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A.C. Grayling is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has written for the Guardian, the Observer, the Economist, Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review and the New Statesman, and is a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He has also recently been involved in a UN Human Rights initiative.
To understand The Idiot it is best to look at how its themes emerged from Dostoyevsky’s preoccupations in the works he wrote during the four years beforehand. Between 1864 and 1868, writing under tremendous personal pressure, Dostoyevsky produced three novels of philosophical fiction, at least two of them permanent classics of world literature. The first, written in 1864, is Notes From Underground. The second is Crime and Punishment, published in 1866. The third, completed in 1868, is The Idiot. They are not linked as a series, but by the unfolding of a theme; for they embody Dostoyevsky’s evolving attempt to understand and state the truth about ethics.
In the winter of 1863-4 Dostoyevsky was ill, his wife was dying of tuberculosis, his mistress had betrayed him and gone to Paris, and in St Petersburg his stepson was wasting the money he struggled to send him. For nearly a year Dostoyevsky had been unable to write. But then a commission from the Epocha, a new magazine, promised income, and at the same time he received a spur to his energies by reading Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky’s optimistically liberal What Is To Be Done?, which promoted the utopian ideal of a society in which free individuals attain happiness by satisfying their rational desires, under the sole constraint of not harming others. A follower of J. S. Mill, Chernyshevsky argued that the only true basis of morality is enlightened self-interest and reason; and correlatively, that evil is done only by those who do not understand their own best interests.
The Notes From Underground was an angry response to this view. “I am a sick man. I am a malicious man. I am an unprepossessing man. I think I have a pain in my spleen.” So begins the novel, written straight from the anguish of Dostoyevsky’s circumstances yet far more than autobiography; for he wished to show that human beings are not fundamentally benign, as Chernyshevsky assumed, but are made of profoundly mixed metal. They might well know the difference between good and evil, yet they are capable of choosing the latter. “Who was it, pray, who first declared that man behaves like a scoundrel only because he does not know his true interests…O pure, innocent babe!” the Notes scornfully says.
This is the first statement of Dostoyevsky’s rejection of Enlightenment notions of rational morality in favour of the view that human psychology is irrational and chaotic. This view fed into one major strand of the modern European mind, as the direct ancestor of those modern movements in thought and art that premise pessimism and absurdity, and recognise – and sometimes even celebrate – the darkest aspects of human nature.
But Dostoyevsky could not rest content with the negative implications of the Notes. He had an urgent desire to know whether it is possible to transcend conventional ideas of good and evil by choosing to act for reasons which, although conventionally describable as evil, would in fact represent an act of self-assertion or self-legislation in something like Nietzsche’s sense, rather than the obedience that ordinary morality requires; a superman morality, chosen by the individual for himself in fulfilment of his superiority to the norm.
This is what Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment tries to do. He decides to murder an old woman, and carries the decision out, later explaining his motivation in these terms: “I wanted to kill without casuistry, to kill for my own sake…it was not money I needed but something else…I wanted to know, and to know quickly, whether I was a worm like everyone else, or a man. Shall I be able to transgress or shall I not? Shall I dare to stoop down and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or have I the right?”
Such was Raskolnikov’s explanation for his act; but he was not so sure about its justification. He wavers between two alternatives, one the Nietzsche-like claim that because he is a superman he can make his own moral laws, the other a utilitarian one saying that because the victim was a hateful and hated old money-lender, her death benefited humanity.
But the essential point is that Raskolnikov finds he cannot live with what he has done; he becomes unnerved, feverish and strange; and eventually, in an agony of mind, he confesses. In Siberia after his trial he repents – not for having committed the murder, but either (and he is not quite sure which) for having been too weak to live with what he had done, or for having discovered that there is something in the human spirit that makes the attainment of “moral superman” status impossible.
This dilemma is at the novel’s heart. When he reached its end Dostoyevsky suddenly saw that perhaps the story of the regeneration of a man like Raskolnikov could show how to resolve that dilemma. “Here begins a new story,” the closing words of Crime and Punishment say, “the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his rebirth, of his gradual transition from one world to another, and of the revelation to him of a new, hitherto quite unknown reality.”
But Dostoyevsky did not write the story of Raskolnikov’s rebirth. Instead he went straight to the new reality, inhabited by a new and different kind of moral protagonist – a being of the sort a Raskolnikov could only become after an infinite journey across moral space.
That being is the hero of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, the “positively good man”, a holy fool, a saint-like figure, or even a Christ-like one (saying which is to forget the many disanalogies between a truly Myshkin-like character such as Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski’s novel and film Being There, and Jesus-like characters who drive money-lenders from temples). Where Raskolnikov had made a febrile and failed effort at conquering morality, Myshkin succeeds; The Idiot is the story of a triumph, though of an utterly different order.
Dostoyevsky had a clear conception of his aim in The Idiot. To his niece Sonya he wrote, “The idea of the novel is my old favourite idea, but so difficult that for long I did not dare to try it; and if I try it now it is only because I am in a desperate situation. The principal aim of the novel is to depict the positively good man. There is nothing in the world more difficult…it is an infinite task. The good is an ideal, and both our ideal and that of civilised Europe is far from being worked out. In the whole world there is only one positively good man, Christ.” In literature, Dostoyevsky continued, there is Don Quixote and Pickwick; but they are good only because they are at the same time ridiculous. Both invite compassion because they are mocked by those far inferior to them in the worth they possess without knowing it. Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean is another example; but he provokes sympathy not for his undoubted goodness but for the injustice he suffers.
Apart from some explicit New Testament analogies and allusions (Myshkin gathers children round him; he is kind to a sinning woman; seeing an ass rouses him from his despondency), what seems most influential in shaping Dostoyevsky’s image of Myshkin are two striking figures. One is the ‘yurodivy’, the wandering beggar-pilgrim familiar in old Russia, whose physical and mental disabilities are signatures of holiness. Rogozhin indeed says to Myshkin, 'You are quite a yurodivy; and God loves such as you.'
The other is the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance himself, Don Quixote. He is by far the one who most readily comes to mind when seeking Myshkin’s literary forebear. Dostoyevsky wrote eloquently of ‘the greatest and saddest book ever created by the genius of man’ in Journal of an Author, and he has Aglaya quote Pushkin’s Poor Knight expressly in order to apply it to Myshkin. Though one takes the form of comedy and the other as tragedy, both Don Quixote and The Idiot are at bottom about the same thing: the conflict between reality and the ideal.
There is, though, a revealing difference between Quixote and Myshkin. Quixote seeks to express his goodness in action: he attacks the world’s evils, he tilts at windmills. Myshkin is wholly passive. He is the embodiment of the renunciation and humility that one species of Christian view identifies as a supreme virtue, second only to faith. To achieve it requires humiliation and suffering, and Myshkin embraces both, without hesitation, at every opportunity. His morality is quintessentially that of the Beatitudes, where to mourn, to be poor, meek, reviled and persecuted, is to be blessed. This is a far cry from the Nietzschean self-assertion of Raskolnikov, and even further from Nietzsche’s contempt for the ‘slave morality’ expressed by the Beatitudes, which in his view turn true morality upside down. Perhaps paradoxically, the examples of active goodness in The Idiot – Nastasya’s self-sacrifice in refusing to marry Myshkin for his sake rather than her own, and Aglaya’s uprightness and steadfastness, which are so much part of the charm of her innocence – are more attractive to the modern eye than Myshkin’s negative energy. And yet his charisma is great: there is something breathtaking about his reply to the young man dying of tuberculosis and enraged at his fate, who asks Myshkin what he has to do to achieve an honourable death: and Myshkin quietly replies, ‘pass by us and forgive us our happiness.’
Of course there is no happiness at the end of Myshkin’s foray home to Russia from his Swiss sanatorium. The novel ends with the horrific scene of the vigil kept by Myshkin and Rogozhin over Nastasya’s murdered body: Rogozhin collapses with a brain-fever, and Myshkin returns to the idiocy from which the events of the novel had been only half an awakening, taking with him his simplicity, passivity, and unimpeachable goodness.
Is that goodness believable? Of course not: it is even a question whether someone who has no desires, feels no temptations, nor ever notices the smile on the face of seductive evil, can be called good. Writing of Tolstoy’s Levin, in Anna Karenina, when this latter had thrown aside Kant and the philosophers to adopt the simple faith of his peasants, Dostoyevsky said, ‘Two weeks after the end of the novel Levin will snag his soul on a rusty nail.’ Levin was a promissory note; Tolstoy later explored more fully the idea of a real person aspiring (with few guarantees of success) to be a ‘positively good man’, in the figure of Prince Nekhlyudov in Resurrection. But it is Dostoyevsky who tried the more ambitious experiment of placing a holy fool in a world of passions and desires, and allowing the strange logic of the situation to pursue itself home. As a result The Idiot is one of the most excoriating, compelling and remarkable books ever written: and without question one of the greatest.
Links for further reading
The Idiot
Notes From Underground
Crime and Punishment
Don Quixote
Anna Karenina
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