Adored it. Loved it. Murdered by it.
I was so taken in by these characters. I think the women in the Epanchin family and Nastasya Fillippovna are the best female characters in classic Russian literature that I’ve read.* Lizaveta P in particular has my heart with her direct manner and a heart that’s quick to sympathy and love, even if it’s tough love. I loved every single one of her rants and outbursts, and her friendship with our protagonist the Prince was one of my favorite aspects of the novel. She was probably the most amusing of all the characters. Two of the three Epanchin sisters, Aglaya and Adelaida, were superbly painted, though I wish the eldest Alexandra got more page time.
And Nastaya Fillippovna was absolutely fascinating. Her tale of a wronged woman intent on self-destruction was written with a very humane and sensitive yet insightful eye, something I always appreciate in Dostoevsky.
But none of this has to do with our penultimate character, our “idiot,” Prince Myshkin. I almost feel afraid to write about him, and I’m not sure if it’s because it’s too precious or because he’s a character that defies thought. He’s a character whose guiding star is compassion, and his goodness leads him to make decisions that the people around him do not understand. It reminds me of something I also just finished—Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, in which Kierkegaard discusses how faith, which he considers the highest form of emotion and being, makes you entirely incomprehensible to the universal, because faith is beyond the limit of thought. I’m not sure if Kierkegaard would classify our Prince as having perfect faith “on the strength of the absurd” and I think that our Prince cares way too much about the people on this earth to be “infinitely resigned” to it, but I think Prince Myshkin comes as close to incomprehensible and unattainable goodness as anyone in literature. The Prince is such a darling, but he also proves that compassion to such a degree can get you into a lot of scrapes. And someone like that also does not belong in the realm of romantic love. If you love everyone to such a high degree, you cannot show an exclusive love as a partner would want and expect.
The character of the Prince also battles the notion that pure goodness is equated with stupidity. He is called “an idiot” so many times throughout the novel, but the insightful characters come to realize that he is not so at all, but in fact quite intelligent. It is often said that the highly intelligent find it harder to have faith since they are always questioning, and peace of mind is commonly associated with faith, so perhaps that’s why we do not associate goodness with intelligence and worldliness. But it’s a sad world where we can’t accept goodness for what it is, instead tainting it with condescension and even hatred.
Near the end of the book, I was afraid to pick it back up and finish. Genuine fear. Because I knew it was going in a direction that would destroy me. And it did, though I wasn’t even then aware of how deeply painful Dostoevsky was going to take the narrative. There was so much tension in the climax that just kept building, until finally it broke, and we arrived at the ending for our protagonist that I did not even want to consider.
The only point I will take off in this book’s excellence is for the lengthy asides—which includes perhaps the longest suicide note in the history of literature—some of which Dostoevsky himself admitted to being superfluous by amusingly breaking the fourth wall and inserting himself into the novel as an authorial “we” to directly address us readers. In some of these asides, I was wondering what the point was in including them, though most of the time, Dostoevsky revealed it later.
I don’t feel like this review does the book justice; I’ll just have to read it again to fully appreciate it. The Idiot had everything I love in a Dostoevsky novel: insights into human nature and society, and superb character depth and development. It’s now my favorite Dostoevsky, behind Crime and Punishment, and before Brothers Karamazov and Notes from the Underground.
*At the time or writing, this includes Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground, The Master and Margarita, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Dead Souls, and select works of Chekov.
