CLASSICS REVISITED
Dostoevsky's useful idiots
RAVI VYAS
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The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by David Magarshack, Penguin, 1955 edition.
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Reality is the most important thing of all. It is true my conception of reality may be different from the concept of other people. Perhaps in the idiot man is more real... I have my own idea of reality in art; and what most will find fantastic and an exception sometimes constitutes for me the very sense of reality. The ordinariness of events and the conventional view of them is not realism in my opinion, but, indeed, the very opposite of it. In every newspaper you find accounts of the most real facts which are also the most strange and most complex.
Dostoevsky's Diaries
IN all of Dostoevsky's novels there is a struggle, or rather, a tug-of-war, between faith and a rational approach to life, the idea of balancing feelings with reason. Dostoevsky's man is a deeply split personality; in his metaphysics, good and evil are indissolubly entangled with the pendulum motion of the individual psyche between two abysses, good and evil, the irrational winning out in the end because of the human propensity to evil. Among the great 19th-century novelists, all more or less tainted with false hopes because of the new-found power of reason, only Dostoevsky could stand up today, seeing the mess all around, and say to us: "I told you so."
The "idiot" is Prince Myshkin, a composite figure: we come to discern in him parts of Christ, of Don Quixote, of Pickwick, in order to present the ideal of a Christian. But, unlike, Christian in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Dostoevsky endows his hero with real, not allegorical, traits of character, and places him in a real, not allegorical and fantastic world. By placing the "idiot" in a mundane world, Dostoevsky provides a crushing criticism of this feudal world and particularly the ruling class of 19th-century Russia.
Pure goodness
The story line. Prince Myshkin, a young man, returns to Russia after years in a Swiss clinic where has been treated for epilepsy. In addition to his illness, and perhaps because of it, Myshkin is a representation of pure goodness. "Pure goodness" is made up of a cluster of characteristics — he is solitary, poor, innocent and naïve, honest, intuitive, generous, easily imposed upon, forgiving and "democratic" (in the sense that he doesn't care about social status), socially awkward, afflicted by epileptic fits and given to visions of romantic love and brotherhood. Unlike Raskolnikov, the main character in Crime and Punishment, who was based on a real murderer Dostoevsky had read about in a newspaper, Prince Myshkin is based on an image of himself.
Hard choice
As soon as the Prince arrives in St. Petersburg, he meets two beautiful women. One is a former mistress of a wealthy old man, a young woman who was taken up as an orphan by the owner of the estate her family lived upon, and educated and raped by him for several years. Her attempts to free herself from this man is the talk of the town. The other woman is the spoiled younger daughter of the prince's only living relative.
Myshkin is drawn to both these women, but he is too naïve to understand the difference between love and passion. The prince is unable to choose, and unable to understand the intentions of either of them. Is it naiveté? Or is it that in a truly good man, especially one who is a virgin, as Myshkin certainly was, there is no difference? But while both are drawn to him, neither is capable of feeling or acting in a consistent manner, or even in a kind of manner. It is a question of multiple attachments he puts before us as he is divided between Aglaia and Nastasya.
"I love her with my whole heart," [he says to Aglaia's mother, referring to Nastasya].
"And at the same time you have declared your love for Aglaia Ivanova?"
"Oh, yes, yes."
"How so? Then you must want to love both of them."
"Oh, yes, yes."
"Upon my word, Prince, think what are you saying... Do you know what, the most likely thing is that you have never loved either of them! And how can you love two at once? That's interesting!"
Dostoevsky is never perfectly straightforward and leads us to numerous suppositions but of one thing he is perfectly clear: there is a duality of feelings or at least a hierarchy of feelings in all of us. "I've as many lives as a cat. I can with perfect convenience experience two opposite feelings at one and the same time, and not of course, through my own will." But he doesn't want to account for this co-existence of conflicting feelings because "if it happens that I try to explain an idea I believe in, it almost always happens that I cease to believe what I have explained."
Psychologist first
Dostoevsky is first and last a psychologist, "the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn," as Nietzsche said. But he presents a less myopic picture of man than other novelists; he is more complex, less manageable, echoing Shakespeare: "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There are very few writers like Dostoevsky, probing into the cellarage and morass of the soul.
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