You Need To Read Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”

If ethics, political philosophy and hermeneutics entice you

Only a limited selection of books boasts a resemblance to encyclopedias. Those authors who manage to find the hidden connections between fields that rarely go hand in hand offer original lenses through which readers can process and interpret reality. Several 19th-century Russian writers’ works belong to this group; among them, we can find Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot.” A labyrinthine net of characters emerges from the book’s pages; their vices, virtues and contradictions carry questions ranging from Epicureanism to existentialism, from normative political philosophy to Biblical hermeneutics. The distinction between main and secondary characters is often blurred in this framework. The only exception is Prince Myshkin, also known as “the Idiot.”

The Prince: a man who does not belong to mankind

It is hard to describe the character of Prince Myshkin without utilizing the words employed by Dostoevsky in a letter written on May 27, 1869, in which he referred to him as a “positively beautiful person.” He fully embodies the principles of compassion, altruism, empathy and honesty. After years of illness-induced exile in the idyllic Swiss alpine landscape, the Prince returns to his motherland, Russia. From the second the Prince set foot in Saint Petersburg, he unwittingly disrupts the ordinary unfolding of events, surrounding himself with disarray and grief like a plague-spreader. By guiding the reader through the extremely diverse vicissitudes, Dostoevsky convinces us that this is the only possible result that could arise from the collision between an inhumanly good person and a 19th-century society characterized by a hypocritical social hierarchy and merciless taboos. By gathering intra- and extra-text clues, philosopher Michel Terestchenko, suggests that prince Myshkin is the allegory of Christ. The Prince’s story thus shows the disastrous consequences that would occur, according to Dostoevsky, if Christ should restumble upon Earth.

Terestchenko’s pessimistic statement can be analyzed through different hermeneutical levels. Firstly, from a teleological perspective, one could argue that the writer aimed to depict how human flaws are necessary for coexistence in society; that the paradoxical presence of only one human being freed by such flaws would degenerate into collective madness. However, other elements in the novel also hint at an irreverent social critique.

Lebedev or modernity understood by a depraved theologian:

Dostoevsky mainly confers the role of critic of modernity to the most unsuitable character: Lebedev — a drunkard who embodies the discrepancy between intellectual depth and virtue. Lebedev denounces the social consequences of the still young capitalist system by giving a modern interpretation of John’s Apocalypse, which predicts the extinction of the “sources of life.” He provocatively affirms that railways are what will bring life on Earth to its end. In the beginning, this unreasonable sentence seems to fit with the other aspects of his nonsensical personality. However, in later pages, the symbolic meaning of his thought is unpacked --- railways indicate industrial development that amplify hecticness and noise in society. With the development of transportation, human beings are constantly dissatisfied with the place in which they find themselves at any given moment. The gasping search for happiness distances people from the “only true happiness,” which would be spiritual peace and consciousness. As in Tolstoj’s “Anna Karenina,” the Epicurean understanding of happiness as the product of a complete withdrawal from society reemerges, but this time it is entrenched in the modern infiltration of capitalism (the base) that penetrates collective and individual values and habits (the superstructure). These are the capitalistic ruins that would hypothetically kill Christ upon his resurrection: schizophrenic modernity filled with spiritual taboos and greedy egoism. Forty-four years after Lebedev was written into “The Idiot,” Charles Peguy also denounced the subordination of all “spiritual powers” to a single material one: money. However, Dostoevsky crafts the eccentric drunkard’s personality to offer a metacritique that warns us to be skeptical of modernity’s enemies. In fact, despite having identified modernity’s flaws, Lebedev falls into them more than anybody else, freeing himself, thanks to self-deception, of any moral compass. The conclusion seems to be, once again, of a pessimistic nature, suggesting that immunity to the economy’s moral backlashes does not exist and that, instead, one can merely choose whether to adapt consciously or unconsciously to the status quo.

Hippolyte and the cruelty of waiting

“The Idiot” would sound outrageous to the ears of any past or present conservative. The first part of the book is soaked in a denunciation of the death penalty, which then lingers in later developments of the story. During Prince Myshkin’s first encounter with some members of the Russian bourgeoisie, he firmly condemns the death penalty by affirming that the executioner commits a more serious crime than the murderer. A person sentenced to death has, in fact, a double conviction: not only will she soon disappear, but she is also aware of that in advance. According to the Prince, physical pain cannot compare to the tremendous torment that the waiting and certainty of death entails. One can find this same reasoning in Franz Kafka’s novel “The Trial,” where Joseph K. is suspected of an unknown crime and awaits a trial that never takes place. Eventually he dies after having been deprived of his life for what seemed to be an eternity. In Dostoevsky’s book, the inhumane burden of the wait is embodied by Hippolyte, an 18-year-old boy in the final stage of tuberculosis. He attempts to escape his sentence by accelerating it with a gun, but he fails because of inattention or survival instinct. His desperation is not met by compassion but by disdain and mockery, which highlight the intolerant posture that Russian 19th-century society had towards public manifestations of grief. This is, however, not necessarily relegated to the context in which Dostoevsky was writing. As Elnathan John wrote in “The Africa Report” last March, the intersection of death and sorrow has little public space in the West today, silenced by the numerous taboos surrounding it.

The only person who comprehends the complexity of Hyppolite’s sorrow is, of course, the Prince. The latter, by virtue of his inadequate and radical thoughts (concerning capital punishment, for example), manages to reach realms of empathy unimaginable and unwanted to the other characters. In this case, the idiot is bound to suffer inaction: even a man freed from mankind is powerless in front of an inhumane conviction imposed on a human life