Paying Attention To The Sky

Holbein's "Deposition of Christ"

Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot in 1867–1869, and today it is considered one of his greatest works, along with Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In The Idiot Dostoevsky hoped to portray the ideal of a “positively beautiful individual,” a man who wishes to sacrifice himself for others. Prince Myshkin is a sort of Russian Christ who represents the values Dostoevsky deemed the highest and most noble: altruism, meekness, kindness, and brotherly love.

As Dostoevsky saw sexual passion as inherently selfish, it is not surprising that Prince Myshkin is a completely asexual character. Though he develops romantic feelings toward Aglaya, he subordinates them to a higher ideal of pity and compassion that he expresses in his relationship with Nastassya Filippovna. Facing the “dark world” of corruption and moral decay that he meets in society, he inevitably perishes.

On the metaphysical-religious level Prince Myshkin and Ippolit Terentyev are the main antagonists. Although Ippolit has no objective reason to hate Myshkin, he senses in him an ideological adversary: “I hate you all, every one of you ! — it’s you, Jesuitical, treacly soul, idiot, philanthropic millionaire; I hate you more than every one and everything in the world! I understood and hated you long ago, when first I heard of you: I hated you with all the hatred of my soul” (335/249). There is extrinsic evidence that Dostoevsky himself saw things in this way. “Ippolit is the main axis of the whole novel,” we read in his notebook (277). Kolya speaks of Ippolit’s “gigantic idea” without defining it. But the fact that Ippolit’s idea is apparently developed further and commented on by Kirillov in The Possessed allows us to identify the “gigantic idea” as the rejection of an absurd life. It is up to Myshkin to refute this idea.

In effect, Ippolit reverses what is known as the argument for the existence of God “from design”: the actual condition of the world is in his experience such that it makes faith in God impossible. The conflict between Myshkin’s faith and Ippolit’s revolt parallels the antinomy [vocab: a contradiction between two statements that seem equally reasonable] of Christ absolute spiritual significance and the particular facts of history, Christ’s promise of immortality and physical death continuing as ever before.

The repeated introduction of the theme of execution and Ippolit’s condition as a man doomed to death before he has started to live leads up to the scene in front of Holbein’s “Deposition of Christ,” a picture that could cause a man to lose his faith, as Myshkin observes. Ippolit, referring to the same picture, utters the ultimate challenge to faith:

The question instinctively arises: if death is so awful and the laws of nature so mighty, how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who vanquished nature in His lifetime, who exclaimed. “Maiden, arise!” and the maiden arose — ”Lazarus, come forth!” and the dead man came forth? Looking at such a, picture, one conceives of nature in the shape of an immense, merciless, dumb beast, or more correctly, much more correctly, speaking, though it sounds strange, in the form of a. huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of that Being. (451/339)

The helplessness of mortal man facing inexorable nature causes Ippolit to draw some practical and hypothetical conclusions. He realizes that he could commit the most heinous crime with guaranteed impunity because his case would assuredly not come to trial: he would die before under the solicitous care of the authorities, who would be anxious to keep him alive for his trial. This conceit presages Ivan Karamazov’s maxim: “If there is no immortality, everything is lawful.” On the practical side, too, Ippolit realizes that every conceivable activity or plan he might consider is made senseless by his impending death.

Furthermore, Ippolit reaches the same conclusion as Kirillov does, with a more elaborate argumentation: choosing the time of his own death by committing suicide is the only way in which he can assert his independence from the dumb power of nature. Like his successor in The Possessed, Ippolit is loath to admit that his suicide will be an act of despair more than an act of revolt. Vladimir Solovyov, in his third “Discourse on Dostoevsky” (1883), made the point that any man who becomes aware of universal evil, as Ippolit does, but is unable to see also universal good — that is, God — is inevitably driven to suicide. Ippolit in fact perceives nature not only as indifferent but also as malevolent, cruel, and mocking. At the same time, he is unaware of any beneficent saving principle.

Like Ivan Karamazov, Ippolit does not explicitly deny the existence of God but resolutely rejects His world: “So be it! I shall die looking straight at the source of power and life; I do not want this life! If I’d had the power not to be born, I would certainly not have accepted existence upon conditions that are such a mockery” (457/344). Yet at the same time Ippolit — again like his successors Kirillov and Ivan Karamazov — loves life and asks why he must be so alienated from it: “What is there for me in this beauty when, every minute, every second I am obliged, forced, to recognize that even the tiny fly, buzzing in the sunlight beside me, has its share in the banquet and the chorus, knows its place, loves it and is happy; and I alone am an outcast” (45 5/ 343). Myshkin, a few pages later, echoes Ippolit’s sentiment (466/352).26 The theme of man’s discord with God’s world is made explicitly anti-Christian as Ippolit sarcastically rejects the Prince’s “Christian arguments, at the happy thought that it is in fact better to die” (455/342).

Ippolit himself suggests an escape from this situation: perhaps man or, rather, man’s conscious mind does not understand the world correctly and human alienation from the cosmos is due to a misunderstanding of some divine truth. It is up to Prince Myshkin to resolve this misunderstanding, although Ippolit has unwittingly found the resolution himself when he quits staring at Meyer’s wall (the wall is a symbol of the cul-desac into which reason takes man even in Notes from Underground) and becomes involved in the fate of another human being, the unfortunate young doctor who gets another chance at life through his efforts.

Myshkin, who is specifically identified as a self-proclaimed Christian believer (423/3 17), presents the alternative to Ippolit’s self-conscious solipsism: personal experience of a reality that transcends individuality. Vladimir So1ovyos who was the first to translate Dostoevsky’s fiction into the language of academic philosophy, said, “Nature, separated from the Divine Spirit, appears to be a dead and senseless mechanism without cause or goal — and on the other hand, God, separated from man and nature, outside His positive revelation, is for us either an empty abstraction or an all consuming indifference.” Dostoevsky set himself the task to realize this “positive revelation” in a fictional character. Prince Myshkin’s role as a symbol of man’s salvation is enhanced by many significant details that make him a Christ figure.

Extrinsic evidence (Dostoevsky’s notebooks and correspondence) suggests that in Prince Myshkin Dostoevsky wanted to create an absolutely beautiful character, though fully aware of the insurmountable difficulty of this task. Mochulsky suggested that Dostoevsky’s artistic tact caused him to halt “before the immensity of this task” and made him reduce the Prince to something closer to ordinary human stature. Rut we know that Dostoevsky never relinquished his plan to write “a book about Jesus Christ.”

An entry to this effect is found in one of his last notebooks. In surveying world literature, Dostoevsky came to the conclusion that Christ was the only character in all literature to answer the definition of an “absolutely beautiful character” and that the closest approximation to it was Don Quixote, a wise madman and ridiculous to boot. Accordingly, Myshkin was made not only a Christ figure but a quixotic figure as well, with Don Quixote a notable and explicit presence in the text. The fact that Myshkin is explicitly presented as a Christ figure makes the observation, appealing in itself, that Myshkin’s story is a version of the Dionysian myth somewhat redundant. The notion that Jesus Christ was yet another hypostasis of “the. suffering god” was around before Nietzsche popularized it.

Prince Myshkin returns to his native Russia from the mountains of Switzerland and returns there at the end of the novel. An innocent idealist, he enters a cruel, greedy, mercenary, decadent, but functioning society that refuses to appreciate his virtues. Kjetsaa has suggested that the ‘Johannine principle of the word made flesh and entering the world was the idea. that guided Dostoevsky in creating this character. Prince Myshkin is of ancient noble lineage but impoverished and a recipient of charity until informed that he has come into a large inheritance, which he claims on his return to Russia.

His physical appearance reminds one of an icon qf a Russian saint, and he has some pronounced monkish traits tie is a virgin at twenty-six, painfully chaste, has a love for medieval manuscripts and calligraphy, even wears a cloak that resembles a monk’s cassock and cowl He has a saint’s humility, an unconditional willingness to forgive any., wrong, and ‘refuses to be provoked to anger. by violence.’ When Ganya slaps his face he responds by saying, “Oh, how ashamed you will be of what you’ve done” (142/99)

Rogozhin calls him “such a sheep,” and he is called an “idiot” by various parties throughout the novel, although he is during the whole action of the novel obviously quite sane. His “terrible power of humility” (an idea of Myshkin’s, echoed by Ippolit) is that of the kenotic3’ Christ of the Eastern church, Christ who has divested Himself of all His glory and may appear in the hypostasis of a humble beggar.

Myshkin has other Christ-like traits. He is pure, in mind and a virgin He is attracted to children (90/57—58) He pities Marie, a “fallen woman,” and meets with the hostility of self-righteous local authorities, the pastor and the schoolmaster. The many blatant biblical echoes in the tale of Marie (the parable of the prodigal son, the washing of feet, the Mary Magdalene theme) enhance Myshkin’s Christ-like image. He seems clairvoyant, though his penetrating understanding of people is psychologically motivated by the genuine interest he takes in people and by his willingness to see things from their viewpoint (for example, 23 8/172 and 469/354). He inwardly relives not only all the terrible suffering that is part of the human condition, but also the evil and murderous passions that cause it. He knows very well how Rogozhin feels. Aglaya at one point says that though he is sometimes “sick in his mind,” he has more wisdom than all other people and that of all the people she knows only her mother has some of that wisdom (471-72/356).

Before the tragic plot comes to a head, Myshkin for a moment considers to escape it all, perhaps to return to Switzerland, but then decides that this would be cowardly and that he will have to enter this world and meet the challenge that it offers him (344/256). This suggests that Myshkin, like Jesus Christ, has a mission

In spite of all his moral qualities, Prince Myshkin is an apparent failure. He returns to the mental asylum he came from without having significantly affected the lives of most people he met. They “go on living as before and have changed but little” (668/508). A notebook entry confirms this but adds, “But wherever he did touch someone, he left an indelible trace everywhere” (242). The Prince may be held responsible for Nastasya Filippovna’s tragic and Aglaya’s disappointing fates.

There are critics who understand the allegoric message of The Idiot to be a negative one. Murray Krieger properly entitled his interpretation “The Curse of Saintliness.” Some other critics have suggested that although Dostoevsky’s original intent was to present a positive alternative to Ippolit’s pessimistic existential philosophy, the integrity of his creative imagination forced him to let Myshkin, Ippolit’s ideological antagonist, fail dismally. These critics do  consider the fact that Jesus Christ was in their terms a failure: people went on living as before and changed but little even after He departed this world. Some of the most beloved saints of the Russian church were not successful prelates but humble martyrs or “fools in Christ.” Myshkin’s response to Ippolit’s challenge has to be found in something other than the plot of the novel.

Edward Wasiolek, in his book Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (1964), put it this way; “The..Prince is a success because for a moment he is able to kindle the faith in others of a truer image of themselves; for a few minutes he is able to quiet, by his own suffering, the rage of insult upon insult.” This moves success from the level of action and good deeds to the level of attitudes of the human soul. Kjetsaa, among others, has pointed out that it is precisely this idea that answers the question as to the novel’s religious message. He suggests that in the context of Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox faith the attitude of a man’s heart, his responsiveness to God’s grace, the degree of his spirituality, rather than his moral accomplishments, are the measure of a Christian’s progress.

In a conversation with Rogozhin in chapter 4 of part 2, Myshkin brings up this topic. He tells of a murderer who begs God for mercy even as he cuts his victim’s throat and of a young mother who crosses herself as she sees the first smile on her baby’s face, then observes that “religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors” (252-53/183-84). Dostoevsky’s works have a pattern of tolerance of sins of commission. His drunks, thieves, frauds, and even murderers are often treated with sympathy. They also have a pattern of stern judgment of sins of omission — that is, a lack of compassion, kindness, and forgiveness.

With his own example and with those that he reports, Prince Myshkin acknowledges the irresoluble antinomy between the Orthodox Christian’s position and that of the unbeliever. Michael Holquist has defined this antinomy in terms of two aspects of time: chronos and /kairos. There is unstoppable, irretrievable, entropic chronos: Nastasya Filippovna cannot retrieve her innocence, Myshkin cannot stop the unfolding catastrophe, Rogozhin cannot escape his fate. Christ died on the cross, a son of man, nor did He stop the course of history..

This is the only kind of time the unbeliever Ippolit knows, time as man’s enemy, time the destroyer and the bringer of death. But there is also kairos: the good time, the right time, the moment of epiphany, the moment when chronos comes to a stop, all of which Ippolit mockingly rejects (425/318). It is here that Myshkin’s epilepsy acquires a symbolic meaning. He is subject to the course of time in a real world (only Christ is beyond time), but during the moment of ecstasy before a fit time does have a stop (258/188). The experience described by Myshkin is real and not to be confused with “abnormal and unreal visions” triggered by opium, hashish, or wine; it is in fact an experience of reality quintessentially compressed.

Early on in the novel, Myshkin expresses his intuitive awareness of a reality other than that of mundane experience: “I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours” (82/51).

Myshkin’s function on the religious-metaphysical level of the novel is “not to alter the course of the action but to disseminate the aura of a new state of being.” This “state of being” is one of communion and unity with the all, with God, and hence with nature and humanity. Somewhat surprisingly the explicit statement to this effect is made by Ippolit and not by Prince Myshkin: “In scattering the seed, scattering your ‘charity,’ your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another… All your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form” (447/336).

This “state of being” means overcoming the separation from God, nature, and humanity that comes in the wake of human individuation and surrender to hostile chronos. This victory over human alienation is easier for the Orthodox Christian, since Orthodox Christianity, taking a less extreme view of the effect of original sin than the Western church, perceives man as inherently divine as well as earthly, while Western Christendom stresses man’s sinful earthly nature. To Dostoevsky, at Orthodox Christian, moments in which man’s divine nature allows him to commune with God and His cosmos are a part of reality

Ippolit, an unbeliever and a self-centered, alienated individual looking for the absolute but finds none because he looks for it for and within himself. Myshkin, a believer, gratefully accepts what God, nature, and men bring him because he has overcome his sense of separateness. At one point Prince S. suggests that Myshkin believes in finding paradise on earth (380/ 282). However, in several passages in the novel we learn that Myshkin at one time suffered precisely from a sense of separateness and alienation: “What affected me most was that everything was strange [chuzhoe, which is perhaps better translated by “alien”]; I realized that. I was crushed by the strangeness of it. I was finally roused from this gloomy state, I remember, one evening on reaching Switzerland at Bâle, and I was roused by the bray of an ass in the marketplace” (78-79/ 48).

Later in the novel, Myshkin remembers how he had “stretched out his hand to that bright, infinite blue, and had shed tears” because “he was utterly outside all this” (466/351). However, Myshkin’s alienation is different from Ippolit’s. It is not alienation through individuation, the inevitable result of human free will and a condition that follows the fall from grace, but rather the pristine condition of a soul that is awakening to a consciousness of self, of its freedom, and of God.

The allegoric role of Nastasya Filippovna is announced early in the novel. As Myshkin is left alone with her photograph, he raises it to his lips and kisses it (104/68). Adelaida, on seeing it, says: “With beauty like that one might turn the world upside down” (105/69). Nastasya Fi1ippovna is no ordinary beauty. (Adelaida, it must be noted, is herself an exceptionally handsome woman.) Nastasya Filippovna’s is a beauty illuminated by an aura of the ideal. Mochulsky, who on the empirical plane describes Nastasya Filippovna as a “proud beauty” and “wronged heart,” projects her on the metaphysical plane as “a symbol of beauty,” seduced and degraded by “the prince of this world.”

Myshkin immediately recognizes in her divine Psyche, an emanation of the world soul. In a somewhat less fanciful way, one may see Nastasya Filippovna as a symbol of pure beauty cast into a world that is incapable of appreciating beauty. Totsky, Ganya, Epanchin, and Rogozhin, each in his own way, futilely seek to possess her. Totsky, who fancies himself an aesthete, is really a common lecher, who reduces the radiant beauty of an innocent maiden to the glamor of a demimondaine.

Rogozhin, obsessed with the urge to possess her, does not realize that he is pursuing beauty, an ideal entity, which must inevitably elude his violent carnal passion. Nastasya Filippovna tells him that his passion for her is no different from his father’s obsession with the accumulation of money, also a futile pursuit of a forever elusive goal. Rogozhin, wiser than his father, kills her. Only Myshkin can perceive the ideal of pure beauty in her. Myshkin, who says that “beauty will save the world,” cannot save Nastasya Filippovna. The very context (423/317) suggests that he was wrong. This agrees with the message of The Brothers Karamazov, where Dimitry Karamazov, a believer in the power of beauty, learns that it is not beauty that saves the world, but faith.

Nastasya Filippovna’s beauty suffers the same fate as Prince Myshkin’s saintliness. In mundane, temporal terms, it does not save anyone. It does turn the world upside down, and it causes Nastasya Filippovna and all the men around her nothing but grief. But as a vision, as the symbo1of an ideal, it is an immediate revelation of the divine. Again, this makes more sense in an Orthodox Christian context than it does in a secular context.

The Orthodox belief that ideally the human face has retained the divine features of God’s face, a belief on which the worship of icons is based, makes Prince Myshkin’s reaction to Nastasya Filippovna’s portrait more understandable.

The irresoluble contradiction between two opposing principles is underlined by recurrent bursts of strident dissonance, scandal, and violence that disturb the otherwise placid world of middle-class St. Petersburg. Prince Myshkin’s appearance coincides with an eruption of disorder, discord, and ultimately misery and death in the world he has entered. This is allegorically significant. The temporal world to which Christ descended was one of discord and violence. The disharmonious world of The Idiot falls in line with the orientation of modern religious novels by Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Heinrich Boll, Anthony Burgess, and others.

The conjuring of scandals is one of Dostoevsky’s great specialties, and The Idiot features a long line of them. The Prince is a party to a series of scandalous scenes. Varya spits in her brother’s face, who tries to attack her, is stopped by the Prince, and slaps the Prince’s face (142/99). Rogozhin’s drunken crowd crashes the genteel gathering at Nastasya Filippovna’s, and a climactic scandalous scene ensues (184/131-32). Nastasya Filippovna disrupts a gathering that has already seen much unpleasantness by announcing that Rogozhin has bought up Evgeny Pavlovich’s IOUs (337/251). A bit later there comes the horsewhipping scene (391/291).

The scene between Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna ends in another scandal. Finally, Nastasya Filippovna runs away from her wedding. Myshkin is unable to prevent any of these scandals. Yet his reaction is in each case that of a Christian, not to say that of a Christ figure. The allegoric message of this is that religious feeling “has nothing to do with crimes and misdemeanors” or, more specifically, that the essence of religion does not lie in the successful prevention or curtailment of scandalous behavior, impropriety, violence, or crime but in a willingness to meet these acts with forebearance, kindness, and courage.

The same applies to a series of executions that appear in the text in one form or another throughout the novel. They are another symbol of the jarring dissonance between the principles of chronos and kairos. Myshkin brings up this theme twice at the very outset of the novel and immediately establishes the cruel paradox it entails:

The uncertainty and feeling of aversion for that new thing which would be and was just coming was awful. But he said that nothing was so dreadful at that time as the continual thought, “What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life — what eternity! And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!” He said that this idea turned to such a fury at last that he longed to be shot quickly. (83-84/52)

The point of this is, of course, that the condemned man will, if his life will be indeed spared, go back on his promise to live a life beyond the tyranny of chronos. He will not “turn every minute into an age” but will waste it, as most men do most of the time.

Subsequently several further executions are brought up. The Countess Du Barry pleads with her executioner for another moment of life (227/164). The boyar [vocab: A member of a class of higher Russian nobility that until the time of Peter I headed the civil and military administration of the country] Stephan Glebov, impaled under Peter the Great, Chancellor Osterman, who went through a mock execution (571-72/432-33), and finally Thomas More (580/440) are brought up to illustrate the idea that in earlier days men were “of one idea” and therefore capable of making death a meaningful part of their existence, while “modern men are broader-minded — and I swear that this prevents their being so all-of-a-piece as they were in those days” (572/433).

We also hear that the Prince is “collecting facts relating to capital punishment” (426/319). There is also the description of Holbein’s “Deposition of Christ,” Ippotit’s “Essential Explanation,” and the death of Nastasya Filippovna under Rogozhin’s knife. In all of these instances Prince Myshkin is more than a passive observer. Rather, he vicariously experiences each death as though it were his own, each execution as though he were the victim — and the executioner. This powerful assertion of dissonance, discord, and death is deeply meaningful, because it does not disturb the Prince faith or his serene acceptance of the world as it is.