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
*Dostoevsky, du double à l'unité, Paris, 1963 (in English, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground, New York, 1997).
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 noveclass="underline" 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 naive directness prompts a similar directness in others, who speak themselves out to him, seek his advice, look for some saving word from him.
But this general outspokenness can also turn scandalous. Ganya Ivolgin repeatedly denounces the prince to his face and once even slaps him. At Nastasya Filippovna's party, a parlor game is played in which each guest (the ladies are excused) must tell the worst thing he has done in his life. On the prince's terrace in Pavlovsk, surrounded by almost the entire cast of characters, a vicious newspaper lampoon about the prince himself is read aloud. And on the same terrace Ippolit reads his "Necessary Explanation," which, among other things, is a direct attack on the prince for his "Christian" humility and meekness.
As one reads, however, and even rather early on, one becomes aware that, together with this outspokenness, there is a great reticence in The Idiot. For all its surprising frankness, there is much that goes unsaid, and what goes unsaid is most important. Olga Meerson has written a witty and penetrating study of this question,* showing how what is normally taboo in society is easily violated in Dostoevsky's work, but as a way of pointing to the greater significance of what his characters pass over in silence. This is a poetics of opening, but hardly of openness.
An ironic variation on the influence of the unsaid is the famous phrase "Beauty will save the world." These words are often attributed to Dostoevsky himself and have been made much of by commentators, but in fact he never said them. Both Ippolit and Aglaya Epanchin refer them to Prince Myshkin, but we never actually hear him say them either. The one time the prince comments on beauty is when he is giving his observations about the faces of Mrs. Epanchin and her daughters. He says nothing of the youngest, Aglaya. The
* Dostoevsky's Taboos, published (in English) in Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden-Munich, 1998.
mother asks why, and he demurs: "I can't say anything now. I'll say it later." When she presses him, he admits that she is "an extraordinary beauty," adding: "Beauty is difficult to judge; I'm not prepared yet. Beauty is a riddle." This is the prince's first real moment of reticence in the novel. By the end he will have moved from naïve candor to an anguished silence in the face of the unspeakable.
Everything is a riddle in The Idiot, everything is two-sided, ambiguous. The structure of reality is double: there is the social world of Petersburg and Pavlovsk, and within it a world infinitely higher and lower, both personal and archetypal. Olga Meerson says in the conclusion of her book:
Dostoevsky . . . uses the language of social interactions for non-social purposes. Rather than depicting society, he borrows the sign system of literature - anthropological and fictional - that depicts society, in order to depict and address human conscience, conscious, unconscious, subconscious. Signs of verbal social decorum are transformed by having gained a new function; they no longer apply to the actual social decorum. The latter is constantly and scandalously violated in Dostoevsky precisely by those characters who are exceptionally sensitive to the new, meta-social functions of these signals of decorum.
The social world is relative, ambivalent, comic, "carnivalized," as the critic Mikhail Bakhtin preferred to say - a world in which a polite drawing room turns into a public square. The meta-social world is located in the deepest layers of consciousness, of memory, internal in each of us and at the same time transcending each of us. In this world, characters acquire the qualities of folk-tale heroes and villains, of figures in a mystery play, of angels and demons. There is a captive princess, there is a prince who is called upon to save her, and there is a dark force that threatens them both. The heavenly emissary must deliver the world's soul from bondage, Andromeda from her chains; if he betrays his calling, disaster will follow.
As if to underscore the distance between social realism and his own "realism of a higher sort," Dostoevsky refers to two other stories of fallen women: La Dame aux camélias by Dumas fils, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which the prince finds in Nastasya Filippovna's rooms near the end of the novel.
Nastasya Filippovna will hardly efface herself like Dumas's heroine; that sentimental resolution suits the taste (and the hopes) of her mediocre seducer, the "bouquet man" Totsky, whom she calls a monsieur aux camélias. Nor will she take her own life in despair, like Emma Bovary. Her fate is enacted in a different realm. The parallels serve to mark the difference. But, owing to the chasteness of his art (as opposed to its obvious scandalousness), Dostoevsky allows himself no direct statement of his idea, no symbolistic abstraction, no simple identification of the "archetypes" behind his fiction. He uses the methods and conventions of the social novel to embody an ultimate human drama.