The Idiot (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  TRANSLATIONS OF DOSTOEVSKY

  BY PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY

  The Adolescent (2003)

  The Idiot (2002)

  Demons (1994)

  Notes from Underground (1993)

  Crime and Punishment (1992)

  The Brothers Karamazov (1990)

  FIRST VINTAGE CLASSICS EDITION, JULY 2003

  Copyright © 2001 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This translation has been made from the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition (Izdatel’stvo “Nauka”), volume 8 (Leningrad, 1973).

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821—1881.

  [Idiot. English]

  The idiot / Fyodor Dostoevsky; translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky; introduction by Richard Pevear.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90189-4

  I. Pevear, Richard, 1943—. II. Volokhonsky, Larissa. III. Title.

  PG3326.I3 2002

  891.73′3—dc21 2001033561

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Translators’ Notes

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  Notes

  About the Translators

  INTRODUCTION

  On a house near the Pitti Palace in Florence there is a plaque that reads: “In this neighborhood between 1868 and 1869 F. M. Dostoevsky completed his novel The Idiot.” It is strange to think of this most Russian of writers working on this most Russian of novels while living in the city of Dante. In fact the author’s absence from Russia can be felt in the book, if we compare it with his preceding novel, Crime and Punishment (1866), which is so saturated in place, in the streets, buildings, squares, and bridges of Petersburg, that the city becomes a living participant in events. Place has little importance in The Idiot. Petersburg and the residential suburb of Pavlovsk, where most of the action occurs, are barely described. There is little sense of a surrounding world or a wider human community. Russia is present in the novel not as a place but as a question — the essence of Russia, the role of Russia and the “Russian Christ” in Europe and in the world. It was precisely during the four years he spent abroad, from 1867 to 1871, that Dostoevsky brooded most intensely on the fate of Russia, as the exiled Dante brooded on the fate of Florence.

  But it would be a mistake to think that this lack of an objective “world” makes The Idiot an abstract ideological treatise. On the contrary, it is perhaps the most physical and even physiological of Dostoevsky’s novels. Its events seem to take place internally, not in a spiritual inwardness but within the body, within a body, rendered more by sensation than by depiction. With Crime and Punishment, as the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff wrote recently,* Dostoevsky buried the descriptive novel; in The Idiot he arrived at a new form, expressive of “the inobjective body,” which overcomes the dualities of interior and exterior, subjective and objective, physical and psychological. It is given in certain modes of experience: sickness, for instance, is as much subjective as objective; so is violence, and so is life with others, the “invasive” presence of the other (hence the privileged place Dostoevsky gives to doorways and thresholds, to sudden entrances and unexpected meetings). And so, finally, are words spoken and heard, written and read aloud. Dostoevsky concentrates on these modes of experience in The Idiot to the exclusion of almost all else. The novel, broadly speaking, is an exploration of what it means to be flesh.

  The idea of the “Russian Christ” is important in The Idiot (and was certainly important to his creator, who repeated Myshkin’s words on the subject almost verbatim nine years later in his Diary of a Writer), but a much stronger presence in the novel is the painting that Dostoevsky significantly calls “The Dead Christ” (the actual title is Christ’s Body in the Tomb), a work by Hans Holbein the Younger that hangs in the museum of Basel. Dostoevsky places a copy of the painting in the house of the young merchant millionaire Rogozhin. It is discussed twice in the novel, the second time at length and in a key passage. The shape of the painting is unusual: the narrator describes it as being “around six feet wide and no more than ten inches high.” It is, in other words, totally lacking in vertical dimension.

  Dostoevsky first read about Holbein’s painting in Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveler (1801), an account of the young author’s travels in Europe, modeled on Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. In a letter written from Basel, Karamzin mentions that he has been to the picture gallery there and “looked with great attention and pleasure at the paintings of the illustrious Holbein, a native of Basel and friend of Erasmus.” Of this painting in particular (giving it yet another title) he observes: “In ‘Christ Taken Down from the Cross’ one doesn’t see anything of God. As a dead man he is portrayed quite naturally. According to legend, Holbein painted it from a drowned Jew.” That is all. But these few words must have made a strong impression on Dostoevsky. In August 1867, on their way from Baden-Baden to Geneva, he and his young wife made a special stop in Basel to see the painting.

  Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna Grigorievna, wrote an account of their visit to the museum in her memoirs, published forty years later:

  On the way to Geneva we stopped for a day in Basel, with the purpose of seeing a painting in the museum there that my husband had heard about from someone.

  This painting, from the brush of Hans Holbein, portrays Jesus Christ, who has suffered inhuman torture, has been taken down from the cross and given over to corruption. His swollen face is covered with bloody wounds, and he looks terrible. The painting made an overwhelming impression on my husband, and he stood before it as if dumbstruck …

  When I returned some fifteen or twenty minutes later, I found my husband still standing in front of the painting as if riveted to it. There was in his agitated face that expression as of fright which I had seen more than once in the first moments of an epileptic fit. I quietly took him under the arm, brought him to another room, and sat him down on a bench, expecting a fit to come at any moment. Fortunately that did not happen.

  In a stenographic diary kept at the time of the visit itself, she noted: “generally, it looked so much like an actual dead man that I really think I wouldn’t dare stay in the same room with it. But F. admired this painting. Wishing to have a closer look at it, he stood on a chair, and I was very afraid he’d be asked to pay a fine, because here one gets fined for everything.”

  Each of the three main male characters of the novel — the saintly “idiot” Myshkin, the passionate, earthbound Rogozhin, and the consumptive nihilist Ippolit — defines himself in relation to this painting. The question it poses hangs over the whole novel: what if Christ was only a man? What if he suffered, died, and was left a bruised, lifeless corpse, as Holbein shows him? It is, in other words, the question of the Resurrection. Dostoevsky, who was very careful about the names he gave his characters, calls the heroine of The Idiot Nastasya, a shortened form of Anastasia: anastasis is “resurrection” in Greek. Her last name, Barashkov, comes from the Russian word for “lamb.”


  The name of the novel’s hero, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, is also worth considering. It draws a pointed and oddly insistent comment from the clerk Lebedev on its first mention at the start of the novel: “the name’s historical, it can and should be found in Karamzin’s History.” Karamzin’s History of the Russian State was one of the most popular books of nineteenth-century Russia. In his Diary of a Writer (1873), Dostoevsky recalls: “I was only ten when I already knew virtually all the principal episodes of Russian history — from Karamzin whom, in the evenings, father used to read aloud to us.” He could assume a similar knowledge among his contemporaries. But, as the literary scholar Tatiana Kasatkina pointed out in a recent lecture,† later commentators on The Idiot have generally failed to follow Lebedev’s suggestion. Looking in Karamzin’s History, we do indeed find the name Myshkin; it belonged not to a prince but to an architect. In 1471 Metropolitan Filipp of Moscow decided to build a new stone Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and Myshkin was one of the two architects called in to build it. It was to be modeled on the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, the biggest in Russia. The architects went to Vladimir, took measurements, and promised to build an even bigger cathedral in Moscow. By 1474 the walls had reached vault level when the addition of a monumental stairway caused the entire structure to collapse. Dostoevsky twice wrote the words “Prince-Christ” in his notebooks for The Idiot. Readers have taken this to be an equation and, like Romano Guardini in Der Mensch und der Glaube (Man and Faith, subtitled “a study of religious existence in Dostoevsky’s major novels”), have seen Prince Myshkin as a “symbol of Christ” or, in Tatiana Kasatkina’s words, as a man upon whom “the radiance of Christ somehow rests,” one who is “meant to stand for, or in some way even replace, the person of Christ for us.” Karamzin’s account of the architect Myshkin suggests a more ambiguous reading — as indeed does the prince’s name itself, which is compounded of “lion” (lev) and “mouse” (mysh).

  Dostoevsky began work on The Idiot in September 1867, a month after his visit to the Basel museum, but it was some time before he finally grasped the nature of his hero. His first notes show the “idiot” as a proud and violently passionate man, a villain, even an Iago, who is to undergo a complete regeneration and “finish in a divine way.” After working out a number of plans, he ended his notebook on November 30 with a final resolve: “Detailed arrangement of the plan and begin work in the evening.” Four days later he threw everything out and started again. A new conception of the hero had come to him. He was to be a pure and innocent man from the beginning, a saintly stranger coming from elsewhere, and the drama would lie not in his own inner struggle but in his confrontation with people (“Now I am going to be with people,” Myshkin thinks to himself on the train back to Russia) and in the effect of his innocence and purity on others. Instead of going on from the situation of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, as Dostoevsky’s early sketches suggested, he leaped to his diametrical opposite.

  Dostoevsky described this new conception in a letter to his friend the poet Apollon Maikov: “For a long time now I’ve been tormented by a certain idea, but I’ve been afraid to make a novel out of it, because the thought is too difficult, and I’m not ready for it, though it’s a thoroughly tempting thought and I love it. The idea is — to portray a perfectly beautiful man. Nothing, in my opinion, can be more difficult than that, especially in our time.” He discussed the same idea in a letter written the next day (January 13, 1868) to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova. It is important enough to be quoted at length:

  The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There is nothing more difficult in the world and especially now. All writers, not only ours, but even all European writers, who have merely attempted to portray the positively beautiful, have always given up. Because the task is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but this ideal, whether ours or that of civilized Europe, is still far from being worked out. There is only one perfectly beautiful person — Christ — so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful person is, of course, already an infinite miracle. (That is the sense of the whole Gospel of John: it finds the whole miracle in the incarnation alone, in the manifestation of the beautiful alone.) But I’ve gone on too long. I will only mention that of beautiful persons in Christian literature, the most fully realized is Don Quixote; but he is beautiful solely because he is at the same time ridiculous. Dickens’s Pickwick (an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote, but an immense one all the same) is also ridiculous and succeeds only because of that. Compassion is shown for the beautiful that is ridiculed and does not know its own worth — and so sympathy appears in the readers. This arousing of compassion is the secret of humor. Jean Valjean is also a strong attempt, but he arouses sympathy by his terrible misfortune and society’s injustice towards him. I have nothing like that, decidedly nothing, and that’s why I’m terribly afraid it will be a positive failure.

  At that time he had written only the first seven chapters of part one. They were produced in a single burst of inspiration and sent to his publisher, Mikhail Katkov, who included them in the January 1868 issue of The Russian Messenger. The remaining nine chapters of the first part were finished by the end of February. But Dostoevsky was uncertain about what would follow, and he continued in that uncertainty all the while he was writing the novel. Only as he worked on the fourth and last part did he recognize the inevitability of the final catastrophe. And yet he could write to Sofya Ivanova in November 1868: “this fourth part and its conclusion is the most important thing in my novel, i.e., the novel was almost written and conceived for the novel’s denouement.”

  This novel, which was to be filled with light, which was to portray the positively beautiful, ends in deeper darkness than any of Dostoevsky’s other works. What happened here? Some remarks from another letter to Maikov may begin to suggest an answer. Speaking of his own poetic process, he says: “in my head and in my soul many artistic conceptions flash and make themselves felt. But they only flash; and what’s needed is a full embodiment, which always comes about unexpectedly and suddenly, but it is impossible to calculate precisely when it will come about; then, once you have received the full image in your heart, you can set about its artistic realization.” Dostoevsky’s work was always “experimental” in the sense that, between the conception and the full embodiment, he allowed his material the greatest freedom to reveal itself “unexpectedly and suddenly.” Despite his passionate convictions, he never imposed an ideological resolution on his work; he was never formulaic. But it is the special nature of The Idiot that the full image revealed itself as if with great reluctance and only towards the end of its artistic realization. René Girard was right to say that the failure of the initial idea is the triumph of another more profound idea, and that this prolonged uncertainty gives the novel “an existential density that few works have.”‡ Much of Dostoevsky’s distinctive quality as a writer lies in this living relation to his own characters.

  Part one of The Idiot introduces most of the characters of the novel — the three central figures, Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Nastasya Filippovna; the three families of the Epanchins, the Ivolgins, and the Lebedevs — and entangles them in various complex relations. Riddles and enigmas appear from the start, surrounded by rumors, gossip, attempted explanations, analyses by different characters (reasonable but usually wrong). The narrator himself is not always sure of what has happened or is going to happen. When he finished the first part, Dostoevsky still thought that the prince could go on to redeem Nastasya Filippovna and even to “regenerate” the dark Rogozhin. He wrote to Sofya Ivanova: “The first part is essentially only an introduction. One thing is necessary: to arouse a certain curiosity about what will follow … In the second part everything must be definitively established (but will still be far from explained).” But the second part was slow to come; it was finished only five months later, in July; and in it we immediately sense a change of tone and coloration. It
begins under the image of Holbein’s “Dead Christ,” which appears here for the first time, and of Rogozhin’s gloomy, labyrinthine house, a house associated with the castrates and old Russian sectarianism. The prince’s humility and compassion acquire a strange ambiguity, and before long, the epilepsy for which he had been treated in Switzerland returns with a violent attack that throws him headlong down the stairs.

  Critics have found this shift abrupt and puzzling. But there are hints of it even in the first part, not only in the name Myshkin, which “can and should be found in Karamzin,” but in the prince’s repeated accounts of executions he has witnessed or heard about, and above all in the story of his life in Switzerland, the befriending of the village children, and the death of poor Marie. This story, with its Edenic overtones, has deception at its center, and the deceiver is the prince himself, as he admits without quite recognizing. It is a first variation on one of the central themes of the novel: the difference between love and pity. The relation of the first part to the rest of the novel is one of question and answer, and the question was posed first of all for Dostoevsky himself, who did not know the answer when he started. It is essentially the same question implied in Holbein’s painting: what if Christ were not the incarnate God but, in this case, simply a “positively beautiful man,” a “moral genius,” as a number of nineteenth-century biographers of Jesus chose to portray him, and as Leo Tolstoy was about to proclaim — “a Christ more romantic than Christian,” in René Girard’s words, sublime and ideal, but with no power to redeem fallen mankind? The prince cannot tell Nastasya Filippovna that her sins are forgiven. What he tells her is that she is pure, that she is not guilty of anything. These apparently innocent words, coming at the end of part one, unleash all that follows in the novel.

  The Idiot is constructed as a series of outspoken conversations and exposures, beginning with the very first scene of the novel, the meeting of the prince with Rogozhin and Lebedev on the train to Petersburg, and continuing virtually unbroken till the final scene. The prince, being unguarded and guileless, blurts out things about himself that anyone else would conceal. This is such a winning quality in him that it even wins over the brutish Rogozhin. It also wins over, one after another, the whole procession of people he meets on his arrival in the city, from General Epanchin’s valet to the general’s private secretary, Ganya Ivolgin, to the general himself, his wife and daughters, to the whole of Ganya Ivolgin’s family, and finally to the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. He readily speaks of his illness and “idiocy,” tells how he was awakened from mental darkness by the braying of an ass (at which the Epanchin girls make inevitable jokes), reveals his odd obsession with executions and the condemned man’s last moments, and when one of the girls asks him to tell about when he was in love, he tells them at length about his “happiness” in Switzerland. His first words to Nastasya Filippovna, when he comes uninvited to her birthday party, are: “Everything in you is perfection.” And his naïve directness prompts a similar directness in others, who speak themselves out to him, seek his advice, look for some saving word from him.