Dostoevsky (125 page)

The thematic motif of religious faith is also what saves the episodes involving Myshkin’s encounter with the group of so-called Young Nihilists from becoming merely an acrid satire against the radicals of the mid-1860s. Dostoevsky wisely focuses the spotlight on the dying young consumptive Ippolit Terentyev, who detaches himself from the group to rise to major heights and become the first in the remarkable gallery of metaphysical rebels that Dostoevsky created. For Ippolit is revolting not against the iniquities of a social order but, anticipating Kirillov in
Demons
and Ivan Karamazov, against a world in which death, and hence immitigable human suffering, is an inescapable reality. Ippolit is another quasi-double
for Myshkin—one who shares his obsession with death and his ecstatic sense of life, yet lacks the Prince’s sustaining religious faith in an ultimate world-harmony. For this reason, Ippolit cannot achieve the self-transcendence that is the secret of the prince’s moral effulgence and the response he evokes in others.

Ippolit’s semihysterical “Necessary Explanation” is composed to contain all the main features of Myshkin’s
Weltanschauung
—the reverence for the infinite beauty and value of life—but combined with an
opposite
human attitude. His preoccupation with death does not lessen but strengthens his self-concern, and turns it into a pathetic megalomania, as can be seen from the touchingly incongruous epigraph, “
après moi le deluge
!” that he appends to his “Necessary Explanation” (8: 321). Instinctively, Ippolit’s feelings are on the side of the victims of social injustice; and when he is carried on the current of such benevolent feelings, he admits “that I forgot my death sentence, or rather did not come to think of it and even did work” (8: 328). Only such concern with others can ease the tragedy of Ippolit’s last days, but he finally abandons all such endeavors to brood over his own condition. Death, the universal portion, he comes to regard as a personal insult and “humiliation” aimed at him by “nature,” or rather by the creator of a world that requires the individual’s consent to the indignity and injustice of being destroyed.

The thematic contrast between Ippolit and the Prince is brought out most forcefully in their differing reactions to the key religious symbol of the book, Holbein’s
Dead Christ
. Holbein’s picture, as we have seen, had led Myshkin to affirm the irrational “essence of religious feeling” as an ineradicable component of the human spirit; but for the Young Nihilist, it is only a confirmation of his own sense of the cruel meaninglessness of life. To Ippolit, the picture conveys a sense of nature “in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction,” which “has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all of nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the advent of that Being” (8: 339). Ippolit simply cannot grasp how the first disciples of Christ, who witnessed in reality what he sees only at the remove of art, could still have continued to believe in the triumph over death that Christ proclaimed, but this is precisely the mystery of faith to which Ippolit is closed, and whose absence poisons his last days with bitterness and despair.

Ippolit, like the other characters, instinctively regards the Prince as the standard for his own conscience. The Prince’s “humility,” however, is the ideological antithesis of Ippolit’s “revolt,” and it is Myshkin who must bear the brunt of the Young Nihilist’s vituperative shifts of feeling. “Can’t I simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me?” Ippolit asks caustically, in rejecting the Prince’s “Christian meekness” (8: 343). This question comes from such a depth of suffering in Ippolit that no offense on his part can lessen his right to an
absolute claim on the indulgence of the other characters. The Prince understands that, for Ippolit, the untroubled possession of life by others is a supreme injustice, which should burden them with guilt and a sense of moral obligation.

Hence the Prince’s moving reply to Ippolit’s question on how best to die: “Pass by us and forgive us our happiness,” says Myshkin in a low voice (8: 433). Hence, too, the macabre quality of gallows humor in several of the scenes with Ippolit, the grating callousness that some of the characters display toward his plight. No pages of Dostoevsky are more original than those in which he tries to combine the utmost sympathy for Ippolit with a pitiless portrayal of what may be called “the egoism of dying.” Dostoevsky wishes to show how the egocentricity that inspired Ippolit’s “revolt” also impels him to a behavior that cuts off the very sympathy and love he so desperately craves. By turns pathetic and febrilely malignant, the unfortunate boy dies offstage, unconsoled and inconsolable, “in a state of terrible agitation” (8: 508).

In addition to Ippolit,
The Idiot
is filled with all sorts of minor characters related to the main plot lines only by the most tenuous of threads. But it is not too difficult to see the thematic rationale of most of these episodes even if, structurally, they come and go with very little motivation. Many of them have the function of the comic interludes in medieval mystery plays, which parody the holy events with reverent humor and illustrate the universality of their influence. Others serve to bring out facets of the prince that Dostoevsky was unable to develop from the central romantic intrigue.

Lebedyev, General Ivolgin, and the “boxer” Keller make up a group with common characteristics—a group that affirms, sometimes in a grotesquely comic form, that the inner moral struggle precipitated by the Prince in the major figures also can be found among the smaller fry. To be sure, Dostoevsky abandons all attempts to maintain any psychological verisimilitude in the case of Lebedyev and Keller; their mechanical shuttling between devotion to the Prince and petty swindling and skullduggery sometimes reaches the point of self-parody. This is particularly true of Lebedyev, transformed from the randy scrounger of
Part I
into the compassionate figure who shares Myshkin’s horror of capital punishment ands prays for the soul of the guillotined Mme Du Barry.

Without ceasing to be an unscrupulous scoundrel, ready to sell his soul for a ruble, Lebedyev also piously interprets the Apocalypse and rails against the “materialism” of the modern world in drunken tirades. His long mock-serious historical “anecdote” on the famines of the Middle Ages is manifestly a burlesque exemplum of the significance of his character and that of others like him. Similar to the starving medieval “cannibal”—who devoured sixty fat juicy monks in the course of his life and then, despite the prospect of the most horrible tortures, voluntarily confessed his crimes—the behavior of Lebedyev and his ilk testifies to the miraculous existence of conscience in the most unlikely places.

Another exemplum is the broken-down Falstaffian General Ivolgin, whom Dostoevsky uses very effectively in
Part I
to parody the “decorum” surrounding Nastasya’s life, and whose colossal mythomania is a protection against the sordid reality of his moral and social decline. The general dies of a stroke brought on by his torments over having stolen Lebedyev’s wallet, torments caused not so much by the theft itself—he returned the wallet untouched—but by the fear that he would henceforth be regarded as a thief in his own family. The completely fictitious narrative of how, as a young boy, the general served as a page to Napoleon and used his influence to motivate the French retreat from Moscow in 1812 is an irresistible example of Dostoevsky’s too little used talent for high-flying comic extravagance.

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:

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.”