, into a large inheritance which he tries to use to block Rogozhin from further disgracing Nastasya, which the Prince, in his guileless way, has already fallen deeply in love with. But, in one of the most electrifying scenes in the whole book, Nastasya moves to accept, then suddenly rejects, the Prince’s selfless offer and instead leaves with Rogozhin.

There are MAJOR SPOILERS in the following paragraph.

Like most of the big Russian novels, the ensuing book defines simple description. There’s ample intrigue interspersed with long conversations that are sometimes fascinating and moving, as when the Prince tells about a mentally ill outcast he befriended in Sweden, or his story of trying to understand the feelings of a man who is only moments from being executed, and dull or confusing, as in the two or three conversations where everyone seems to be in hysterics for no clear reason. Which is not really a downside--part of the buy-in with Dostoevsky is the sprawling nature of the stories and, just like I wouldn’t remove Teso Dos Bichos or Space from The X-Files, I wouldn’t remove a single long digression about Russian politics. Suffice to say, the book hurtles (if something can hurtle slowly) towards a number of confrontations. Unexpectedly (or not?), Dostoevsky’s book about a Christlike Prince has what is easily the darkest ending of his major works, ending with (GIANT SPOILERS) Nastasya’s murder by Rogozhin and Myshkin’s subsequent return to Sweden, his mind and spirit seemingly broken beyond repair.

Holbein’s painting The Dead Christ, which is what’s being discussed in the excerpt above, is the connection point between the various characters that populate the novel. The painting, which depicts Christ’s body in the grave, is grotesque, almost gleefully. It asks, what if Christ never rose but is, instead, rotting in the grave? What good is it to follow a dead man who led a good life but died a failure? And of course it is impossible not to ask these same questions of Dostoevsky’s hero, as Myshkin is always upright, always kind, always reaching to “save” the wicked Rogozhin, the unfairly exiled and used Nastasya, the beautiful but machiavellian Aglaya, the vindictive and jealous Ganya, the foolish and dishonest Ivolgin, even the aggressively antagonist young anarchist Ippolit, and in return, is embroiled in their petty conflicts and scandals, used as a pawn, and discarded, broken and seemingly without hope at the end of the story?

Like Dostoevsky’s most famous writings, the “Grand Inquisitor” chapters from The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot asks the hardest questions; unlike the later novel, The Idiot offers very little as a counterargument, save, perhaps, that everyone in this book is pretty miserable except Myshkin. The most famous line from The Idiot is “Beauty will save the world”; but the phrase isn’t uttered or affirmed by Myshkin, the novel’s moral center, but mockingly by Aglaya Epanchin, whose machinations propel the tragedy that closes the story. 

Maybe beauty will save the world. Or maybe what is beautiful will always be crushed by the ugly and powerful. Maybe Christ is still rotting in that tomb and selfless love is a mug’s game. I closed the book impressed the Dostoevsky, a devout Christian whose life was marked by violence and tragedy, was able to write something so unflinchingly bleak. And I think about all the “Christians” running things now who see following Christ as a guarantee of victory, and not an invitation to love our neighbors more than we love ourselves, even if that means we rot too.