Who He Is
Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is, together with the general's wife Epanchina, the last of the old and decayed princely line of the Myshkins (ch. II of Part One), orphaned from childhood, raised in the country by his benefactor Pavlishchev for the sake of his health and sent to Switzerland to treat a nervous illness, a kind of epilepsy, which the fits of his childhood had left almost an idiot (ch. III of Part One). He returns to Petersburg after more than four years in Doctor Schneider's sanatorium, penniless, with a small bundle and a cloak unsuited to the Russian winter (ch. I of Part One), and at the end of the first day he receives news of an inheritance of a million and a half (ch. XVI of Part One). The novel revolves around him: he arrives, enters every house, is called an idiot in all of them, and in the last chapter returns to the sanatorium he left (ch. XII of Part Four). The trait that defines him from the first scene is reading faces and saying what he reads, without calculation and without fear of the effect.
Trajectory
In ch. I of Part One, in the third-class carriage of the Warsaw train, the narrator introduces him through his gaze before naming the illness:
Глаза его были большие, голубые и пристальные; во взгляде их было что-то тихое, но тяжелое, что-то полное того странного выражения, по которому некоторые угадывают с первого взгляда в субъекте падучую болезнь, his eyes were large, blue and fixed; there was something quiet but heavy in his gaze, something full of that strange expression by which some guess at first sight the falling sickness in a person.
His seatmate, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, tells him of his passion for Nastasya Filippovna, and the prince answers the story with a disarming frankness:
Потому, я вам скажу откровенно, вы мне сами очень понравились и особенно, когда про подвески бриллиантовые рассказывали. Даже и прежде подвесок понравились, хотя у вас и сумрачное лицо, because, I'll tell you frankly, you yourself pleased me very much, especially when you were telling about the diamond earrings. You pleased me even before the earrings, although you have a gloomy face.
When he says that because of his illness he has never known a woman, Rogozhin classifies him with the word of popular piety that will follow the prince from then on:
Ну, коли так [...] совсем ты, князь, выходишь юродивый, и таких как ты бог любит!, well, if that is so [...] you, Prince, turn out to be a complete holy fool, and God loves people like you!
In ch. II of Part One, in General Epanchin's anteroom, he talks with the servant about the guillotine he saw in Lyon and shifts the horror of the execution from the body to the certainty:
А ведь главная, самая сильная боль, может, не в ранах, а вот, что вот знаешь наверно, что вот через час, потом через десять минут, потом через полминуты, потом теперь, вот сейчас — душа из тела вылетит, и что человеком уж больше не будешь, и что это уж наверно; главное то, что наверно., but the main, the strongest pain, perhaps is not in the wounds but in this: in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this very moment, the soul will fly out of the body, and that you will no longer be a man, and that this is certain; the main thing is that it is certain.
In ch. III of Part One, before the general, he offers the only thing he possesses, time, and names himself without shame:
Частые припадки его болезни сделали из него совсем почти идиота (князь так и сказал: идиота), the frequent fits of his illness had made of him almost a complete idiot (the prince said exactly that: idiot).
In the same chapter he sees the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova and reads in it, all at once, the suffering, the pride and the doubt about her kindness:
Удивительное лицо! [...] Лицо веселое, а она ведь ужасно страдала, а? [...] Это гордое лицо, ужасно гордое, и вот не знаю, добра ли она? Ах, кабы добра! Все было бы спасено!, an astonishing face! [...] The face is cheerful, and yet she suffered terribly, didn't she? [...] It is a proud face, terribly proud, and yet I do not know whether she is good. Ah, if only she were good! Everything would be saved!
Minutes later, asked about Rogozhin, he makes the prediction that the book fulfills at the end:
Да что же, жениться, я думаю, и завтра же можно; женился бы, а чрез неделю, пожалуй, и зарезал бы ее, well, marry, I think he could do it even tomorrow; he would marry her, and a week later, who knows, he would stab her to death.
In ch. V of Part One he tells the Epanchin ladies about the man pardoned in front of the firing squad, and in ch. VI of Part One the story of Marie, the girl from the Swiss village whom he kissed out of pity and whom the children, persuaded by him, came to love; the outcome is what he tells next:
Через них, уверяю вас, она умерла почти счастливая. Через них она забыла свою черную беду, как бы прощение от них приняла, потому что до самого конца считала себя великою преступницей, thanks to them, I assure you, she died almost happy. Thanks to them she forgot her black misfortune, as if she had received forgiveness from them, because to the very end she considered herself a great criminal.
In the same chapter he confesses to the women he has just met the thought with which he protects himself:
Меня тоже за идиота считают все почему-то, я действительно был так болен когда-то, что тогда и похож был на идиота; но какой же я идиот теперь, когда я сам понимаю, что меня считают за идиота? Я вхожу и думаю: «Вот меня считают за идиота, а я всё-таки умный, а они и не догадываются…», everyone takes me for an idiot too, for some reason; in fact I was once so ill that back then I did look like an idiot; but what kind of idiot am I now, when I myself understand that they take me for one? I walk in and think: here they take me for an idiot, and yet I am clever, and they haven't the faintest idea...
In ch. VII of Part One he refuses to judge the face of Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina (beauty, he says, is an enigma), goes back alone to Nastasya's portrait, kisses it while looking around him, and serves as the messenger of Ganya's note. In ch. X of Part One, in the Ivolgins' house, he holds the arm of Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin raised against his sister, takes the slap in her place, and turns to the wall:
О, как вы будете стыдиться своего поступка!, oh, how ashamed you will be of what you have done!
In ch. XI of Part One, when Ganya comes to ask forgiveness, the prince corrects his morning judgment and adds the most honest verdict, that of an ordinary man, which Ganya hears as the worst offense of the day. At the party in ch. XIV of Part One, Nastasya hands him the decision about her own marriage to Ganya, and he answers with an effort:
За… за кого? [...] Н-нет… не выходите!, For... for whom? [...] N-no... do not marry!
In ch. XV of Part One, when Ferdyshchenko jokes that only the prince would take her without a thing, he asks her to marry him and grounds her purity in her suffering:
Я ничто, а вы страдали и из такого ада чистая вышли, а это много., I am nothing, and you suffered and came out pure from such a hell, and that is a great deal.
Я вас… Настасья Филипповна… люблю. Я умру за вас, Настасья Филипповна. Я никому не позволю про вас слова сказать, Настасья Филипповна… Если мы будем бедны, я работать буду, Настасья Филипповна…, I... Nastasya Filippovna... I love you. I will die for you, Nastasya Filippovna. I will not allow anyone to say a word about you, Nastasya Filippovna... If we are poor, I will work, Nastasya Filippovna...
In ch. XVI of Part One the inheritance arrives, she refuses so as not to ruin him, and she leaves with Rogozhin, and he takes a carriage after the troikas.
In ch. I of Part Two he spends six months in Moscow, where he pays even the creditors without documents of the dead merchant, and writes Aglaya a note signed as a brother:
Вы мне нужны, очень нужны. Мне нечего писать вам о себе, нечего рассказывать. Я и не хотел того; мне ужасно бы желалось, чтобы вы были счастливы. Счастливы ли вы? Вот это только я и хотел вам сказать, You are necessary to me, very necessary. I have nothing to write you about myself, nothing to tell. I did not want that either; I terribly wished that you would be happy. Are you happy? That is all I wanted to tell you.
In ch. III of Part Two he visits Rogozhin at the house on Gorokhovaya Street and defines what he feels for Nastasya with the word that his rival cannot stand:
я ее «не любовью люблю, а жалостью», I love her not with love, but with pity.
In ch. IV of Part Two, before the copy of Hans Holbein's dead Christ that Rogozhin keeps above a door, he says almost in jest that the painting can make someone lose his faith, and he answers Rogozhin's question about God not with an argument but with four encounters of the week, the last being that of a peasant woman who crosses herself at her son's first smile:
сущность религиозного чувства ни под какие рассуждения, ни под какие проступки и преступления и ни под какие атеизмы не подходит; тут что-то не то, и вечно будет не то, the essence of the religious feeling does not fit any reasoning, any offense or crime, any atheism; there is something here that is not that, and forever will not be that.
In the same chapter he exchanges his tin cross for Rogozhin's gold one and is blessed by his mother. In ch. V of Part Two, after a day wandering through Petersburg with the knife from the shop window in his head, he accuses himself of baseness for suspecting his brother by the cross and arrives at the maxim the whole book puts to the test:
Сострадание есть главнейший и, может быть, единственный закон бытия всего человечества, Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of the existence of all mankind.
Hours later, on the hotel staircase, he meets Rogozhin's eyes and raised hand:
Парфен, не верю!, Parfen, I don't believe it!
The epileptic fit that begins with this cry is what saves him. In ch. VIII of Part Two, before Burdovsky's group, which demands Pavlishchev's money as a right, he offers ten thousand rubles in public and judges himself at once:
Да, я идиот, истинный идиот!, Yes, I am an idiot, a true idiot!
In ch. XI of Part Two he recognizes in Keller, who confesses to having wept to extract money, his own double thoughts, and in ch. XII of Part Two he explains to Yelizaveta Prokofyevna why he continues to trust Ganya, who deceives him:
Я хорошо знаю, что он меня иногда обманывает, [...] и он знает, что я это знаю, I know very well that he sometimes deceives me, [...] and he knows that I know it.
In ch. I of Part Three, at the Epanchins' table, he separates the murderer who knows he has erred from the one who thinks himself entitled to kill. In ch. III of Part Three, on the park bench, he shares with Rogozhin the guilt of the knife:
Мы тогда в одно слово почувствовали. Не подыми ты руку тогда на меня (которую бог отвел), чем бы я теперь пред тобой оказался? Ведь я ж тебя всё равно в этом подозревал, один наш грех, в одно слово!, That day we felt the same thing, in one word. If you had not raised your hand against me then (the hand that God turned aside), what would I be now before you? For I too suspected you of it, one sin, ours, in one word!
In ch. VII of Part Three, after the shot without a cap of Hippolyte Terentyev, he recognizes in the fly of the Explanation his own weeping in the mountains of Switzerland:
один он ничего не знает, ничего не понимает, ни людей, ни звуков, всему чужой и выкидыш, he alone knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a miscarriage.
In ch. VIII of Part Three, on the green bench, Aglaya accuses him of having only truth and no tenderness, and he answers the question about Nastasya with the clearest sentence he gives about her:
Что мне только жаль ее, а что я… уже не люблю ее, That I only pity her, and that I... no longer love her.
In ch. X of Part Three, Nastasya kneels in the street and asks whether he is happy; he does not answer her, and minutes later he answers Rogozhin:
Нет, нет, нет! — воскликнул князь с беспредельною скорбью, No, no, no! cried the prince with boundless grief.
In ch. IV of Part Four he hears General Ivolgin's story of being Napoleon's page and, so as not to contradict him, gives the old man the argument he needed; in ch. V of Part Four he tells Aglaya's family that he is asking for her hand in marriage. At the solemn gathering of ch. VII of Part Four, convinced he is among friends, he attacks Catholicism because of Pavlishchev, breaks the Chinese vase that Aglaya had told him to break, and, before the fit, says the happiest sentence in the book:
Знаете, я не понимаю, как можно проходить мимо дерева и не быть счастливым, что видишь его? Говорить с человеком и не быть счастливым, что любишь его! О, я только не умею высказать… а сколько вещей на каждом шагу таких прекрасных, которые даже самый потерявшийся человек находит прекрасными? Посмотрите на ребенка, посмотрите на божию зарю, посмотрите на травку, как она растет, посмотрите в глаза, которые на вас смотрят и вас любят…, You know, I don't understand how one can walk past a tree and not be happy to see it. To speak with a person and not be happy at loving them! Oh, only I don't know how to say it... and how many beautiful things there are at every step, which even the most lost man finds beautiful? Look at a child, look at God's dawn, look at the grass, how it grows, look into the eyes that look at you and love you...
In ch. VIII of Part Four, before the two women who demand that he choose, he turns to Aglaya asking for pity for the other:
Разве это возможно! ведь она… сумасшедшая!, But is that possible? She is... mad!
He stays stroking Nastasya's head as if it were a child's. In ch. IX of Part Four he tells Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky why he is going to marry:
Счастье? О, нет! Я так только просто женюсь; она хочет; да и что в том, что я женюсь: я… Ну, да это всё равно! Только она непременно умерла бы., Happiness? Oh, no! I am simply marrying, that's all; she wants it; and what does it matter that I marry: I... Well, it's all the same! Only she would certainly die.
And in the same dialogue he confesses the secret he did not tell even Aglaya:
я этого никому не говорил, никогда, даже Аглае, но я не могу лица Настасьи Филипповны выносить… [...] я смотрел на ее лицо! Я еще утром, на портрете, не мог его вынести… Вот у Веры, у Лебедевой, совсем другие глаза; я… я боюсь ее лица!, I have never said this to anyone, never, not even to Aglaya, but I cannot bear Nastasya Filippovna's face... [...] I was looking at her face! Already in the morning, in the portrait, I could not bear it... Vera Lebedeva has completely different eyes; I... I am afraid of her face!
In ch. X of Part Four the bride runs off with Rogozhin from the churchyard, and he reads the flight through her state, without thinking of himself. In ch. XI of Part Four he finds the body in the house on Gorokhovaya Street, spends the night lying beside the murderer, and at dawn makes the only gesture left to him:
князь протягивал к нему тогда свою дрожащую руку и тихо дотрогивался до его головы, до его волос, гладил их и гладил его щеки… больше он ничего не мог сделать!, the prince then stretched out to him his trembling hand and lightly touched his head, his hair, stroking it and stroking his cheeks... he could do nothing more!
When they break down the door, he no longer recognizes anyone, and the book closes his story with the word of the title:
И если бы сам Шнейдер явился теперь из Швейцарии взглянуть на своего бывшего ученика и пациента, то и он, припомнив то состояние, в котором бывал иногда князь в первый год лечения своего в Швейцарии, махнул бы теперь рукой и сказал бы, как тогда: «Идиот!», And if Schneider himself were to come now from Switzerland to see his former pupil and patient, he too, recalling the state the prince sometimes fell into in the first year of his treatment in Switzerland, would wave his hand in dismay and say, as he did then: "Idiot!"
In ch. XII of Part Four, through Radomsky's efforts, he returns to Schneider's sanatorium, where the Epanchin family visits him and he does not recognize her.
Themes Embodied
The prince is compassion put to the test from beginning to end, and the book does not let it stay abstract: it has a method, reading suffering in the face before guilt, which he applies to Marie (ch. VI of Part One), to Nastasya's portrait (ch. III of Part One), to Ganya after the slap (ch. XI of Part One) and to the lying general (ch. XII of Part One). That is why he is at once what disarms (Nastasya says that for the first time she saw a human being, in ch. XVI of Part One) and what humiliates (Hippolyte hates him for having foreseen his shame, in ch. X of Part Two; the general breaks with him for not accepting signs of compassion, in ch. IV of Part Four). The theme he carries is that of Compassion and charity, and the novel measures him against Beauty and Madness.
What he does not know is how to want for himself. In the two moments when the book asks him to choose (Nastasya in ch. XIV of Part One, the two women in ch. VIII of Part Four), he answers for the other, for what the other person needs, and never for what he desires; the final marriage is decided by her, because without him she would die (ch. IX of Part Four). The distinction between pity and love that he makes to Rogozhin (ch. III of Part Two) and repeats to Aglaya (ch. VIII of Part Three) is exact about what he feels and blind about what the others receive: for Nastasya, pity is proof that she is looked down upon; for Aglaya, it is proof that he always stays with whoever suffers most.
The illness works both for and against him in the same scene. The light that precedes the fit is the instant in which everything seems to him harmony, and he knows it comes from the illness and cannot deny what he felt:
Если в ту секунду, [...] ему случалось успевать ясно и сознательно сказать себе: «Да, за этот момент можно отдать всю жизнь!», — то, конечно, этот момент сам по себе и стоил всей жизни, if in that second [...] he happened to have time to tell himself, clearly and consciously: Yes, for this moment a whole life could be given! then, of course, that moment alone was worth a whole life.
The fit that saves him from the knife on the staircase (ch. V of Part Two) is the same one that knocks him down before society in ch. VII of Part Four, and the trust that makes him speak in the drawing room is the same that makes him believe in Rogozhin until he sees the blade.
Divergent Readings
The book itself puts the two opposite readings in the mouths of those who observe him, and neither is refuted. Doktorenko, in the Burdovsky affair, voices the doubt that runs through the novel:
Это или уж слишком невинно, или уж слишком ловко, Either this is too innocent, or it is too clever.
Aglaya, on the green bench, defends him by the distinction between two intelligences, the principal and the non-principal:
я вас считаю за самого честного и за самого правдивого человека, всех честнее и правдивее [...] то зато главный ум у вас лучше, чем у них у всех, такой даже, какой им и не снился, потому что есть два ума: главный и неглавный, I consider you the most honest and most truthful man, more honest and truthful than all of them [...] but on the other hand your principal intelligence is better than that of all of them, such as they never dreamed of, because there are two intelligences: the principal and the non-principal.
Radomsky, at the end, gives the verdict of the man of the world, who measures love by the desire to possess:
Аглая Ивановна любила как женщина, как человек, а не как… отвлеченный дух. Знаете ли что, бедный мой князь: вернее всего, что вы ни ту, ни другую никогда не любили!, Aglaya Ivanovna loved as a woman, as a human being, and not as... an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince? It is most likely that you have never loved either one!
One reading sees Myshkin and Rogozhin as a double, the spiritual pole and the material pole of a single soul, who meet on the train and end up embracing over Nastasya's body; and the epileptic crisis on the staircase is read as a window, not only as pathology.
Readings diverge over what counts as failure. Those who demand that the prince take a position, that he set limits to the evil around him, read the ending as proof that compassion alone is not enough, and the book gives reason to this: no one is saved by his hand (ch. XII of Part Four). Those who read through the key of the double or of the window see in the final gesture, the hand on the murderer's head (ch. XI of Part Four), something the world cannot name except with the word of the title. Against the first reading it is worth remembering that he takes a position when it matters (he holds Ganya's arm, does not take the slap as an offense to himself, does not abandon Rogozhin even after the knife); against the second, that the book never shows his compassion changing the fate of the one who receives it, only the way that fate is lived.
Relationships
- Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova: he reads her from the portrait before meeting her (ch. III of Part One), asks her hand in marriage on the night of the birthday (ch. XV of Part One), tells Aglaya that he no longer loves her and only pities her (ch. VIII of Part Three), agrees to marry because without him she would die (ch. IX of Part Four) and keeps vigil over her body (ch. XI of Part Four).
- Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin: the travelling companion on the train (ch. I of Part One), brother by the cross (ch. IV of Part Two), near-murderer on the staircase (ch. V of Part Two), forgiven on the park bench (ch. III of Part Three) and stroked on the night beside the body (ch. XI of Part Four).
- Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina: receives from him the note signed as a brother (ch. I of Part Two), recites to him the ballad with the swapped letters (ch. VII of Part Two), proposes that they run away together on the green bench (ch. VIII of Part Three), asks in public whether he is asking for her hand in marriage (ch. V of Part Four) and runs off when he hesitates before the rival (ch. VIII of Part Four).
- Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina: the distant relative to whom he comes to present himself (ch. II of Part One), who calls him sent by God as friend and brother (ch. XII of Part Two) and who weeps for him in Switzerland (ch. XII of Part Four).
- Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin: gives him the slap meant for his sister (ch. X of Part One), confesses to him the same day (ch. XI of Part One), and is the man of whom the prince says he knows he deceives him, and that he knows he knows (ch. XII of Part Two).
- Hippolyte Terentyev: weeps in the lap of Yelizaveta Prokofyevna and comes to hate the prince for having foreseen his shame (ch. X of Part Two); reads the Explanation at the prince's birthday party (ch. V of Part Three).
- Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev: the landlord of the dacha at Pavlovsk; the prince perceives from the doorway that he is deceiving him and rents the dacha all the same (ch. II of Part Two), hears from him that lie and truth go together within him (ch. XI of Part Two), and is the target of his attempt to put him under guardianship before the marriage (ch. X of Part Four).
- Ardalion Alexandrovich Ivolgin: the general whose lie he follows without contradicting it at Kulakov's door (ch. XII of Part One), and whose fantasy of being Napoleon's page he feeds out of delicacy (ch. IV of Part Four).
- Nikolai Ardalionovich Ivolgin: Kolya, who embraces him after the slap (ch. X of Part One), takes him, wounded, to Lebedev's house (ch. V of Part Two) and, in the end, seeks out Radomsky to take him back to Switzerland (ch. XII of Part Four).