What a struggle I had with this. It's a deep and probing work, and you sense in it how Dostoyevsky advanced the art of the novel with an almost psychologically-informed treatment of how people interact with society. It's very long, though, with a wild and woolly plot that tries too hard to be dramatic at every turn, often edging into maudlin melodrama.
The central character, Prince Myshkin, is called "an idiot" by many who know and even like him. He's an epileptic, and prone to saying unguarded things, but there's more to it than that. There is a purity of nature about him, a willingness to risk humiliation rather than compromise a person, even someone he knows in turn may be playing him for a fool. He loves a woman, pities another, and can't decide to which he should dedicate his life. He's a good man, Dostoyevsky tells us again and again, perhaps a spiritual ideal, but presented in a way that's often off-puttingly abstruse and inert.
What makes him tick? I don't know, and neither, perhaps, did Dostoyevsky. At one point, Myshkin offers some self-analysis that only deepens the mystery: "...the prince blamed himself for two extremes: for his extraordinary 'senseless and tiresome' trustfulness and at the same time for his 'contemptible and gloomy' suspiciousness..." Yes to the first part, I could definitely see it, but suspiciousness was something the poor boy could have used more of.
The fact that Myshkin does deal so open-handedly and positively with people is often portrayed as a plus. He encounters characters of varying types, some quite base, who at times merit his good intentions. One, a fellow named Keller, is more or less introduced having slandered Myshkin in print, but after being forgiven, becomes one of Myshkin's truer friends. With a plethora of minor characters, one gets a myriad of reactions to the Prince, which perhaps more than the love triangle at the book's center captures what Dostoyevsky wants to present, the problem of a Christian mindset (though the Prince is not orthodox in either the lower- or upper-case sense) coming to grips with a turgid, materialist world.
The Penguin edition I read, translated by David Magarshack, may have been a problem. Though it's an easy enough read from page to page, eschewing big words, one wonders if some of Dostoyevsky's thematic concerns got oversimplified. Yet as a pure story, the novel's plot lurches in a way that makes clear translation alone is not the issue. In Part 1, he makes his tentative way into society, struggling to present himself correctly to society mavens like Mrs. Yepanchin and her three beautiful daughters, including Aglaya, whom he will come to love. But no sooner is he settled in than he runs off after the minx of the tale, Nastasya Filppovna. We end Part 1 with him chasing her from Petersburg to Moscow and start Part 2 with them already apart; the crux of their relationship taking place off-stage.
Nastasya seems to be the book's most mesmerizing character to many readers; I found her shenanigans to be highly annoying and wondered why, with so many miserable people around him, the Prince feels such a strong pity pull for her. For me, the novel's most wonderful figure is Mrs. Yepanchin, who can't make up her mind about the Prince but likes him very much against her better judgment. To the extent I did come to care for the guy, it was because of her.
Mrs. Yepanchin is also wonderfully comic and vivid, "warm-hearted and impulsive" to a fault as Dostoyevsky describes her. There are some funny moments in the book, at times resembling early Dickens, like with an aged, drunken general who tells tall tales he seems to half-believe even as his knowing family shakes their heads. Episodes like this, and a famous description of Holbein's painting of a dead Christ, offer sparks of engagement, but when the story reverts to the Prince and the two women, a twisted, uneven quality played havoc with my efforts to follow along. "A good Russian cry" is how Mrs. Yepanchin describes it at the end. It's all a lot of soap opera stuff, and with 19th-century Russian manners being what they were, not exactly hot and heavy. You couldn't really write "Peyton Place" in 1867, even if seeming hints of lesbianism and foot fetishes squeak through.
Knowing the problem may rest not with Dostoyevsky but me, and fondly recalling those good bits here and there, I plan to return to this author some day. But not in a hurry.Get more detail about The Idiot.
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