Money, the most ambiguous of values, is the medium of the social world. Its fatal quality is treated in all tones, at all levels, in The Idiot. Totsky wants to "sell" Nastasya Filippovna to Ganya for seventy-five thousand roubles; Rogozhin offers a hundred thousand for her. In one of the greatest scenes in the novel, Nastasya Filippovna throws his hundred thousand into the fire with everyone watching and challenges Ganya to pull it out. There are many other variations: the prince's unexpected inheritance, and Burdovsky's outrageous attempt, spurred on by his nihilist friends, to claim part of it while maintaining his nihilist principles; General Ivolgin's theft of Lebedev's four hundred roubles and his subsequent disgrace; Ptitsyn's successful moneylending and his dream of owning two houses (or maybe even three) on Liteinaya Street; Evgeny Pavlovich's rich uncle and his embezzlement of government funds; Ippolit's story of the impoverished doctor; Ferdyshchenko's "worst deed"; the repeatedly mentioned newspaper stories of murders for the sake of robbery. The clownish clerk Lebedev, though a petty usurer himself, is also an interpreter of the Apocalypse: "we live in the time of the third horse, the black one, and the rider with a balance in his hand, because in our time everything is in balances and contracts, and people are all only seeking their rights: 'A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny . . .' And with all that they want to preserve a free spirit, and a pure heart, and a healthy body, and all of God's gifts. But they can't do it with rights alone, and there will follow a pale horse and him whose
name is Death." His interpretation unwittingly reveals the twofold structure of reality in The Idiot.
Prince Myshkin has two loves, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya, one belonging to each "world" of the novel. He also has two doubles: Rogozhin and Ippolit. There is a deep bond between the dying consumptive nihilist thinker and the impulsive, unreflecting, passionate merchant's son, between the suicide and the murderer, and Ippolit recognizes it. "Les extrémités se touchent" he says, quoting Pascal. As late as September 1868, Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook: "Ippolit - the main axis of the novel." The young nihilist belongs among Dostoevsky's "rebels against Creation," along with Kirillov in Demons and Ivan Karamazov. His "Necessary Explanation," as Joseph Frank has observed,* contains all the elements of the prince's worldview, but with an opposite attitude. Speaking of Holbein's Christ, he says that it shows nature as "some huge machine of the newest construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being." And he wonders how Christ's disciples, seeing a corpse like that, could believe "that this sufferer would resurrect," and whether Christ himself, if he could have seen his own image on the eve of his execution, would have "gone to the cross and died as he did." Ippolit is also a man sentenced to death by the "dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power to which everything is subjected," but instead of meekly accepting his fate, instead of passing by and forgiving others their happiness, as the prince advises, he protests, weeps, revolts. If Ippolit is not finally the main axis of the novel, he poses its central question in the most radical and explicit way.
Rogozhin, on the other hand, tells the prince that he likes looking at the Holbein painting. The prince, "under the impression of an unexpected thought," replies: "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!" "Lose it he does," Rogozhin agrees. But to Rogozhin's direct question, whether he believes in God, the prince gives no direct reply. That is another significant moment of reticence
*Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, Princeton, 1995.
on Myshkin's part. Instead, he turns the conversation to "the essence of religious feeling" and says, "There are things to be done in our Russian world, believe me!" A moment later, at Rogozhin's request, they exchange crosses and become "brothers." Yet the exact nature of their brotherhood remains a mystery. From that point on, Rogozhin becomes the prince's shadow, lurking, menacing, hiding, yet inseparable from him, until the final scene finds them pressed face to face. Dostoevsky's doubles, which might seem images of personal division, are in fact images of human oneness.
The Idiot is Dostoevsky's most autobiographical novel. He gave Prince Myshkin many details of his own childhood and youth, his epilepsy, his separation from life and Russia (the author's years of hard labor and "exile" in Siberia corresponding to the prince's treatment in Switzerland), his return with a new sense of mission. More specifically, in Myshkin's story of the mock execution of an "acquaintance," Dostoevsky gives a detailed account of his own experience on the scaffold in the Semyonovsky parade ground, at the age of twenty-eight, when he thought he had only three more minutes to live. According to a memoir by another of the condemned men, Fyodor Lvov,* Dostoevsky turned to their comrade Speshnyov and said: "We will be together with Christ." And Speshnyov, with a wry smile, replied: "A handful of ashes." As Myshkin puts it: "now he exists and lives, and in three minutes there would be something, some person or thing — but who? and where?" The Idiot is built on that eschatological sense of time. It is the desolate time of Holy Saturday, when Christ is buried, the disciples are scattered and - worse than that - abandoned. "Who could believe that this sufferer would resurrect?" As it turned out, Dostoevsky had not three minutes but thirty-two years to think over Speshnyov's words and his own response to them. The Idiot marks an important step on that way.
Richard Pevear
*Published in Literaturnoe nasledstvo ("Literary Heritage"), vol. 63, p. 188; Moscow, 1956.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mikhail BAKHTIN, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985. The classic study of Dostoevsky's formal innovations and his relations to the traditions of Menippean satire and carnival humor. Michel ELTCHANINOFF, L'Expression du corps chez Dostoevski], unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Paris, 2000. A study of the phenomenology of the body in Dostoevsky's work, in the context of philosophical and religious tradition.
Joseph frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous fears, 1865-1871, Princeton University Press, 1995. The volume of Frank's major five-volume literary-historical study that covers the period of composition of The Idiot.
bruce a. French, Dostoevsky's "Idiot": Dialogue and the Spiritually Good Life, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 2001. rené Girard, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground, tr. J. Williams, Crossroads, New York, 1997. An English translation of Girard's 1963 essay Dostoïevski: du double à l'unité, indispensable for its commentary on the erotic/mimetic aspects of Dostoevsky's work. romano guardini, Der Mensch und der Glaube: Versuche iiber die religiose Existenz in Dostojewskijsgrossen Romanen, Hegner, Leipzig, 1932. (French translation: L'Univers religieux de Dostoïevski, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1947.) An important interpretation of the Christian structure of Dostoevsky's work as a whole, never translated into English. vyacheslav ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky, tr. Norman Cameron, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1968. A classic study of Dostoevsky by one of the major Russian symbolist poets.