Holy Fool

[mtvessel]

Jun 2017
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky tr. David McDuff - Penguin Classics, 2004
* * * *
Dostoyevsky's characters often experience extreme and conflicting emotions, and the two books of his that I had read before this one did much the same for me. I really liked Crime and Punishment for its thoughtful exploration of the mind of a proto-terrorist, and really disliked The Brothers Karamazov for its religious browbeating. The Idiot, I am pleased to report, is very much at the Crime and Punishment end of my affections, largely due to its wonderfully hilarious premise of a guileless man entering the snakepit of a corrupt society and causing utter chaos. Not that this was the author's intention, of course.

We first encounter our hero, Prince Mishkin, on a commuter train approaching the suburbs of St Petersburg. He falls into conversation with a bootlicking official called Lebedev and a "swarthy young man" called Rogozhin, who has recently acquired an inheritance and is obsessed with Nastasya Filippovna, a society beauty with a scandalous past. Mishkin, who is returning from four years treatment for epilepsy at a Swiss sanatorium, is seeking out his only living relative, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, the wife of a General Yepanchin. While attending the family house, Mishkin meets Yepanchin's snooty assistant Ganya, who, it turns out, has proposed to Nastasya at the behest of her erstwhile guardian Totsky, but has not received a response. Mishkin sees a picture of Nastasya and is struck by her appearance. Which is unfortunate, as Lizaveta's youngest daughter Aglaya has rather taken a shine to him.

This is just a taste of the large array of characters and relationships that Dostoyevsky builds. They are all deeply flawed people, many of whom have engaged in outrageously bad behaviour which is cheerfully gossiped about behind their backs. By contrast, Mishkin is honest, open, straightforward and unjudgmental. The rest of the cast think he is an idiot, which doesn't stop them from listening to and being swayed by his opinions. This is particularly true of Nastasya, who is clearly attracted to the prince but has a self-destructive side caused by her shame at her fallen nature. By providing an alternative, the prince unwittingly abets her inability to commit to any of her many besotted admirers. This leads to one of the best scenes of escalating farce that I have ever read as they turn up one by one to disrupt the at-home where an increasingly frustrated Ganya hopes that Nastasya will finally give him her response.

Sadly, that's only a quarter of the way through the book and the rest cannot live up to that dramatic high. It is fairly clear that Dostoyevsky was casting around for things to do with his characters which leads to long and relatively uninteresting digressions, such as the consumptive nihilist Ippolit, who insists on reading a long essay about death at the prince's birthday party, or the bizarre side-plot involving a monetary demand against the prince by someone claiming to be an illegitimate son of his benefactor.

Nonetheless I enjoyed it, but not for the reasons that Dostoyevsky intended. He clearly saw the prince as a saintly figure embodying Russian spiritual values who is too good for the corrupt society in which he lives. But to me, Mishkin is a more complicated and interesting character than that. In one surprising scene he suddenly goes on an anti-Catholic rant which evidently channels the author's somewhat ugly nationalism. He leads on both Nastasya and Aglaya, who understandably become very annoyed with him, and seeks wishy-washy compromises with his rivals which causes them to distrust his motives. Seeing only the good in human nature is an attractive trait, but it is not a virtue. Mishkin may not be the idiot that the other characters think he is, but, thank goodness, he isn't the paragon of goodness that Dostoyevsky intended him to be either.