The Idiot

About the work

Author

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Original title

Идиот (Idiot)

Publication

1868 to 1869, serialized in The Russian Messenger

Genre

Novel

Setting

St. Petersburg and the summer resort of Pavlovsk, from late November to early July, in the 1860s

Narrator

Third person, a chronicler who sometimes admits he does not know everything

Structure

Four parts, 50 chapters (the last is the Conclusion)

Protagonists

Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna

Central Theme

Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, of an old princely family in decline, returns to Russia after more than four years in a sanatorium in Switzerland, where he was treated for a nervous illness similar to epilepsy, and arrives in Petersburg one morning at the end of November, without money, without a post, and without guile. In a single day he enters three houses (those of General Epanchin, of the Ivolgins, and of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova), and in all of them he is called an idiot. In all of them, too, he finds a negotiation in progress: the rich Totsky wants to buy his freedom to marry for seventy-five thousand rubles, Ganya accepts a bride he despises in exchange for her dowry, the merchant Rogozhin raises the bid from eighteen to a hundred thousand, and Myshkin is the only one who puts no price on anything. The book does not ask whether goodness is desirable; it asks whether it survives where everything has a price, whether the compassion of someone who asks for nothing can save someone who considers herself guilty, and what it costs the one who offers it. The prince disarms almost everyone who approaches him and saves no one, and the story ends with him back in the sanatorium, recognizing no one.

The action runs from the end of November to the beginning of July of the following year, between Petersburg and the summer resort of Pavlovsk. Around the prince are Rogozhin, the son of a merchant who inherits more than two million and pursues Nastasya Filippovna; Nastasya, twenty-five years old, an orphan raised by Totsky and then supported by him, who considers herself guilty of what was done to her and therefore flees from those who treat her as innocent; the Epanchin family, with the youngest daughter, Aglaya, whom the prince goes so far as to ask in marriage before everyone; Ganya Ivolgin, a clerk who wants to make his way through money; the young consumptive Hippolyte, who reads aloud his farewell to the world; and General Ivolgin and the clerk Lebedev, who lie, confess, and lie again before a prince who takes them in.

The Thread That Runs Through the Work

The novel does not ask whether Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is good; it asks what goodness without calculation achieves in a world where everything has a price, and it answers through what happens to each person he touches. The First Part puts the price on stage: in twenty-four hours nearly everyone appears with a figure in hand, and the woman everyone bargains over is the only one who knows her own worth, because she fixed it by the contempt she feels for herself (Part One, ch. IV, Part One, ch. XV).

In the middle of this market the prince has no bid. What he has is a habit of looking, that of seeing the suffering in a face before the guilt, which he practiced with Marie in the Swiss village (Part One, ch. VI), and which is the only form of compassion the book shows working in full, among children.

Part Two shows what happens when that compassion meets adults. Rogozhin hears it as superiority (Part Two, ch. III), Burdovsky's group hears it as alms (Part Two, ch. VIII), Hippolyte hears it as an insult (Part Two, ch. X), and the prince names it without circumlocution: he loves Nastasya Filippovna with pity, not with love (Part Two, ch. III).

At the center of the part is the copy of Holbein's Dead Christ, before which, the prince says, someone may lose their faith (Part Two, ch. IV).

Part Three gives this painting to the word of someone who does not believe: in the Explanation, Hippolyte reads in the same dead Christ a nature that grinds up the best it has created (Part Three, ch. VI), and the beauty of the world shows him only the feast from which he is excluded (Part Three, ch. VII). The book does not refute the argument (the shot fails on a technical detail, and the guests laugh), and the only response that suggests itself is the prince's, who recognizes in Hippolyte's fly his own weeping in Switzerland (Part Three, ch. VII).

Part Four settles the account. Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky tells the prince that he never loved either of the two women, and the narrator does not contradict him (Part Four, ch. IX); the prince agrees to marry Nastasya Filippovna because, without him, she would die, and loses Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina at the moment he hesitates before his rival (Part Four, ch. VIII).

On the last night, compassion no longer has any words, only a hand that strokes the murderer's head (Part Four, ch. XI).

The prince's compassion is well received where those who receive it have nothing at stake against it: the children in Switzerland (Part One, ch. VI), the servant in the antechamber (Part One, ch. II). Where there is a price (Ganya, Rogozhin, the two women), it is read as superiority, as alms or as weakness, and the novel leaves two readings standing: that goodness is defeated by the social machine without being disproved, and that it sees everything and chooses no one, as Radomsky accuses.