Dostoevsky
Page 86
The major action of The Idiot after Part I centers on the Prince’s budding romance with Aglaya Epanchina. By reading Pushkin’s poem “The Poor Knight” in the Prince’s presence, with obvious reference to his intervention on behalf of Nastasya, Aglaya reveals to what extent her lofty imagination has become inflamed by the Prince’s self-sacrificing magnanimity toward, in the eyes of society, a victimized “fallen woman.” Aglaya’s whole relation to the Prince is thus tainted with misunderstanding from the start. To Aglaya, Myshkin is the Poor Knight of Pushkin’s poem—a poem in which she sees united “in one striking figure the grand conception of the platonic love of medieval chivalry, as it was felt by a pure and lofty knight,” who was a “serious and not comic” Don Quixote (8: 207). Although these words apply to the Prince in part, their function is to bring out the illusory nature of Aglaya’s image of his character. Nothing could be less characteristic of the Prince than the deeds of military valor performed during the Crusades by the Poor Knight in the service of the Christian faith:
Lumen coeli, Sancta Rosa!
Shouted he with flaming glance
And the thunder of his menace
Checked the Musselman’s advance (8: 209).
The Poor Knight, in other words, represents the Christian ideal of the Catholic West in its days of glory and in all its corrupting confusion of spiritual faith and temporal power. The Russian Christian ideal, as Dostoevsky understood it, sharply splits off one from the other and accepts all the paradoxical and even demeaning social consequences of the Prince’s humility, meekness, and all-forgiving love.
Aglaya’s misconception mirrors her own character, with its combination of ardent idealism and personal arrogance and pride. Aglaya is irresistibly attracted by the purity of spirit and the selflessness that she finds in the Prince, but at the same time she wishes her ideal to be socially imposing and admired by the world. This fusion had attracted her to militant Catholicism, and she misguidedly seeks it in the Prince. By introducing the Young Nihilist scenes right after the “Poor Knight” reading, Dostoevsky forcefully dramatizes the opposition between Aglaya’s image and the actual values that inspire the Prince’s conduct. The combative Aglaya welcomes the intrusion of the group because, as she says, “they are trying to throw mud at you, Prince, you must defend yourself triumphantly, and I am awfully glad for you” (8: 213). Far from emerging “triumphant,” though, Myshkin reacts to insult and provocation with a docility and passivity that drive Aglaya into a towering rage.
Before the party scene at which he will be presented officially as Aglaya’s betrothed, she tries to have a “serious” talk with him to make sure that he will not commit any faux pas. Nonetheless, under the influence of the pre-epileptic “aura,” the Prince launches into a Slavophil attack on Roman Catholicism as “unchristian” because “Roman Catholicism believes that the Church cannot exist on earth without universal political power” (8: 450). He is thus denouncing in Roman Catholicism the very confusion of the temporal and the spiritual that, on the personal level, Aglaya wishes him to incarnate. It is no hazard that this speech appears precisely at the point where his personality is shown as most hopelessly incompatible with her requirements.
Myshkin’s disastrous harangue also incorporates other motifs of great importance to Dostoevsky. The Russian need for religious faith is asserted yet again as Myshkin describes the Russian proclivity to be converted to false faiths—such as Roman Catholicism or atheism. “Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits are the outcome not only of vanity,” he declares, “but also of . . . spiritual thirst, a craving for something higher . . . for a faith in which they have ceased to believe because they have never known it! . . . And Russians do not merely become atheists, but they invariably believe in atheism, as though it were a new religion without noticing that they are putting their faith in a negation” (8: 452). Myshkin here utters some of Dostoevsky’s profoundest convictions, which the author knew would be looked on by the majority of his compatriots with the same rather frightened and pitying incredulity as that displayed by the Epanchins’ guests.
Despite the catastrophe of the Prince’s outburst and epileptic attack at the engagement party, Aglaya still manages to overcome her dismay, since her ultimate test of Myshkin will be his relation with Nastasya. No more than Rogozhin can Aglaya view the Prince’s “Christian love” for Nastasya—his boundless pity and sense of obligation—as anything but a threat to her own undisputed possession of the man she loves. In the powerful confrontation scene between the two women, Myshkin is called upon to choose and is utterly unable to do so. Nastasya’s “frenzied, despairing face” causes him to reproach Aglaya for her cruelty to the “unhappy creature.” Aglaya, meanwhile, looks at him with “such suffering and at the same time such boundless hatred that, with a gesture of despair, he cried out and ran to her, but it was already too late.” He is stopped by Nastasya’s grasp, and remains to comfort the fainting and half-demented creature whose tortured face had once “stabbed his heart forever” (8: 475).
The Prince thus finds himself helplessly caught in the rivalry of clashing egoisms, and he responds, on the spur of the moment, to the need that is most immediate and most acute. Each woman has a differing but equally powerful claim on his devotion; and his incapacity to make a choice dramatizes the profoundest level of Dostoevsky’s thematic idea. For the Prince is the herald of a Christian love that is nothing if not universal; yet he is also a man, not a supernatural being—a man who has fallen in love with a woman as a creature of flesh and blood. The necessary dichotomy of these two divergent loves inevitably involves him in a tragic imbroglio from which there is no escape, an impasse in which the universal obligation of compassion fatally crosses the human love that is the Prince’s morally blameless form of “egoism.”
Three years earlier, sitting at the bier of his first wife, Dostoevsky had stated that Christ had given mankind only one clue to the future nature of the “final ideal goal” of humanity—a clue contained in the Gospel of Saint Matthew: “They neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in Heaven” (20: 173). Even that “most sacred possession of man on earth” (20: 173), the family, is a manifestation of the ego, which prevents the fusion of individuals into an All of universal love. The “final ideal goal” of humanity is thus the total fusion of the individual ego with all in a mystic community literally (and not metaphorically) freed from the constraints and limits of the flesh; it is the transcendent “synthesis” that Myshkin had glimpsed in the ravishment of the pre-epileptic “aura.” Hence even the most chaste and innocent of earthly love constitutes an abrogation of the universal law of love, whose realization, prefigured by Christ, is man’s ultimate, supernatural goal. The closing pages of The Idiot strikingly present this insoluble conflict between the human and the divine that Dostoevsky felt so acutely and that could achieve its highest pitch of expressiveness and poignancy only as embodied in such a “perfectly beautiful man” as Prince Myshkin.
Up until these concluding chapters, the omniscient narrator has usually been able to describe and explain what the Prince is thinking and feeling. Now, however, the narrator confesses that he is unable to understand Myshkin’s behavior and must confine himself to a “bare statement of facts” (8: 475). The facts referred to are these: on the one hand, Myshkin has become the fiancé of Nastasya, and the plans for their wedding are going forward. But, on the other, the Prince still tries to visit Aglaya as if nothing had changed, and he cannot comprehend why the impending marriage should affect his relation to her. “It makes no difference that I’m going to marry her,” he tells Radomsky. “That’s nothing, nothing” (8: 483). The strain of the Prince’s impossible position has finally caused him to lose all touch with reality. No longer able to distinguish between his vision of universal love and the necessary exclusions and limiting choices of life, he is presented as having passed altogether beyond the bounds of accepted social codes. To express this transgression, Dostoevsky adopts the guise of the baffled narrat
or, whose bewilderment accentuates the impossibility of measuring the Prince’s comportment by any conventional standard.
The moral profundities of the Prince’s conflict are thus distorted and reduced to the level of spiteful tittle-tattle and current clichés over, for example, female emancipation. The melancholy irony of the Prince’s situation is now complete. Like Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, who alone hears the secret commandment of God to sacrifice his son, the Prince has now become a knight of faith whose obedience to the divine makes his conduct appear to others, more often than not, a sign of madness. Quite appropriately, Lebedyev comes to this conclusion and tries to have the Prince committed to a mental institution before the wedding ceremony. Radomsky too shares the same conviction that the Prince “was not in his right mind”; but his thoughts come closer to Dostoevsky’s thematic mark: “And how can one love two at once? With two different kinds of love? That’s interesting . . . poor idiot” (8: 485).
The closing pages show us the Prince helplessly trapped between the conflicting claims of his human nature and his divine task, deprived of all comprehension and almost all sympathy, and overwhelmed by events over which he has no control. His grasp of the real world becomes weaker and weaker, and at the end his personality simply dissolves, abandoning all claims for itself and becoming a function of the needs of others. In the eerie and unforgettable death-watch scene over Nastasya’s corpse, after she has deliberately chosen to submit herself to Rogozhin’s knife, the Prince loses himself completely in the anguish of the half-mad murderer and sinks definitively into the mental darkness that he had long feared would be the price of his visionary illuminations. So ends the odyssey of Dostoevsky’s “perfectly beautiful man,” who had tried to live in the world by the divine light of the apocalyptic transfiguration of mankind into a universal harmony of love.
With an integrity that cannot be too highly praised, Dostoevsky thus fearlessly submits his own most hallowed convictions to the same test that he had used for those of the Nihilists—the test of what they would mean for human life if taken seriously and literally, and lived out to their full extent as guides to conduct. With exemplary honesty, he portrays the moral extremism of his own eschatological ideal, incarnated in the Prince, as being equally incompatible with the normal demands of ordinary social life, and constituting just as much of a disruptive scandal as the appearance of Christ himself among the complacently respectable Pharisees.
The last words, though, are given to Aglaya’s mother, Lizaveta Prokofeyevna, the character who has always been the closest in spirit to the Prince but has managed to keep her feet successfully on the ground. Her typically explosive and matronly denunciation of Europe—“they can’t make decent bread; in winter they are frozen like mice in a cellar” (8: 510)—concludes the book with a down-to-earth affirmation of the same faith in Russia that Myshkin had expressed in the messianic eloquence of his ecstatic rhapsodies. “We’ve had enough of being carried away by our enthusiasms,” she complains. “It’s high time we grew sensible.” Whatever the tragedy that Prince Myshkin and those affected by him may have suffered in this world, however, he brings with him the unearthly illumination of a higher one that all feel and respond to; and it is this response to “the light shining in the darkness” that for Dostoevsky provided the only ray of hope for the future.
1 PSS, 29/Bk. 2: 139; February 14, 1877.
2 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (London, 1954), chap. 2.
3 Kenosis is a theological term defined in Webster’s as “Christ’s action of ‘emptying himself’ on becoming man, humbling himself even to suffering death.” One of the distinguishing aspects of the Russian religious tradition, as defined by its greatest modern historian, G. P. Fedotov, is the stress placed on the suffering and humiliated Christ, who lies at the heart of Russian spirituality. Writing of the first Russian martyred saints, the princes Boris and Gleb, Fedotov compares their meek acceptance of their fate with the teachings of the monk Theodosius, the founder of the Russian kenotic tradition. “Boris and Gleb followed Christ in their sacrificial deaths—the climax of his kenosis—as Theodosius did in His poverty and humiliations. . . . From the outside, it must give the impression of weakness as Theodosius’ poverty must appear foolish to the outsider. Weak and foolish—such is Christ in his kenosis in the eyes of a Nietzsche just as he was in the eyes of the ancient pagan world.” See G. P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1 (New York, 1946), 130, and chap. 4 (“Russian Kenoticism”). There is good reason to believe that Nietzsche was familiar with The Idiot, and that Dostoevsky’s novel helped to shape his whole interpretation of Christianity. See Ernst Benz, Nietzsche’s Ideen zur Geschichte des Christentums und der Kirche (Leiden, 1956), 92–103.
4 Albert Schweitzer’s famous book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906), first focused attention on the importance of such eschatological expectations as the source of the Christian ethic of love. Ever since, this theory has been subjected to a flood of criticism, without being shaken as a psychological basis for understanding the more extreme aspects of the Christian doctrine of love (or agape).
CHAPTER 41
The Pamphlet and the Poem
The termination of The Idiot allowed Dostoevsky, who had been writing steadily for a year and a half, to catch his breath for a moment, but it also meant the end of the monthly stipend he had been receiving from Katkov. To make matters worse, Dostoevsky calculated that the amount of copy he had furnished still left him with a debt to Katkov’s journal of one thousand rubles. Dostoevsky thus begins to mention all sorts of new plans and projects, and the relation of these crisscrossing ideas to the works he then wrote is sometimes difficult to unravel.
Even before finishing the fourth part of The Idiot, and in the same letter to Maikov in which he defines his aesthetic of “fantastic realism,” Dostoevsky had outlined the idea for a major new novel. This outline immediately precedes the statement of his aesthetic, which may have emerged not only as a response to criticisms of The Idiot but also as a generalization of the approach to Russian life and reality expressed in his new creative project. Dostoevsky had in mind
a huge novel whose title will be Atheism. . . . The main figure is: a Russian of our society, . . . he loses faith in God. All his life he . . . did not go off the beaten path, and for forty-five years was in no way other than ordinary. . . . His loss of faith in God has a colossal effect on him. . . . He darts about among the young generation, the atheists, the Slavs and Europeans, the Russian fanatics, anchorites, the priests; he is strongly affected, among others, by a group of Jesuits, propagandizers, Poles; he slips away from them to the depths of the flagellants—and in the end finds Christ and the Russian God.1
Such a novel was never written, but this outline soon developed into a much longer work that also remained unwritten, The Life of a Great Sinner (Zhitie velikogo greshnika), and both then fed into Demons. Dostoevsky’s ambition, it is clear, was to present a large fresco of Russian opinions and religious experiences, and to dramatize his main character in terms of such competing views and ideologies, including those of “the young generation.”
“I must absolutely return to Russia,” he writes his niece from Florence; “here I will end by losing any possibility of writing for lack of my indispensable and habitual material—Russian reality (which feeds my thoughts) and the Russians.”2 Dostoevsky wrote to The Russian Messenger again asking for an advance on a new novel that he promised to provide in about a year. Faced with temporary indigence, he responded to another invitation from Strakhov at the end of January for a contribution to Dawn; an advance would allow him to meet his most pressing needs until the money from Katkov was forthcoming. Dostoevsky proposed that he be sent an advance of a thousand rubles with no delay, and in return he would write “a novel.”
Ten days later Dostoevsky finally received an advance from Katkov, meanwhile having been forced to borrow one hundred francs from some unknown benefactor and to pawn whatever he a
nd Anna could spare for another hundred francs. (Anna recalls how they even began to joke about their unrelieved poverty and to refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs. Micawber.) Dostoevsky was relieved to receive the money, not only for obvious reasons but also because he had been worried about his status at the journal. “I don’t believe,” he wrote his niece, “The Idiot will bring them new subscribers; I am very sorry about that, and that’s why I am very happy that they hold on to me despite the obvious lack of success of my novel.”3
After much negotiating, the editors of Dawn finally accepted Dostoevsky’s reduced demands for only three hundred rubles to be sent immediately in return for “a story, rather short, about two signatures.”4 The weather in Florence was turning torrid, and the Dostoevskys had been advised to leave because Anna, now pregnant again, was expecting a child in four months. They planned to move to Dresden, where they could find a doctor and nurses “who express themselves in a comprehensible language and are competent.”5 They were awaiting the arrival of Anna’s mother in a few days and planned to depart as soon as means were available.
By the time the advance arrived, however, Dostoevsky’s extra expenses had eaten up what he received. Intending to quit Florence immediately, the couple had moved out of their apartment to save on rent; but the single room was more expensive for a prolonged period, and Anna’s mother had by now arrived to look after her. “The heat in Florence is unbearable,” he wrote to Maikov in mid-May, “the city is white-hot and stifling, our nerves are overwrought—which is particularly bad for my wife; right now we are packed together (still attendant) in a small narrow room giving on the marketplace. I have had enough of this Florence, and now with no space and the heat, I cannot even write. In general, a terrible anguish—and worse, because of Europe; I look at everything here like a wild beast.”6 “Most of all, I felt sorry for my poor Anya,” he wrote after escaping. “She, poor thing, was in her seventh or eighth month, and suffered terribly from the heat.”7