About a Fool
Image Description: One of the many elaborate drawings and notes from Dostoevsky’s manuscripts.
“Let no man deceive himself. If any man thinketh that he is wise among you in this world, let him become a fool, that he may become wise.” 1 Corinthians 3:18
How odd that a state of gambling mania may have produced what could be conceived as a portrait of the most beautiful human being. Fyodor Dostoevsky, accidental interlocutor of a historically debated truth, answers the question posed against the nature of beauty: beauty as truth, and vice versa. The Idiot grapples with the ontology of beauty, its metaphorical and physical significance, twirls one around, causing oscillation between passionate admiration towards Prince Myshkin and a simultaneous resentment for his apparent naivete. Misunderstood by most, Myshkin’s caricature lies within a fine line between child-like innocence and bruteness. Those at the exterior live within a world consumed by avaricious greed, reputation and legacy, while Myshkin easily sacrifices his image for the sake of unconditional love. Dostoevsky’s search for the most beautiful human necessitates some semblance of divinity, and so the parallel between a Christ-like figure and Myshkin works like an apparition behind an invalid’s body. Divinity becomes apparent once one excavates past the narrator’s eyes, past the eyes of Aglaia, Lizaveta, Ygeveny and everyone else who confines him to the label, a simple “idiot.” The Idiot that makes manifest a beautiful being, one who lives humbly to the utmost extent, a truly compassionate individual, his literal truth, hiding beneath the story of a romantic entanglement. Still intellectually ostracized, belittled and ultimately determined ill-equipped for this society, the novel ends where it began, and Myshkin is left an invalid, being the hypersensitive man he is.
There are multiple ways in which Dostoevsky draws parallels between a Christ-like divinity and Prince Myshkin. First, there are the unanticipated interruptions of the body’s natural condition, which, for him, occur periodically: the epileptic fits. Dostoevsky posits these instantaneous flashes of illness as direct vessels through which Myshkin gains access to his inner light, a pure state of consciousness he becomes aware of within the first half of the novel. This idea he conceives himself but hastily returns to second-guessing his interior voice and succumbs to the others’ influence, and so the derogatory “idiot” neglects his own instincts. His epilepsy services a kind of higher knowing, placed on the back burner by Dostoevsky, though the flame lingers there across all three parts of this container. Second, the distortion that is the oblique narration of his relationships, which are construed romantically on the surface, but once observed non-mechanically (rather through the distillation of Myshkin’s voice), are meant to culminate a different perception of his merit. They expose the extent to which characters like Aglaia learn to understand Myshkin, how he is truly as a person, not a lover; thus, Myshkin’s divinity is further drawn out. Third is the novel’s occupancy of the poem “Poor Knight” by Pushkin, read by Alglaia and witnessed by other members, deploys inaccurate presumptions of Myshkins character— save that he is not a fool, though constantly proven to be one in the scope of the Epanchin’s. Therefore, the reader (a lazy one) can not help but conclude that Myshkin, poor knight, fool, susceptible to the whims of the wet hen, cannot help but reaffirm his naive idiocy. Like any divine figure, misunderstood and scrutinized, he must be carved out from the perspective others hold about him, in order to reach the more correct conclusion that Myshkin does transcend these idle stamps placed upon him. He is one worth defending, and Dostoevsky affirms this.
To omit any value of Myshkin’s epilepsy from the novel would certainly leave out, like a peach missing its pit, the core essence of his being. Among a significant moment when Myshkin recalls a seizure, he makes profound aphoristic sentiments as to the exact feeling that is the violent (metaphorical and physical) shaking of his consciousness. Reflecting upon it, the narrator shares access to Myshin’s thoughts:
Suddenly, in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light in his brain, and with extraordinary impetus all his vital forces suddenly began working at their highest tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were multiplied ten times at these moments which passed like a flash of lightning. His mind and his heart were flooded with extraordinary light; all his uneasiness, all his doubts, all his anxieties were relieved at once; they were all merged in a lofty calm, full of serene, harmonious joy and hope (Dostoevsky 254).
These are moments of completeness — a moment of an absent consciousness which births an absolute sense of consciousness — that Myshkin only has access to inside that second before the revulsions. The “acme of harmony and beauty” are brought about within his body, more specifically his mind, to facilitate an unparalleled experience. His seizure could be a momentary death. Or, a moment in-between, in-between what exactly? Perhaps between the half-thought existing in the middle of the following clauses: “It is overcoming me soon, I will have a seizure in the next coming moment,” and possibly “Oh, it is happening now, and I must surrender to it, it is engulfing me.” This series of circumstances that do not occur for anyone else, not even Ippolit, the other invalid in the novel, would ever experience. Upon returning to his latter thoughts of these moments, Myshkin would once again, affirm the classicist dubito ergo sum, recoils back his sense of insecurity, that these were “nothing but disease” (254). Myshkin prevents himself from fully expelling any conclusions of the semblances of his fits: that they could be portals to some divine knowing, that being moment in time is enough, that the beauty of life passes the mind in one quick flash, are quickly deserted by his ego. Such are the circumstances of his kind, unknowing of his divinity, treads forward, cycles through dismissals of self by his own accord, ignoring that which makes him celestial, thinking, “I am a man of no heart and a coward” (262).
The romantic narrative that underpins the novel could easily pass off The Idiot as a simple love story in which lust distracts one from making the right decisions, hence Myshkin’s isolation at the end. This would be an overcast statement about the “romantic” dynamics between Myshkin, Nastasya and Aglaia. Romance is not, and should not be considered to hold any importance; it is simple content through which the narrative holds up its own flesh. The love plot enraptures the reader; it should not interfere, however, with the skeletal structure that is Myshkin’s attitudes towards such relationships. The romantic element of the novel must be taken hand in hand with the use of “The Poor Knight;” thus, they should be expounded together and reveal the misinterpretations of Myshkin’s character beheld by others.
Aglaia parallels Prince Myshkin with the knight of Pushkin’s poem during circumstances that have brought the various families together one evening, and uses it to make a mockery of Myshkin while uncovering her devout feelings for him, bleeding jealousy along with it. Although this leads to unprecedented feelings of embarrassment for Myshkin, one should suppose Aglaia is not to blame, for she is only doing as one does in love: hiding behind it, being mean about it. “The Poor Knight” in Aglaia’s own words, is meant to deliver most earnest respect for the “poor knight’s ideal . . . some image of “‘pure beauty”‘ and the knight in his loving devotion has put a rosary round his neck instead of a scarf” (280). Aglaia is convinced Myshkin’s ideal, the ideal that raptures the knight of the poem, is Nastasya Filipovna. This is not so; as Myshkin has declared time and time again, his feelings for Nastasya are “a sensation of infinite pity,” and loves her “as if she were a child” (393, 659). The homage done to her translates to Myshkin’s unconditional faithfulness to Nastasya, and it is difficult to understand why he should act in such a way if not because he is in love. He is not; moreover, he discerns Nastasya’s “irresistible craving to do something shameful” so as to call herself a “degraded creature.” She is a traumatized character, seeking to justify her self-loathing, only capable of substantiating that which she believes herself to be: a soiled soul. Moment of applause for the devout gambler here; Dostoevsky does not resist embedding his psychology background into the text. And so the divine figure does not cast her away like the rest, for they are dispensable to each other. Myshkin does fall at her feet every time, with hopes to reconcile the good that lies within her. Though she can never see that herself, he fails with a willingness to do it again. The platonic love encompassing the “Poor Knights” devout feelings are not comprehensible for Aglaia, thus, she cannot help her frustration. The narrator intrudes: “It was difficult to tell whether she was in earnest or laughing” (280). She loves Myshkin in a way he would not submit to, and admits to this later on, “If anyone told him at that moment he had fallen in love, that he was passionately in love, he would have rejected the idea with surprise and perhaps with indignation” (480). It is not his objective to love in romantic terms. Like Christ, he loves because one is human, plainly because they happen to exist around him. And he sees that good cannot be taken away no matter what one does. In his eyes, everyone is absolved of sin, and he tolerates everything completely, though it causes him pain. Such is Aglaia’s frustration: she cannot comprehend a kind of love not grounded in transactional properties, that he does not seek to satiate his own desires, if any. She becomes aware that he is someone who is easily taken for granted, someone who is stomped over. Agalaia declares throughout the novel that it is Myshkin’s naivete that prohibits him from being perceived as a venerable person. Concerned for his lack of pride, her passion is also the cause of her vexation towards him: “There’s no one here, no one, who is worth your little finger, nor your mind, nor your heart! You are more honorable than any of them, nobler, better, kinder, cleverer than any of them …Why do you distort everything in yourself?” (385). And thus Aglaia sees Myshkin through a lover’s eye, carries a finite love, bound by romantic illusion; she cannot fully see him for what he is. He emanates an unconditional love which extends beyond the prolific limitations of romantic accounts; Myshkin loves even those who despise him.
The nihilist, apparent antithesis (albeit young and immature) to Myshkin, Ippolit is not denied the love Myskin allots him without let. The image is this: Ippolit is dying from consumption and lodges for a time at Myshkin’s house. In a flight of rage turns to all and in what seems to be some kind of cathartic release, shouts, “I hate you all, every one of you!– its you, Jesuitical, treacly soul, idiot, philanthropic millionaire . . . This has all been your contriving. You led me on to breaking down! You drove a dying man to shame! You, you, are to blame for my abject cowardice! . . . I don’t want your benevolence” (337). It is through this turn of occurrences that Ippolit expels his own shame for the lack of autonomy over his body, the declaration of control that would be the taking of his own life, onto Myshkin; the nihilist has disdain for the divine insofar that he has become limited in practicing his own beliefs. He failed at his own death, so consequently, Myshkin is to blame. Beyond the irony that is the nihilist, strongly dissenting from “looking like a fool,” beholds this image himself as he continues forth in the societal normalcy of caring for appearances, simultaneously illustrating the lack of care Myshkin has for his own image, portrait-ing him more and more as a divine figure. The divine does not care to look not ridiculous, therefore Myshkin faceplants head first into the pool of bad manners and unforgivable humiliation, per the Epanchin’s degradation of his behavior.
A fitting question still poses itself, the question of Myshkin’s naïveté. It seems it is the sequence of love he moves through, ultimately leading to mental abasement, that returns him back to Switzerland once again. It is as though his “naivete” has failed him; it has made him ill. Or could it be that his divinity does not make him exempt from the exhaustion that is the coined “karamazovism,” the human experience? That is the price to pay, the ultimate sacrifice to being a kind of good so pure that it must not be repaid on earth? A plausible interpretation, one Dostoevsky would likely defend, for he was an Orthodox Christian; there lies the promise of heaven. A mind concerned for Myshkins’ naivete might try throwing away the word all together; because had Myshkin known his stars before, this miserable destination, surely would have still made the same decisions. He was not painted by Dostoevsky to exert dominance or power, he is painting beauty. Beauty defined not by physicality, but attributes which mimic pure ethical efforts to remain imperfect, to forgive. And so this is neither a novel which questions the intelligence of that man, it may simply be inconceivable that he would do the things willingly. Yevegeny asks, “What will compassion lead you to next?” Myshkin answers quietly, in his bed, in Switzerland, betrayed by broken earth, compounded by the other-aches of those he can’t help breeding sympathy for; “this.” And Dostoevsky would likely respond, “And rightfully so, for a beautiful human being does not look after the self, he is altruistic.”
