Dostoevsky (124 page)

Max Scheler, in his admirable book,
The Nature and Form of Sympathy
, distinguishes what he calls “vicarious fellow feeling,” which involves experiencing an understanding and sympathy for the feelings of others without being overcome
by them emotively, from a total coalescence leading to the loss of identity and personality.
²
The underlying movement of
The Idiot
may be provisionally defined as the Prince’s passage from the first kind of fellow feeling to the second, but in
Part I
there are no indications of such a loss of identity. Rather, all the emphasis is placed on the Prince’s instinctive and undifferentiated capacity for completely lucid vicarious fellow feeling even under great stress. As an example, we may take the scene where the Prince intervenes in the bitter altercation between Ganya Ivolgin and his sister, and himself receives the blow intended for the young woman. His response is to hide his face in his hands, turn to the wall, and say to Ganya in a breaking voice, “Oh, how ashamed you will be of what you’ve done” (8: 99).

This quality of the Prince’s character is not motivated psychologically in any way, but, in a suggestively symbolic fashion, it is linked with certain leitmotifs. On the one hand, the Prince is much possessed by the prospect of death: twice in these early pages he speaks of an execution he has recently witnessed, and he also recounts vividly the feelings and thoughts of a man first condemned to death by a firing squad and then unexpectedly reprieved. A third description stresses the immense value assumed by each moment of existence as the end approaches. Despite the obsessiveness of the death motif in these early pages, the Prince also admits to having been “happy” in the years just preceding his arrival in St. Petersburg, and the relations between these two motifs provides the deepest substratum of his values. The Prince’s “happiness,” we learn, began with his recovery from a state of epileptic stupor. A sudden shock of awareness woke him to the existence of the world in the form of something as humble and workaday as a donkey. The donkey, of course, has obvious Gospel overtones, which blend with the Prince’s innocence and naïveté, and this patiently laborious animal also emphasizes, in accord with Christian kenoticism,
³
the absence of hierarchy in the Prince’s ecstatic apprehension of the wonder of life. The same contrast is
introduced by the Prince’s remark that, in the early stages of his recovery, he had been consumed by restlessness and had thought to find “the key to the mystery of life” in his transcendent yearning to reach “that line where sky and earth meet”; but then, he adds, “I fancied that one might find a wealth of life even in prison” (8: 51).

Myshkin imaginatively reexperiences the universal and ineluctable tragedy of death with the full range of his conscious sensibilities, but this does not prevent him, at the same time, from marveling in ecstasy before the joy and wonder of existence. Indeed, the dialectic of this unity is the point of the story about the man reprieved from execution—the story that embodies the most decisive event in Dostoevsky’s own life. Most dreadful of all in those last moments, Myshkin says, was the regret of the poor victim over a wasted life and his frantic desire to be given another chance. “What if I were not to die? . . . I would turn every minute into an age; . . . I would not waste one!” But on being asked what happened to this man after his reprieve, Myshkin ruefully admits that his frenzied resolution was not carried out in practice:

Here is the point at which Myshkin’s love of life fuses with his death-haunted imagination into the singular unity of his character. For Myshkin feels the miracle and wonder of life so strongly precisely because he lives “counting each moment” as if it were the last. Both his joyous discovery of life and his profound intuition of death combine to make him feel each moment as one of absolute and immeasurable ethical choice and responsibility. The Prince, in other words, lives in the eschatological tension that was (and is) the soul of the primitive Christian ethic, whose doctrine of totally selfless
agape
was conceived in the same perspective of the imminent end of time.
⁴

There is a constant play of allusion around the Prince that places him in such a Christian context. Rogozhin, the merchant’s son still close to the religious roots of Russian life, labels him a
yurodivy
, a holy fool, and though the gentlemanly and well-educated prince bears no external resemblance to these eccentric figures, he does possess their traditional gift of spiritual insight, which operates instinctively, below any level of conscious awareness or doctrinal commitment.
The idyllic New Testament note is struck strongly in the Prince’s story of the poor, abused, consumptive Swiss peasant girl Marie, who had been reviled as a fallen woman and whose last days the Prince and his band of children brighten with the light of an all-forgiving love. In this way the figure of the Prince is surrounded with a pervasive Christian penumbra that continually illuminates his character and serves to locate the exalted nature of his moral and spiritual aspirations.

The story concerning Marie also brings sharply to the foreground another leitmotif, one that may be called the “two loves”—the one Christian, compassionate, nonpossessive, and universal, the other secular, ego-gratifying, possessive, and particular. Alexandra Epanchina’s suggestion that the Prince must have been “in love” prompts him to tell the story of Marie. But while the young woman was referring to the second kind of normal, worldly love, the Prince’s “love,” as he explains, was only of the first type. Even the children clustered around the Prince were confused by this difference and happily believed that the Prince was “in love” with Marie when they saw him kissing her. But “I kissed her,” he explains, “not because I was in love with her but because I was sorry for her” (8: 60). The confusion of the children (and Myshkin is also a good bit of a child) will anticipate his own entrapment in the “two loves,” whose mutually incompatible feelings and obligations will later result in the Prince’s disastrous inability to choose between Nastasya and Aglaya.

The world into which the Prince is plunged upon his unexpected arrival in St. Petersburg is locked in the grip of conflicting egoisms, a world in which the desire for wealth and social advantage, for sexual satisfaction, for power over others, dominates and sweeps away all other humane feelings. All these motives are given full play in the intrigue, which in
Part I
revolves around the drama of Nastasya Filippovna (who, in retrospect, will survive as Dostoevsky’s major female protagonist) and her fatal entanglement with Prince Myshkin.

Her appearance has been preceded by a narrative of her past as a destitute but aristocratic orphan, sequestered and violated at sixteen and kept in sexual bondage by Totsky. In contrast to the conventional literary type of the betrayed, fallen, but ultimately redeemable woman—like the heroine of
La dame aux camelias
, a novel by Dumas the Younger that Totsky naturally admired—Nastasya is cast by Dostoevsky as degraded in the eyes of society but blamelessly pure, not unlike Clarissa Harlowe. At age twenty she descends on Petersburg as a self-avenger, determined to assert herself against the terrorized Totsky’s self-protective scheme to pawn her off with a dowry on the greedy Ganya Ivolgin. This would clear the way for Totsky’s own marriage to one of the two older
Epanchin daughters. Facing the insurmountable contradiction of inner purity and her outward disgrace, Nastasya Filippovna as a character is irremediably doomed, and she will function to bring down “her savior,” the Prince, in her own tragic end. Prince Myshkin first hears her name in the opening train scene. He is immediately spellbound by her haunting portrait displayed at the Ivolgins, which he kisses surreptitiously, and finally meets her (as does the reader) there.

Nastasya’s fate is presumably to be sealed in the tumultuous birthday-party scene at her dwelling that climaxes
Part I
. At that time, she is supposedly to decide whether or not to marry Ganya, although her previous behavior makes it highly unlikely that she would be ready to accept Totsky’s scheme. On the contrary, after indirectly exposing the ridicule and venality of her assembled guests, Nastasya is finally given full voice to evoke her past subjection and forced debauchery (quite graphic for its time, but with enough suspension points to gratify the censors) as well as her suicidal urges. Nastasya seemingly turns to the Prince to decide the question of
her
marriage to Ganya because, as she says, the Prince “believed in me at first sight and I in him” (8: 131). But when the tenderhearted smitten Prince proclaims his belief in her purity and offers her his hand in marriage, and a fortune, she rejects him as well, refusing to emulate Totsky as a violator of “innocence,” and a “a cradle-snatcher,” even though Myshkin is the miraculous realization of her hopeless adolescent dreams. Through her own rejection of Myshkin, she has now internalized her outward stigmata of shame and repeatedly claims a streetwalker-slut identity as she runs off with the passionate Rogozhin to certain self-destruction, after defiantly throwing the purchase money (wrapped in the
Stock Exchange News
) into the fire. The satisfaction of humiliating and thus of symbolically debasing Totsky and all her respectable “admirers” at the same time proves stronger than the Prince’s appeal to her need for disinterested compassion and his recognition of her essential purity.

Although no longer an active protagonist, her half-demented, shadowy persona haunts and indirectly sets in motion all the subsequent peripeties of the plot, from Myshkin’s following her to Pavlovsk to the pantomime reenactment of the aborted wedding. Finally, there is the suicidal flight with Rogozhin. A mysterious coda to her tragic destiny is provided by Myshkin’s finding a copy of
Madame Bovary
in her abandoned rooms, the tale of another hopeless suicide but in this case of an adulteress betrayed by Romantic fantasies.

From the beginning of
Part II
, the Prince is cast in a tragic (or at least self-sacrificial) role; and the inner logic of his character now requires that the absolute of Christian love should conflict irreconcilably with the inescapable demands of normal human life. This altered projection of the Prince also leads to
the introduction of a new thematic motif, which first appears in the strange dialogue between Myshkin and Rogozhin about religious faith. Somewhat improbably, a copy of Holbein’s
Dead Christ
turns up in Rogozhin’s living room, and, with no transition whatever, the erstwhile drunken rowdy of
Part I
is shown as tormented not only by Nastasya but also by a crisis of religious doubt. We learn here that “a painting of our Savior who had just been taken from the Cross” has begun to undermine Rogozhin’s religious faith, and Myshkin attempts to allay Rogozhin’s disquietude in a lengthy and crucial speech.

This speech consists of four anecdotes, grouped in pairs, that illustrate that the human need for faith and for the moral values of conscience based on faith transcend both the plane of rational reflection and that of empirical evidence. On the one hand, there is the learned atheist whose arguments Myshkin cannot refute; on the other, there is the murderer who utters a prayer for forgiveness before slitting his victim’s throat. The point of these stories is to exhibit religious faith and moral conscience existing as an ineradicable attribute in the Russian people independent of reason, or even of any sort of conventional social morality. “The essence of religious feeling,” Myshkin explains, “does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors. . . . But the chief thing is that you will notice it more clearly and quickly in the Russian heart than anywhere else” (8: 184).

This thematic motif is of key importance for understanding the remainder of the book. For in depicting religious faith and the stirrings of conscience as the irrational and instinctive needs of “the Russian heart,” whose existence shines forth in the midst of everything that seems to deny or negate its presence, Dostoevsky is surely indicating the proper interpretation of Myshkin’s ultimate failure and tragic collapse. The values of Christian love and religious faith that Myshkin embodies are too deep a necessity of the Russian spirit to be negated by his practical failure, any more than they are negated by reason, murder, or sacrilege. If Holbein’s picture and Myshkin’s tirade are introduced so awkwardly and abruptly at this point, it is probably because Dostoevsky wished immediately to establish the framework within which the catastrophic destiny awaiting the prince would be rightly understood.