Dostoevsky and the Idiot: Author, Narrator, and the Reader [1 ed.] 0-674-21490-0

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 8
Contents......Page 12
Introduction......Page 16
1. The Narrative Imperative......Page 26
2. The Notebooks for The Idiot......Page 61
3. Shaping the Reader's Expectations: The Narrative, Parts I and II......Page 105
4. The Breakdown of the Reader's Trust in the Narrator: The Narrative, Parts III and IV......Page 141
5. The Clash of Truth and Falsehood: The Inserted Narrative, Parts I and II......Page 180
6. The Search for a Binding Idea: The Inserted Narrative, Parts III and IV......Page 215
Conclusion......Page 238
Appendix A. The Novel and the Critics......Page 247
Appendix B. The Phenomenology of Reading......Page 253
Appendix C. Characters and Family Constellations......Page 267
Note on Citations......Page 271
Notes......Page 272
Index......Page 302

Citation preview

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

Dostoevsky and The Idiot Author , Narrator, and Reader Robin Feuer Miller

H a r v a r d U n iversity P ress Cam bridge, M assachusetts an d London, England

1981

Copyright © 1981 by the President and Fellows of H arvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Andrew W . Mellon Foundation

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Miller, Robin Feuer, 1947Dostoevsky and The Idiot. Includes index. 1. Dostoevskii, Fedor Mikhailovich, 1821-1881. Idiot. I. Title. PG 3325.I33M 54 ISBN 0-674-21490-0

8 9 1 .7 3 3

80-29496

F or A big ail an d A lex a R ose

Preface

ostoevsky's genius has set each generation of readers and critics musing, looking for answers to his riddles. New vocabularies, new definitions of subject m at­ ter, approach, or ideological propriety keep offering fruitful new approximations but leave new generations of critics, ultimately, gratefully perplexed. W hat critic of D ostoevsky is not aware that he has not penetrated the center of whatever work he has chosen for scrutiny? The Idiot embodies Dostoevsky's first sustained attempt at creating a narrator-chronicler who alternately practiced decep­ tion and truth-telling. Dostoevsky composed this novel out of words which, even when they lied, were vehicles for truth. But whether through arachnid instinct or calculated technique —or, as is most likely, a com bination of the tw o —all of Dostoevsky's narrative webs remain inviolable in their intricacy, their inter­ connecting strands too numberless for any critic to unweave and reweave. His texts cannot be demystified. And that is why he will continue, even as they unravel his texts, to entangle his readers.

D

I am immensely grateful to the Russian Institute of Colum ­ bia University and to the Russian Research Center of Harvard University. W ithout the initial and continuing encouragement of the Russian Institute, which approved this b o o k —even be­ fore it was com pleted—for its Institute Series, I would not have undertaken the task of preparing the book for publication so eagerly. I especially thank Lynn Solotaroff. The Harvard Rus­ sian Research Center has offered me support over the last three years; it has supplied that, elusive mix of friendly involvement

uni

Preface

and courteous disengagement which combine to produce the best context in which to write. I thank M ary Tow le, M ary Christopher, Rose DiBenedetto, and Christine Balm for skillful typing and much patience. Anne Kearney's affectionate care of my daughters has given me many quiet hours for writing. I am also indebted to the support offered by a grant from the Ameri­ can Council of Learned Societies. I thank the friends and colleagues who read portions of the manuscript, discussed its limitations as candidly as its points of interest, and made suggestions about matters of form and con­ tent: Diana Bürgin, Ellen Chances, Karen Dacey, Paula Foresman, Sima Godfrey, John Malmstad, Ruth M urray Mathewson, Robert Louis Jackson, the late Lionel Trilling, and Michael W ood. I am grateful to Katherine O'Connor, for expert advice in her capacity as a translator, and to Donald Fänger, for cheer­ ful counsel along the way on matters trivial or weighty. Robert Belknap inspired, encouraged, and helped me at every stage in the writing of this book. M y involvement in Dos­ toevsky's works is inextricably linked to being his student, reader, and friend. Not only has he frequently pointed the straight way out of a muddled thought, but many of my most cherished ideas about Dostoevsky belong, in their original form, to him. Joseph Frank took time from his own writing to read my manuscript three times; each time he was an ideal reader and critic, offering advice on where to expand, where to be more concise, and where to excise. The good will of such a reader must be a source of pleasure and pride to any writer. But my greatest debt of gratitude belongs to Rufus M athewson, and it is a debt that will never be repaid. His un­ timely death left a generation of students at Columbia Univer­ sity bereft. I was fortunate to have studied with him, to have written my dissertation —an early version of the present w o r k - in large part under the influence of his discerning, al­ ways searching mind, and to have become his friend. It was he who first encouraged me to write this book, and the memory of him will accom pany me in every scholarly endeavor throughout my life. I thank Lewis and Kathryn Feuer for their excellent advice as writers and their loving, uncritical support as parents. And

Preface

ix

finally I thank my husband, Chris, who wishes, wisely, to be spared a list of reasons. It would be too long. A fter all these acknowledgments and thanks it only remains for me to say that I alone am, of course, responsible for any er­ rors of translation, fact, or judgment contained herein. Because I have dealt in such detail with the genesis of The Idiot in the notebooks, and because the flow of characters from the notebooks into the novel may not always be clear to my readers, I have included a brief appendix which identifies the characters and fam ily constellations. I have translated passages from The Idiot from the ongoing Soviet edition of Dostoevsky's complete works. References to the novel in the text are to that edition, but for the benefit of the reader who does not read Russian I also provide a second page number directing him to a good recent English translation of the novel by Henry and Olga Carlisle (New York, New Am erican Library, 1969). Parts of the text have appeared in different form in The Slavic and East European Journal 23 (1979): 190-202, The Ulbandus Review 1 (Fall 1977): 1 5-28, and in Western Philosoph­ ical Systems in Russian Literature, ed. A nthony M . M likotin (Los Angeles, University of Southern California Press, 1979) pp. 89 -1 0 3 , and are reproduced by permission of the publishers.

Contents

In trod u ction

1

1

T he N arrativ e Im p erativ e

11

2

T he N o te b o o k s f o r T h e Id io t

46

3 S hapin g th e R eader's E xpectation s: T he N arrative, P arts I an d II

90

4 The B rea k d o w n o f th e Reader's Trust in the 5 6

N arrator: T he N arrative, Parts III a n d IV

126

The C lash o f Truth a n d F a lseh o o d : T he In serted N arrative, P arts I an d II

165

T he S earch f o r a B inding Id ea: T he In serted N arrative, Parts III an d IV

200

C on clu sion

223

Appendix A. The N ovel and the Critics

232

Appendix B. The Phenom enology o f Reading

238

Appendix C. Characters and Family Constellations

252

Note on Citations

256

Notes

257

Index

287

Tell all the truth, but tell it slan t — S uccess in circuit lies. Emily Dickinson

Note on Transliteration Russian names in the text are spelled either in the form most familiar to readers who know no Russian or in such a way as to facilitate pronunciation. For all other Russian words I have followed the Library of Congress transliteration system.

Introduction

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composi­ tion that each bit, each moment plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. —Michel de Montaigne, "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions"

n The Idiot D ostoevsky undertook the difficult task of portraying a "wholly beautiful man" and the effect he had on the worldly society of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. He never ceased to worry about whether he had achieved his aim and was the first to call attention to the weaknesses of his novel. Upon finishing the book in 1869 D ostoevsky wrote from Europe to his niece Sonya Ivanova that it had not expressed "even a tenth" of what he had intended. Nevertheless, he always maintained a special fondness for this novel and, by extension, for those readers who valued it. As late as 1877 D ostoevsky wrote of The Idiot that "all who have spoken to me about it as the best of my works have something special in their cast of mind which is always very striking to me and which I like very much" (P, III, 377). Yet any reader, even one whose cast of mind permits him to love and understand the meaning of the novel, must be led to grasp that meaning —or rather, made to come to it himself. For although D ostoevsky manipulated his readers unsparingly, he left them, at the end of his novels, free to m ake their own deci­ sions about the import of what had occurred. Before the end is reached, however, both author and reader are made to suffer various metamorphoses along the way. This study of The Idiot explores the ways in which D ostoevsky used the figure of the narrator-chronicler to make the reader confront m oral and ethical problems, and seeks to make explicit the implicit system of narration in the novel. This undertaking has seemed espe-

I

2

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

d ally appropriate because The Idiot itself treats problems of communication or speaking more metaphysically, the possibility of communion. Its vehicle for that com m unication, the narra­ tive, form ally embodies a basic idea o f this novel —that words can never fully express a thought. W ith this hypothesis, the novelist D ostoevsky proceeds to write his novel; the narrator narrates; the characters seek to exchange ideas; and the reader begins his task of discriminating, weighing, and sifting words and sentences. The focus of the present work, then, is a double one: the narrative of The Idiot —in its various forms —m ay be understood in the light of its impact upon the reader, who may himself, in the course of reading, also assume various forms. Dostoevsky's narrative methods in his six novels vary widely. In The Insulted and Injured and The Raw Youth, a cen­ tral character narrates the story. A usually omniscient thirdperson narrator relates the events o f Crime and Punishment. The Possessed and The Brothers Karam azov are written from the point of view of a more elusive persona —the narratorchronicler—which Dostoevsky began to develop in earnest in The Idiot. (Much earlier, in 1859, he had experimented with a similar narrative voice in his story "Uncle's Dream .") The two first-person novels have found the least praise among his readers. But his first-person short stories have proved extremely successful; "White N ights,""N otes from Underground," "A Gen­ tle Creature," and "The Dream of a Ridiculous M an" m ay be counted among his greatest short works. Despite the instinctive preference Dostoevsky seems to have had for the first-person confessional mode, and despite his ability in using it in the short story, he could not manipulate this method as effectively in the novel. In The Possessed and The Brothers Karam azov, Dostoevsky combined the techniques of first- and third-person narrative; the figure of the narrator-chronicler offers the advantages of both form s. He lives in the town where the action occurs, has access to minute details of that action, but does not participate in it. He does not shrink, however, from judging or interpreting the people and events around him. In spite of the narratorchronicler's general reliability, his point of view often differs from Dostoevsky's. The Idiot, which has usually been read as a third-person narrative, contains the rudiments and, I believe,

Introduction

3

the first elaboration of the figure of the narrator-chronicler that was subsequently perfected in The Possessed and The Brothers

Karamazov. M ikhail Bakhtin, in considering both Pushkin's Belkin and "the narrator-chronicler in D ostoevsky," maintained that "for the author, not only the narrator's individual and typical man­ ner of thinking, experiencing, and speaking is im portant, but above all his manner of seeing and depicting, therein lies his im­ mediate purpose as narrator, as surrogate for the author . . . The author does not show us the narrator's word (as the objectivized word of a hero), but makes use of it from within for his own purposes, causing us to clearly feel the distance between him and this word which is foreign to him ."1 Bakhtin is indeed correct to emphasize that the author makes use of the narrator's word for his own purposes. W hat makes Dostoevsky's narratorchronicler such a fascinating, often perplexing figure, however, is precisely the fa ft that we do not always "clearly feel the distance" between him and the author. M y concept of the roles assigned in the course of The Idiot to the reader was frequently influenced by W ayne C. Booth's book The Rhetoric o f Fiction. In the course of examining in specific literary works the complicated relationships among authors, narrators, readers, and the text, Booth wrote about the difference between the real-life author and the implied author of a w ork. "Implied author" provides a way of speaking about the self an author becomes as he writes, and in Booth's scheme every novel has an implied author: "Even the novel in which no narrator is dramatized creates an implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes whether as stage manager, as pup­ peteer, or as indifferent God, silently paring his fingernails. The implied author is always distinct from the 'real man' —whatever we m ay take him to b e —who creates, a superior version of himself, a 'second self,' as he creates his w ork."2 Sim ilarly, the implied reader, the self one becomes in the course of reading, differs from the real-life reader. These created literary entities must be able to agree with each other; such agreement becom es possible because both the implied author and the implied reader are capable of making more disinterested judgments in fiction than in life. Booth writes, "But the implied author of each novel is someone with whose beliefs on all sub-

4

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

jects I must largely agree if I am to enjoy his work. O f course the same distinction must be made between myself as reader and the often very different self who goes about paying bills, repairing leaky faucets, and failing in generosity and wisdom. It is only as I read that I become the self whose beliefs must coincide with the author's." These two created selves, the implied author and the implied reader, are often in collusion behind the back of the narrator or of anyone else "in the story or out of it" who fails to get the point.3 In The Idiot the collusion between the implied author and the implied reader does not operate smoothly throughout. Though the implied author and the narrator in The Idiot do not coincide, the difference between them is not always apparent to the reader. They share certain ideas but toward the end of the novel they disagree sharply. The narrator rejects M yshkin, while the implied author stands staunchly behind his hero. The implied reader, though partly a creation of the implied author, also retains his own identity throughout his reading. Thus the process of reading demands a delicate balancing of real and assumed identities. In the course of reading, Booth asserts, the reader's beliefs coincide with those of the author. "Regard­ less of my real beliefs and practices, I must subordinate my mind and heart to the book if I am to enjoy it to the full."4 Yet he quickly adds, "We m ay exhort ourselves to read tolerantly, we m ay quote Coleridge on the willing suspension of disbelief until we think ourselves totally suspended in a relativistic universe, and still we will find many books which postulate readers we refuse to becom e, books that depend on 'beliefs' or 'attitudes'. . . which we cannot adopt even hypothetically as our ow n."5 Booth tends to concentrate on the implied reader who responds to the implied author's lofty m achinations. In the second half of The Idiot , however, the balance be­ tween the necessary subordination of one's mind while reading and the maintenance of certain basic attitudes falters; the reader gradually finds that he is being asked to assume a role he may not wish to play. The figures of the real author, the implied author, the real reader, the implied reader, and the narrator no longer consistently offer a useful way of discussing the narrative structure of the novel. It becomes necessary, at times, to add yet another reader to Booth's model, a reader who is far less serious

Introduction

5

and less concerned with questions of belief than Booth's implied reader. He is the narrator's reader. There are then three readers in The Idiot. The real reader of the novel corresponds to the real author o f the work; he is a nonideal, everyday self. He contains within him the implied reader. But the narrator of the novel addresses another figure —the narrator's reader. O n certain occasions this reader lacks serious m oral concern; he merely reads for plot and for en­ joym ent. Then one must carefully distinguish between the response this narrator's reader is asked to have and the response expected of the implied author's reader. The real reader of the novel subsumes the implied reader and the narrator's reader, but he does not combine them. They continue to exist separately, at times in diametric opposition within the real-life reader, who ex­ periences the responses of both sim ultaneously.6 The implied reader responds to the implied author's indirect manipulation of him, while the narrator's reader, uncritical and curious, does not suspend belief in the narrator's rendition of the story. The real reader, if he is learning to see and feel as the authorD ostoevsky intends him to, must know in precisely what ways the other two readers within him diverge. I have traced the growth and shape of this divergence in chapters 3 and 4. An investigation of the narrative of The Idiot —or indeed, of any of his works —would not have surprised Dostoevsky. Throughout his career, Dostoevsky grew more and more aware that the success of a given w ork depended on its narrative strategy. The notebooks for the novels reveal his observations on these strategies as well as his manipulation of them. D ostoev­ sky hoped that his work would at all times interest the reader and that it would make him see reality in a new way. M aintain­ ing a high level of interest outweighed any demands of a prede­ termined form or aesthetic principle. In fact his concern for holding the reader's interest largely determined Dostoevsky's narrative manner. But D ostoevsky sought to maintain his reader's interest not solely in order to entertain him. The securing of his reader's in­ terest set in m otion a mechanism by which Dostoevsky could begin to implicate his reader in m oral and religious questions, questions supposedly safely contained within the fictional

6

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

boundaries of the novel. O f course most novelists seek, to some extent, to involve their readers in the moral and religious ques­ tions their novels pose. But Dostoevsky sought to m ove his reader beyond mere engagement: he attempted to make him ac­ tually share responsibility with the characters in the novel for the m oral and ethical judgments with which the characters, often tragically, affected each other's lives. M y discussion of the narrative in The Idiot attempts to trace the precise workings of this mechanism of implication. In his efforts to hold the reader's interest, D ostoevsky borrowed freely from other masters of sheer entertainment, but his borrowed rhetorical equipment seduced his readers into acknowledging their own membership in a universe fraught with m oral and metaphysical complexities. O f course no one disputes the prosaic and commercial reasons for Dostoevsky's preoccupation with his audience. But far more interesting is the construct of the reader that emerges directly from the works themselves. In all his works, Dostoevsky viewed his audience as a group upon whom he should exercise the most wily strategies. His nar­ ration always embodied a conscious method of persuasion. These two subjects —the reader to be persuaded and the narra­ tive —converge, for they are simply points at either end of the same line: an artist's notion of his audience must determine, to some extent, his modes of narration; at the same time, artists like D ostoevsky also hope to remake their readers through the impact of their narrative. Dostoevsky, however, sought always to conceal his own narrative voice. As early as 1846, having finished P oor Folk, he wrote that his audience, "accustomed to seeing the ugly mug of the author in everything," had not "even guessed that Devushkin is speaking and not I" (P, I, 86). This concealment of the author's voice continued as a principle of Dostoevsky's narrative technique for the next thirty-five years. W hereas earlier writers such as Pushkin and Lerm ontov had complained of their public's inability to separate a narrator's voice from an author's, Dostoevsky (like Gogol) capitalized upon it to serve his own literary ends. The question of the audience's response also remained a cen­ tral concern. Tow ard the end of his life, Dostoevsky wrote that he had always been tormented by the question of how his work would be received and whether it would turn out that he had

Introduction

7

done more harm than good by publishing his "sacred convic­ tions" (P, IV, 194). (In The Idiot M yshkin shares this deep am­ bivalence about direct expression of ideas.) But although Dostoevsky's novels did contain his sacred convictions, these were carefully shielded by layers of narrative fabric, by the constant filtering of his own ideas through a narrator's point of view .7 An author's preliminary notes for a novel do not necessarily offer a key for deciphering the final text. The notebooks for The Idiot grip the reader in another way: they demonstrate a creative mind at work —exploring, expanding, rejecting, and ac­ cepting his own ideas. In reading Dostoevsky's notes we spy upon the novelist's mind stripped of its coverings of paragraphs, chapters, plots, and images. We see the range of possibilities that lure him in contradictory directions. The mystery remains in the splendid creative gap between the notes and the actual novel; fortunately no critic can ever pry that far into a novelist's mind. Nevertheless the notes for The Idiot , like the notebooks for Dostoevsky's other novels, especially The Possessed and The Raw Youth , do show the narrative strategist at w ork. In this respect the plans Dostoevsky rejected have proved as telling as those he subsequently carried into the novel. In particular, the notebooks for The Idiot offer important clues to Dostoevsky's often baffling narrative manner. They contain evidence suppor­ ting the hypothesis that Dostoevsky's disturbing and abrupt distancing in Part IV of the book of his narrator from his hero was deliberate, and indeed essential to the structure of the novel. M y reading of The Idiot has followed the chronology of the novel, for D ostoevsky constructed his narrative out of definite expositions, variations, and recapitulations of voices that de­ mand a chronological reading to be perceived. He also intended the reader's responses to these voices to becom e more complex and ambivalent as the novel unfolded. I have tried to locate cer­ tain moments in the novel when the web connecting the author, narrator, and reader grows most intricate, but the reader's en­ tanglement must be traced sequentially. In considering the usefulness of the concept of the reader, Donald Fänger has voiced the suspicion that "the reader as tool more often than not may resemble those absorbable surgical

8

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

sutures that lose their identity as they do their job; i.e., that in many cases the concept is resolvable into more conventional categories, so that its utility, though real, is less than unique. W hen traditional criticism speaks of tone, pathos, absurdity, laughter, the grotesque, structure, or meaning, it always has in view (albeit implicitly) 'the actualization of a text in the reader,' and it is not clear how much is to be gained by dwelling explicitly on that fact."8 Although Fanger's metaphor for the concept of the reader as absorbable suture is extremely apt, I have found this suture, at certan points in the novel, invaluable for seaming together the disparate elements of manipulation, com plicity, implication, and aesthetic-moral awareness that D ostoevsky in­ fused into his work. Once these elements are joined together, however, the presence of the binding stitch may become insig­ nificant. There are at least four separate modes of narration coexis­ ting within the novel: a comic voice that relates a kind of novel of manners (or ill-manners), a Gothic voice that employs tech­ niques of arbitrary disclosure and heightened terror, the voice of a sympathetic and omniscient narrator, and a voice that is ironically detached from the action and easily swayed by the current local rumors. Thus the reader must constantly readjust his attitude toward the narrative texture as well as toward the characters it portrays. Dostoevsky's deliberate mixing of completely diverse forms, such as the philosophical confession, the criminal adventure, the religious drama, and the boulevard tale, creates what Leonid Grossman called the "whirlwind" effect.9 1 have tried to discover the order in this whirlwind and to understand why the author endows the narrator with a particular voice at a particu­ lar time. Other attempts to recover order in Dostoevsky's narra­ tion have noted that all these various forms emanate from the single "idea" of the novel. M y search for order remains at the narrative level. Bakhtin has offered the most comprehensive examination of Dostoevsky's narrative technique. By exploring Dostoevsky's methods for establishing the tensions between the voices of the different characters in his novels, he developed the now com ­ monplace notion of Dostoevsky's "polyphonic novel" (with roots in the Socratic Dialogue and the Memppean Satire), where

Introduction

9

the voices of all the characters have equal, contrapuntal value.10 I extend this hypothesis to include the multiple voices of the nar­ rator within that novel; the narrative of The Idiot is in different keys that often collide with each other in wrenching counter­ point. The narrator's numerous voices serve as forcefully as do the characters and the sensational maneuvering of the plot in sustaining the reader's interest. Bakhtin has argued convincingly that Dostoevsky's fiction is profoundly dialogical —indeed this view has becom e almost an axiom among Dostoevsky's critics. One of my purposes is to restore the author Dostoevsky to the role of a "monologist," but one who makes brilliant use of the strategies of dialogue—whether among characters or within them .11 Though the voices in a polyphonic composition may be heard separately, they are organically connected. They are composed and carefully orchestrated by a single consciousness that is carrying out a highly structured plan. Determining the success or failure of Dostoevsky's rhetori­ cal manipulation of his assigned reader throughout the novel, especially in Part IV, offers a way of judging the success or failure of the novel as a whole. In keeping with Dostoevsky's desire that his readers see reality in a new way, the constantly changing narrative modes force the reader to begin to see the events and characters as separate from the voices portraying and judging them. Having made this separation, the reader formulates his own understanding of the novel, an understand­ ing often dissociated from the narrator's interpretations. In all of Dostoevsky's novels, inserted texts or titles (articles or diaries written by the characters, poems, newspaper articles, accounts of trials, and so on) figure as essential aspects of the overall narrative plan. In The Idiot each inserted narrative pro­ vides a footnote in some way to the narrative of the novel as a whole; each presents a variation on some aspect of narration. But taken as a whole they give the reader a parallel text that in m any respects duplicates the structure of the novel. I have tried to analyze (in chapters 5 and 6) the particular and the general significance of each of the inserted narratives in the novel. Even the sequence in which other texts are mentioned can suggest cor­ respondences with the narrative structure of the novel. For ex­ ample, the image of Don Quixote overshadows the first parts of the novel, but it is the image of M adame Bovary, a kind of

10

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

negative, diminished version of Don Quixote, that hovers over its final pages.12 In The Idiot all the characters and the narrator share a con­ cern with the inherent inability of words to express a thought. They all hope that somehow, in spite of their own misrepre­ sentations, their thought will emerge. Nevertheless, except for M yshkins own parabolic anecdotes, each of the interpolated passages in The Idiot is in some sense a false narrative. General Ivolgin's anecdote about the lap dog may actually have oc­ curred but it did not happen to him; Pushkin's poem about the poor knight contains a vital alteration; the newspaper article about M yshkin mixes truth with slander; Ippolit's confession preludes an unperformed act. Even the confessional stories told at Nastasia Filippovna's nameday party, while true in fact, are false in intent. "Instead of your nastiest deed, Your Excellency," said Ferdyshchenko, "you have told one of the good deeds of your life; you have cheated Ferdyshchenko" (VIII, 127; 171).* The characters and the reader cannot simply believe any of these narrations, for they contain a mixture of truth and decep­ tion. By analogy —and paralleling or doubling was a favorite structural principle of Dostoevsky —the reader cannot unblinkingly accept with equal value the diverse voices and tones of the narrative in the novel. ‘ Throughout the text, the volume number and first page reference are to the ongo­ ing Soviet edition of Dostoevsky's complete works, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh. All the translations from this edition (which includes The Idiot) are my own. For the benefit of readers who wish to refer to an English text of the novel, I pro­ vide a second page number referring them to the Henry and Olga Carlisle translation of The Idiot (New York: New American Library, 1969).

1^

The Narrative Imperative

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feel­ ing—this is the activity of art. —Leo Tolstoy, W hat is Art?

Instruction without entertainment (were I capable of giving the best) would have but few readers. Instruction, Madam, is the pill; amusement is the gilding. —Samuel Richardson, letter to Lady Elchin, 22 September 1755

t is a truth universally acknowledged that Dostoevsky was a novelist of ideas. But his own keen awareness of how essential the choice of a particular narrative method was for the portrayal of a particular idea has not generally occupied his critics. Dostoevsky ex­ pressed concern for narrative methods throughout his career, in his letters, notebooks, articles, and in his fiction. In a study such as this, which limits itself to the scrutiny of a single work of fic­ tion, the general and the particular are in a state of competing balance. Hence the analysis of the narrative techniques Dostoevsky employed in The Idiot must gain in interest if it can become, to some degree, a case study, a description of some of Dostoevsky's fundamental artistic concerns. But before turning to The Idiot, it is useful to examine Dostoevsky's attitudes toward his readers and his own assessments of his narrative skill as he expressed them in his early journalism and in his letters. My aim has not been simply to catalogue Dostoevsky's pro­ nouncements about his audience and ability to write, although

I

12

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

such a catalogue would not be without interest, but rather to combine Dostoevsky's scattered, often fragmentary observa­ tions to produce a larger statement about his audience and his narrative m ethods.1 M ost im portant, D ostoevsky understood narration as a strategy, as a subtle means of persuasion rather than as a simple vehicle for direct expression of his thoughts. In fact, D ostoev­ sky believed that in fiction he must always avoid direct expres­ sion of his thoughts. Such a conception of narration assumes the im portance of the audience as a group to be persuaded, taught, and manipulated. In July 1876, in a letter to Vsevolod Solov'ev, during the writing of The Diary o f a Writer, Dostoevsky com ­ mented on the ill effect that a direct, nonstrategic mode of narration had upon his general readers. He thanked Solov'ev for not being one of these general readers. "And so the June issue of the diary pleased you. I am very glad of that, and I have a special reason for it. I have never yet allowed myself, in my writings, to follow som e of my convictions to the end [dovesti . . . ubezhdeniia do kontsa ]; to say the very last word. One in­ telligent correspondent from the provinces even reproached me for opening discussion in the diary on m any things, touching on much, but never taking these things to the end, and he urged me not to be timid" (P, III, 227). Dostoevsky then described how newspapers and journals, even the ones usually friendly to him, criticized or simply ignored him when he did pursue an idea "to its end," that is, when he expressed an idea fully and directly: Here is what it means to take an idea \mysl] to its end! Set up any paradox that you like, but do not take it to its end, and you will be considered witty, subtle, and comme il faut; but take some risky word to the end, suddenly say, for example: "And here is the Messiah" — directly, and not by hinting, and no one will believe you precisely because of your naivete, precisely because you took things to the end and said your very last word. However, on the other hand, if many of the most famous wits, like Voltaire, for example, instead of mockeries, allusions, hints and reservations, had suddenly decided to express all that they believed, had showed their whole secret [podkladka], their essence, all at once, —then, believe me, they would not have obtained even a tenth of their former effect. Worse than that, they would only have been laughed at. Indeed, on the whole, man somehow in no way likes the last word of a "spoken" thought, [and]

The Narrative Imperative

13

says that, "The thought spoken is a lie" ["Mysl' izrechennaia est' lozh' "].2 The writer, then, must try to communicate indirectly with the reader. A fter expressing his joy that Solov'ev had not been such a reader, D ostoevsky added, "And if such good judges as you, even a few of them, are found among the public then I have at­ tained my goal, and I am satisfied; that means that the expressed word has not been wasted. But here they cry out with jo y : 'Paradoxes! Paradoxes!' and this is said precisely by those who have never had a single thought of their own in their heads" (P, III, 228). Here D ostoevsky is talking about the readers of his journalism, but his words could apply to the readers of his fic­ tion as well, though there the strategy of persuasion becomes m ore complex. Dostoevsky wanted his readers to go beyond their hungry craving for "fashionable paradoxes." Still, he presented such paradoxes in order to force his readers themselves to go beyond them. In this way he left "the last word" to the reader. Fifteen years earlier, in 1861, Dostoevsky ruefully expressed the same belief about the impossibility of simply expressing the truth. He noted, with self-mocking irony: Indeed, the moment you wish to tell the truth according to your con­ victions, you are at once’accused of uttering copybook maxims. How extraordinary! Why are so many modem truths uttered in a tone that is just a little pompous at once characterized as copybook maxims? Why is it that if in our age we feel the need to tell the truth we have more and more to resort to humor or satire or irony in order to sweeten truth as if it were a bitter pill, or to present one's convictions to the public while pretending to be a shade haughtily indifferent to them or even with a certain shade of disrespect for them—in short, with some mean little concession?3 Dostoevsky's narrative methods resulted from a conflict be­ tween a strong desire to tell the truth and a practical need to escape "copybook m axim s." His narrators commonly pretend indifference or a "certain shade of disrespect." Yet perhaps these "mean little concession[s]" turn into the stuff of the great novelist's craft.

14

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

Dostoevsky frequently felt that both the critics and the public misunderstood him, yet he could not help being influenced by their evaluations. A t the beginning of his career, he discovered that he could not expect the critics to follow his own inclinations. In February 1846 he boasted to his brother M ikhail of the hero of The Double: "Golyadkin is ten times better than P oor People . . . Y o u will like it even better than Dead Souls, I'm sure of it" (P, I, 87). In April of the same year Dostoevsky complained to M ikhail, "But this is what is sickening and tormenting: O ur friends, Belinsky, and many others are not satisfied with Golyadkin" (P, I, 88). Their judgment that the story was drawn out and boring made Dostoevsky feel disgus­ ted with his Golyadkin. He revised his own estimation of the work: "Next to brilliant pages there is foul stuff, rubbish; it makes me sick, and I don't want to read it" (P, I, 89). Dostoevsky's early letters rarely praised the public as readers, but he often agreed with their opinion of his work in spite o f himself. Yet even though he had a dim view at first of the public's ability to understand the real meaning of a story, he had from the beginning settled upon a narrative style that ex­ pressed his own ideas indirectly: In our public, as in any crow d, there is instinct, but there is no educa­ tion. They do not understand how one can write with such a style [as mine]. They are accustomed to seeing the ugly mug of the author in everything; I have not shown mine. And they haven't even guessed that Devushkin is speaking and not I, and that Devushkin cannot speak in any other w ay. They find the novel to be overlong, but there is not a superfluous w ord in it. They find in me a new, original spring (Belinsky and others) consisting in the fact that I write with Analysis and not with Synthesis, that is, I go into the depths and by examining the atoms I search for the whole, while Gogol takes the whole directly, and is thus not so deep as I.4

D ostoevsky came increasingly to value that instinct in the public which he here dismissed so lightly. In fact, his narrative manner of indirect persuasion sought to appeal to the instinct rather than to the reason of his readers. Significantly, he main­ tained that his own voice was absent in P oor People; the absence o f the author's voice remained a basic principle of Dostoevsky's narrative technique throughout the rest of his

The Narrative Imperative

15

career. Much of the public was never to guess "that Devushkin [or Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Ivan] is speaking and not I." This misunderstanding has endured persistently. Indeed, as late as 1876 Dostoevsky was still complaining about the tendency of his readers to confuse the n arrators voice with that of the author. T wrote my Letters from a Dead House fifteen years ago under the name of a fictitious person, a criminal who supposedly had murdered his wife. In passing, I may add, by way of detail, that since that time m any people have been under the impres­ sion, and are even now asserting, that I was exiled for the murder of my wife."5 But Dostoevsky valued the critics' early view of him in 1846 as a "new, original spring"; this insistence on and pride in his originality continued to be vital to Dostoevsky's vision of himself as an artist. (It is no surprise that he both exal­ ted and parodied the notion of originality in his fiction.) Ten years later, in January 1856, Dostoevsky reworked his theory of artistic creativity and emphasized the synthetic rather than the analytic process in literary com position. One can assume that his years of enforced literary inactivity in prison helped to reformulate his ideas about writing. In a letter from Semipalatinsk to his friend Apollon M aikov, Dostoevsky praised the young writer Alexei Pisemsky and then added: It is necessary to have more pride, more respect for one's own talent and for art. Ideas [idei] in youth pour in so fast; one should not catch each one in flight, immediately express it, and hurry to express one's opinion about it. It is better to wait longer for the synthesis, —to think longer, to wait, until the many small things that express a single idea gather themselves into a single larger whole, into a single large image in relief, and then to express it. Colossal characters created by colossal writers have often been created and expressed through long, insistent labor. But one should not express all fleeting attempts and sketches! (P, I, 167) The synthesis should be in the writer's mind before he begins to write. For D ostoevsky it was synonymous with the poetic idea of a w ork, and should therefore be treasured and not wasted. Dostoevsky's reluctance to part prematurely with his ideas never deserted him. The years in prision may also have changed and softened Dostoevsky's judgment of the ability of the public to compre­

16

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

hend the meaning of a literary work. In another letter to M aikov, he placed a heavier burden on the writer to express his idea well: "You write that it is as if our society has awakened from apathy. But you know that, in general, in our society there are not demonstrations. But who ever concludes from this that it is without energy? Elucidate a thought well, and call upon society, and society will understand you" (P, I, 163). A t the same time, Dostoevsky had become more eager to win the public's approval. In 1859, after finishing The Village o f Stepanchikovo, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother that if the public received his novel coldly, he would fall into despair. His desperate need to regain recognition after prison and exile had determined much of Dostoevsky's dependence on the public's reaction, but artistic considerations also played a role. He felt he had portrayed in the novel two typical Russian characters that had never been well drawn before in Russian literature (P, I, 249). Despite his greater respect for the public, Dostoevsky con­ tinued to insist on his own originality, as he had done since the days of P oor Folk and The Double, and was not daunted by his own awareness that one of these characters —Foma Fomich Opiskin —was a mixture of Pecksniff and Tartuffe. Dostoevsky's view of his readers, his perceptions about the craft of fiction, and his desire to portray original, new material developed together and were interdependent; the need for both writer and reader to work hard remained constant. M oreover, when Dostoevsky wrote about his audience, he usually found himself writing about his craft as well. Although he was eager to win the approval of the public, he still privately regarded it as a relatively hostile group. In his let­ ters D ostoevsky frequently contrasted the public's reaction to that of some ideal reader like M aikov, Nikolai Strakhov, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, or a particularly perceptive though unfamiliar, correspondent. At other times, usually when he was writing about his struggles in composing a novel, D ostoevsky referred not to the public but to the reader. This reader assumed a personal rather than a collective shape; he was someone with whom the author was forging an intimate relationship. He was not a member of the hounding, herdlike public that had "in­ stinct" but no education, although he too could easily

The Narrative Imperative

17

misunderstand the meaning revealed by the narrative. Despite this possibility, the relationship between Dostoevsky and this reader was one of good faith. Dostoevsky's famous letter to his niece Sonya Ivanova (ex­ tensively quoted in chapter 2), in which he disclosed his inten­ tion to write about a positively beautiful man, illustrates the reader's central role in the essence of the idea itself. The point is not simply that the image of a positively beautiful man occupied Dostoevsky's imagination while he was writing The Idiot-, what is im portant both for the author and for his readers is that D ostoevsky undertook the task of portraying such a man (izobrazit' polozhitel'no prekrasnogo cheloveka. The word prekrasnyi means beautiful or fine and can carry with it the ad­ ditional meaning of goodness). D ostoevsky felt that there was no artistic task more difficult than this portrayal of a good man. He consciously stressed the assigned role of the reader as a basic part of this central idea, for he categorized other novelists' at­ tempts to portray such a character by the response they had in­ voked in their readers. Past prototypes of the good man, such as Don Quixote and Pickw ick, he w rote, had been humorous. "Compassion appears for the beautiful man who is m ocked and who doesn't know his own value, consequently sympathy appears in the reader. This awakening of compassion is the secret of hum or." Jean Valjean, another good man, affected the reader's sense of tragedy. "Jean Valjean is also a powerful attempt, but he awakens sympathy by his terrible unhappiness and by the injustice of society towards him ." But D ostoevsky wrote of his own novel, T have nothing similar, decidedly nothing, and therefore I am terribly afraid that it will be a positive failure."6 That is, at this point in the composition of the novel Dostoevsky was using neither the traditional devices of comedy nor of tragedy as a way of engag­ ing his reader; he had not yet found his particular narrative mechanism for awakening the reader's sympathy. "My only wish is that it [Part II will awaken some degree of curiosity in the reader, so that he will go on to the second part" (P, II, 72). He then tells Sonya that he likes the finale of the still unwritten second part of the novel, the scene of Nastasia Filippovna's nameday party (actually the end of Part I in the finished ver­ sion), but wonders "what will the reader say ? . . . I only hope

18

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

that the reader will read it through without feeling great boredom" (P , II, 78). W hile writing The Idiot D ostoevsky thought continually of its effect on the reader. In Decem ber 1868, he assured M aikov, "The end of The Idiot will be effective" (P, II, 151). Tw o weeks later, he complained to Sonya Ivanova, "It has not expressed even a tenth of what I wanted to express, although I do not disclaim it, and I still love my unsuccessful idea. But in any case, the fact is that it is not effective for the public" (P, II, 160). He then expressed his hopes for his next projected work, Atheism, in terms of its effect on the reader. "Now I have in my head an idea for a big novel, which, in any case . . . must have an effect, if only by virtue of its theme . . . It must entice the reader against his will" (P, II, 161). D ostoevsky admitted to Strakhov that, in comparison with Crime and Punishment, the effect of The Idiot on the public had been slight; he added, "I want to produce something effective again" (P, II, 171). Dostoevsky's disappointment over the relative failure of The Idiot made him becom e like one of his own readers; he almost agreed with the public's appraisal of the novel, just as he had when the critics had found fault with The Double. In M arch 1869 he wrote, "And as to the shortcomings [in the novel] I am completely in agreement with everyone; but, mainly, I am so angry at myself for those shortcomings, that I myself want to write criticism" (P, II, 175). Nevertheless, as he had with The Double, Dostoevsky continued to defend the idea of his novel. Dostoevsky's private attitude towards his readers remained am bivalent; it varied with their response to him. The young Dostoevsky's overflowing praise for Vissarion Belinsky's and Nikolai Nekrasov's literary judgment when they admired Poor Folk in 1845 touchingly bears witness to his changeable attitude. Dostoevsky's entrance upon the literary scene occurred after a dramatic meeting in which Nekrasov and Dmitri Grigorovich stayed up all night reading aloud to each other the manuscript of Poor Folk. Then Nekrasov brought the manuscript to Belin­ sky with the famous words, "A new Gogol has appeared." D ostoevsky later recalled his first meeting with Belinsky —who lectured to him about the mystery of art and about Dostoevsky's own great, though perhaps unconscious, artistic gifts —as a "solemn moment" of "timid ecstasy," and as "the most

The Narrative Imperative

19

delightful minute in m y whole life."7 Soon afterwards, D ostoev­ sky's relations with Nekrasov and Belinsky becam e strained. But almost thirty years later, N ekrasovs publication and praise of A Raw Youth made Dostoevsky forget their former coldness. (At this time Dostoevsky felt himself to be in competi­ tion with Tolstoy: A nna Karenina was appearing in D ostoev­ sky's favorite journal, Russkii Vestnik [The Russian M essenger] at the same time as A Raw Youth was coming out in O techestvennye Z apiski [The Fatherland N otes].) The euphoric scene of twenty-nine years before underwent a muted repeti­ tion. O n 9 February 1875, Dostoevsky recounted Nekrasov's words in a letter to his wife, Anna Grigor'evna: "I was so carried away that I sat up all night reading, and at my age, and with my health, I should not permit myself to do this. And what fresh­ ness you have, my dear man . . . Such freshness in our times is already lacking, and not a single writer has it. In Leo Tolstoy's latest novel there is only a repetition of those things which I read in him earlier, only before it. was better" (P, III, 152). D ostoevsky then agreed with Nekrasov's criticism of the eighth chapter of Part I; he noted that when he reread the proofs he found much of it to be weak. The old enemy's praise had given him a right to criticize and had turned him into a friend. But old friends could easily becom e foes; only three days later D ostoevsky complained "And when M aikov began to make inquiries about Nekrasov, and when I told about Nekrasov's compliments to me; he made a glum face, and Strakhov became quite cold. No A nya, he [Strakhov] is a nasty seminarian and nothing more; he has already abandoned me once in my life, at the failure of Epoch, and he ran back only after the success of Crime and Punishm ent ." Dostoevsky then went on to spare M aikov, "He is nevertheless a good fellow and not a seminarian" (P, III, 155). But it was the "seminarian" Strakhov's views on narration that had haunted D ostoevsky in his notes for A Raw Youth much m ore than Nekrasov's later praise ever could. For example, on 26 and 27 August 1874, when D ostoevsky was debating about what kind of narrative he should choose for A Raw Youth, he typically sought to gauge the effect of his choice upon his imagined reader: 'T h in k over the possibility of a first-person narrative. M any advantages . . . Nicer . . . If I write the novel in the first-person, this will un-

20

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

doubtedly give it more unity, and less of that which Strakhov has been criticizing me for, i.e. too large a number of characters and subjects. But what about the style and tone of the Youth ['s narrative]? This style and tone m ay help the reader in an­ ticipating the denouement."8 In his later years, D ostoevsky increasingly found ideal readers in the conservative Pobedonostsev and in Vladimir Solov'ev. In a rare mood of solid pride (rather than a moment of euphoria sparked by a particular compliment) he wrote to Pobedonostsev late in the summer of 1879, of his amazement and delight in his success among the reading public: M y literary position (I have never spoken to you about this) I consider to be almost phenomenal; how can it be that a man who is writing tirelessly against European principles, who has compromised himself forever by The Possessed, i.e., by his retrogression and obscuran­ tis m -h o w can this man, despite all the Europeanizers, their journals, newspapers, and critics,—nevertheless have been accepted by our youth, by this very unstable youth of nihilists and others? They have already declared this to me, from many places in individual declara­ tions or in whole groups. They have already announced that from me alone they expect a sincere and sympathetic word and that they con­ sider me, alone, to be the writer who will lead them. These declara­ tions of the young people are known to our literary critics, those brigands of the pen and swindlers of the press, otherwise they would not let me write freely! (P, IV, 108-109)

Once he attained a firm belief in the readers' affection for him, Dostoevsky's optimism about the responses of the general public to his work did not desert him. The letters he received from the readers of The Diary o f a Writer helped to bring about this change in his attitude. Anna Grigor'evna commented that the many letters D ostoevsky received while working on The Diary had a "very good effect" on him. "They demonstrated to him that there were people who shared his views and that society valued his objective voice and trusted him ." She goes on to quote a letter written by D ostoev­ sky in 1877 to his friend Stepan Yanovsky, "You simply would not believe the degree to which I have enjoyed the acceptance of the Russian people during these two years of publishing. Letters . . . have come to me in the hundreds . . . from all classes of

The Narrative Imperative

21

society . . . O nly modesty prevents me from telling you how much fellow feeling all express. And if you could only know how much I myself have learned from these two years of publi­ cation,. from these hundreds of letters from the Russian people!"9 Before he began to write The Diary his cor­ respondence had been much smaller; hence the readers had re­ mained for him a distant, slightly menacing public whom he could only hope to "entice against their will" or to provide "ef­ fective" novels for them to read. The numerous letters he re­ ceived in the late 1870s made D ostoevsky trust the publics response in fact instead of merely in theory. Conversely, the reactions o f the critics became less impor­ tant to him, although, as he wrote to Pobedonostev in August 1880, he desperately wanted the support of the people he per­ sonally respected: Every time I write something and put it into print, it is as though I am in a fever. It is not that I don't believe in what I myself have written, but I am always tormented by the question: how will this be re­ ceived —whether people will want to understand the essence of the matter or whether it will turn out that I shall have done more harm than good by publishing my sacred convictions. All the more so be­ cause I am always obliged to express some ideas only as basic thoughts, which always are much in need of more development and proof. And that is why the opinion of people such as you is decidedly a support for me. It means that I have not been mistaken in every­ thing; it means that I have been understood by those whom I value be­ cause of their intelligence and impartial judgment, and, consequently, my labor has not been in vain. I will tell you openly: I am now finishing the Karam azovs. This last part, I myself see and feel it, is so original and so unlike what oth­ ers are writing, that I decidely am not expecting approval from our critics. The public —the readers —are another m atter: they have al­ w ays supported me. (P, IV, 194-195)

Dostoevsky's private comments on his readers —the public and the critics —do not correspond to the more complex and intimate relationship in his fiction between the author-Dostoevsky and the implied reader of a particular w ork. That is a pri­ vate relationship upon which Dostoevsky touched only in pass­ ing in his letters and journals when he wrote about seeking to

22

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

"attract the reader against his will" or when he lamented the need for methods of indirect persuasion and "mean little conces­ sions." But these letters suggest the basis from which the authorD ostoevsky created his implied reader. The hope of gaining a better understanding of this second, more elusive relationship between the author D ostoevsky and his implied reader underlies much of the analysis of The Idiot which is to follow . Although Dostoevsky's correspondence expressed certain reservations about the reading public, these reservations did not appear in his journalism. O n the contrary, in his journalistic writings he defended the unerring taste of the public, whether it be that of high society or of the peasant; "it seems to us that this universally human response [to art] is even stronger in the Rus­ sian people than in all other nations and is its highest and best characteristic."10 Dostoevsky even maintained that the Russian reading public knew more of English and German literature than did the French reading public.11 Even the illiterate peasants had excellent potential as readers: "You claim that Pushkin is not appreciated by the com m on people. Yes, but that is because the common people have made no progress in their develop­ ment, and they have made no progress because they could not do so. They are illiterate. But the moment education makes any headway among the common people, Pushkin will acquire his national significance for the masses also."12 The public shaped the definition of good art as much as the writer did. "And if po­ etry, the word, literature, is also a medicine, there is at least some measuring rod to determine what is good in poetry and what is inappropriate for it. The measuring rod is simple: the more sympathy a poet arouses in the masses, the more he justi­ fies his appearance as a poet."13 Dostoevsky allowed the public this determining power over the writer's fate, while still ac­ knowledging the weaknesses of that public: "the masses may not know at a given moment what they want, what they ought to love or sympathize with. But these deviations soon pass away by themselves and society can always find the right way by it­ self."14 Dostoevsky's monumental trust in the public, whose in­ stincts are always right, is striking for he has not idealized it. In the end it is the same public to whom the writer must make "mean

The Narrative Imperative

23

little concessions" and use all his energies to interest and enter­ tain. Dostoevsky could not afford to chastise the public too se­ verely in his journalism; his politics would not permit it. M ore­ over, he frequently became caught up in his arguments and would then push them beyond his actual beliefs. But despite the power of political considerations and artistic gusto to deflect him from making measured, careful statements, his public view of the Russian readership did not contradict his private view. Publicly as well as privately Dostoevsky had acknowledged that the most valuable asset of the Russian reading public was instinct rather than educated taste; he had emphasized, in his early journalism as well as in his correspondence, the writer's obligation to awaken his reader's sympathy. In his letters and journalism Dostoevsky frequently stressed the importance of interesting and entertaining the public. Cap­ turing and holding the reader's interest took precedence over any predetermined aesthetic requirements. Dostoevsky was more confident of his ability to entertain than of his skill at nar­ rative technique and style. O n 18 January 1856, in his first letter to M aikov after his re­ lease from prison, Dostoevsky disclosed his plan to write Notes from the House o f the Dead. The Notes were to achieve a strik­ ing effect on the reader without being strictly autobiographical: "In the hours when there is nothing for me to do, I am noting down from my recollections of my stay in prison what was most curious. However, there is little that is purely personal" (P, I, 164). Three years later, in a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky still described his Notes in the same terms: he emphasized the odd nature of their content and the removal of all directly auto­ biographical material. "M y personality has disappeared. These are the notes of an unknown man; but I can vouch for their in­ terest. The interest is the most important thing. The tone will be serious, gloom y, humorous, touching, and there will be peasant speech with the special prison coloring . . . the portrayal of per­ sonalities never before heard o f in literature, and, finally, the main thing, —m y name . . . I am certain that the public will read it avidly" (P, II, 9 O ctober 1859, p. 605). A nother typically D ostoevskyan concern is evident here as well: the assertion that the work is original because it contains new, but real characteri­

24

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

zations. Throughout his career Dostoevsky continued to vouch for the presence of these three attributes in his fiction: a high level of interest, the disappearance of his own personality in the narration, and the originality of the work. As early as 1863 Dostoevsky was already planning The Gambler (1886). (It is even possible that he had a first draft writ­ ten by the time he hired Anna Grigor'evna to take dictation from him in 1866). He linked this future novel to Notes from the House o f the Dead; both portrayed hitherto undescribed aspects of Russian life; both, he felt certain, would prove extremely in­ teresting to the reader: If The House o f the Dead called itself to the public's attention as a por­ trayal of prisoners whom no one had portrayed graphically until The House o f the Dead, then this tale, without fail, will call attention to it­ self as graphic and most detailed portrayal of the game of roulette. M oreover, similar articles are read by us with extreme curiosity, — gambling at the watering places, particularly relating to Russians abroad, has a certain (maybe not unimportant) significance . . . The story m ay be very good. M y "Dead House" was really most interest­ ing. And here there shall again be the picture of hell, of the same kind as that 'Turkish bath in the prison." (P, II, 333)

The first-person narrators of both works recount extreme ex­ periences that Dostoevsky had had. They would seem to be the most obviously autobiographical of his novels. Yet in both works Dostoevsky carefully separated himself from his narra­ tor's point of view; autobiographical material must pass through the filter of a fictional character's personality. (The same rule later applied to the autobiographical sections in The

Idiot.) Tw o years later, in 1865, Dostoevsky wrote to M ikhail Kat­ kov on the theme of Crime and Punishment, "I vouch for its in­ terest. O f its artistic execution [khudozhestvennost'] —I do not take it upon myself to judge" (P, I, 420). Citing this same letter, F. I. Evnin noted that although efforts to make the novel inter­ esting played an outstanding role in Dostoevsky's creative plans, "interest in Dostoevsky's eyes never became an aim in it­ self, something important or definitive; in the just quoted utter­ ance, 'interest' is even separated from artistic execution' as from something much more essential."15 This is not the case at all.

The Narrative Imperative

25

Though Evnin is right in observing that Dostoevsky separated interest from artistic execution, Dostoevsky did not place the minimal value on interest that his critic did. At times he even valued interest m ore than artistic execution. In his letter to Sonya Ivanova, written in O ctober 1870 after sending off the beginning of The Possessed to Russkii Vestnik, he remarked that despite his dissatisfaction with the first part, he had hopes for the novel's continuation and its ending and added, "at least it will turn out entertainingly [zanimatel'no ], (and entertainment, which I have attained so far, I place higher than artistic merit, [ khudozhestvennost ']). As to its artistic merit I don't know, though it seems that it must be successful. The thought is an audacious and big one; the thing is that I always choose themes beyond my power. The poet in me pulls the artist back and forth, and this is bad" (P, II, 296-297). Again, as in his 1865 letter to Katkov, Dostoevsky charac­ teristically has separated interest from artistic execution. Here, however, he has made a further compartmentalization in the artist's creative process: he has separated the poet from the art­ ist, the creative thinker from the artificer. A . S. Dolinin, in his notes for this letter, has pointed out that Dostoevsky quite often juxtaposed the poet and the artist in his letters. Dolinin has regarded this separation of the poet and the artist in D ostoev­ sky's terminology as equivalent to the more generally made distinction between inspiration and the strict, careful execution of it —the ability to express each detail.16 Taken together, Dostoevsky's separate emphasis on the poet, the artist, and the quality of interest in a work can offer a model of the process whereby an author communicates the cen­ tral idea of his w ork to the reader. In fact, D ostoevsky has sug­ gested the terms which could be used to produce a theory about the phenomenology of reading, although he does not himself take this final step. Nevertheless, one can visualize these separa­ tions functioning as a dynamic equilibrium, whereby interposed between the author who created a text, and the reader who reads it, are three aspects of the author —the poet, the artist, and the entertainer. The poet's idea is given form by the artist. But this artistic shape must have some easily accessible quality of interest that will quickly attract and hold the reader's atten­ tion. That is, the reader first responds to the efforts of the enter­

26

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

tain er. O n ly later, as he b eco m es im m ersed in the w o rk , does th e read er start to u n co v e r th e p o e ts idea. D o sto e v sk y 's re ­ p eated em phasis o n th e sep aratio n o f these a sp ects o f the cre a tiv e p ro cess ca n n o t p rev en t them fro m rem ain in g , m o st essen tially, asp ects of the sam e thin g. C erta in ly in his n o te b o o k s and in his fiction D o sto ev sk y 's p o e t, a rtist, and en te rta in e r m erg e.

A striking instance of the necessity for having all three work together occurs when Dostoevsky tried to do without one mem­ ber of this creative trio. In the early stages of the com position of The Possessed, he attempted to express his idea in an interesting way, without the factor of artistry —of artistic execution. In M arch 1870 he explained to Strakhov: "I have great hopes in the thing which I am now writing for The Russian Messenger, but not from its artistic side, rather, from its tendentious side; I want to express certain thoughts even if my artistry [ khudozhestvennost'] will be ruined because of it. That which has gathered itself together in my mind and in m y heart attracts me; let it turn out to be only a political tract [pam flet ]; I will express myself" (P, II, 257). Four months later he wrote to Sonya Ivanova that the book had had to be radically altered. He struck out all that he had written so far and began again (P, II, 282-283). Georgy Chulkov has seen this as a dramatic example of the inexpendability of "artistic execution." "And so, fifteen sheets of the tendentious tale were destroyed. The political tract had failed, and the sacrifice of artistic execution' proved useless."17 D ostoevsky separated the notion of interest from the other realms of the creative process. His two closest literary friends, M aikov and Strakhov, regarded the bald manipulation of the reader's interest as something rather vulgar and outside the realm of the creative process. In September 1868 M aikov wrote to D ostoevsky of the reaction to the ongoing serial publication of The Idiot: What are you so worried about with regard to your novel? One thing is already clear —the fact that it is very interesting forces the public to read it. The thought which I begin to see is a great one. Since it is not yet finished, I cannot give it a final verdict. There are various opin­ ions; the main reproach is in the fantasticality of the characters; one fellow even says that "there are no such summer cottages in Pavlovsk"

The Narrative Imperative

27

. . . But, nevertheless, the main thing is that people are reading it, so that on this score especially there is nothing to worry about. (P, II, 426) M a ik o v v alu ed the fa c t of the novel's interest m erely as a useful startin g p o in t: it m ad e p eop le re a d the b o o k . D olinin h a s n o ted th a t these w o rd s p ro b a b ly g av e D o sto e v sk y little c o m fo rt. "H e u n d ersto o d , of co u rse , th at M a ik o v didn't like the n o v e l, th a t in essen ce M a ik o v fully sh ared th a t 'fello w s' opin ion " (P , II, 4 2 6 ).

Similarly, Strakhov's article in praise of War and Peace af­ fected D ostoevsky as an indirect reproach for his own un­ abashed attempts to hold the reader's interest. Strakhov wrote that: the success of War and Peace is an extremely simple and distinct phe­ nomenon, not containing in itself any complexity or confusion . . . Tolstoy did not try to attract the reader either by any sort of con­ fusing and mysterious happenings, or by a description of dirty and terrible scenes, or by the portrayal o f terrible spiritual torment, . . . in a word, not by any of those means by which the thought or the imagi­ nation of the reader is teased, painfully irritating his curiosity by pic­ tures of a life which he has neither tried nor experienced. (P, II, 446) D ostoevsky reacted to this thinly veiled reproach of his tech­ niques by asserting his version of a fantastic reality, a reality which could best be portrayed by the use of the very devices Strakhov had denigrated (P , II, 4 2 6 ). But he did not directly de­ fend his methods. Later, in a letter to D ostoevsky in which he commented on The Possessed , Strakhov softened his reproach: It is evident, in terms of the content, by the abundance and diversity of ideas, that you are the first among us, and Tolstoy himself in com­ parison with you is monotonous . . . But it is also evident that you write, for the most part, for a select public, and you overload your works; you overcomplicate them. If the fabric of your tales were sim­ pler, they would act more powerfully . . . This shortcoming, per­ haps, is found in connection with your merits . . . And the whole se­ cret, it seems to me, consists in the fact that you need to loosen your creative work, to reduce the subtlety; instead of twenty figures and one hundred scenes, stop at one figure and ten scenes . . . It seems to me that until now you have not been controlling your talent; you have not been adapting it for the greatest effect on the public. (P, II, 509)

28

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

Strakhov here revised his criticism of D ostoevsky. Instead of deploring the use of flagrant devices to entrap the reader, Strakhov phrased his critique in terms of how best to preserve the readers interest. Perhaps knowing Dostoevsky's unshakeable devotion to keeping his readers entertained (or interested), his friend was merely trying to couch his objections in strategic, effective language. Dostoevsky agreed with Strakhov here; Strakhov's words continued to haunt him during the writing of

A Raw Youth. M ore m odem critics such as Grossman, Bakhtin, and Chulkov have rejected the notion that entertainment is separate from artistic execution; instead they have recognized that keeping a high level of interest is a basic aspect of Dostoevsky's narrative technique. Grossman has contended that for Dostoevsky, after a period in his youth when he valued perfection in form above all other considerations, the demands incurred by the mainte­ nance of interest largely determined the entire shape of a work: "He [Dostoevsky] considers it possible now to sacrifice all the canons of form and classical prescriptions of the academy in the name of the realization of his main problem —to startle, to in­ trigue, or to stun the reader from the very first line, so that sub­ sequently, until the end, he will not let him [the reader] out from under the power of his tale."18 Dostoevsky's narrators per­ sonified this aim: "The narrator above all must be fascinating — here is Dostoevsky's new axiom, which has crowded out the precepts of his early theories. 'To compose with talent means to compose in an entertaining m anner'—he [Dostoevsky] after­ ward formulates the basic law of literary art, 'because the very best book, whatever it is and whatever it treats, is entertain­ ing.' "19 The choice of a particular narrator becam e inherent to making the work interesting. "How to impart to his statement the ability to fascinate the most apathetic reader —here is the main theoretical question, to which, in his latest period, was directed, almost wholly, his creative doctrine."20 Dostoevsky's own separation (in his letters) of the notion of interest or entertainment from that of artistic execution was a false division. Perhaps harsh circumstances determined this un­ necessary separation in his mind; throughout most of his career D ostoevsky needed to maintain and increase his readership in order to eat. The notion of interest easily assumed its own pro­

The Narrative Imperative

29

portions as something vital to each of his works despite any ar­ tistic shortcomings a particular work may have had. Critics have cited this overzealous desire to interest the public as a sad fact of Dostoevsky's life, as a failing that prevented him from realizing his complete potential as an artist. Dostoevsky's early journalism , however, belies a biographi­ cal explanation of his emphasis on interest. M oreover, his jour­ nalism does not separate interest and artistic execution as deci­ sively as his letters do. Interest did not conflict with the demands of good art; it was part of it. Certainly to be entertain­ ing was a practical demand of the novelist's craft, but this practicality was outwardly, not inwardly, directed. The quality of entertainment could ultimately serve genuine larger needs of the audience; the arousal of a reader's interest was not merely an author's ploy to m ake himself be read. Dostoevsky's two articles in Time in 1861 on "Pedantry and Literacy," for example, urged again and again that the best way to get the peasants reading was to make their reading matter en­ tertaining. The manipulation of interest has a serious purpose: to get the com m on people to read. The educated must teach the uneducated. It is their duty, isn't it? But what is rather strange and even bad is that they do not seem able to approach the common people without laughing at them, "without sat­ ire" and above all, without wishing to teach them . . . No doubt we are most anxious to confer benefits by our satires and mockeries . . . We merely wanted to observe humbly that before thinking of any im­ mediate benefits conferred by the popular books, before indulging in satiric mockeries, moral admonitions and eradications, it would not be a bad idea to concentrate simply on the spread of reading among the common people, on trying to arouse in them a desire for reading entertaining books even without any satirical contents . . ,21 But Dostoevsky's strategy was far more complex than that of the well-meaning compilers of a useful Reader for the peasant. D ostoevsky described his own version of such a Reader, "and though in the first 'Readers, . . . no one can prevent me from choosing articles that would be of the greatest usefulness for them, I would all the same put the entertainment value of these books above everything else, for it is necessary first of all to achieve one thing —the spread o f a desire for reading among the

30

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

peasants".22 If the peasant reader could not distinguish D ostoev­ sky's proposed volume from the popular peasant favorite The Beautiful Muslim Girl, so much the better, "Let them even won­ der which to give preference to. For it must mean that they like it if they are comparing it with one of their favorite books. It is quite impossible to ask them for precise criticism im m edi­ ately."23 But, Dostoevsky predicted, they would then buy his next book, because the first had been so entertaining; soon they would even prefer his book to The Beautiful M uslim Girl, "for it is the nature of good literature to purify taste and reason, and that is why I pin m y hopes on it."24 In short, Dostoevsky's prescriptions on the nature of peas­ ant reading m atter differed in degree, but not in kind, from his endeavors among his more sophisticated readership. Clearly in this article the need for interest served the writer's higher m o­ tives of teaching or persuading his readers; as such, interest was essential to the artistic execution of the idea. But the writer's m otive, said Dostoevsky, must be carefully concealed, even subordinated to the entertainment value o f the work. Again, this polemical, often sarcastic article reiterates Dostoevsky's concerns within his own fiction. The reader must never suspect that he is being manipulated; "if there is anything that disturbs us [in the project of a peasant R eader proposed by Dostoevsky's ideological oponents], it is this unnecessary painstakingness; the fact that it is too clever, quite unnecessarily prefigured and calculated; that is to say, what we don't like about it is that it is much too good: an absurd impression, no doubt, but not unknown in nature."25 O f course D ostoevsky is really saying the opposite: the w ork is not too good at all; it puts the reader on guard; he senses that he is being manipulated. Instead, as in Dostoevsky's proposed peasant R eader, the intent should be perfectly concealed, "it should be very difficult (and not easy, as M r. Shcherbin claims) to per­ ceive the 'essential qualities of the logic and the practical and psychological motives' which the publisher puts at the basis of his boo k."26 D ostoevsky, while seeming in these two articles to call for a relaxation of effort and to ask only that a work be interesting, has called for a redoubled effort to achieve a rhetorical manipu­ lation of the reader that is adeptly hidden from him, so that he

The Narrative Imperative

31

reads on for sheer entertainment. The maintenance of interest has becom e, in practice, a narrative strategy inseparable from the artistic qualities of the work. It is not a separate, less artistic concern as it appeared to be in Dostoevsky's letters. In these two m inor essays D ostoevsky has provided important clues to his own narrative strategies: the author must manipulate and enter­ tain his reader with painstaking care, and he must perfectly con­ ceal his own intent, that is, his own voice. Dostoevsky's preoccupation with the question of interest never developed into a complete articulation of the interdepend­ ence between content and form and the role of interest as part of both. Nevertheless, his notebooks and letters illustrate his con­ stant experimentations with various forms to express a single idea. Rem arkably, Dostoevsky's emphasis on the quality of in­ terest finally closely resembles the form ulations of Henry James. James's only absolute requirement for a work of fiction was that "it be interesting."27 Dostoevsky, who shared this view, equally stressed the need for the author's masking of his own voice. Such a concealment carried with it the assumption that a reader must work hard at uncovering the author's meaning. James ex­ pressed a similar point of view, and also linked the notion of in­ direct m anipulation of the reader with the quality of interest. "W hen he [the writer] makes him [the reader] ill, that is, makes him indifferent, he does no work; the writer does ill. W hen he makes him well, that is, makes him interested, then the reader does quite half the labor."28 Literary interest, according to Booth, m ay be divided into three types: intellectual or cognitive interest, qualitative inter­ est, and practical interest. A reader's intellectual interest in a work centers around his curiosity about "the facts of the case," the reader's qualitative interest in a w ork draws upon his aes­ thetic sensibility, his "strong desire to see any pattern or form com pleted." Finally, a reader's practical interest encompasses his moral and "human" curiosity. 'W e have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate."29 W hen D ostoevsky wrote about interest he was describing, in terms of these categories, a com bination of the reader's intellectual and practical interests. Dostoevsky's term "artistic execution" corresponds m ost closely to the category of "qualitative interest," although Booth's concern here is the van-

32

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

tage point of the reader while Dostoevsky has described the ef­ forts of the novelist. But in the end, their articulation of the types of literary interest closely coincides, for each places the greatest emphasis on the "practical" interest of a w ork of fiction, which arouses the readers m oral and human curiosity.30 Considerations about holding the readers interest occupied Dostoevsky throughout his career and forced him to use a peculiar, but extremely illuminating, critical vocabulary. But his theories often collided with his artistic practice. In describing his proposed novel Notes from The House o f the Dead D ostoev­ sky had located the interest of the novel in two things: the wideranging narrative tones of the work, and the portrayal of original but typical characters. Later, during the writing of the early drafts of The Possessed , the attempt to leave out "artistic execution" had caused the ultimate rejection of those drafts, most certainly because the sacrifice of artistry led to the loss of the interest of the novel as well. Here Dostoevsky's attempted separation of interest from artistic execution had proved too severe; they were instead different aspects of the same process. Yet however he related the m atter of interest to the rest of the creative process, Dostoevsky always considered interest to be part of any narrative strategy. The power of a work to enter­ tain could effectively mask the fact of the author's manipulation of the reader. This principle of concealment of purpose under layers of entertaining narrative remained a cornerstone of D os­ toevsky's own art throughout his life. T o capture and maintain the reader's interest meant invent­ ing and developing particular narrative strategies. Dostoevsky's letters do not give a complete or systematic view of his opinions on narrative strategy, but certain concerns about narrative methods emerge as particularly im portant. M ost of his com ­ ments about narrative method refer to novels, written and un­ written, rather than to his shorter works. (O f course, the note­ books to the novels provide the best clues to his strategy.) Before beginning the business of writing, Dostoevsky agonized over how best to express (that is, by which narrative method) the idea of a work. He feared that the act of writing —the artistic execution —would spoil the idea. The attempts to express the poetic idea resulted in an abundance of plans for each novel.

The Narrative Imperative

33

(There are fewer plans, however, for Crime and Punishment and The Brothers K aram azov than there are for The Idiot, The Possessed, and A Raw Youth.) Thus it comes as no surprise that upon his release from prison D ostoevsky revealed that he was postponing work on certain favorite ideas because he did not want to spoil them. He wrote to K atkov from Semipalatinsk in January 1858, "I have not wanted to profane my best ideas and my best plans for tales and novels by working hurriedly and for a deadline. I have loved them so much; I have so wished to create them without haste and with love, that it seems to me I would rather die than decide to deal with my best ideas dishonorably" (P, IV, 262). W hen D ostoevsky wrote that he could vouch for the interest or the truth of a particular idea, but not for its artistic execution, he was voicing the fear that he had spoiled the idea or brought it forth too quickly. Yet his notebooks reveal the strenuous, care­ ful, and unhurried working out of ideas, despite the terrible time pressures under which he labored. Nevertheless Dostoevsky al­ ways claimed that he had had to bring forth ideas prematurely. D ostoevsky worried about The Idiot, fearing that he had failed in the struggle to express a most beloved idea, the idea of portraying a perfectly beautiful man in nineteenth-century Rus­ sia —perhaps because of narrative weaknesses. D ostoevsky ex­ perienced similar doubts as he worked at shaping other ideas into novels. While working on The Possessed, he told M aikov, "But again, I repeat: I am as afraid as a frightened mouse. The idea tempted me, and I loved it terribly, but whether I will com­ pose it or whether I will spoil the entire novel, —that's the trou­ ble!" (P, II, 323-333). D ostoevsky never ceased his lam entations over having to labor under severe serial publication deadlines, and m any of his critics, following his lead, have linked his continual fears about spoiling the idea of a work to the fact of these time pressures. But although he complained about time pressures generally, or before a w ork was finished, he did not usually blame the lack of time for specific failures. In fact, Dostoevsky resisted the pres­ sure to turn a treasured idea prematurely into a work of fiction even when his needs were greatest. In November 1857 he wrote to his brother, M ikhail, that he had left a novel unwritten rather than write it too soon:

34

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

As to my novel, something unpleasant happened both to me and to it, and here is why: I had supposed and vowed that I would not publish anything not well-considered, not yet ripened, or anything written for a deadline (as before) for money; I supposed that one must not trifle with an artistic production, that one must work honestly, and that if I should write badly, as probably I have many times, it would be be­ cause I had no talent, and not because of carelessness and frivolity. That is why, seeing that my novel was taking on a huge size, that it was falling into shape excellently, but that it would be necessary, ab­ solutely necessary, (for money) to finish it quickly—I reconsidered it. There is nothing sadder than this indecision while you are working. Eagerness, will, energy —all are extinguished. I saw myself forced to spoil the idea [isportit' mysi] which I have been thinking about for three years, for which I had gathered an endless amount of material . . . and which I had already partly carried out, having noted down an endless number of separate scenes and chapters. (P, II, 585) H e in form ed his b ro th e r th a t he h ad p u t the w o rk a w a y in a d ra w e r. C ertain ly tim e p ressu res p osed a sev ere p ro b lem to him . B u t he w ou ld a b a n d o n a w o rk ra th e r th a n a llo w it to fail th rou g h h av in g to ru sh it. D o sto ev sk y 's fear o f spoiling an idea stem m ed as m u ch fro m m istru st o f his o w n skill a t "artistic e x ­ ecu tion " as fro m a n y co n stra in ts im p osed b y fin an cial co n sid er­ atio n s an d deadlines.

Some ideas, most notably the one embodied first in the pro­ jected novel A theism and then in The Life o f a G reat Sinner, were so dear to him that he never risked spoiling them; the nov­ els remained unwritten. The P ossessed, A Raw Youth, and The Brothers K aram azov contain the essential ideas of these two un­ written novels. But one could argue that Dostoevsky's hesitancy in writing The Life o f a G reat Sinner sprang from his lifelong re­ luctance to part with a favorite idea prematurely and subject it to artistic realization. He almost approached the point of writ­ ing it: he wrote to Strakhov from Dresden in the spring of 1870, 'T h e idea of the novel has already been in me for three years, but before I was afraid to sit down to it abroad; I wanted to be in Russia for [the writing of) it. But in three years much has rip­ ened —the whole plan of the novel —and I think that for its first part . . . I can even write here, for the action begins many years ago" (P, II, 258). Dostoevsky then informed Strakhov that the novel would be like a Tolstoy novel in size, that the five ma-

The Narrative Imperative

35

jo r parts of it would be like separate works, and that the title of the whole was to be The Life o f a G reat Sinner. Several years later Dostoevsky rejoiced that he had not rushed into writing another unwritten novel, Fathers and Chil­ dren. "W hen, a year and a half ago, Nikolai Alekseevich Nekra­ sov invited me to write a novel for N otes o f the Fatherland , I almost began at that time m y Fathers and Children , but I held myself back, and I thank God for it; I wasn't ready. And so far I have written only A Raw Youth —the first attempt at expressing m y thought."31 This unwritten novel and The Life o f a Great Sinner partly coalesced in The Brothers K aram azov. Instead of the vision of an author pressured by time into writing rapidly and spoiling his ideas, we see in Dostoevsky a man who could wait for years, even indefinitely, before he would seek to trans­ form an idea into a novel. This fear of spoiling the idea also resulted, often, in an in­ tense struggle to express that idea. Each of Dostoevsky's m ajor novels, except The Brothers K aram ozov , represents the result of numerous drafts and variations. The notebooks for The Idiot exhibit this struggle in the extreme; they are largely notes for a nonexistent novel. Even of Crime and Punishm ent , which he composed with relatively more ease than his next three novels, D ostoevsky wrote, in February 1866, to his old friend A. E. Vrangel, "At the end of November much had been written and was ready; I burnt it all; now I can confess to this. I didn't like it. A new form , a new plan attracted me and I began again . . . A novel is a poetic affair [delo p o e tic h e s k o e ], for its fulfillment it demands peace of mind and imagination. But creditors are tormenting me" (P, I, 430). The m ajor change in the notes was in the realm of narrative method; a third-person narrator replaced Raskolnikov's first-person narration. The writing of The P ossessed involved similar, more ex­ treme rejections of previous plans and drafts. D ostoevsky de­ scribed his labors to Sonya Ivanova in August 1870: The novel that I was writing was big, very original, but the idea was in a somewhat new category for me; much presumption was needed to manage it. But I didn't manage it, and I became exhausted. My work was going listlessly; I felt that there was a major insufficiency in the whole thing, but what exactly, I couldn't guess . . . And now, two

36

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

weeks ago, sitting down again to my work, suddenly I saw all at once what was lacking, and where my mistake lay. Then, in an inspiration, a new plan of the novel in full harmony presented itself to me. Every­ thing had to be radically altered. Without thinking about it at all, I crossed out everything I had written (approximately 15 sheets) and be­ gan again from the first page. The work of an entire year had been de­ stroyed. (P, II, 282-293) He complained that if he were Tolstoy, G oncharov, or Tur­ genev he would not have had to hurry with his novel. Neverthe­ less, Dostoevsky admitted, "The idea is so good, so significant in m any ways, that I myself must bow down before it" (P, II, 283). But, he said, he would have to write the novel in eight or nine months and thus spoil it. Characteristically, Dostoevsky complained about time pressure, about the fact that wealthier writers did not have to struggle as he did. But in fact he had not hesitated to throw out a whole year's w ork. The force of a new idea —not a new idea about the subject of the novel, but a dras­ tic revision in the narrative method of the novel —drove him to rewrite the whole thing. Dostoevsky's The Diary o f a Writer, though not a novel, re­ sembled his novels in being a m ajor undertaking that extended over a long period of time. D ostoevsky deliberated over its final form as well; various ideas vied with each other in his mind, with a familiar outcom e. In April 1876 he wrote: "I have still not succeeded in clarifying for myself the form of 'the D iary,' and I don't know whether I will ever get it right; so that 'the Diary' m ay even continue for two years, say, and still be an unsuc­ cessful thing. For example, when I sit down to write, I have 10-15 themes (not less). But the themes which I like best, I un­ willingly set aside for later; they will occupy much space, they will take much energy . . . and so I write not of what I had wanted to. O n the other hand, I thought, too naively, that this would be a real 'diary / A real 'diary' is almost impossible, but it is only for show, for the public." (P, III, 206-207). Four years later he complained to Ivan A ksakov that though he had been issuing his Diary himself for two years, he was still plagued by doubts over what to say about certain m atters, what tone to adopt, and on what matters to remain silent.32 In The Diary, the pressure of time may genuinely, from

The Narrative Imperative

37

Dostoevsky's own account, have been victorious. In the novels D ostoevsky did seek final forms and did grapple with those themes that demanded "space" and "energy." Common to D os­ toevsky's perception of both The Diary and the novels, though, was his sense of having reluctantly put away favorite themes for a m ore auspicious time; common to readers of The Diary and the novels is the feeling that D ostoevsky has successfully devel­ oped and expressed those very themes. The com position of A Raw Youth followed the pattern of the earlier novels. M oreover, while writing it D ostoevsky was haunted by Strakhov's criticisms of his style, although the note­ books show that he could not change his narrative methods to suit Strakhov and perhaps did not even want to.. The letters of this period carry more references to Tolstoy than do the earlier letters. He compared the size of The Life o f A G reat Sinner to the size of a Tolstoy novel; he wrote, in the letter quoted above, that he had come to the conviction that the artist must study everything, current and historical, that related to the reality he was trying to show. He saw Tolstoy as the only Russian writer who succeeded at this as well as V ictor Hugo had in France. He felt a sharp sense of com petition with Tolstoy during the simul­ taneous appearances of A nna Karenina and A Raw Youth and was jealously aware of Strakhov's extreme admiration for T o l­ stoy. In a letter to his wife during the writing of A Raw Y outh , in July 1874, D ostoevsky revealed that composing the plan for the novel was the most difficult aspect of his literary endeavor; after that, the writing of the novel itself could flow more sm oothly. "Anya, my work progresses sluggishly, and I am tor­ mented over the plan. An abundance of plans —that's the main deficiency. W hen I look at it as a whole, then I see that 4 novels are joined in it. Strakhov always sees m y shortcoming in this. But there is still time. Perhaps I shall correct it. The main thing is the plan, and the work itself is easier" (P , III, 114). (From M ay to August of 1874, for example, D ostoevsky made only 47 pages of notes for the novel, whereas from August to Septem­ ber, when the novel was better under way, he made 140 pages of notes [P, II, 327].) Later in the m onth Dostoevsky repeated the same hopes to her, "At home I am working hard at the plan . . . But if a successful plan emerges, then the work will flow

38

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

like oil. If only I could find a successful plan!" (P, III, 131). D ol­ inin has described the special nature of these plans for D ostoev­ sky: . . . in the course of Dostoevsky's creative work, the plan always oc­ cupied an exclusive place. For him, the making of a good plan was al­ ready half the work. One must, however, make this stipulation: Dos­ toevsky's understanding of a "plan" is an original one, peculiar to him; it is not only the order of the distribution of plot [siuzhetnye] and ideological elements, not only the foundations of an architectonic na­ ture, it is notes, at times extremely detailed, which characterize one or another personage or which define the basic centers of the plot [uzly siuzheta] and which are very often ideological (as for example, the plans for The Idiot). (P, III, 330) Clearly, Dostoevsky's plans all attempted the same thing: the effective portrayal of an idea already decided upon. The plans, however "ideological" they m ay be, in fact comprise vari­ ous sets of narrative strategies. O nce D ostoevsky had settled on the idea, it remained constant; the rhetoric of persuasion varied. The Brothers K aram azov , which had been ripening in D os­ toevsky's consciousness for years, still demanded extensive re­ writing despite Dostoevsky's certainty about the idea of the novel. He wrote to Ivan A ksakov: I am just now finishing the Karamazovs, consequently I am summing up the work, which I, at least, value, for there is much in it of me and of mine. I am in general working nervously, with torment and anxiety . . . And now I have to sum up all that I have pondered, gathered, and set down in the last three years. I must do it well, that is, as well as I can . . . But the time has come, nevertheless, to finish and finish with­ out delay. Will you believe, notwithstanding, tht I have been making notes for 3 years already, —I set down some chapter, and then I reject it; I write it again, and I write it again. Only inspired passages come at one sitting, in one gulp, but the rest is all very hard work. (P, IV, 198-199) Thus, before Dostoevsky began to write a novel, he deliber­ ated over his idea and whether he should use it. If he did decide to use it, a long process of planning and rewriting began. The fi­ nal product was merely the visible part of a monstrous iceberg; its beholder may see it sharply outlined against the water and

The Narrative Imperative

39

the sky, but his fear and awe spring from his knowledge of what is below. Dostoevsky hoped that his readers would sense the underlying idea of his work. "The high artistic quality [k h u d ozhestvennost') of . . . a novelist is his ability to express the idea of his novel in the characters and images of the novel so that after reading it the reader understands the writer's idea as well as the writer had understood it himself when creating his work."33 But the writer must first find the right form, the right narrative strategy in which to cast his idea, "How does one recognize the high artistic quality of a work of art? By the fact that we see the fullest possible harmony between the artistic idea and the form in which it is embodied?"34 Dostoevsky's numerous plans and drafts exhibit his search for the right form. Although he hoped that the reader would un­ derstand his idea as "well as the writer has understood it himself," and although he sought "the fullest possible harmony between the artistic idea and the form," nevertheless Dostoev­ sky believed that the reader must elaborate the meaning of the novel for himself. The writer must be a strategist, a rhetorician who could never speak his thoughts and say "the last word," be­ cause of the withering effect such directness would have on his art. The tendentious author manipulates his reader unsparingly, but he must preserve the reader's illusory sense of freedom. Dos­ toevsky warned the critics, "Divine, wish for, prove, ask people to follow you, by all means —it is all permissible; but to pre­ scribe is not permisible, to be a despot is not permissible,"35 and the same exhortation applied to the artist. Perhaps the most prescriptive of Dostoevsky's novels is The Brothers K aram azov ; the most prescriptive part of the novel lies at its core, in the juxtaposition of Ivan's creation, "The Grand Inquisitor," and of Alyosha's real chronicle, "Notes of the Life of the Deceased Priest and Monk, the Elder Zosima." Dostoevsky's narrative methods culminate in this novel, especially in the ap­ position of the two inner narratives. But the novel escapes des­ potism. In fact readers have been swayed by the challenge of the Grand Inquisitor rather than by the answer contained in Alyo­ sha's "Biographical Notes." Dostoevsky, though he sought to avoid despotism, hardly hoped for such an outcome. Yet while writing the novel he consciously tried to veil the refutation of the Grand Inquisitor by presenting it indirectly

40

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

and by leaving (or seeming to leave) the conclusion to the reader. Despite the ideological importance Dostoevsky attached to the refutation, he would not resort to a direct negation of the Grand Inquisitors argument. He wrote to Pobedonostsev late in the summer of 1879: You pose the most pressing problem: that I have not yet given the an­ swer to all those aesthetic propositions, and that it must be done. Ex­ actly so, and in this all my care and anxiety now reside. For the sixth b o o k —The Russian M onk —which will appear on August 31st is in­ tended to answer all that negative side. And so I tremble for it in this sense: will it be a sufficient answer? Especially as the answer is not in fact direct, not an answer point by point to the theses previously ex­ pressed (in the Grand Inquisitor and earlier), but [is an answer] only by implication. Here I have presented something exactly the opposite of the world-outlook expressed earlier—but again it is not presented point by point, but as an artistic picture, so to speak. This is what disturbs me, i.e., will it be understood, and shall I achieve even a part of my aim? (P, IV, 109)

However much D ostoevsky wanted the reader to share his idea, his point of view, he would not have recourse to simple, and therefore self-defeating measures to achieve that support. A bove all, he remained a strategist who, while refining the artis­ tic execution of his idea into a persuasive form , left the final burden of comprehension up to the reader. O nce the plan for a new novel was ready, the writing of the beginning of a novel was also extremely difficult for D ostoev­ sky .36 T o begin a novel meant to establish its tone, its narrative mode, and although he knew that the final form of the novel must be linked to its themes and should even be engendered by those themes, Dostoevsky found the search for that tone and narrative manner a strenuous one. During the writing of The Possessed he wrote in O ctober 1870 to Strakhov, "It is true, much of the novel was written from the middle and much has been rejected (to be sure, not the whole of it). But, none the less, I'm still sitting at the beginning. A bad sign, and, m oreover, I want to do something better. They say that the tone and man­ ner of a story must be engendered by themselves in the artist. This is true, but sometimes you go astray and you must seek them [the tone and manner]" (P, II, 294). Four years later Dos­

The Narrative Imperative

41

toevsky wrote to his wife about A Razo Y outh , "If only I could begin successfully" (P, III, 133).

Beginnings represented a formidable leap from the realm of poetic inspiration to its concretion in narration, plot, and char­ acterization. Endings, however, did not pose such a threat to Dostoevsky. True, he deliberated over the outcome of a plot; for example, he debated throughout the writing of Crime and Punishm ent over whether Raskolnikov should commit suicide. He often feared that his works were too long: he frequently de­ scribed his short stories as overextended; he pushed himself to end The Brothers K aram azov "without delay." But he had confi­ dence, finally, in his ability actually to write a good ending. As he struggled with the writing of The Id io t , D ostoevsky realized early on, in O ctober 1868, that the ending would be critical to the overall success o f the novel, "finally, and (the main thing for me) is the fact that this 4th part and its ending are the most im portant in my novel; that is, practically the whole novel was written and conceived for its denouement" (P, II, 138). Unlike the rest o f the novel, writing the ending o f The Idiot came easily to him; he was unabashedly proud of it. Tw o months later he wrote to M aikov, "I am noting things down more or less in rough draft, and I know every word by heart. If The Idiot has readers, then perhaps they will be somewhat sur­ prised by the unexpectedness of the ending; but, thinking it over, they will of course agree that it had to end this way. In general this ending is of the best, that is, strictly as an ending; I'm not speaking about the merit of the novel proper" (P, II, 148-149). In the same letter to M aikov Dostoevsky disclosed his plan for a novel to be called A theism . Yet even in the flush of a new, compelling idea he could not squelch his enthusiasm for the re­ cently discovered ending of The Id iot , "The ending of The Idiot will be effective (I don't know whether it's good) . . . I have no understanding about the success or lack of success of the novel. However, the ending will decide everything" (P, II, 151). Pre­ dictably, D ostoevsky vouched for the interest of his ending but expressed hesitancy over its artistic value. Yet this is one of the few letters from the period of the writing of The Idiot in which D ostoevsky expressed any optimism about his novel. W hen D ostoevsky began The Possessed he voiced, in an­

42

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

other letter to M aikov, a similar confidence, amidst numerous worries, about the proposed ending for Stepan Trofim ovich. "I am simply in despair . . . S. T . — ich is a secondary character; the novel will not be about him, but his story is closely connec­ ted with the other happenings (the main ones) of the novel, and so I took him as a kind of cornerstone for the whole thing. But, nevertheless, Step. Trof. s benefit perform ance will be in the 4th part; here there will be a most original conclusion of his fate. For all the rest —I can't answer, but for this place I can answer in advance" (P, II, 333). One can conjecture that the beginning of a novel was diffi­ cult for D ostoevsky because it involved decisions about tone and narrative method. Endings were easier; they represented the culm ination of the inspirational idea. By then the tone and nar­ rative method would have jelled; the reader's interest merely had to be maintained, and this was easier for him to do. When writing The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky had revealed that he wrote only his "inspired passages" at one sitting. These are the passages where he himself had been consumed by in­ terest; in such rare moments the author is at once writer and reader. The ending of The Idiot and the fate chosen for Stepan Trofim ovich fascinated Dostoevsky in the same way. O f course, when Dostoevsky wrote of "endings," he was not always describing the final pages of a novel, but rather the last big scene in a novel. One could argue, furthermore, that these sensational final scenes often obscured the more difficult ques­ tions raised in the novel and offered the novelist an escape hatch through a tour de force. Certainly the final clim actic scene of The Idiot, with Rogozhin and M yshkin keeping watch over Nastasia Filippovna's body, could be described as a way of avoid­ ing a resolution to the problems created throughout the novel by the effects of the good man, M yshkin, upon others. Dos­ toevsky himself would probably argue the reverse: he would find the predicament at the end of the novel to be the most ex­ treme, most painful, but most fitting outcome of the dramatic situation. E. M . Forster has written of the delicate manipulations an author must bring off in order to achieve a balanced ending. The plot and the characters vie with each other, with the result that almost all "novels are feeble at the end . . . The writer,

The Narrative Imperative

43

poor fellow, must be allowed to finish up somehow, he has his living to get like anyone else, so no wonder that nothing is heard but hammering and screwing."37 He concludes that a novelist must seek to find endings which expand rather than complete. "Expansion. That is the idea a novelist must cling to. Not com pletion. Not rounding off but opening out."38 D ostoev­ sky's novels end in such gestures of expansion. But it seems that D ostoevsky does not fully share Forster's sense of the philo­ sophical and aesthetic problems inherent in ending a novel. Although D ostoevsky often had difficulty in deciding how a novel should end, once he had decided, he gave himself up, with relish, to the preparation of a powerful scene. A reader of D ostoevsky hears no hammers at the end of the novel. D ostoevsky knew, however, that a writer must be his own ruthless critic as well as his own eager reader; he must be able to separate the false from the truly inspired passages; he must know when to reject his w ork. In December 1864 Dostoevsky advised the writer Anna Korvin-Krukovskaia on the need for merciless revision, "From this shortening the tale will becom e more terse, more concise, and less obscure. Everything will be clear. W ith this, let me add, that the most valuable skill of a writer is to know how to cross out. He who can do this —and who has the strength to cross out his own work —will go far. All great writers are extremely concise. But the main thing is not to repeat what you've already said or what is understood by every­ one anyway" (P, I, 381-382). Dostoevsky's own conciseness and terseness are hardly of the usual kind. W e know he rewrote and revised his novels, that he struck out large portions of them; his novels, bare of detailed scenery and protracted physical descriptions, convey a pareddown, yet heightened world. A t the same time, Dostoevsky and his critics frequently felt that he overwrote and overextended his w orks.39 D ostoevsky agreed with Strakhov's criticism of The Possessed. In April 1871, he wrote: You have pointed out the main deficiency terribly aptly. Yes, I have suffered and am suffering from this: I haven't known at all, up to now, how to get control of my means. I have squeezed together a great number of separate novels and tales into one novel, so that there is neither measure nor harmony. You have said all this with amazing ac­

44

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

curacy; I have already suffered because of this [deficiency] for many years . . . But there is something even worse: I, not asking myself to be responsible for my means, and being carried away by a poetic im­ pulse, undertake to express an artistic idea [khudozhestvennaia ideia] beyond my power. (N.B. Just as the power of the poetic impulse is al­ ways, for example, in V. Hugo more powerful than the means of ful­ fillment. One can discern the traces of this duality in Pushkin.) And this will be my undoing.40 D ostoevsky the critic found fault with his own writing; at the same time, in doing so he put himself in the company of Hugo and Pushkin. Dostoevsky continued to take seriously Strakhov's criti­ cisms of his w ork; four years later, when Strakhov did not like the first parts of A Raw Youth, Dostoevsky, though angry with him, hoped to prove in the later parts of the novel that his judg­ ment had been mistaken (P, III, 151). But despite his sensitivity to Strakhov's criticism, Dostoevsky never actually changed his narrative methods. The com bination of several novels in one, or giving one hundred examples instead of ten comprised an es­ sential part of his narrative strategy. The multiplicity of narra­ tive voices in The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers K ara­ m azov heightens the interest of the novels and masks the "ugly mug" of the author. "It goes without saying that many of the les­ sons of my elder Zosima (or, better to say, the mode of their ex­ pression) belong to his character. I fully agree with the thoughts he expresses, but if I expressed them personally from m yself then I would express them in a different form and with a differ­ ent kind of language. He, though, can not express himself in a different language n or in a different spirit from that which I have given him. One could not create a character in any other way" (P, IV, 7/19 August 1877, p. 91). In the last decade of his life Dostoevsky returned to his youthful preoccupation with form . His early letters reveal a wildly appreciative reader of great writers and an admirer of beautiful form in general. Later, toward the end of his life, he believed that certain ideas inherently engendered certain forms. While working on The Possessed and A Raw Youth he had had to seek the right tone and narrative manner, although he still re­ mained convinced that the idea itself should engender them. His

The Narrative Imperative

45

plans for these novels demonstrate a search for the particular narrative manner that an idea demanded: "There is a kind of se­ cret of art according to which an epic form never finds itself in accordance with a dramatic form. I even believe, that for vari­ ous forms of art there exist series of poetic ideas that correspond to them, so that one idea can never be expressed in another form that does not correspond to it" (P, III, 20). Form has become in­ separable from idea; it is, or should be, its concrete manifesta­ tion. We have returned full circle to the acknowledgment of Dos­ toevsky as a "novelist of ideas"; that phrase should now have a different meaning. Dostoevsky was a novelist of ideas, not a novelist of ideas. He faithfully adhered to the belief that the au­ thor should mask his own point of view, that the narration should be the only link between his inspirational idea and the reader's eventual perception of it. The narrative should interest the reader; it should persuade and manipulate him without his knowing it; it should not be overtly despotic or prescriptive, or infringe on the reader's illusion of freedom. But the narrative al­ so had an aesthetic obligation to be the best possible mode for the expression of the author's intent —to be, ultimately, the only way in which a particular idea could find expression.

2

The Notebooks for The Idiot

The whole secret of fiction and the drama —in the construc­ tional p art—lies in the adjustment of things unusual to things eternal and universal. The writer who knows exactly how ex­ ceptional, and how non-exceptional, his events should be made, possesses the key to the art. —Thomas Hardy, Notebook entry, 23 February 1893

I carried off his papers and spent a whole day looking through them . . . . among them was one rather thick volume of finely written manuscript, unfinished, perhaps thrown aside and forgotten by the writer . . . . some strange and terrible reminiscences jotted down irregularly, spasmodically, as though by some overpowering impulse. I read these fragments over several times, and was almost convinced they were written in a state of insanity. —"Dostoevsky" describing Goryanchikov's manuscript. The House o f the D ead

n The Idiot, unlike his other novels, Dostoevsky did not finally settle the basic problems of charac­ terization until he actually began to write the final draft for publication. Of the three notebooks for The Idiot, the first two thus reflect his preliminary struggles to establish the personality of the Idiot and his general position in the midst of the other characters and to fix upon a definite narrative strategy for his novel. These two notebooks are a testing ground for various ideas and plans that bear no direct, step-by-step relation to the final version. The third notebook is qualitatively different. Dostoevsky worked on it only after Part I (chapters 1-16) had already been published. This notebook reflects a different stage of creativity: rather than embodying the search for an idea, it illustrates the

I

The Notebooks for The Idiot

47

struggle to find the best way to express themes already decided upon and to plan the further stages of a work whose beginning had already been published. The first notebooks seek to estab­ lish a form; the last notebook has less freedom for change. Cer­ tain rules have already been established, and the author must maneuver within these self-imposed confines. Ironically, neither the first two notebooks nor the third one gives us a typical creative notebook in which the novelist settles upon basic attributes in his novel and begins to work them out. Between the writing of the first two notebooks and the writing of Part I of the novel there is a crucial gap. In that interval D ostoevsky destroyed what he had written so far, largely reversed his ideas, and began again. He wrote to M aikov on 31 December/12 January 1868, "All summer and autumn I was put­ ting together various ideas [mysli ] (some were most ingenious), but some experience always let me foresee either the falseness or the difficulty or the weakness of a particular idea. Finally, I stopped at one and began to w ork. I had written a lot, but on the 4th of December, foreign style, I threw it all to the devil . . . Then . . . I began to torment myself over the invention of a new novel" (P, II, 59-60). In the creative process extending from the initial idea to the true beginning of a work, we have only the ex­ treme boundaries on either side with which to work; the initial conception does not resemble the final product and is, in fact, often opposite to it.

Despite the amount of destroyed material, the gap between the initial conception and the final product is bridged somewhat by Dostoevsky's correspondence of the period. Moreover, a critic gifted with his well-developed faculty of hindsight can pluck out significant strands from the early notebooks and show how they are rewoven into the fabric of the novel. He can also identify certain broad movements that begin in the note­ books and carry on through the novel. The reversals, most sig­ nificantly those in the character of the Idiot, do not take place entirely unheralded. The notes themselves contain intimations of the surprising switch from a hypocritical, proud, and vengeful Idiot to the Myshkin of the novel. (The actual manuscript of the novel, as dictated to Anna Grigor'evna, does not exist. It was probably destroyed before the Dostoevskys' return to Russia.)1

48

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

Throughout these notes, Dostoevsky's comments about style and structure, though infrequent, have implications for any study of the novel itself. It is equally important, however, to trace the movement of the notebooks as a whole, to follow the sequence of Dostoevsky's own sets of priorities. W here does the consideration of narrative fit into Dostoevsky's general scheme? W hen does it become a serious concern? W hen does it lack importance? Dostoevsky himself had asserted the old truth of the inseparability of form and content, but a discussion of narrative method in its emergent stages must be placed in a larger context. W e have already seen that Dostoevsky found especially agonizing the earliest stages of planning a novel. Anna Grigor'evna said of his labors during the fall of 1867 when he was planning The Idiot , "Fyodor M ikhailovich was faced with the most important part of the work which was especially diffi­ cult for him, namely the consideration, the creation [ tvorenie ], the making [sozdanie] of the plan of the novel. The writing of the novel itself came to him comparatively easily, but the making of a plan presented great difficulties for him. The whole trouble was in the richness of the fantasy and in the dissatisfaction of the author with that form in which he wanted to express the idea which was placed at the basis of the novel."2 Dostoevsky sought the form which would best embody his idea, but, as these notebooks show, that search for form led to changes in the idea as well. Although Dostoevsky typically separated the poet who has an "idea" from the artist who gives creative shape to that idea, he consistently emphasized the overlapping of functions be­ tween these two aspects of the author. M oreover, he assigned to the artist (as differentiated from the poet) a task far greater than that of technical experimentation. In the early notes for A Raw Youth he writes, "In order to write a novel, one must acquire, first of all, one or several strong impressions actually experienced by the author's heart. This is the poet's job. From this impres­ sion there are developed a theme, a plan, a harmonious whole. This is already the artist's job, although artist and poet help each other in one thing as well as the other, in both instances."3 That is, it is the artist who endows the poet's idea with wholeness and harmony. The artist's technical experimentation, by forming the

The Notebooks for The Idiot

49

poet's idea, gives it its first existence. And indeed, from his earliest works, such as Poor Folk or The D ouble , it is com m on­ place to discover that Dostoevsky's technique (or style, or form) is inseparable from the idea of the work. Only in one letter to M aikov, on 15/27 M ay 1869, does D ostoevsky seriously minimize the function of the artist as op­ posed to the poet: I will make an important digression: a poem, in my opinion, is like a natural precious stone, a diamond, in the soul of the poet, quite ready [complete], in all its essences; and here is the first task of the poet, as a m aker and creator, the first part of his creation. If you wish —he is not the creator; life is —the powerful essence of life, the living and essen­ tial God, putting his strength in many distinct creations at various places, and most of all in the great heart and in the strong poet, so that if the poet himself is not a creator, — (and one must agree with this . . . because certainly a creative work comes suddenly, as a complete whole, finished and ready, out of the soul of a poet) —if he himself is not a creator, then at least his soul is that very mine which gives birth to the diamond and without which it would not be found anywhere. Then follows the second task of the poet, no longer so deep and mysterious, but only that of the artist: that is, having received the dia­ mond, to finish [obdelat ] and mount [opravit'] it. Here the poet is almost like a jeweler. (P, II, 190)

In this passage Dostoevsky seems to have been carried away by the neatness of his own m etaphor. In practice, he assigned the artist a far greater role than that of a mere jeweler; the borders between the poet and the artist were never so sharply defined. M oreover, in this letter, whose somewhat "rom antic extrava­ gance" has been aptly pointed out by Robert Jackson,4 D ostoev­ sky has partially embraced the notion of the poet as a mere vessel for divine inspiration. Edward W asiolek has maintained that for Dostoevsky The Idiot was the result of "arduous and painful and exasperating technical experimentation." He has warned that we "cannot go to The Idiot with theories of the organic fitness of every part, of the necessity of every positioning . . . Structure, I hazard, is never as exquisite as our current theories would have it, at least not in this novel . . . the notes show convincingly not only that D ostoevsky was trying out m any routes, but that more than

50

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

one route could have taken him to the same destination."5 To agree with Wasiolek wholeheartedly in his sensible and prudent statement would mean an end of this study of The Id io t. But, even while granting the lack of an "organic fitness" of every part and the absence of "exquisite" structure, one can still make a forceful case that had Dostoevsky followed a different route, he would have arrived at a different destination. A comparative study of Myshkin in The Idiot and Alyosha in The Brothers K aram azov bears witness to this.6 The central idea behind each of these characters is the same: they are both positively (that is, completely) beautiful men seeking to do good in the world. But they follow exceedingly different courses of action and arrive at opposite destinations. Thus questions of structure and the inter­ relation of the parts of a novel reenter through the back door. For example, Myshkins resurrection of poor Marie through the children's love occurs at the beginning of this novel; in the ensu­ ing tangle of events its significance gradually becomes blurred. Alyosha's momentary resurrection of Illusha ends that novel, and the reader joins the children in a moment of thrilling optimisim. The first two notebooks for The Idiot (nos. 3 and 11 by Sakulin's count, and nos. 3 and 4 in the 1974 edition) extend from 14 September 1867 to 30 November 1867. There is no break between these two notebooks; Dostoevsky simply made notes first in one book, then in the next. The first notebook already contained some notes written while he was working on Crime and Punishm ent’, the second notebook is interlaced in the middle with notes for The Eternal H usband and part of The Possessed. Fortunately Dostoevsky's entries are dated, so that a consecutive reading of the notes remains possible, and editors of each of the versions of these notes have arranged the material by dates, with some minor variations in the positioning of cer­ tain paragraphs. The third notebook (no. 10 in Sakulin, no. 5 in the 1974 edition) is interspersed with notes for "About Kartuzov" (a preliminary sketch for Captain Lebyadkin in The Possessed) and ideas for new works. This third notebook ex­ tends from 7 M arch 1868, to 11 November 1868, and contains notes for the rest of the novel. D ostoevsky wrote The Idiot while abroad with his new wife. He began the notes for the novel on 14 September 1867 in Geneva, where he stayed until

The Notebooks for The Idiot

51

the end of M a y 1 8 6 8 ; co n tin u ed th em in V e v e y fro m June until th e beginning of S ep tem b er 1 8 6 8 ; in M ilan until the m iddle of N o v e m b e r; and he finished the n o v el in F lo ren ce, w h ere he stay ed th ro u g h Ja n u a ry 1 8 6 9 (IX , 3 3 8 ).

The first two notebooks are largely notes for an unwritten novel, for the image of M yshkin as a completely or positively beautiful man, which dominates The Idiot , does not ever fully appear and is only hinted at towards the end of these notes. The rem arkable development in these pages of the early version of the vengeful Idiot into the meek and good M yshkin demon­ strates a quintessentially Dostoevskian development: the pro­ jected, though unrealized, plans for the transform ation of the Idiot's personality reflect Dostoevsky's own conviction that true goodness arises out of the abyss of human evil and suffering. In the novel, however, no character undergoes such a far-reaching development. M ost o f the outlined plans for action in the first two notebooks are linear ones —where development and perma­ nent changes in the characters o ccu r—whereas the overall shape of the novel itself, in contrast to the notes, is a zigzag or a circle, the lines of which are constantly being retraced. One develop­ ment is usually cancelled out in the next scene by a reverse oscillation; heroes and heroines do not really change —they vacillate. At the center of the web of relationships and events stands the Idiot. Thus the novel's final structure, a sequence of oscillations, grew instead out of an opposite structure, a developmental one, planned for it in its early notebooks. The change in idea had led to a corresponding change in form . The portrayal of an Idiot who was evil but who finally repented would have given the novel a linear shape; on the other hand, a constant character, in this case a good man, creates waves around himself which intersect to m ake a circular pattern. This Idiot's constancy caused those around him to fluctuate within themselves and to clash with each other. (Even though the notebooks contain projected plans for the development of characters, the actual structure of the first two notebooks themselves is as circular as that of the final novel. Here too one plan for development cancels out the next; the final effect of the notebooks as a whole resembles the oscillations of Nastasia Filippovna in the novel.)

52

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

In the first two notebooks D ostoevsky sought to establish the broadest structural contours of his novel. From entry to en­ try he juggled repeatedly with the composition of the members of the families, trying to decide upon their intra- and inter­ relationships. Establishing the composition and the number of important families constituted a m ajor task in the early notebooks. M ost im portant, he experimented with the Idiot's position within the family as an illegitimate or legitimate son, nephew, and so on, and put him now in one fam ily, now in another. At the same time Dostoevsky also sought to find the Idiot's role in that fam ily; he tried to outline the shape of the Idiot's personality. Belchikov and Sakulin as well as W asiolek have divided their editions of these first two notebooks into a series of plans. Their rule for division has mainly been dictated by the changes in the familial structures throughout the notes. This division into plans is useful insofar as it quickly and correctly em­ phasizes the extreme importance Dostoevsky himself placed on the establishment of the structure of family relationships and interrelationships in the novel. We can see that Dostoevsky's novel began as a family novel, that the fam ily was at the heart of its initial conception. In the long run, however, the division into plans, though initially helpful, is finally misleading, for it imposes an arbitrary order on the notes. The 1974 Soviet edi­ tion of the notes is more informative than the other two in that it does not follow this division into plans but sets the notes out as they were written, entry by en try.7 Throughout the m any conceptual changes, certain cons­ tants remain from the earliest plans until the final version of the novel. The Heroine, the model for Nastasia Filippovna, is pre­ sent from the beginning, as are, to a lesser degree, the related and mutually dependent themes of the ordinary versus the "original" man and of the power of money. Other plot fragments reappear repeatedly throughout: the burned finger, the arrival of the Idiot and the meeting with his brother (who later becomes Rogozhin) in a railway coach, an evening party at the General's house, the Idiot's handwriting, the lost wallet, and a preoccupa­ tion with severed heads. These fragments give no genuine clues to understanding how D ostoevsky built his novel. But because they provide the elemental stuff out of which Dostoevsky is able

The Notebooks for The Idiot

53

to spin some of his most powerful and scandalous scenes, they are able to show that the germs of certain heightened moments were present in the author's mind even before a particular scene had a reason for being as a function of an already existing plot and its characters. M ost of the plot material in the first two notebooks never recurs in the novel. For example, Dostoevsky was eagerly following the course of the case of Olga Umetsky during the fall of 1867.® Olga Umetsky, a girl beaten and maltreated by her parents, had several times attempted arson on her family's estate but had always then warned them of the fire. Nevertheless she was charged with having set the fires, and her parents were charged with having abused their child. Although Dostoevsky had originally intended this case to be a cornerstone in the plot, The Idiot contains only a shadowy reference to it in the fact that Nastasia Filippovna's parental estate had burned down many years before the story actually begins.9 Dostoevsky's interest in this case as one of the first to be tried under the new jury system in Russia carries over into the novel, which contains numerous references to other trials by jury. D esp ite the fa c t th a t the a ctu al details o f the p lo t in the n o te b o o k s differ fro m th e final v ersio n , ce rta in b ro a d stru ctu ra l outlin es rem ain th ro u g h o u t. D o sto ev sk y 's p re o ccu p a tio n w ith the co m p o sitio n of an d in terrelation sh ip s am o n g fam ilies p ro ­ vid es the m o st fruitful th read to fo llo w th ro u g h the b a c k tra c k ­ ings an d jo ttin g s w h ich co m p rise the m aze o f th e ea rly n o te ­ b o o k s. T h e ch an gin g p atte rn s o f fam ily relation sh ip s reflect the alteratio n s in the Idiot's c h a ra c te r as w ell.

In the first entry, dated 14 September 1867, there are three families: a family of impoverished gentry, the Uncle's family, and the fiancés fam ily. The family of gentry is the initial con­ ception of the Ivolgin family in the novel and contains a father, a mother, two sons —the elder, "the handsome son," and the younger, "the Idiot" —a daughter M asha, and a foster daughter M ignon, who partly anticipates Nastasia Filippovna. Nastasia is also foreshadowed, however, by the Heroine who is also called "the beauty" and Hero who is a cousin in Masha's fiancés fam ­ ily .10 Dostoevsky's earliest plans were for an intense family drama; three prototypes o f main characters in the novel, the Idiot, G anya, and Nastasia crowd together within the confines

54

Dostoevsky and The idiot

of a single family unit. All relationships among characters are doublebonded by familial ties. The theme of incest exists from the beginning; the father of the first fam ily tries to rape his foster daughter, Mignon. This family structure holds through the second entry on 4/16 O ctober. In both entries Dostoevsky emphasizes the tense relationship between the Idiot and his m other. In the first entry his m other detests him; in the second, he scornfully pushes her away. Tow ard the middle of the second entry Dosteovsky in­ troduces a second general's family (IX, 154). This family's high opinion of itself vaguely foreshadows the Epanchin fam ily. Dostoevsky's addition of yet another family with a willful m other provides a hazy prefiguring of General Epanchin's wife. By the next entry, dated 17 O ctober, this structure has broken down. A pattern of vacillation begins and continues throughout these notes. Dostoevsky tentatively distances the Idiot by sug­ gesting that he may be a stepson or a naturell (illegitimate) son, not of the improverished general bu t of the Uncle (IX, 155). The Heroine enters the general's family as a ward or governess. By 18 O ctober the Uncle has acquired yet another son: the Idiot is his natural son, the second son is legitimate. Deciding upon the Idiot's familial ties becomes necessary for the expression of the main idea about him. In a later entry the same day the Idiot is simply the son of the Uncle (IX, 160). On 22 O ctober D ostoevsky notes that he must work out the relations between the two brothers (IX, 162). They are to meet for the first time on a railway car: "The Natural Son. He was traveling with the Son. They have become acquainted. The Natural Son knows that this is the Son. The Son has heard that there is a Natural Son . . . The Son: T e s , but he doesn't seem stupid to me. It's true, he's strange. He's quite a yurodivyi [fool, in the sense of God's fool, that is an idiot believed to possess the gift of prophesy]' " (IX, 163). Although he later at times wandered away from it in the notes, by this ninth entry D ostoevsky had found a form ulation that was to resurface as the beginning of his novel, where M yshkin and Rogozhin meet on the train. In these earliest notes, then, the Idiot has moved out of the central family into the Uncle's fam ­ ily. He has become successively a stepson and a natural son. D ostoevsky further distances him by having him arrive on the

The Notebooks for The Idiot

55

scene an d b y h av in g him m eet his b ro th e r fo r th e first tim e. Fam ily ties h av e slacken ed rap id ly in D o sto ev sk y 's stru ctu ral sch em e.

The son's labeling of the Idiot as a yurodivyi counter­ balances the frequent assumption of critics that the early drafts of the novel show an Idiot completely unlike the M yshkin of the novel. Although this characterization does not occur again until the last entries of the first two notebooks, its early presence sug­ gests that Dostoevsky's final notion of the Idiot did not spring full-blown in December 1867, but was a possibility in his mind all along. Indeed, as we shall see, other intimations of the final meek Idiot appear amidst the early notes which depict him, for the most part, as a predominantly vengeful and proud char­ acter. In the tenth entry, 27 O ctober, Dostoevsky transplants the Idiot back into the General's family, where the Heroine has re­ mained as a ward. Olga Umetsky is still part of the family as well (IX, 165). At the head of this entry Dostoevsky has written "Ganya" in calligraphic lettering.11 The Idiot has reentered the tight structure of the fam ily, so that the son's and the Idiot's shared passion for the Heroine carries a shade of incest. Throughout all these early entries, however, the Uncle, who is also a suitor of the Heroine, plays a central role; at times he overshadows the Idiot. In the tenth entry Dostoevsky assigns them equal significance: "Memento. The main point of the novel: the Uncle and the Idiot, two characters."12 O n 29 O ctober D ostoevsky again slightly distanced the Idiot from the fam ily; he becom es a natural son of the General. Everyone is terribly kind and affectionate to him but unjust at the same time. This arouses hatred in the Idiot (IX, 169). Later on the page, Dostoevsky reemphasizes the Idiot's abrupt, bewil­ dering arrival on the scene. "From whence has the Idiot come? (They all make him understand that he has fallen on their shoulders) . . . The heirs of his godmother sent him from somewhere or other with a letter" (IX, 169). In entry twelve, 30 O ctober, the Idiot becomes the child from a prior marriage of the general; Ganya's m other hates the Idiot, while Ganya himself resembles the Idiot of the final ver­ sion. "Pure, beautiful, virtuous, strict, very nervous, and a deeply Christian, compassionate lovingness . . . He lives by

56

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

feeling. He lives powerfully and passionately. In a word, a Christian nature" (IX, 170). He forgives the spiteful and sneering Idiot. Dostoevsky's idea of portraying a beautiful, Christian character has found its first fleeting expression in this plan for Ganya. (Ironically, in the third notebook G anya often becomes like the Idiot of the first two notebooks. Their symbiotic rela­ tionship, so powerful in the notebooks, disappears in the novel. There Ganya never fully develops as a character.) D o sto e v sk y co m m en ces an o th e r e n try later th e sam e d a y : "T h e n ov el begins w ith fam ily difficulties an d w ith the a rriv a l of the Idiot" (IX , 172). T h e n o tio n th at th e Id iot, th o u gh still p a rt of the G eneral's fam ily, m u st a rriv e as a n e w co m e r seem s to have

tak en

firm

h o ld .

Two

d a y s la te r,

on

1 N o v e m b e r,

D o sto e v sk y begins his e n try b y shifting the Idiot to the U ncle's fam ily:

No good. The main thought about the Idiot does not emerge. It is necessary: that the Idiot —is the son of the Uncle. THE ID IO T IS THE SON OF THE UN CLE.

(IX, 174)

Dostoevsky's mounting frustration in his struggle to settle upon characters and a plot for the novel thus became focused on the problem of deciding upon the Idiot's kinship relationship with everyone else. Dostoevsky repeatedly tries to solve his difficul­ ties with expressing "the main thought about the Idiot" by reshuffling family groupings. Here the solution is to remove the Idiot from the General's family and to place him once again in the fam ily of the Uncle. Yet even here Dostoevsky has the Idiot exert power in much the same way as M yshkin subsequently does in the novel —through his simple, childlike honesty. "The Idiot captivates everyone with his childlike naiveté" (IX, 174). Nevertheless the Uncle continues to vie for the central role in the novel; on 2 November Dostoevsky writes, "N .B. The figure of the Uncle over everything. This is the main thing" (IX, 175)' Interestingly, the Uncle, who plays a m ajor role throughout the first two notebooks, disappears in the novel, although some vestiges of him reappear in General Epanchin and Totsky. But plans for the Uncle's central role do not solve any of Dostoevsky's problems with the figure of the Idiot; still fussing about the family structure, Dostoevsky asks himself,

The Notebooks for The Idiot

57

"W hy not arrange it so that the M other of the Idiot is alive?" (IX, 176). He plans to have the Idiot seek her out and find her living in squalor in St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky's intensifying struggles obsessively repeat themselves in juggling the Idiot's position. O nce again the Idiot becomes legitimate, "The Idiot —a. legitimate son of the Uncle and the blood brother to the Son, but he has been an outcast since childhood and has never seen the Son" (IX, 177). Later the same day, Dostoevsky begins his next entry with the now familiar emphasis on family structure as the root of the problem:

2 November. Hurry. He is a legitimate, but unacknowledged son of the Uncle. An Idiot.

(IX, 177)

Now the Idiot has been married off into the Umetsky family and sent to Switzerland. Amidst a maze of plot intrigues the sentence "He is a legitimate son " appears again (IX, 178). It is as though D ostoevsky felt that the repetition of this phrase would somehow anchor his work and hold its fragments together. In this same entry relationships are then suddenly reshuffled: "The Heroine is a princess . . . but he is simply a Ptitsyn. (Is he a Ptitsyn?) . . . Umetskaia is not his sister" (IX, 179). Then, several pages later, "Either a Ptitsyn or a legitimate son? (a final deci­ sion)" (IX, 182). The oscillations grow more pronounced, " m a y b e it w o u l d b e m u c h b e t t e r t o m a k e h im a l e g it im a t e s o n "

(IX, 184). W e are witnessing one half of an intense internal argu­ ment taking place within Dostoevsky. All the heavy, argumen­ tative assertions of the Idiot's legitimacy are in firm reply to some unexpressed alternative solution. D ostoevsky is fighting against an intuition that he should remove the Idiot farther away from any family by making him illegitimate. It is difficult for a reader of the notebooks to understand why, out of all the thousands of potential problems tormenting D ostoevsky in his attempts to set the foundations for this novel, the question of the Idiot's position in the family should assume such terrific proportions. The next entry for 3 Novem ber pro­ vides a clue: " t h e f u n d a m e n t a l q u e s t i o n : In which way will the figure of the Idiot express the idea m ore interestingly, more

58

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

rom antically, and more graphically? By legitimacy or il­ legitimacy?" (IX, 187). Dostoevsky then sets up a plan for each alternative. Legitimacy would give the Idiot more pride; he could demonstrate that even without wealth or the help of other people, he could still triumph. If he were illegitimate, he could at first harbor dreams of the Heroine, of a career, and of high society, and then suddenly encounter the vivid possibility of at­ taining them all. D ostoevsky weighs the interest value of pride and domination against that of dreams and the sudden accessi­ bility of those dreams. It is significant that Dostoevsky sees both possibilities as alternative ways of expressing the same idea ( m ysl ). Thus, the problem of the Idiot's legitimacy or illegiti­ m acy boils down to a strategic consideration for the achieve­ ment of an aim that we have already seen is crucial for D ostoev­ sky: which way would be more interesting? Neither alternative has yet outweighed the merits o f the other. The vacillations continue: BETTER THAT HE IS LEG ITIM A TE (W ITH O U T A M O TH ER) . . .

Illegitimate is better: everything will be explained . . . Illegitimate: a terribly proud and tragic character. N .B. But why not thus : legitimate, but rejected, he has rejected himself. A majestic role. (IX, 188-189)

D ostoevsky hammers persistently at the possibilities for each alternative. This 3 November entry reads like an ugly fugue be­ tween two m onotonous voices, neither of which achieves any resolution. Part of this debate over questions of the Idiot's legitimacy and the role o f the Uncle is simply the exorcism or suppression of the complex of ideas that emerges later, in A Raw Youth. There the Uncle figure develops into Versilov and the natural son becomes the Raw Youth. Some parts of the early notes for A Raw Youth could belong in the notebooks for The Idiot : "Stepson and stepfather. An artistic nature . . . Better if he is his natural Father . . . b u t w h a t i s m o s t i m p o r t a n t , retain throughout the entire narrative a tone of his unchallenged superiority over the Youth and everybody else . . . let the reader feel all along that, at the end of the novel, he is tormen­ ted by a idea."13 Dostoevsky, for all his seemingly profuse out­

The Notebooks for The Idiot

59

pourings of ideas for entire novels and fragments of plot and character detail, was extremely econom ical: he rarely let a good thought go to waste. Dostoevsky's preoccupation with the legitimacy or illegiti­ m acy of his hero may reveal a partial influence of Tolstoy's W ar and Peace, where Pierre Bezukhov, just returned from Switzer­ land, is established as an illegitimate son. M yshkin, like Pierre, has just returned from Switzerland. Both men receive an inheri­ tance which suddenly changes their expectations. Each has an overriding sense of his mission in the world. They share minor personality traits as well. M yshkin, in Part I of the novel, enters General Epanchin's office through the wrong door, yet he still quickly wins over both the General and the General's wife by his candid, cheerful modesty. At the beginning of W ar and P eace the narrator describes Pierre at Anna Pavlovna's so irée: "All his absentmindedness and inability to enter a room and converse in it was, however, redeemed by his kindly, simple and modest expression. Anna Pavlovna turned to him and, with a Christian mildness that expressed forgiveness of his indiscre­ tion, nodded and said: 'I hope to see you again.' "14 There are other hints of Tolstoy's influence on The Idiot. The Idiot is Prince Lev Nikolaevich M yshkin. The name and patronym ic are Tolstoy's own, and M yshkin, or "mousekin," is a kind of antonym to Lev (lion) and even to Tolstoy (stout, heavy). Later, in the third notebook, D ostoevsky writes, "the chain and hope. To do a little" (IX, 241), and later, "The chain, he speaks of the chain. M ake the shackles clank. T o do a little" (IX, 269-270). The editors of the 1974 edition of the notes cite Tolstoy's influence here. (This is especially interesting because the notion of the chain becom es so crucial to The Brothers K ara­ m azov.) They write that the chain as a symbol of the im mortal­ ity o f good deeds most probably derives from W ar and P ea ce : "In trying to convince Andrei Bolkonsky to becom e a mason, so that he might serve goodness, Pierre Bezukhov says '. . . enter our brotherhood . . . and you will at once feel yourself to be . . . part o f that vast, invisible chain, whose source is hidden in the heavens . . . Don't I f e e l. . . that I form on e link, one step, between the lower and higher beings . . . I feel that I cannot disappear, because nothing in the world disappears, but that I shall always exist and that I have always existed' " (IX, 465).15

60

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

The editors then cite Dostoevsky's letter to A . N. M aikov of 18 February/1 M arch, 1868, in which he says that he has read the first half of Tolstoy's n ov el.16 In the first two notebooks for The Idiot , the tangle of frus­ trations about family structure and the position of the Idiot within a family has unraveled into the question of the Idiot's le­ gitimacy. Dostoevsky's debate over this m atter, which to the reader seems like an unproductive and endless repetition of al­ ternatives without any hint of progress, bears fruit: the resolu­ tion of the question of legitimacy bears as much upon the Idiot's personality as it does upon his place in the family structure. The issue of the Idiot's legitimacy becomes at once a private and a public question which shapes both his personality and the ulti­ mate structure of the fam ily; his place in the family has gradu­ ally condensed into a more inherently interesting problem —the determination of his character. By following this particular thread, we have seen the unerr­ ing but unconscious path of Dostoevsky's mind throughout these entries. Elizabeth D alton, who has found that these note­ books resemble "primary process thinking," has asserted that "the author is simply recording rapidly whatever comes into his mind without much attempt at order or coherence."17 Although her observation may well reflect the actual creative process in Dostoevsky's mind as he jotted down ideas and outlines, the end result —the notes themselves —exhibits, if only in its regularity of oscillation, a discernible structural coherence. Some instinct compelled him to cover the same ground over and over again while seeming merely to repeat himself. W hen in the following entries D ostoevsky seems to have simply abandoned the ques­ tion of the Idiot's legitimacy, he has not done so at all. He has found a more essential way of asking the question he has really been asking all along: W hat is the Idiot's place? W here does he fit? W ho is he? That has been the real issue since the beginning. The search for the novel's structure forces D ostoevsky to state his ideas in their most elemental form . On 4 November he no longer asks himself whether the Idiot is legitimate or illegiti­ m ate. “An enigma. W ho is he? A terrible villain or a mysterious ideal?" (IX, 195). The Idiot's position in the fam ily no longer de­ fines him; Dostoevsky has moved into a more metaphysical

The Notebooks for The Idiot

61

realm. Nevertheless, he still halfheartedly experiments with family relations until he finally arrives at his solution, " There are no relatives" (IX, 204). The most important concern has be­ come the crystallization of the Idiot's personality. O n 21 N o­ vem ber D ostoevsky notes: " n e c e s s a r y : to set forth the character of the Idiot in a masterful way" (IX, 208). Throughout this entry the Idiot reveals his character indirectly, through the stories he tells. D ostoevsky again reminds himself, "The character of the Idiot" (IX, 208). O n 6 November, while planning the Idiot's arrival upon the scene in a railway car, D ostoevsky writes: The Idiot. Everything is based on vengeance. A humiliated being . . . He is a Prince. A Prince. Yurodivyi. (He is with the children)?! (IX, 200)

This form ulation, so crucial for the entire novel, predictably ap­ pears as a fragment amidst mounds of unrelated m aterial. Nor does the characterization even hold. W ithin the same entry the Idiot returns to his former role of the envious, proud seducer. But the crucial passages discussing the Idiot's place in the family appeared in the same fragmented way —amidst pages of m ater­ ial that were never brought into the novel. The critic's hindsight does not give him any power to discern a rule that determines which material will be picked up again and which will be finally rejected, but it can enable him to gaze upon an intricate, maze­ like tableau which presents a convincing picture of the fact that, for the artist, there is a path through that maze, after some bar­ riers are pushed aside to disclose it. The appellation yurodivyi holds; throughout the next page D ostoevsky repeatedly calls the Idiot yurodivyi (IX, 201). Frojn here the determination of the character of the Idiot takes prece­ dence over the efforts to place him in a family situation. (Dos­ toevsky's deadline for sending in Part I was rapidly approach­ ing.) " t h e c h a r a c t e r o f t h e i d i o t . There are oddities. Quiet. Sometimes, he says nothing" (IX, 201). He reads to the children about future bliss. D ostoevsky emphasizes the Idiot's relations with the children, " t h e m a i n t h i n g . The character o f his rela­ tions tow ards children. Very w e a k health" (IX, 202).

62

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

The final entry for the early notebooks, dated 11/30 No­ vember, bears even less resemblance to the novel than do most of the preceding notes. The m aterial is m ostly about the children and the Umetsky fam ily. The Idiot does not occupy much of Dostoevsky's attention here, although his conception of the Idiot has consciously and irrevocably changed. D ostoev­ sky reveals that he himself now thinks of the Idiot as having changed from one kind of character to another when he writes, "N .B. The nephew, the character of the form er Idiot. A tirade about the King of the Jews" (IX, 212). Still preoccupied with shaping the Idiot's new personality, he notes, "A bout the Idiot there are only stories" (IX, 213). (This idea becomes increasingly important in the third notebook.) "The Idiot's character" (IX, 214). "N .B. Until the slap itself, everyone laughed at the Idiot and he was in terrible disregard. He is always silent" (IX, 215). This final entry closes with the vow , "Make a detailed arrange­ ment of the plan and begin in the evening" (IX, 215). Dostoevsky's painstaking arrangements and rearrangements o f the family structures in the early notes led him inexorably, though in a pattern of seeming oscillation, to distance his central character from any family role. As the Idiot withdrew from the fam ily, Dostoevsky, in the last several entries, instead empha­ sized the Idiot's illness as well as the fact that he was "with the children." In the final version of the novel, D ostoevsky gives his hero only the vaguest of biographies. In fact in the novel M yshkin knows little about his past; a man whom he encoun­ ters at General Epanchin's evening party seems to know as much about Myshkin's life history as he does himself. (This stranger, it turns out, had met M yshkin briefly when he was a child.) Thus, the Idiot is isolated; the reader and the other characters know only stories about his past, stories he and others tell. His own m emory is often hazy. He becom es, as it were, part of each family in the novel, while really belonging to none. This, rather than having him be in any one fam ily, best expresses the "idea" behind the Idiot. Dostoevsky's instinct had led him to the solu­ tion. Bakhtin has pointed out that the internal monologues of many of Dostoevsky's characters, most notably those of G olyadkin, Raskolnikov, and the underground man, can be read as dialogues between doubles.18 Dostoevsky's notebooks reveal

The Notebooks for The Idiot

63

that this mode of thought was far more than a literary device employed to create a polyphonic effect. The entire fabric of the notebooks can be unraveled into such dialogues in much the same way that a paragraph from The Double, Crime and Pun­ ishment, or Notes from Underground can be. Yet there is an im­ portant distinction to be made: in his notebooks Dostoevsky often explored variant ways of expressing a single idea; in the end, however, he always decided firmly upon a single way. His characters' internal monologues, on the other hand, usually re­ mained unfinalized. Other, perhaps more interesting questions for the reader, such as why the Idiot is called an idiot or what his childhood was like, do not receive the same insistent treatment, although Dos­ toevsky does touch upon them sporadically and tantalizingly. Throughout, the question of the Idiots idiocy is mildly prob­ lematic. In the earlier drafts he has merely been dubbed an idiot by his mother who hates him. The other characters do not under­ stand why he has been called that. In the ninth entry on 22 O c­ tober, the Idiot is merely pretending to be an idiot; then at the Generals he shows triumphantly that he is not one at all. The son says of the Idiot, "Either he is very proud, so that he disdains everything, or he is very stupid, that is, sincere" (IX, 164). The son adds later, "He is simply not an Idiot" (IX, 164). On 29 O c­ tober Dostoevsky writes, "The Idiot was always considered an Idiot" (IX, 169). But three days later, on 1 November, the Idiot's mother is again declaring that the Idiot is merely pretending, dissembling (IX, 173). Then Dostoevsky writes, 'T h e Idiot is an idiot," though the Uncle later doubts that he is an idiot (IX, 174). The debate continues from time to time throughout the notes. For a reader of the novel, the problem of Myshkin's idiocy and what it means looms large. Is his idiocy to be understood strictly as a link to the tradition of the Russian kenotic saint and yurodivyil Is M yshkin the Idiot because he has fits, because he is childlike? Each reader must work out some understanding of what Myshkin's idiocy signifies to him. Clearly, this was Dos­ toevsky's intention in the novel. Yet he never refers to this prob­ lem in the notebooks. He himself vacillates over the depiction of the hero's idiocy; he notes the perplexity of the other characters, but he provides no substantial clue or formulation of what Myshkin's idiocy m eans.19

64

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

The word "idiot" in both Russian and English comes from the Greek idiotes —private person, a common man, an ignorant uninformed person. Idios means private, own, peculiar.20 So idiot need not mean merely imbecile and fool, but it can also signify a man who is private and somehow set apart. It can also carry the meaning of a private versus a public man. All these meanings reverberate throughout The Idiot at various times. A t scattered intervals throughout the early notes D ostoev­ sky posits a psychological explanation for why the Idiot is so proud and so full of hatred. He depicts the Idiot as having suf­ fered a terrible spiritual wound in childhood. We have already seen that his m other hates him. In the first entry, Dostoevsky had noted: "N .B. In childhood he wept upon being scolded, but then he became stronger and he scoffs at others. There was an incident with a headmaster" (IX, 157). On 29 O ctober, D ostoev­ sky wrote again of his hero's difficult childhood, "He needed from childhood more beauty, more beautiful sensations, more encompassing love, more bringing up. But now: a thirst fo r beauty and at the same time a 40% lack o f faith in it, or faith, but no love for the ideal. T h e devils also believe, and tremble.' " (IX, 167).21 On 2 November, another jotting seeks to link the Idiot's childhood to his character. "In his development and in his sur­ rounding milieu he assimilated all these poisons and principles, which entered into his blood. A totally outraged heart has un­ limited magnanimity and a need for love. He did not have them, and therefore he revenged himself and acted evilly towards those whom he wanted to love endlessly and for whom he wanted to shed his blood" (IX, 180). Dostoevsky's note to him­ self is difficult to follow , but the main point seems to be that the Idiot's acute suffering in childhood, though it had not destroyed his desire to love, had destroyed his ability to do so. Harder to explain is the peculiar assertion that the Idiot's childhood had been terrible, but not terrible enough for him to attain an unlim­ ited magnanimity and need for love. Here the novelist has not explicated his idea for any reader; this abbreviated note re­ mains, for the most part, undecipherable.

Dostoevsky's explanations of the Idiot's character in terms of his childhood resemble the attempts to fix him within a tight family structure; a typical hero in a nineteenth-century novel

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65

comes complete with memories of his childhood and family ties. Dostoevsky's movement away from the typical biographical ex­ planations parallels his decision not to present the Idiot as a son in a family: in both aspects the writer has moved toward the creation of a more isolated, more enigmatic character. Of course one must also remember that these are sketches for the notebook Idiot who often differs greatly from his namesake in the novel. All of the psychologising about the Idiot disappears in the novel, where Dostoevsky sticks to the narrative formula he had found towards the end of these notes, "About the Idiot there are only stories." As early as 22 O ctober 1867, Dostoevsky had already char­ acterized the Idiot as a y u rod iv y i, so that side by side with the proud, dissembling Idiot who would eventually be regenerated through love, there already existed glimpses of a character who resembled the final version of the Idiot. The term y u ro d iv y i provides a bridge between the character of the Idiot in the early notebooks and the almost opposite character of the Idiot in the novel: on the one hand a y u ro d iv y i could be a shrewd, calculat­ ing, aggressive, and objectionable figure; on the other hand, because he had renounced the flesh "for Christ's sake," he was believed to have the gift of prophecy. James Billington has ob­ served that this figure of the Holy Fool "reinforced the already marked tendency of Slavic O rthodoxy toward passion and pro­ phecy rather than reason and discipline."22 The notebook Idiot embodies the less attractive traits of that figure, while the novel Idiot displays more of the positive traits, but any Russian reader would be aware of the entire spectrum of associations invoked by the word, y u rod iv y i. In the novel Myshkin mimics the yu rodivyi's effect on oth­ ers more than he wishes to. The y u ro d iv y i often feigned mad­

ness and immorality to cause a public scandal which served, in a roundabout way, to convert sinners; he also wished to provoke vilification against himself in order to struggle against his own pride, the worst fear of the ascetic.23 The y u ro d iv y i fought his own propensity for corruption this way, but he also had a pub­ lic duty or quest. George Fedotov has described this quest as consisting of "service to the world in a special mission, not by word or bénéficient action but through the power of the Spirit which works through the disguise of madness but is manifested

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

in clairvoyance and prophecy."24 Myshkin carries with him an aura of these qualities: he provokes extreme anger in men; he causes scandal; and he has a definite sense of being on a mission of service in the world. He has a fondness for making parabolic and prophetic statements. Fedotov describes the life of a Holy Fool as a "perpetual os­ cillation between moral acts of saving men and immoral acts of insulting them."25 This could also serve as an epigram for Mysh­ kin, for although Myshkin never sought consciously to insult the other characters he unwittingly does so repeatedly through­ out the novel. The yurodivyi made an ethical attempt to deride the world of common sense by laying bare the gap between the order of the world and God's order.26 Myshkin too sought to bring the other characters back to the simpler moral and re­ ligious precepts of God's world; he advocated a return to a more primitive form of Christianity. Moreover, many Holy Fools were supposedly of foreign origin,27 and Myshkin, though his Russian ties become increasingly important, seems like a foreigner at the beginning of the novel. Myshkin particularly resembles one such holy man, Michael of Klopsko. Like Myshkin, he had obscure origins, but in social rank he was almost a prince; this heightened the effect of his hu­ mility.28 The same may be said of Prince Myshkin. When Mi­ chael first appeared at Klopsko, the Abbot asked him, "Who are you, my son, a man or a Devil?" Michael replied, "Are you a man or a Devil?"29 When Myshkin arrives on the Petersburg scene people react to him with the same ambivalence, and he too immediately starts questioning and involving himself in the lives of others. In the novel M yshkin also shares a kinship with the Russian kenotic saints, such as Theodosius, Sergius, and Tikhon. The Russian kenotic saints, who sought to make their lives an active example of Christ's humility, love, and service, were not, gener­ ally, proselytizing teachers. St. Theodosius (d. 1074) of Kiev was the first representative of kenoticism ; m any of his beliefs were modeled on those of St. Theodore the Studite (d. 826). In his ideal of community life and service to the world, he humbled himself not before the powerful but before the low ly.30 M yshkin follows the same general lines of action. St. Sergius (d. 1392) was remarkable for his gentleness, for

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his "neighborly," simple, humble, and grave character.31 These are, of course, all qualities of Myshkin as well. Like Sergius, Myshkin enters upon his mission of service to the world after a period of isolation in the symbolic desert—in Myshkins case, a Swiss hospital. Kenotic humility cannot be equated with obedi­ ence; all the Russian kenotic saints lived by their own ascetic law. Myshkins humility is not synonymous with obedience either. Unlike these saints, however, Myshkin is a wealthy prince who does not renounce his property. In this respect he rather resembles the yurodivyi, who were sometimes even quite greedy. While the kenotic saint shunned earthly possessions, Myshkin is simply indifferent to them. St. Tikhon (d. 1783) who lived in the eighteenth century and was known as a westernizing kenotic, suffered from a com bina­ tion of nervous illness and m elancholy which resembles that of M yshkin. M oreover, M yshkin echoes him in the two foci of his spiritual life: the thought of death and the vision of the celestial world. M yshkin, like Tikhon, is preoccupied with the idea of the "double eternity"32, that is, the eternity of death and the eter­ nity of the other world. Tikhon, who is regarded as unRussian in his continual concentration on the suffering o f the crucified Savior, "had always before his eyes the icons, or rather pic­ tures —portraying the various moments in the tragedy of Golgo­ tha".33 M yshkin too is obsessed with pictures of C hrists suffer­ ing and with the moments before and after death. Myshkin's sensations during the moment before an epileptic fit resemble the spiritual state experienced in prayer described b y another holy man of the fifteenth century, Nilus of Sorsk (d. 1508). "O f a sudden, the soul is infused with joys, and this in­ com parable feast paralyzes the tongue. The heart overflows with sweetness and while his delight endures, a man is drawn unwittingly from all sensible things . . . One who has dis­ covered this joy in God, not only knows no stirring passion but is forgetful of his very life since the love of God is sweeter than life".34 For M yshkin the "incomparable feast" which overwhelms him is the "feast of life," but, like Nilus he experiences moments when his "soul is infused with joys" and he undergoes an acute perception of something beyond life.

The most typical characterizations of the Idiot in the early notes find their final fruition in the novel in the figures of

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G anya, Rogozhin, and to some extent Ippolit. For example, on 29 O ctober 1867, Dostoevsky writes of the Idiot: The finale of a great soul. Love —in three phases: revenge and self-love, passion, a loftier love. Man becomes purified. (IX, 168)

Then, in the later notes for Part II of the novel (after Part I had already been published), Dostoevsky writes on 12 March 1868: IN THE NOVEL THERE ARE THREE KIN DS OF LO VE:

1) Passionate-spontaneous love —Rogozhin. 2) Love out of vanity—Ganya. 3) Christian love —the Prince.

(IX, 220)

Dostoevsky has parceled out the stages of development planned for the Idiot in the first notebooks to these other characters, none of whom undergoes any significant change or develop­ ment in the course of the novel.35 On 18 October 1867, Dostoevsky conceived a plan for the Idiot's character which he called Plan for Iago. f o r t h e c h a r a c t e r o f t h e id io t

—Iago. But he ends divinely. He

renounces, and so on. N .B. He has slandered everyone; he has intrigued before everyone; he has attained everything; he has taken money and even a fiancee, and yet he renounces. (IX, 161)

Iago's primary role in O thello is to incite action, to ensnare other characters in their own webs. The Idiot becomes an in­ citer, a catalyst for action in the notes. Even when the Idiot acts as a peacemaker —as, for example, between the Unde and the son— he still incites one against the other. In the novel the Idiot's boundless, though quiet, energy also often causes situa­ tions to become extreme. Myshkin seeks sincerely to spread peace and goodwill among the other characters. Yet the result is often better than his Iago counterpart could have hoped. His in­ terference in the family fight at the Ivolgins' in Part I of the novel, for example, serves to intensify all the existing tensions. Later in the Plan for Iago entry, Dostoevsky described the Idiot's depression and weariness, his sense that he is separated

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69

from life and that events resemble a vaudeville. In the novel, Myshkin, at his weariest moments on the park bench in Pavlovsk, also perceives everyday life as something from which he alone has been excluded, a festival in which he cannot take part. In entry twelve, 30 O ctober, the Idiot arrives from somewhere, enters into the family as a nonentity, and gains ascendency over all of its members (IX, 170). Prince M yshkin of the novel, unwittingly and in good faith, achieves the same power over most of the other characters —such as the Ivolgins, the Epanchins, the Lebedevs. "Thé Idiot," writes Dostoevsky in the notes, "does not justify himself. His magnanimous deeds (they were, invent ) are done by him without publicity, but he is nevertheless dissatisfied with himself; he judges and torments himself, because his pride is not pure but vain' (IX, 192). Nor does M yshkin seek to justify himself; at most, he is at times vaguely aware of his own "double thoughts." Thus, however different the early and the final versions of the Idiot may be, M yshkin bears more than slight resemblance to his energetic, demonic predecessor in the early notes. They share the qualities of the yurodivyi and of a catalytic, unsoliloquizing Iago figure. Dostoevsky's frenzied attempts in these first two notebooks to establish the most general structural outline and to shape his characters did not leave him much time to worry about nar­ rative manner. A few brief references and remarks, however, show in a kind of shorthand how he conceived the narrative method of his novel; these comments prove interesting later in the light of the third notebook. Tw ice in the first entry of the early notes D ostoevsky tells himself to "Invent some terrible episodes." Later, having made a plan for the spiteful Idiot's eventual regeneration, Dostoevsky adds to himself: "(N .B. Trace the thread of his ch aracter—that will be entertaining.)" (IX, 156).

In the novel the characters do not change very much and Dostoevsky does not give any extended biographical details about his hero. Thus the final narrative is not usually ex­ planatory. But here, in the early notes, Dostoevsky planned to follow the Idiot through successive and varied stages of development. Such a content demanded a different sort of nar­ rative, as Dostoevsky tells himself: "but do it this way: . . .

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

Show what kind of man has been oppressed" (IX, 156). Throughout these chaotic notes the attainment of some degree of clarity in the narrative becomes at times a primary stylistic goal —along with, of course, the constant desire to be entertain­ ing. O n 30 O ctober D ostoevsky writes, "(Explain and delineate m ore precisely and m ore clearly)" (IX, 172). Not surprisingly, one assertion can lead to its opposite. On the same page, Dostoevsky, while planning a series of violent events ("a fire, a finger [burned], a rape") which would show what the Idiot is capable of, chooses an opposite narrative man­ ner, "N .B. W ithout explanation" (IX, 172). But the basic aim still seems to be "to explain," for on 2 November 1867 he reiterates the need for an explanatory narrative style, "Explanatory con­ versations for the whole novel and scenes with the brother and the Uncles —as before" (IX, 178). The explaining is to be done through "showing" rather than by "telling": "From this it follows that it is necessary to explain this passion and this burning love in the course o f the n ovel by means of episodes" (IX, 183). Curiously, even at the time of writing these early notes, while the novel hulked before him as a shapeless, unwritten thing, Dostoevsky foresaw the defense he would later make for his w ork, "For the epilogue: I have written a fantastic novel, but never more real characters" (IX, 199). Towards the end of the first two notebooks, in the last en­ tries, Dostoevsky's primary narrative concern is that "I must be concise" (IX, 106). On 11/30 November he begins his final entry for the early notes, "Part O ne. The Idiot and Umetskaia, the business has begun , a concise story" (IX, 209). But conciseness for D ostoevsky does not necessarily mean clarity or explana­ tion. ("About the Idiot there are only stories.") It would be rash to attribute undue significance to the few unsystematic notations about narrative manner that D ostoev­ sky has made in the early notebooks. It is striking, however, that the early versions of the Idiot as a developing character loosely paralleled the author's search for an explanatory nar­ rative. By the last entries, when Dostoevsky had already de­ cided upon the prin ce-yurodivyi plan for the Idiot, the desire for an explanatory style gave way to a more generalized goal of conciseness. Conciseness refers to a narrative manner rather than content: to be concise does not necessarily include explana­

The Notebooks for The Idiot

tions; one can be enigmatic and still be concise. new emphasis on conciseness carried over into novel, where the events take place in a single day. have "only stories" about the Idiot; he has arrived

71

Dostoevsky's Part I of the There too we as a stranger.

Although much of the material in these notes never resur­ faces in his published fiction, the first two notebooks contain in­ timations of elements that reappear in Dostoevsky's last three novels —The Possessed , A Raw Y outh , and The Brothers K aram azov. M any of the notes are taken up with the Idiot's secret marriage to a humble girl in the Umetsky family, who is at times described as a yurodivaia. The Idiot courts the Heroine despite his secret marriage; she offers herself to him. The m ar­ riage is suddenly revealed, and in some of the notes the Idiot kills his wife. Perhaps, too, he married her while he was drunk. These themes cluster around Stavrogin in The Possessed. The Idiot's "Byronic despair" describes Stavrogin (IX, 190). The Heroine's letter to the Idiot resembles in imagery and tone Pyotr Verkhovensky's letter to Stavrogin. The Heroine writes: "W hy you? Because you were there like some kind of sun; at that time everyone sought you out; everyone adored you, but I hated them all . . . And you are the sun, you ridiculed me from our first meeting" (IX, 190). Pyotr says to Stavrogin, "Stavrogin, you are beautiful. Do you know that you are beautiful! . . . You are my idol! You injure no one, and everyone hates you. You treat everyone as an equal, and yet everyone is afraid of you —that's good . . . You are the leader, you are the sun, and I am your worm" (X [1974], 323). The Heroine's letter immedi­ ately follows a plan for the death of the Idiot's secret wife; Pyotr's mad speech occurs on the eve of the murder of M aria Tim ofeevna, Stavrogin's secret wife.

The "Rothschild" theme, of a poor man slowly and deliberately amassing a fortune, reverberates through the notes for The Idiot and finds fruition in A Raw Y outh; another theme in the notes, of the hero's suffering and blighted childhood, also finds it fullest expression in A Raw Youth. The editors of the 1974 edition of the notebooks for The Idiot stress the similarity of the relationship between the Idiot and the Uncle with that of Arkady and Versilov. A Raw Youth also continues the theme of illegitimacy explored in the early notes for The Idiot (IX, 345). Finally, the theme of a father's and son's rivalry for the same

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

recurs in A Razo Youth and in The Brothers Karamazov. The Idiot of the early notebooks fragments into Dostoevsky's next four m ajor heroes: M yshkin, Stavrogin, A rkady, and Alyosha. The last entry of the second notebook is dated 11/30 November. Presumably the next few days were spent in intense writing. Then, on 4 Decem ber Dostoevsky announced that he had "thrown it all to the Devil"; he began to rework his plans for the novel and started to write again on 18 D ecem ber.36 Unfor­ tunately these crucial notes no longer exist. Tw enty-three days later Dostoevsky sent off Part I of the novel to the Russkii Vestnik. (He had sent off the first five chapters of Part I by 5 January).37 Between the last notebook entry and the first page of the novel, then, there is a large gap. It may be bridged at various points by minimizing rather than by accentuating the differences between the early notes and the final version, thereby allowing us to see that the novel did in fact grow, in however mutant a form, out of the notes. Such a dramatic gap certainly lends itself also to psychological interpretation, and Dalton, who finds that the overall creative process in the notebooks resembles the form ation of a dream, discovers an essential act of regression in the gap between the notes and the novel: "the notes record not only the movement toward expres­ sion of ideas . . . but also, paradoxically, the struggle to repress those ideas. Between the last plan and the beginning of the novel itself, an act of creative repression has taken place. The novel is a compromise form ation."38 woman

But it would be wrong to underestimate the importance of the vision which came to Dostoevsky during these days in December and about which he had written so movingly to his friend, Maikov, and to his niece Sonya Ivanova. The months of unsuccessful attempts to portray an idea resulted in a drastic recasting of that idea. On 31 December 1867/12 January 1868, Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov, after a long silence, about his novel: And with me it's been this w ay: I have been w orking and tormenting myself. Do you know what it means to com pose? . . . Having taken so much money from Russkii Vestnik (alas! 4500 rubles) I, you see, had fully hoped at the beginning of the year that poetry wouldn't

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73

desert me, that the poetic idea would flash and develop artistically towards the end of the year, and that I would manage to satisfy everyone. It seemed all the more probable to me because always both in my head and in my soul m any pregnant artistic ideas flash and are felt. But they only flash, and a full embodiment is necessary, and such an embodiment always proceeds accidentally and suddenly. But one cannot predict exactly when it will arise; and only after that, having received in your heart a full image, can you set about the artistic em­ bodiment of the image . . . Well then, all summer and autumn I have been putting together various thoughts (some were most ingenious), but some experience always let me foresee either the falseness or the difficulty or the weakness of a particular idea. Finally, I stopped at one idea and began to w ork. I had written a lot, but on the 4th of December, foreign style, I threw it all to the Devil. I assure you that the novel could have been satisfactory; but it became incredibly repulsive to me precisely because it was satisfactory and not positively [polozhitel'no] good. I didn't need that. But what was I to do? It was already the 4th of December! . . . I thought from the 4th till the 18th of December new style . . . My head was turning into a windmill. W hy I didn't go mad, I don't know. Finally, on the 18th of December I sat down to write a new novel; on the 5th of January (new style) I sent off to the editorship 5 chapters of the first part (nearly 5 sheets) with the assurance that on the 10th of January (new style) I would send the remaining two chapters of the first part. Yesterday on the 11th I sent these 2 chapters, and so I have sent off the whole first part —6 or 6 Vi printed sheets . . .

Now about the novel . . . In essence I absolutely do not myself know what I have sent off . . . For a long time already a certain thought has tormented me, but I was afraid to make a novel out of it, because the thought was too difficult and I was not ready for it, although the thought was completely tempting and I loved it. This idea is —to portray a wholly beautiful man [izobrazit' vpolne prekrasnogo cheloveka ]. There can be, in my opinion, nothing more difficult than this, especially in our time . . . This idea formerly has appeared for a moment in some artistic form [obraz], but indeed, only in part, and the whole is necessary. Only my despairing situation compelled me to take up this premature thought. I gambled as one does at roulette, "maybe it will develop under my pen." This is un­ forgivable. In general, the plan has taken shape. Furthermore, there flash by me details which are very seductive to me and which inspire fervor in me. But the whole? The hero? . . . I am obliged to construct an im­ age. Will it develop under my pen? . . . Of the 4 heroes . . . the

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fourth, that is the main one, the first hero, is extremely weak. Maybe he does not sit weakly in my heart, but he is terribly difficult. (P, II, 59-61)

A day later, in his letter to Sonya Ivanova, Dostoevsky elaborated on his new plan: I have destroyed much of what was written . . . At that time, 3 weeks ago I applied myself to another novel and began to work day and night. The idea of the novel—my old and beloved, but nevertheless difficult, idea —is one which, for a long time, I dared not tackle, and if I have tackled it now, it was decidedly because I was in a desperate situation. The main thought of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful person [izobrazit' polozhitelno prekrasnogo ch elov ek a]. There is nothing more difficult than this in the world, and especially at this time. All writers, not only ours, but even all Europeans, who but undertook this depiction of the positively beautiful man —always had to pass it up. Because this problem is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but an ideal which neither we nor civilized Europe has in the least perfected. On earth there is only one positively beautiful per­ son —Christ, so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful person is, of course, an infinite miracle in itself . . . But I have gone on too long, I will mention only, that of the beautiful characters in Christian literature Don Quixote is the most finished. But he is beautiful only because at the same time he is also comic. Pickwick of Dickens (an infinitely weaker idea than Don Quixote, but nevertheless great) is also comic, and by that alone affects us. Com­ passion appears toward the beauty that is mocked and doesn't know its own worth —and consequently sympathy appears even in the reader. This awakening of compassion is the secret of humor. Jean Valjean is also a powerful attempt, but he excites sympathy by his ter­ rible misfortune and by society's injustice toward him. I have nothing similar, nothing, decidedly, and therefore I am terribly afraid that it will be a positive failure. Some details perhaps aren't bad. I am afraid that it will be boring. It's a long novel. It wrote the first part entirely in 23 days . . . It will decidedly not be effective . . . My only wish is that it will awaken even a little curiosity in the reader, so that he will go on to the second part . . . The novel is called The Idiot (P, II, 71-72)

The ideas expressed in these often quoted letters provided the cornerstone for the novel. The early notes were a preparation for that vision; in them one can discover the seeds of Dostoev­

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75

sky's decision to portray a positively beautiful man. Through­ out these two letters D ostoevsky treated his problem as a nar­ rative one —that of portrayal (izobrazit) —rather than as a philosophical or ideological one. The idea "to portray a wholly beautiful man" was "old and cherished" but "difficult." The dif­ ficulty revolved around turning that idea into words, making others accept and love it. The third notebook, written after the first sixteen chapters of the novel had already been published in the January and February (1868) issues of Russkii Vestnik, also gives evidence of authorial indecision and contains brief, unfinished plans. But whereas the indecision of the first two notebooks revolved around the conception of the Idiot's character and the search for the idea of the novel, the problems in the third notebook often derive from the very stability of the Idiot's character and the subsequent need to focus events around him —that is, the prob­ lem of the artistic execution of the idea (what Dostoevsky called khudozhestvennost '). This last notebook touches m ore often upon questions of narrative strategy than do the first two, although there is still no systematic discussion of the problem. For D ostoevsky the writing of Part II of the novel (which he thought of as Part III, Part I being the first six chapters and Part II being chapters 7 to 16) proved excruciatingly difficult; it did not pour forth in a whole as had Part I. The notes for Part II in the third notebook reflect Dostoevsky's loss of momentum. Although the first part of the novel foreshadowed the course of the narrative, the perspective of the work still remained unclear to D ostoevsky.39 Part II was due to appear in Russkii Vestnik in April 1868, but only the first two chapters of Part II were published in April. The following three chapters appeared in M ay. D ostoevsky suffered over this piecemeal form of writing. In a letter to M aikov, he called it "shameful" (P, II, 122). O n 3 June he sent off the next four chapters (6-9) of Part II, but only chapters six through eight were published then. Chapter 9 evidently arrived too late. In July Dostoevsky finally completed Part II, through chapter twelve. The notes from M arch through July 1868, while Dostoevsky was trying to write Part II, reflect his uncertainty over the direc­ tion of the novel. In seeking to formulate the plot for Part II,

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Dostoevsky also continually outlined plans for the rest of the novel. Part I had ended noncommittally, with most of the major characters setting off to Moscow; upon their return anything could happen. In writing Part I Dostoevsky needed to settle upon a definite characterization of the Idiot, but he had not yet had to commit himself to a certain plot. The notes for Part II of the novel portray this search. Predictably, in the third notebook Dostoevsky addresses himself often to the question of the manner in which the novel should be written. But when Dostoevsky writes about the struc­ tural organization and the narrative strategy of his novel, he does not formulate abstract or ideal statements about the craft of writing novels. Instead, he makes precise, practical prescrip­ tions for getting this particular and troublesome novel under way and written. Thus notes about composition and narrative are often expressed as notes about the plot —how long is the Idiot in Moscow? —whom does he marry? —and about the roles of other more peripheral characters, like Ganyà, Evgeny Pavlovich, and the children. We have already seen that pro­ posed elaborate character development in the first two note­ books did not carry over into the novel and that stages of development in the Idiot's personality were fragmented into separate characters in the novel. In the transformation of the third notebook into the novel further reductions occur: Ganya's role diminishes; the Idiot of the novel becomes less introspective than the Idiot of the third notebook, and the children's club, of which the prince is head, disappears. In the opening pages of these notes Dostoevsky is clearly at loose ends. "The Prince was away three weeks in M oscow" (IX, 216). (In the novel, he is away for six m onths.) Dostoevsky plans that the prince will m arry Nastasia Filippovna, "N. F. Is he married to her in secret or not, that's the question?" (IX, 216). 'T h e Prince is married to N. F." (IX, 216). "Invent a role in the intrigues for G anya, Ippolit, and others. For Vera" (IX, 218). M oreover, in these first pages of the third notebook, the Idiot, like his earlier version, experiences and expresses more turmoil and doubt than he exhibits in the novel. "N .B. A t every moment (inwardly) he asks himself: Am I right or are they right?" (IX, 218). Ganya's role also resembles that of the earlier Idiot; he must make himself indispensable to everyone (IX, 219).

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Dostoevsky is frantically seeking a beginning for Part II, and by implication, an ending for the novel. "P roject: Shouldn't I begin then with Ganya? Intrigues of Ganya, Varya, Ptitsyn, Rogozhin, and company. Lebedev and the others. . . p r o j e c t s . N.B. Shouldn't I end the novel with a confession, published publicly?" (IX, 220). After postulating a beginning for Part II and an end for the novel (neither of which he finally used),Dostoevsky, on 11 March, turns to a plan for his nar­ rative strategy: N .B . The relations with the children, do it this w ay: at first, when the subject m atter is about A glaya, about G anya, about N . F ., about the intrigues, and so on, why not mention casually and almost enigmatically [zagadochno ] about the relations of the Prince with the children, with Kolya, for example, and so on. Don't mention about the club, but why not present it suddenly, having introduced it with vague rumors, and present the Prince in its midst like a tsar, in the 5th or 6th part of the novel? N .B . W hy not present the character of the Prince enigmatically throughout the entire novel, from time to time defining by means of details (more fantastically and m ore questioningly, arousing curiosity) and suddenly to elucidate his character at the end and, on the other hand, N .B . W ith all the other characters from the very beginning more defined and elucidated to the reader? (as, for example, G anya?) (IX,

220 )

The children's club and the final elucidation of Myshkin have disappeared, but the narrative manner proposed here carries over into the novel. Much of the narrative of the novel is at once casual and enigmatic, often maddeningly so. Vague . rumors about the prince abound; by an arbitrary presentation of details about the prince, the narrator makes him more unreal and curious to his reader. On the other hand, other, minor characters, like Totsky, General Epanchin, Pavlishchev's nephew, the General's wife, Kolya, and General Ivolgin are clearly drawn throughout. Dostoevsky's strategy of balancing enigma with explanation has taken root. On 12 March he writes: Detailed plan of 3rd part. 3 months later.

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Morning. Ganya, Ptitsyn. The sister is in the other apartment . . . They are expecting something and someone. An enigmatic conversa­ tion. (An explanatory chapter. The scene at the garden.) OR

1st chapter explanatory; scene at station. But the only main character—Ganya. 2nd chapter . . . Enigmatic conversation. (IX, 224-225) Later in this entry, Dostoevsky continues to conceive his plan in terms of how it will affect his readers; he deliberates over whether or not he will maintain the readers interest through arousing his curiosity or through revealing what has been hid­ den. . . . the character of Rogozhin in the 3rd part is mysterious . . . (IX, 226) 2) Meanwhile, actually there are only rumors about the Prince's exploits, good deeds, about the children (so that in the end everything comes to light).

But however; 3) Something flashes by fits and starts even before the end. (N.B. O r else to develop things not so quickly??) . . . The course of events? N .B . N .B . N .B .? The course of events. (IX, 227)

For D ostoevsky the creation of the texture and tones of the narrative was inseparable from elaborating the plot itself; thus, the need to create a balance between enigma and explanation partially shapes the course of events. Once D ostoevsky had conceived of the character of the Idiot and the most general idea of his novel, the business of setting the pace of the narrative was as crucial to the expression of the idea of the novel as was the development of the plot and was often indistinguishable from it. Although most writers, to some degree, seek to balance an enigmatic with an explanatory narrative, to witness in the notes the way in which Dostoevsky makes choices that create this balance shows us that his novels, at their most heightened, pas­ sionate moments, often grew out of a deliberate, prearranged choice of narrative tone. Dostoevsky's decision to present the prince "enigmatically, throughout the entire novel," means that the reader is to learn about him through stories and rumors, but shall also be permitted flashes of understanding. A nother writer

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79

might have elaborated M yshkin as fully as possible. By reading an author's notes and thereby crossing into the realm of inten­ tional fallacy, one can attain a glimpse of the rudiments of that author's style and of his own perception of how he forms that style. Imperceptibly Dostoevsky's goal of balancing enigma with explanation turns into the attempt to weld these two seemingly opposite narrative styles into a single narration. He creates a kind of narrative oxym oron —a mode of "enigmatic explana­ tion." He strives for a style that is both precise and mysterious, that seems to explain without really explaining. "My task: to write more briefly. So that it should be more catchy [shchegol'ski ], sympathetic, (briefly and always to the point) and entertaining. N .B. the mysterious relations of N. F. with Rogozhin in the 3rd and 4th parts" (IX, 231). Brevity and absence of digression masquerade as explanation, while an air of mystery really prevails. "N .B. Indispensable: They crowd around him and pester him from all sides as if to get m oney. The result: O nly dark rumors about the adroitness of the Prince" (IX, 231). One must bear in mind that these notes reflect Dostoevsky's hopes for his novel; writing it was another matter. The first two chapters of Part II, which Dostoevsky was working on at the same time he wrote these notes, continue the pattern by disguising the narrator's longwindedness and digres­ sions as accurate reportage; there is a minimum of explanation. The opening pages of chapter 1 of Part II quickly set the tone: It was said at the time that there might be other reasons for his hasty departure, but about this, and about the prince's adventures in Moscow and generally about the entire period of his absence from Petersburg, we can provide only scanty information. The prince was away exactly six months and even those who had a reason to be in­ terested in his fate could find out very little about him during that time. True, certain rumors did reach them at times, although very rarely; and they were for the most part strange ones and almost always mutually contradictory . . . Little by little the rumors which had spread through the town became enshrouded in uncertainty . . . This news turned out to be completely accurate as it was later shown. (VIII, 149-151; 199-201)

Throughout the middle of M arch Dostoevsky continues with this precarious narrative manner which hovers between con­

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

cealment and disclosure. "Indispensable —as much as possible to characterize the personality of the prince (by his facial expres­ sion and his idiosyncrasies) in the 3rd part —especially on the occasion of his change of situation because of the inheritance and because of his three-month stay in Russia . . . (Does he love Aglaya?)" (IX, 233). Showing becomes a way to avoid telling, but later, in the novel itself, this frequently arbitrary and strictly dramatic presentation of the prince by a talkative narrator, who can also at will be privy to the thoughts of his character, creates problems for the reader. W hat is significant about these passages from the notebooks is that they show Dostoevsky deliberately undertaking such a narrative. One cannot argue therefore that the shifting perspectives and narrative distances in the novel arose through carelessness on the part of the author or by chance. Indeed, in the third notebook Dostoevsky, perpetually con­ cerned about the effect of his narrative on the reader, defines the narrative texture he hopes to create: W rite more briefly: only the facts, without reasoning and without a description of feelings? . . . W rite using only the facts. Say simply, that Ganya brought the Prince the 1 00,000. From that time there was a friendship (between them), so they say . . . W rite in the sense of: people say . . . N .B. Recount the facts lightly, without special reasoning. (IX,

235-236) D ostoevsky gauged the effect of a light, seemingly casual re­ counting of the facts upon his readers. The facts must prove to be entertaining as well as mysterious: N .B . The general's wife, getting angry, says the sentence, "And I will tell you frankly: you yourself are in love with him." (N.B. that is why you are attacking him.)

She speaks in such a way so that her meaning, even for the reader, must be quite unexpected, that is, even the reader must not be prepared for the fact that Aglaya is in love with the Prince. (IX, 238) Yet at the same time Dostoevsky acknowledges that a light, seemingly factual narrative is not enough. At times a discursive, descriptive voice proves necessary:

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Indispensable Note (1) the effect of Russia on the Prince. How much and in what w ay he has changed. In the description. (IX, 237) Oddly, this grouping of narrative methods has the effect of placing facts on the side of rumor and mystery rather than on the side of description and explanation. The final irony of the narrative in the novel is that the narrator's description and ex­ planation prove to have been misleading in the end; the sparsely scattered facts and abundant mysteries are the stuff out of which the reader must form his understanding of the meaning. At this point Dostoevsky seems to have settled provision­ ally upon the overall narrative manner for the novel. In the notes of late M arch he returns to the problem of portraying the Idiot in a way that will be convincing to the reader, " t h e s y n ­ t h e s i s O F T H E N O V E L . T H E S O L U T IO N O F T H E D IF F I C U L T Y . How tO make the personality of the hero more sympathetic to the reader?" (IX, 239). Several months earlier, in the two letters quoted above, Dostoevsky had defined in narrative terms "the main idea" that had been his cherished intention in this novel: to portray a positively beautiful man in Russia. The problem of how best to portray such a beautiful character still loomed large. The difficulty was how to establish an effective mechanism of com m unication between the novelist and the reader and how to make to make the hero's goodness in­ teresting: "If Don Quixote and Pickw ick, as virtuous characters are sympathetic to the reader and succeed, it is because they are com ic. If —the hero of the novel, the Prince, is not com ic, he possesses another sympathetic feature: he is! Innocent!" (IX, 239). D ostoevsky here consciously rejected the com ic mode as a means of depicting his hero. But a straightforward presentation of a virtuous character could be extremely boring. As an avid reader in his youth of Gothic and adventure novels, Dostoevsky knew how entertaining an air of mystery was. His many direc­ tives to himself to recount only the facts without explanation and to make use of rumor and enigma reflect his awareness that he had to counteract the potential dullness of a perfectly good man. The Idiot is to be portrayed indirectly, by his facial expres­ sions and idiosyncrasies. His innocence provides, as D ostoev­

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sky noted, "another sympathetic feature." As opposed to the merely virtuous hero, an innocent man, like a comic one, has a great capacity for arousing interest, and Dostoevsky immedi­ ately begins to exploit these possibilities. He writes, "all the questions, both those of a personal nature for the Prince (in which the children play a passionate role) and general questions are decided by him, and in this there is much that is touching and naive, for in his most extremely tragic and personal moments the Prince is occupied with the solving of general problems. N.B. Prepare many incidents and stories " (IX, 240). The prince becomes interesting or sympathetic through his naiveté, through his often tragic confusion of the personal with the general. Increasingly, Dostoevsky in these plans turned away from an exploration of the prince's psychology to a demonstration of how he affected the lives of others: "But wherever he only even touched [the lives of others] —everywhere he left a permanent trace. And thus, the infinity of the story in the novel (the wretched of all classes) along with the flow of the main theme. (N .B. N .B . N .B .! that main theme is the one to be polished and created.) He teaches the children through stories" (IX, 242). During M arch D ostoevsky had emphasized the prince's self­ doubt (IX, 218-219). By April, however, Dostoevsky no longer has the prince asking himself whether he is right or they are right. Instead, "And why not present the prince as a perpetual Sphinx? Some mistakes and com ical traits of the Prince" (IX, 242). D ostoevsky had finally acknowledged to himself that his hero permanently perplexed him. Since February he had published nothing; the decision to portray the prince as a "perpetual Sphinx" thus reflected Dostoevsky's own difficulties with the prince's character, but it also provided a way to get on with the w ork at hand. If the prince were a perpetual Sphinx, the author (or the narratorchronicler), Dostoevsky realized, did not ever need to explain him. In a retreat from his previous intention, Dostoevsky here also plans to resort to comedy himself, as Cervantes and Dickens had done, by showing com ical traits in the prince. The decisions to present the prince as a perpetual Sphinx and to show his "comical traits" illustrate both the frustration D ostoev­ sky was experiencing in characterizing the prince and the ways

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83

in which he hoped to overcome it: he planned to solve his dif­ ficulty through the use of mystery and comedy, that is, through the medium of narration. (These choices of narrative tone even­ tually, of course, contribute to shaping the plot of the novel as well. But it is interesting that D ostoevsky resolved these matters before he had decided firmly upon most of the details of the plot.) Frustration mounts. After composing a crowded outline of events for Part II (he calls it Part III), in which, in a jumbled foreshadowing of subsequent scenes that instead span the entire novel, there occurs yet another party at Nastasia Filippovna's, a children's journal, a forthcoming meeting between Nastasia and A g la y a , and episodes in v o lv in g F erd ysh chenk o and Pavlishchev, Dostoevsky writes: N .B . from me: this is too much for the third part. Secrets, mysteries, and subsequent plots. N .B . The problem of presenting N .F. N .B . The Prince as a Sphinx. As a Sphinx. He reveals himself without explanation by the author, except perhaps in the first chapter. If G anya from the first has recounted what he knew about N .F. (to Aglaya) . . . and then the report of Lebedev (earlier in the m orn­ ing) to the Prince, then the reader is sufficiently enlightened so that the role of a sphinx can be maintained . . . (N .B. And Ganya too is a sphinx.) (IX, 248-249)

D ostoevsky has returned to balancing enigma and enlighten­ ment for his readers; here enlightenment serves merely to main­ tain an enigma, to make the prince's role of a sphinx believable to the reader, who must be enlightened only enough to be fur­ ther confused about the hero. Even Ganya has becom e sphinxlike. D ostoevsky has asked earlier, "And Ganya? His role? . . . the role of G anya: incessant betrayals and vacillations" (IX, 245-246). Like the prince, Ganya has driven Dostoevsky to try to dismiss him as a sphinx. Dostoevsky's repeated use of the word "sphinx" in the en­ tries for 9 and 10 April reflected a mounting impatience with his inability to get on with his work, while at the same time it sug­ gested a solution to the problem . A week before the sphinx im­ age first appeared in the notes, Dostoevsky, in despair, ad­

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

mitted that for a month he "had not written a single line!" (P, II, 97). At this moment of keen frustration a new formulation abruptly appears. It relates to nothing else, yet it provides the impetus for movement. On 9 and 10 April Dostoevsky twice jots down the epithet "Prince Christ," (IX, 246, 294). Just as in the earlier notebooks the notation, "He is a Prince. A Prince. A Y urodivyi (He is with the children)" (IX, 200), appeared sud­ denly and seemed to give the notes new life, here the words "Prince Christ" appear in isolation and later take firm ro o t.40 Later the same day D ostoevsky returned to the problem of narrating, of portraying: N .B. W rite more sympathetically, and it will be good. The main problem: the character of the Idiot. Develop him. That is the idea [mysi'] of the novel. How he reflects Russia. Everything that would have been worked out in the Prince is extinguished in the grave. And that is why gradually showing the Prince in action will be sufficient. But! For this is needed the plot o f the novel [fabula rom ana ]. In order to set forth the character of the Idiot [more sympathetically] it is necessary to think up for him a field of action. (IX, 252)

D ostoevsky has come to a m ajor realization: if the narratorchronicler portrays the Idiot as a sphinx, he need not fill the pages with his hero's thoughts, dreams, hopes. Instead, the prince's character will be set forth through the action of the plot. The characterization of the Idiot as a "Prince Christ," far from contradicting the notion of the prince as a sphinx, com ­ plements and deepens that conception of him. The figure of Christ and the style of the Gospels, which portray Him through parables and stories rather than through authorial explanations, provide D ostoevsky with models for characterization and nar­ ration. The characterization of the Idiot as Prince Christ has evoked a narrative solution as well. (In a sense the narrative portrayals of Christ in the Gospels and Iago in O thello are similar: each figure remains a sphinx; their deeds cannot be ab­ solutely interpreted because we are forbidden insight into their mental workings and see them only in action. Dostoevsky's passage from an image of Iago in the second notebook to one of Prince Christ in the third notebook therefore carries with it an underlying narrative logic.) D ostoevsky then turns back to the task of structuring his

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narrative. He plans to insert some narratives to complement both the main story line and each other: (1) in general, histories and stories, that is, histories continuing throughout the whole novel must be harmoniously conceived and exe­ cuted in a way parallel to the whole novel, and therefore (2) think them over and the essential story with the Aide-de-camp [becomes Radomsky], but the main thing, as far as possible, parallel stories. (IX, 252) H e th en lists parallel stories in v o lv in g F erd y sh ch en k o , Ivolgin , an d Ippolit and ends w ith the w o rd s "P r C h rist" (IX , 2 5 3 ). T h e g o v ern in g co n ce rn rem ain s th e cre a tio n of the prince's field of a ctio n an d th e elu cid ation of his c h a ra c te r th ro u g h p arab les an d sto ries.

Five days later, on 15 April, D ostoevsky found an outline for a field of action that would carry him through the first chapters of Part II. The prince returns in a confused state to St. Petersburg after an absence of six months; he has sent a letter to Aglaya via Kolya; the general's wife pays the prince a visit. "They need him at the Epanchins . . . Ganya needs him. K olya —Rogozhin needs him . . . And the main thing, N. F., even Lebedev . . . needs him, and the Prince's heart glowed ('Here, it must be, is my occupation.')" (IX, 2 5 6 ). The plot has taken shape through the need that all the characters have for the prince. D ostoevsky himself realizes this, "the main thing is THAT THEY ALL NEED HIM" (IX, 2 5 7 ). From here on the character of the notes written during the com position of Part II changes: since Dostoevsky has discovered his basic narrative method, m ore of the material from the notes subsequently reappears in the novel. Even the end of the novel has begun to take shape. Throughout all the notes, plans for Rogozhin's eventual murder of Nastasia have existed. In the third notebook there have been plans for a meeting between Aglaya and Nastasia. But on 1 5 and 1 6 April D ostoevsky sketches in concrete details: in the scene between Aglaya and Nastasia, Aglaya is to act uncontrollably, and the prince agrees to m arry Nastasia (IX, 2 5 7 ). A t the last moment Nastasia will run off with Rogozhin. Getting even closer to the final text, D ostoevsky plans that during the engagement with Nastasia the prince shall be

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

thought, by general rumor, to be mad. "Everyone has deserted him, except for a few people" (IX, 258). O n 16 April Dostoevsky writes: " in the 5 th part the scandal about the prince must be too great , the public insult . . . the explanation of the Prince, the Aide-de-camp, almost a duel . . . in the 7th and 8th parts the picture of the ill and wandering Prince . . . They take the Idiot abroad" (IX, 260). Here Dostoevsky has foreshadowed the shape and outcome of the eventual meeting between the two rivals, the public scandal in the park at Pavlovsk where M yshkin intercedes for Nastasia and almost becom es involved in a duel, and Nastasia s final departure with Rogozhin. M ost important for the narrative structure of the novel, we see that D ostoevsky during the writing o f Part II of the novel had already planned the course of Myshkin's growing isolation from those around him. He is to be deserted by his friends and by the narrator as he grows more and more ill and lost. This note offers a vital tool for assessing the narrative in the novel; it shows that D ostoevsky had intended the narrator and the other characters to become impatient with the hero, ("the SC A N D A L A B O U T T H E P R IN C E M U S T BE T O O G R E A T ." ) T h u s i n c h a p t e r

9 of Part IV in the novel, when the narrator himself seems to desert M yshkin and to agree with such critics of the prince as Evgeny Pavlovich, D ostoevsky has not lost control over his m aterial. He has not abdicated responsibility for a hero who has become too difficult to portray; he is having his narrator act ac­ cording to plan.41 The last pages of notes for Part II contain, the working out of the scene in which Aglaya reads Pushkin's poem "The Poor Knight" to the group assembled at the prince's rented cottage in Pavlovsk: The novelist has found his way at last and is willing to defend his narrative and defy his would-be critics. In an earlier entry for 6 November 1867 Dostoevsky had written, "For the epilogue: I have written a fantastic novel, but never more real characters" (IX, 199). O n 11 June 1868, he confirms the feel­ ing of rightness: N .B. The main thing After the scene between the two rivals: We admit, that we will be describing strange happenings. Because it is difficult to explain them, we will limit ourselves to the facts.

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We agree that nothing could have happened differently with the Idiot. So let us bring to an end the story of a character, who perhaps was not worth so much of the readers attention —we agree with that. Reality above all else. It is true, perhaps, that we have another view of reality, 1000 souls, prophecies —a fantastic reality. M aybe in the Idiot is a man who is more real. However, we agree that they m ay say to us: "that's all so, you are right, but you have not been able to present the affair, to justify the facts, you are a bad artist." But here already, of course, there is nothing to. be done. (IX, 276)

In this entry Dostoevsky has further outlined how he intends the narrator-chronicler to express himself near the end of the novel. He has previewed the narrator's distancing of himself from his hero at the very moment when the reader most desires an explanation. Part of this passage recurs in the novel as a cynical apology to the reader on the part of the narratorchronicler (VIII, 475-479, 589-594). The narrator-chronicler lays bare his device: because it was difficult to explain, I confined myself to recounting the facts. He shrugs off the criticism that in not explaining, that is, in not justifying the facts, he has showed himself to be a bad artist. Thus, the narrator's unexpected and disturbing abdication of responsibility toward the hero and the events of the story (in chapter 9, Part IV), which proves so sur­ prising to a reader of the novel, has been, as these notes of 11 June indicate, the novelist's intent all along. If the reader finds the narrative to be enigmatic and baffling, he has merely ex­ perienced what the author intended. The remaining notes are few —some ten pages of notes exist for the rest of the novel, Parts III and IV. Dostoevsky worked on Part III from August through part of O ctober 1868 and finished Part IV by the first part of January 1869 (IX, 378). Despite uncertainties as to exactly how the plot would develop (in O ctober, Dostoevsky still toys with the idea of the prince marrying Aglaya), he has the novel securely underway. D ostoevsky wrote the third and fourth parts in half the time of the first two parts. By 4 O ctober, while writing the end of Part III, D ostoevsky had decided upon all the basic events of Part IV, including the most climactic scene of the novel —the tour de force of Rogozhin's and Myshkin's vigil beside Nastasia's corpse:

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

2nd Half of the 4th Part N .F .—the fiancée of the Prince. Eccentricity. A scene in the temple alone. To Rogozhin in despair (he murders her). He summons the Prince. Rogozhin and the Prince beside the corpse.

Finale. Not bad.

(IX, 283)

This is the only moment in the notebooks where Dostoevsky allows himself a burst of pride and self-congratulation. From here on the notes are brief, except for the 7 Novem ber entry which further outlines the final scene by Nastasia's corpse (IX, 285-286). Dostoevsky was terribly proud of this final scene; on the same day he wrote to M aikov, "Now, when I see every­ thing as if in a mirror —I am completely convinced that never in my literary life have I had a single poetic idea that was better and richer than the one which has been elucidated in Part IV, in the detailed plan" (P, II, 141). On the same day he also wrote to Sonya: "Finally, and the main thing for me is that the fourth part and its finale are the main part of my novel, that is, almost the whole novel was thought out and written for the sake of the denouement" (P, II, 138). In the entry for 15 O ctober Dostoevsky outlines a scene be­ tween Nastasia and the prince on their wedding morning and a scene between Aglaya and the prince (IX, 284-285). In both the word "Othello" appears in parenthesis. This is perhaps an un­ conscious, but powerful symbol for the transform ation of the Idiot that has taken place throughout these three notebooks. Iago has becom e Othello. The inciter of action and instigator of mistrust has become a man infinitely vulnerable to the acts of others, trustful, and uneasily roused to jealously. Othello's dy­ ing words ( Othello , V, ii, 341-344) aptly describe Myshkin's own tragedy: When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am ; nothing extenuate, N or set down aught in malice: then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.

Thé editors of the 1974 edition of the notebooks note that Dostoevsky probably read P. I. Veinberg's 1864 translation of

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Othello. They show similarities of phrasing between this entry and the Russian translation of the play, especially in the passage in which Othello says of Desdemona that she loved him for his sufferings, and that he loved her for her compassion for them. M yshkin assures Nastasia that he loves her not only with com ­ passion but with love (IX, 382). Like Desdemona's love for O thello, Aglaya's love for the prince grew from the stories he told of his past experiences. The notes for Parts III and IV contain no more narrative directives. D ostoevsky had discovered his narrative method while working on Part II on the novel. Yet in his own assess­ ment of the novel upon its completion, D ostoevsky was more ready to find fault with his portrayal of the Idiot, with his nar­ rative in general, than with the idea behind it. In February 1869 he wrote to Sonya Ivanova, "Now it is finished at last! I have written the last chapters day and night, with terrible anguish . . . but I am not happy with the novel: it does not ex­ press even a tenth of what I wished to express. Although, never­ theless, I will not disclaim it, and I still love my idea even though it has not succeeded. But in any case the fact is that it is not effective for the public" (P, II, 159-160). Several weeks later, in a letter to Strakhov, he wrote, "There is much in the novel that was written rapidly, much that is drawn out, much that didn't come off, but something did come off. I don't stand behind my novel, but I do stand behind the idea" (P, II, 170). Nevertheless, his choices of narrative method had been deliberate and the techniques he developed here reappear, with greater success, in The Possessed and The Brothers Karama­ zov .42 Each is a virtuouso performance of the balancing and welding together of enigma and explanation. Ultimately, the narrator-chronicler provides the perfect device for realizing this aim, for his explanations serve to create even larger mysteries. D ostoevsky, in these notes, had designed a narrative style and a plot that would allow the reader, often through the very act of disagreeing with the narrator's assessment of events, to par­ ticipate in the m oral action o f the novel.

3

Shaping the Reader's Expectations: The Narrative, Parts I and II

The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others . . . —Michel de Montaigne, "Of the Education of Children"

I have already betrayed . . . my preference for dealing with my subject-matter, for "seeing my story," through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent witness or reporter, some person who contributes to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it. —Henry James, Preface to The G olden Bow l

ecause Dostoevsky considered form to be in­ separable from idea, the search for the proper narrative mode mattered almost as much to him as finding the idea itself: "for various forms of art there exist se­ ries of poetic ideas which correspond to them, so that one idea can never be expressed in another form that doesn't correspond to it" (P, III, 20). The form of The Idiot subsumes within it several simultaneously coexisting modes of narration: the voice of a sympathetic and omniscient narrator; a voice —ironically detached from the action—which passes along the current local rumors, a comic voice of limited intelligence which relates a kind of novel of ill manners; and a Gothic voice which employs techniques of arbitrary disclosure and heightened terror. At times the narrative style becomes completely dramatic.1 A reader of The Idiot rapidly becomes accustomed to the variety of narrative tones that emerge in the first two parts of the novel.

B

Shaping the Reader's Expectations

91

They are all different voices of a single narrator, who ven­ tures at times to introduce his own opinions and interpretation of events, and must not be confused with the voice of the author, or in Booth's terminology, the voice of the implied author. W e know that in his fiction D ostoevsky always sought to conceal his own voice as a m atter of policy. The entire novel, except for the purely dramatic scenes, is written through the voices of the narrator. N arration generally implies com m unication of the details of a story. Those who judge this novel to be a failure tend to do so on the grounds that the reader has lost touch with the author and that the narrative medium —in this case the narrator's v o ices—has muddied rather than clarified the channels of com ­ m unication between the novelist and the reader. In short, the author has failed to express his idea in a convincing w ay.2 In Parts I and II of The Idiot , however, the narrator does establish a definite modal pattern; the reader is invited to expect the use of a particular voice to describe a particular character or group o f characters. A fter identifying the main voices of the narrator and the patterns that allow the reader's prediction of their oc­ currence, one can begin to assess the balance of these voices in the novel and their possible effect on the reader.3 Does he becom e too bewildered, or, conversely, is he burdened with a too heavyhanded narrative irony? The novel opens with a straightforward, factual account by a narrator-observer. The narrator's sense that he is telling a story predominates from the outset; he tries to restrict himself to a tempered, measured disclosure of the identities of the two young men on the railroad car, yet he cannot resist, in the sec­ ond paragraph, forewarning the reader that this is a remarkable meeting. "Since dawn, in one of the third-class cars, facing each other by the window, sat two passengers —both young people, both with practically no luggage, both unfashionably dressed, both with rather rem arkable physiognomies, and both wishing, finally, to enter into conversation with the other. If they had both known about one another, why they were especially rem arkable at that moment, then of course they would have marveled that chance had so strangely seated them opposite one another in a third class car of the Petersburg-W arsaw train"

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

(V III,

5;

2 5 ).

The

re ad er

im m ed iately

co n n e cts

the

tw o

p assen gers w ith each o th e r; th ey are linked b y the n a rra to r's in­ sistent rep etitio n o f "b o th ." T h e n a rra to r h as also m a n a g e d to assert tw ice th at th ey are each rem ark ab le an d th a t th eir p resen ce on the th ird -class c o a c h is so m eh o w o d d . T h ese c o m ­ p a rtm en ts are u su ally cro w d ed w ith "o rd in a ry p eop le"; his is to be a sto ry of e x tra o rd in a ry m en . The

n a rra to r

con fines

him self

to

being

an

o b se rv e r

th ro u g h o u t the first ch a p te r. H e does n o t en ter the m in ds of M y sh k in o r R og ozh in an d describes th em in a seem ingly o b jec­ tive w a y , but his o w n in terp retatio n s creep in. "T h e read iness o f the b lo n d y o u n g m an . . . to an sw er all the q u estion s of his sw a rth y n eig h b or w as surprising" (V III, 6 ; 2 6 ). T h e n a r r a to r em ­ ph asizes M yshkin's l a c R o f suspicion an d his p ecu liar eagern ess to ad m it "at o n ce w ith unusual h aste" th a t his bundle co n tain ed all his e arth ly possessions (V III, 7; 2 7 ). Seeking to en tice the read er's interest w ith the ca tc h w o rd s "su rp risin g," "unusual h a ste ," "rem ark ab le," "stran g e," th e n a rra to r at the sam e tim e m ain tain s the to n e o f a reliable re p o rte r. T h e first glim pse o f the n a rra to r's ca p a c ity fo r sa rca s m , of an iro n ic m o d e, o ccu rs in the first ch a p te r as w ell, in a o n ep a ra g ra p h digression in w h ich he ch ara cte riz e s a ty p e , "the all­ k n ow in g g en tlem an ." T h is "all-k n ow ing gen tlem an " b ears an u n ­ can n y

re s e m b la n c e

to

th e

s o rt

of

n in e te e n th -c e n tu ry

feuilletonist w h o se p u rp oses D o sto e v sk y o ften p a ro d ie d in his o w n jo u rn alism .4 D o sto e v sk y u n d ertak es a sim ilar p a ro d y h ere as he h as the n a rra to r o ffer his first "so cio log ical v ig n ette": These all-knowing gentlemen are met sometimes, even quite often, in a certain level of society. They know everything; all the restless in­ quisitiveness of their minds and capabilities aspires irrepressibly in one direction, no doubt because of an absence of more important more vital interests and opinions, as a modern thinker would say. By the words "they know everything" must be understood, however, a rather limited area . . . however, m any of them [the all-knowing gentlemen] take positive consolation from this knowledge, which is tantamount to a complete science, and they attain self-respect and even a high spiritual satisfaction. It certainly is a seductive science.^! have known scholars, writers, poets, and politicians who have founcT and do find in this very science their deepest satisfaction, their goals; and who have even actually made their careers out of it. (VIII, 8; 28)

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T h e n a r r a t o r s d ictio n an d log ic h a v e rap id ly ch an g ed . H e has shifted his p oin t of v iew fro m im p erso n al to p erso n alized o b ser­ v a tio n . In this p relim in ary in tro d u ctio n o f the still un n am ed L eb ed ev, the n a rra to r a b ru p tly ab an d o n s his h ith erto m easu red p acin g an d freely exp resses his o w n so cio lo g ical op in io n s, o ffer­ ing a brief p sy ch o lo g ica l descrip tiori o f the "all-k n ow ing" typ es w h o suffer fro m "an ab sen ce o f m o re im p o rta n t, m o re v ital in­ terests"; he sa rca s tica lly labels th eir intellectu al p reten sion s a "co m p lete scien ce." H e also th ro w s in a bit of p erson alized social satire as he cites th e n u m b er o f sch o la rs, w rite rs, p o e ts, and p olitician s w h o suffer fro m the sam e disease. T h e shift in ton e ev id en t in the n a rra to r's d isgression d oes n o t d istra ct the re a d e r b ecau se it is strictly co n fin ed to the d escrip tion o f the "func­ tio n a ry ,"

"the

p im p ly

g entlem an "

L eb ed ev.

Indeed,

the

n a rra to r's an aly sis is co n firm ed sev eral p ages la te r b y Lebedev's self-la u d a to ry e x cla m a tio n : "H e k n o w s e v e ry th in g ! L eb edev k n ow s ev ery th in g " (V III, 1 1 ; 3 2 ). T h e n a rra to r's asides an d the details he em p h asizes in this ch a p te r rev eal a g en erally dim , cy n ical v iew o f m an k in d . A s R og ozh in stares w ith cu rio sity a t the shiverin g, in a p p ro p ria te ly dressed M y sh k in , the n a rra to r easily read s R ogozh in 's exp res­ sio n , "T h e d a rk h aired n eig h b or . . . to o k all this in, p a rtly fro m h av in g n o th in g to d o , an d fin ally, w ith th a t indelicate smile in w h ich , so u n cerem o n io u sly a n d „carelessly is som etim es expressecT hum an p leasu re at the m isfo rtu n es of a n o th e r, he ask ed , 'Ü h iïly T " (V lîî, 6 ; 2 6 ). L eb ed ev is "som eth in g like a fu n ctio n a ry em b ed d ed in the lo w e r ran k s . . . w ith a red n ose and a pim pled face" (V III, 7; 2 7 ). B u t a fter his digression o n the all-k n ow in g gen tlem en , th e n a rra to r retu rn s to his ro le o f im p erson al o b se rv e r an d m ain tain s a stan ce of lim ited om n iscien ce fo r the r est o f the c h a p t e r .5

Chapter 1 has displayed two different narrative textures, yet both fit within the sphere of a narrator-observer. The narrator portrays his two young heroes directly, more or less sym­ pathetically, and with a minimum of intrusive devices such as sarcasm or psychological theorizing. He allows himself freer reign with a second-rank character like Lebedev. In subsequent chapters of the first two parts, the narrator reinforces and ex­ pands this pattern: he usually portrays the central characters dramatically, while the few descriptive passages concerning

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th em are sy m p ath etic ra th e r th a n sa rca s tic. H e d o es n o t th eo rize ab o u t their p erson alities o r cast th em into m o ld s. S e co n d -ra n k c h a ra cters, like G a n y a , T o t sk y , G eneral E p an ch in , an d L izav e ta P ro k o f'e v n a , induce the n a rra to r to t r y His w it an d test his th eo ries. These m o d u latio n s o f n a rra tiv e to n e o c c u r in each ch a p te r, often shifting fro m p a ra g ra p h to p a ra g ra p h . T h e o p en ­ ing p ages of ch a p te r 2 , fo r exam p le, a b a n d o n th e straig h t­ fo rw a rd m easu red m o d e of the n a rra to r-o b s e rv e r of the first ch a p te r. T h e n a rra to r p resen ts his n ext c h a ra c te r,

G eneral

E p an ch in , in a len g th y e x p o s ito ry p assage. T h e read er's a c ­ q u ain tan ce w ith M y sh k in an d R og ozh in h a d g ro w n g ra d u a lly ; it p aralleled the discussion b etw een the tw o h e ro e s, w h o m the n a rra to r did n o t even n am e fo r sev eral p ages. L eb ed ev cre p t in p aren th etically as a kind o f h u m o ro u s a fte rth o u g h t. B u t fo r G eneral E p an ch in , a m a n o f su b stan ce an d so cial stan d in g, the n a rra to r ad o p ts a co rresp o n d in g to n e . T h e n a rra to r's sy n ta x b eco m es m o re co m p licated , resultin g in a h e a v ie r p ro se ; fit­ tin g ly , he p o rtra y s the m an o f so ciety th ro u g h the public's ey e: It was well known to everyone that General Epanchin had par­ ticipated in government monopolies in the past. A t present he p ar­ ticipated and had a decisive voice in certain substantial stock com ­ panies. He was known as a man of big money, big operations, big connections. In certain circles he knew how to make himself com ­ pletely indispensable, as he did, for example, in his own branch of the administration. A t the same time it was also known that Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin was a m an without education and had started life as the son of a soldier; the latter facts, without a doubt, could only reflect honor upon him, but the general, although he was an intelligent man, was also not without little, very excusable weaknesses and didn't enjoy certain hints. But he was, unquestionably, an intelligent and adroit m an. He, for example, had a method of not thrusting himself forward; where necessary, he would efface himself; and m any people valued him precisely for this simplicity, precisely because he always knew his place. Yet if only these judges could know what transpired sometimes in the Heart and mind of Ivan Fyodorovich who knew his place so well! (VIII, 14; 36) T h e n a rra to r goes o n to d escribe the general's fam ily th ro u g h the sam e filter o f the public's v ie w o f th em . O f th e d au gh ters he o b serv es:

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It was known that they loved one another remarkably . . . There was even mention made of . . . sacrifices . . . for the sake of the general household idol —the youngest. N ot only didn't they like to put themselves forward in society, but they were even too modest . . . No one could reproach them for haughtiness or arrogance, but it was known than they were proud and understood their own value . . . In a w ord, m any extremely flattering things were said about them. But there were also ill-wishers. It was remarked upon with horror about the number of books they had read. They were in no hurry to m arry; although they valued a known circle of society, they did not over­ value it. This was all the m ore remarkable, because everyone knew the inclination, character, aims, and wishes of their father. (VIII, 16; 38)

The voice is that of a narrator-chronicler, an inhabitant of the town in which the characters live. Tie even resembles fKe~"aïlknowing" type of gentlem anTieTiad sneered at in the previous chapter. A t the same time he shrewdly directs his irony boTh toward General Epanchin and toward the public's assessments of him. In a manner reminiscent of Gogol, two layers of irony operate here: the narrator's irony toward the general and society, and to a lesser degree, the reader's slightly ironical view of the narrator who is so addicted to reporting all the gossip known about the general. The reader and tKe narrator find themselves in a pleasant, soothing state of collusion both against the general and against the society that finds the Epanchin girls "too m odest." The readers confidence in the narrator's perceptions solidifies. So does the reader's confidence in himself; after all, he has easily detected the presence of this ironic voice. At the same time, the narrator's excessive reliance upon society's view of the Epanchin family has a curious effect. He has told us that General Epanchin is a self-made man who will cater to public whim, while his daughters display that indepen­ dence and capability for sincere affection typical of most novel heroines. They read; they do not especially care about the pub­ lic's opinion of them; they are not eager to m arry. The narrator has in fact presented a typical family for a novel situation, but he has introduced them to us dirough a smoke screen of public "knowledge, prejudice, and rumor. In separating the family from what "was known" about it, the reader finds himself endowing the Epanchins with attributes of freshness and originality

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th ey m igh t n o t oth erw ise h a v e h ad fo r h im , h ad th e n a rra to r m erely p resen ted them straig h tfo rw ard ly as a fa th e r an d m o th e r w ith th ree beautiful m arriag eab le y o u n g d au gh ters. T h e n a r­ r a to r h as co n triv e d to m ak e a sto ck lite ra ry situ ation a p p e a r n ew an d seem ingly o rigin al. T h e n arra to r's ton e does n o t m erely exp ress sa rca sm . U p o n clo ser exam in atio n the log ic b etw een the sen ten ces o f his e x ­ p o s ito ry passages b eco m es slightly su sp ect. O fte n , w hile m a in ­ taining his h u m o ro u s attitu d e, he b eco m es affected b y G en eral E p an ch in , h alf takin g on his valu es w hile m o ck in g th em at the sam e tim e. "T he general w as possessed of a flourishing fam ily. It is tru e, n o t all w as roses h ere, b u t th ere w as m u ch o n w h ich . . . the m o st

im p o rtan t h op es . . .

of his excellen cy h ad been

seriou sly an d earn estly c o n ce n tra te d . Y es, and w h a t g oals in life are m o re im p o rtan t and sa cre d th an p a te rn a l g oals? T o w h a t should one d ev o te oneself, if n o t to the fam ily?" (VIII, 1 5 ; 3 7 ). T h e n a rra to r's ton e v eers b etw een sarca sm an d sen tim en tal sin cerity . M o st often , h o w e v e r, one sen ten ce o r clau se u n d er­ cu ts o r o verq u alifies the one p reced in g it. T h e general's p a re n t­ age co u ld on ly reflect h o n o r u p o n h im , "but the gen eral, alth o u g h he w as an intelligent m an , w as also n o t w ith o u t little, v e ry excu sab le w eakn esses . . . B ut he w a s, u n q u estio n ab ly , an intelligent . . . m a n ." A d jectiv es tend to n eg ate ra th e r th a n qualify n ou n s: the general h as w eakn esses, b u t th ey are e x ­ cu sab le. T h e log ic, in a h igh ly G og olian style, b e co m e s m u d d y h ere, fo r the p oin t of the sen ten ce is th a t the gen eral, despite his intelligence, h as w eakn esses. B ut the in tro d u ctio n o f "excu sab le" dissipates the o rigin al p oin t of the statem e n t. W h y q u alify the general's intelligence w ith the fact o f his w eakn esses, if in the first p lace, y o u are going to assert th at these w eakn esses are ex­ cu sab le, an d th erefore n o t w eakn esses at all? In his o v e re a g e r­ ness to to assert the general's intelligence the n a rra to r u n d er­ m ines the read er's ab ility to believe his statem en ts. L a te r,

w h en the n a rra to r w rites of the d au gh ters th a t

"m an y . . . flatterin g things w ere said a b o u t th e m ," b u t th at there "w ere also ill-w ish ers," his d rive fo r co m p leten ess —his a t­ tem p t to describe fully — results in a to p h e a v y , w o b b ly edifice. "A lth ou g h th ey v alu ed a k n o w n circle o f so cie ty ; th e y did n ot o v e rv alu e it." T h e seem ingly solid, len g th y d escrip tiv e p a ra ­ g rap h s co n tain a degree of inflation th at is outsid e the n a rra to r's

Shaping the Reader's Expectations

91

conscious ironic intent. The reader glimpses a possible failing of the narrator while at the same time he still basically accepts the narrator's judgments. The reader is thus drawn into collusion with both the narrator and the implied author (although the narrator has, in turn, through his choice of mode, manipulated the reader into finding the Epanchin girls more original and ex­ citing than he might otherwise have found them). The narrator immediately shifts to the dramatic mode when he describes Prince Myshkin's entry into the general's house. But when he observes the porter's reactions to this unlikely caller, the narrator enters the porter's mind to reveal his changing view of M yshkin. In contrast, the n arrator remains strictly outside the thoughts of his hero; the reader's curiosity about the prince matches that of all those in the novel who are meetingTiim for the first time. T h e narrator does not consistently use an ironic voice heav­ ily committed to citing all the local rumors to portray the Epan­ chin fam ily. M ore often he describes them in a tone reminiscent of, though varying grotesquely from that of the novel of man­ ners. The presence of this voice is especially notew orthy because critics have not included such a mode within the canon of Dostoevsky's admittedly huge repertoire of narrative voices. Bakhtin for example, quotes B. M . Engelgardt, "One cannot find in D ostoevsky a so-called objective description of the exter­ nal world; strictly speaking there are in his novels neither man­ ners and customs {byt), nor city or country life, nor nature."6 Later, in his examination of Crime and Punishment, Bakhtin ex­ pressed a similar opinion: Dostoevsky "leaps over" all that is homey and settled and stable and far from the threshold, the inner space of houses, apartments and room s, because the life which he depicts is not played out in that kind of space. Dostoevsky was least of all an estate-dom estic-room -apartment-family writer. In homey interior space, far from the threshold, people live a biographical life in biographical time: they are b om , they experience childhood and youth, enter into m arriage, give birth to children, grow old, and die. And D ostoevsky 'leaps over" that kind of biographical time too . . . In essence, the interiors . . . of drawing room s, dining room s, halls, studies and bedrooms in which biographical life unfolds and in which events take place in the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, G oncharov and others, do not exist at all.7

98

Dostoevsky and The Idiot T he Id io t p ro v e s a significant excep tio n t o this rule. It is a

n o v el o t fam ilies — p rin cip ally th e Epan ch in s, b u t also t h e l v o P gins, the L eb ed evs, an d ev en the R og ozh in s. T h e n a rra to r de­ scrib es each of their h o uses. T h e read er h a s som e sense o f b io g rap h ical tim e an d d aily ro u tin e For e a ch ^ o f T h ese fam ilies, despite the fact th at tK eT im e'oFth e n ov el fo cu ses a ro u n d cru cial h e ig h t^ e c fT h b m e n ts th at p u sh e v e ry d a y lifë ïn to tfie b a c k ­ g ro u n d . Ih e '^ ice T K e 'jfT a fra fo r ch o o ses fo r the p o rtra y a l of the E p an ch in s' fam ily life relates a p ecu liar n o v el of m a n n e rs. O n e m igh t ten tativ ely define the n ov el o f m an n ers as an o u tw a rd ly u n am b itiou s a cco u n t o f m id d le-class d o m esticity w h ich , often th rou g h co m e d y , exp resses serious m o ra l co n ce rn s. T h e c h a ra c ­ ters u n d ergo a ty p ical co n fu sio n b etw een a p p e a ra n ce an d real­ ity th at is often exp ressed as an attem p t to su p erim p ose the fo rm s of literatu re o n to life. Jan e A u sten rep resen ts th e n o v el o f m an n ers p a r e x ce lle n ce .8 H ers is the w o rld of the d raw in g ro o m ; fam ily relatio n sh ip s, d aily ro u tin e, en gagem en ts, and m arriag e s m a k e up the stuff of h er n o v e ls .9 T h e n a r r a to r s v o ice at the beginning of ch a p te r 4 addresses sim ilar co n ce rn s, b u t the b a la n ce g ra d u a lly goes ask ew ; a n o th e r, u n m an ageab le w o rld seeks to intru d e b o th u p on the ton es o f the n a rra tio n an d u p o n the d om estic ro u tin e o f the E p an ch in fam ily . (This is the o n ly c h a p te r in P a rt I c o m ­ p osed en tirely o f n a rra tiv e d escrip tion ; thus it p ro v id e s an in­ stan ce fo r scrutinizing the n a r r a to r s v o ice . H e is n o t digressing fro m his p lo t, h o w e v e r, fo r his task w ith in this ch a p te r is n o t one of d irect re p o rta g e .) All three Epanchin girls were healthy, flourishing, tall young ladies, with amazing shoulders, with powerful bosoms, with strong almost masculine arms, and of course, as a result of their strength and health, they sometimes loved to eat well, a fact which they did not at all try to hide. Their m am m a, the general's wife, Lizaveta Prokof'evna, some­ times looked askance at the honesty of their appetites, but as certain of her opinions, despite the total outward respect they were shown by her daughters, in essence, had already long ago lost their former and unquestioned authority among them, and to such a degree, that the firmly established entente of the three young girls had begun to prevail quite often, so that even the general's wife, conscious of her own dig­ nity, had found it more convenient not to argue and to give in . . . The general's wife, m oreover, had herself not lost her appetite and,

Shaping the Reader's Expectations

99

usually, at twelve-thirty took part in an abundant lunch, which was almost a dinner, together with her daughters. Earlier, a cup of coffee had already been taken by the young ladies, at exactly ten o clock. They were so fond of this that they had established it as a regular cus­ tom . A t twelve-thirty a table was set in the small dining room , near their mother's room s, and the general himself sometimes appeared at these intimate family luncheons. Besides tea, coffee, cheese, honey, butter, the special fritters adored by the general's wife, cutlets and so forth, a strong hot broth was even served. On that particular m orn­ ing, in which our story began, the whole family had gathered in the dining room in expectation of the general, who had promised to ap­ pear at twelve-thirty. If he had been late by even a minute, they would have sent for him; but he appeared on time. Approaching his wife to greet her and to kiss her hand he noticed this time an unusual expres­ sion on her face. And although he had already foreseen the night be­ fore that precisely this would happen today because of a certain "inci­ dent" [an ekd ot ] (as he himself had the habit of expressing it) . . . nevertheless, he now became afraid again. (VIII, 32-33; 57-58)

The humor of this passage, and, indeed, of much of the nar­ rator's description of the Epanchins' family life, depends upon the readers acquaintance with the form of the novel of manners or the domestic novel. From the start the narrator plays with conventions and, as it were, bursts the seams that prettily en­ close this form . His physical portrait of the three daughters starts out typically enough, but it rapidly goes astray. However independent and strong a typical novel heroine proves herself to be, she rarely first appears to the reader with such attributes as amazing shoulders, a powerful bosom , strong, almost mascu­ line arms and a gigantic appetite. Yet the Epanchin girls remain as heroines; the narrator's tone does not ultimately undercut them; instead it teases the reader's expectations of what they, as three marriageable maidens of good family, should be like. M oreover, the system of domesticity has broken down: the parent has lost authority over her children. The narrator de­ scribes this loss of authority in a long sentence whose meander­ ing structure parallels this gradual loss. The sentence begins with a statement of the mother's disapproval; the daughters show respect for her opinions, but only an outward respect. In fact her authority has vanished long ago. Not only has her au­ thority dissipated, but a new force has replaced it: the unified

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will of the girls p rev ails. T h e g e n e ra ls w ife gives in to th em to sav e h er o w n d ig n ity . T h e sen ten ce itself loses co n tro l o f its n u m ero u s p h rases an d clau ses, b u t ends, in a fa ce -sa v in g a t­ tem p t, w ith all its m ain v erb s. If all the interven in g lines w ere o m itte d , the sen ten ce w ou ld sim ply read , "T h eir m a m m a fou nd it m o re co n v en ien t n o t to arg u e and to give in ." In stead it em ­ b od ies the p ro cess of h er loss of co n tro l an d h er final a tte m p t to p reserv e som e sem b lan ce o f d ign ity.

W hen the narrator adds, with amusement, that the mother shared the healthy appetite of her daughters, the whole bela­ bored thrust of what went on before becomes insignificant. He then goes on to describe their meal, giving the reader a general notion of the Epanchin family's daily routine and of the struc­ ture of their family relationships. The narrator's domestic por­ trait continues uninterrupted for several more paragraphs. He introduces, as he himself calls it, a direct explanation of the rela­ tionships and circumstances of the fam ily. As might be expected in a novel of manners, everything in the family revolves around the questions of betrothal and marriage. In his first d escrip tion o f the E p an ch in s, the n a rra to r's o u t­ w a rd ly d irected iro n y w as a t tim es u n d erm in ed b y his o w n sh ak y lo g ic; o ne sentence freq u en tly n egated o r overq u alified its p red ecesso r. T h is p a tte rn is evident here to o , b u t it n o lon g er serves to dim inish the read er's ap p raisal of the n a rra to r's c a p a ­ bilities; in stead , it prefigures the E p an ch in fam ily's im m inent loss of co n tro l o v e r ev en ts. T h e general an d his w ife do n o t w o rry to o m u ch ab o u t the relu ctan ce of their d au gh ters to m a rry ; the g eneral h ad devised a "system " fo r n o t h u rry in g his d au gh ters into m a rria g e . A s the n a rra to r m arsh als v a rio u s fa cts attestin g to the d au gh ters' freed o m , the re a d e r d isco v ers th a t the real aim of the "system " is actu a lly to get the d au gh ters m a rrie d : "finally, the m ere fa c t, th at w ith each y e a r, fo r exam p le, their fo rtu n e an d social significance g rew in g e o m e trica l p ro g ressio n m ean t th at the m o re tim e th at p assed the m o re th e d au gh ters gain ed , even as p ro sp ectiv e b rid es. B u t am o n g all these irresisti­ ble facts th ere ap p eared still o ne m o re fa c t: the eldest d au gh ter, A le x a n d ra , su ddenly and alm o st quite u n exp ected ly (as it al­ w a y s h ap p en s), reach ed the age of tw en ty -fiv e" (VIII, 3 3 ; 5 9 ). It is this tin y fa c t th at co n tra d ic ts the o th ers an d sets the p lo t in m o tio n , bringing in T o tsk y as a su itor fo r A le x a n d ra . (T h e n a r­

Shaping the Reader's Expectations

101

r a to r describes him as a "m an o f ab o u t fifty -fiv e, of exquisite ch a ra c te r an d e x tra o rd in a rily refined tastes" [V III, 3 3 ; 5 9 .]) His co n tem p lated m arriag e m ak es it n ecessary to h a tc h the schem e to m a rry off his w a rd , N astasia F ilip p o vn a, to G a n y a Ivolgin an d b rings the E p an ch in fam ily sphere in to collision w ith N a sta sia F ilip p o vn a an d h er w o rld . T h e n a r r a to r o n ly g rad u ally allo w s th e im p act of these ev en ts to strik e the re a d e r an d the m em b ers o f the E p an ch in fam ily . H e w rites eu p h em istically, "an evid en t tra n sfo rm a tio n o ccu rre d in the quiet and a ttra c tiv e co u rse o f G eneral E p a n ch in s fam ily life . . . circu m sta n ce w h ich hind ered ev ery th in g , tro u b leso m e

ev en t,

w h ich

co u ld

T h e re w a s one

one difficult an d

ru in th e w h o le affair ir­

re v o c a b ly " (V III, 3 4 ; 6 0 ).

Throughout the rest of this chapter, in which he describes the relationship between Nastasia Filippovna and Totsky, the narrator scrupulously adheres to the same tone of quiet amuse­ m ent. But meanwhile an unmanageable w orld has intruded. Be­ cause the narrator doesn't change his tone, the balance between the form and the content of his narration begins to waver. The Epanchins' domestic world stretched the limits of a conventional household, but a narrator could still describe it as belonging within some kind of societal norm . But the switch in content transform s the effect of the narrator's tone. W hat had earlier seemed to the reader to be a tone of detached amusement, now expresses either a far more serious irony or a shocking lack of taste. The chapter that began as a description of familial bonds has collapsed into its opposite, a description of a world where these bonds are m ocked and broken. Though Nastasia Filippovna enters the Epanchins' world al­ most parenthetically as a "difficult and troublesome event", her history crowds them out of what was presumably their own chapter. The narrator suddenly takes the reader back eighteen years to the painful details of her childhood. But his tone does not change; he relates Nastasia's history from the distorted, un­ compassionate point of view of the seducer Totsky; he appro­ priates Totsky's self-justifications. By the end of the chapter the narrator has quietly confronted the reader with a grotesque domestic situation in which the worthy General Epanchin would like to seduce the form er mistress of his daughter's pro­ posed fiancé. Having practically offered his own daughter up

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fo r sale, the general even plead s w ith N a sta sia F ilip p o vn a to help m ak e the p ro p o sed m a rriag e go sm o o th ly . "T h en G eneral E p an ch in b eg an to sp eak , in his role as a fa th e r, an d he sp ok e re a so n a b ly ; he av o id ed sen tim en tality ; he o n ly ack n o w led ged th at he fully recog n ized h er right to decid e A fa n a s y Iv an o v ich 's [T o ts k y 's] fate; he ad ro itly sh o w ed o ff his o w n h u m ility b y p re ­ senting it in su ch a w a y , th at the fate of his eldest d au g h ter, an d p erh ap s his

tw o

o th e r

d au gh ters,

now

depen ded

on

h er

decision" (VIII, 4 0 ; 6 6 -6 7 ). T h u s N astasia F ilip p o v n a s intru sion into a d escrip tion of d o m esticity p oin ts up the sim ilarities b e­ tw een the tw o p oles as m u ch as th eir differen ces. T h e girl p ro ­ tected in the b o s o m o f the fam ily is n o safer th an the o u tra g e d o rp h a n . L ater, w h en A g la y a tells M y sh k in to w rite in h e r al­ b u m , in G an y a's p resen ce, "I w o n 't be p a rt o f an y a u ctio n ," she rev eals h er o w n co n scio u sn ess o f this sim ilarity (VIII, 7 1 ; 1 0 4 ). T h e sam eness o f the n a rra to r's to n e th ro u g h o u t the ch a p te r ceases to b e stran g e w h en the re a d e r realizes th a t the intru d ing, u n m an ageab le w o rld of N astasia F ilip p o vn a m e re ly em bodies the p oten tials of the co n fin ed w o rld of d o m esticity in sta rk e r re ­ lief. T h e n o v el o f m an n ers trad itio n ally sou gh t to p o r tra y , b y im p lication , seriou s m o ra l question s w ith in the seclud ed , m icro co sm ic w o rld o f the d raw in g ro o m . H ere the re a l w o rld ca n n o lon g er be rep resen ted th ro u g h im p lication o r m icro co sm ic im ­ ages; it literally pushes its w a y into th e d raw in g ro o m , just as R og ozh in an d his cro w d w ith th eir m u d d y feet push th eir w a y into th e Ivolgins' h o u se, an d L eb ed ev en ters the E p an ch in h ou se th ro u g h the b a ck d o o r. T h e n a rra to r h as tak en the co n v en tio n s o f th e fo rm o f the n o v el of m an n ers an d stretch ed th em to th eir m o st e x cru cia tin g an d rid icu lou s lim its. T h e n a rra to r's ch o ice of a d etach ed v o ice , his p resen tatio n o f N astasia Filippovna's w re tch e d h isto ry fro m T o tsk y 's p oin t o f v ie w , an d his d escrip tion o f the E p an ch in d au gh ters' p red icam en t th ro u g h the eyes o f th eir fa th e r, h a v e all served to ren d er co m ic the situ ation at the beginning o f the n o v el. T h e read er's em o tio n s h a v e been k ep t su ccessfu lly a t b a y th ro u g h the n a rra to r's assu m p tio n o f a d e ta ch e d , am u sed to n e . T h e read er starts this n o v el, th en , cereb rally en gaged ; he h as been lured b y the n a rra to r's to n e in to accep tin g as co m ic ce rta in situ ation s in fictio n th a t w ou ld n o t m ak e h im sm ile in life. H e h as g iven in, if y o u w ill, to a w illing suspension o f co n scie n ce .

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Subsequent voices of the narrator will engage the readers emo­ tions and make him feel these same situations to be tragic. M y sh k in s a p p earan ce in the dining ro o m o n ce again brings the n a rra to r b a ck to the d ra m a tic m o d e, as it did in ch a p te r 2 w h en he en tered the g en erals w aitin g ro o m . T h e general's wife is initially w a r y of receiv in g the "p o o r idiot" and "beggar" during a fam ily lu n c h e o n .10 But she q u ick ly p erceives his fine sensibil­ ity , first co m ica lly , "P erh ap s the n ap k in is u n n e ce ssa ry . P rin ce, d o y o u h a v e a n ap k in tied a ro u n d y o u r n eck w hen y o u eat?" (VIII, 4 7 ; 74) an d then m o re serio u sly, "D on't m a k e fun, m y d ears, fo r h e, m a y b e , is m o re sh rew d th an the th ree of y o u to ­ g eth er. Y o u ll see" (V III, 6 6 ; 9 7 ). T h e n a rra to r does n o t au to m a tica lly use the sam e v o ice to describe ev e ry fam ily's d om estic life. His d escrip tion o f the Iv o lgin fam ily at the beginning of ch a p te r 8 co n tra sts sh arp ly w ith the d etach ed , slightly iron ic v o ice th a t p o rtra y e d the E p an ch in s; it d oes n o t d em an d textu al an alysis fo r the ton e is stra ig h tfo r­ w a rd an d seriou s. T h e re ad er will n o t seek d om estic co m e d y h ere. T h e Ivolgin fam ily's m isfortu nes exem p t them fro m the n a rra to r's b a rb s. N a sta sia Filip p ovn a d eserves the sam e e x ­ em p tio n , b u t in ch a p te r 4 she w as presen ted in directly an d im ­ p erso n ally to the read er as a "difficult an d tro u b leso m e event" th at h in d ered the actio n s of the general and T o ts k y . It w ou ld be fair to exp ect th a t w hen N astasia F ilip p ovn a a p p ears directly the n a rra to r will n o t use a co m ic v o ice to ch a ra cte riz e h er, an d that is just w h at h ap p en s.

So far the narrator has remained strictly outside of his hero's mind except as M yshkin himself chose to reveal it through con­ versations and anecdotes. At most the narrator observes that the prince "seemed confused" or "became moved as he spoke." The narrator's range of vision extends more freely into less im­ portant characters like the general, his hall porter, Ganya, Lizaveta Prokof'evna, and T otsky. He deliberately keeps the central characters a mystery to the reader for as long as possible. (In this respect, D ostoevsky is carrying out the precepts of the note­ books [II, 2 2 0 ]). The narrator's first brief glimpse into Myshkin's mind sets a pattern that recurs during the course of the novel. Entering the hero's mind merely to report on the confusion reigning there, he satisfies the reader's impatience to know what his hero is think­

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ing w ith o u t really telling him an y th in g . T h e E p an ch in w o m en send M ysh k in off to fetch N astasia Filippovna's p o rtra it: " 'O f co u rse , it w as w ro n g o f m e to h av e gon e on so [progovorilsia\ ab o u t the p o rtra it,' the p rin ce th o u gh t to him self; as he p assed into the stu d y he felt so m e p an gs of guilt. 'But . . . m a y b e I did w ell to h av e gon e o n ab o u t it.' " A s so o n as the n a rra to r h as en­ tered M yshkin's m in d, h o w e v e r, he q u ick ly w ith d raw s again to a m o re sp ecu lative v a n ta g e p o in t. "A stran g e, th o u gh still n o t quite clear idea w as beginning to flash in his m ind" (V III, 6 7 ; 9 8 ). T h e n a rra to r does n o t rev eal the id ea, but m erely tak es up this them e sev eral p ages la te r as M y sh k in is on his w a y b ack th ro u g h the p assag ew ay s to M a d a m Ep an ch in 's q u arters:

The prince walked while deep in thought; his errand struck him un­ pleasantly, and the thought of a note from Ganya to Aglaya struck him unpleasantly too. But he suddenly stopped two room s from the drawing room , as if he had remembered something; he looked around, went over to the window —nearer to the light, and began to look at the portrait of Nastasia Filippovna. It was as if he wanted to guess the meaning of something hidden in that face which had struck him earlier. This earlier impression had hardly left him, and now it was as if he hurried to verify it again. This face, unusual for its beauty and for something else as well, now struck him even more forcefully. It was as if an immense pride and contempt, almost hatred, were in this face, and at the same time something trust­ ing, something surprisingly ingenuous; upon looking at these features, it was as if these two contrasting elements awakened a kind of com ­ passion. This blinding beauty was even unbearable, the beauty of the pale face with its slightly sunken cheeks and burning eyes; it was a strange beauty! The prince gazed at it for a minute, then he suddenly remembered where he was, glanced around, hurriedly brought the portrait to his lips and kissed it. When, a minute later he entered the drawing room , his face was completely peaceful. (VIII, 68; 100)

The tentative quality of this passage is particularly striking. The narrator qualifies his entry into Myshkin's mind with repeated use of the phrase "it was as if," and M yshkin himself thinks in this hesitant fashion: "it was as if an immense pride and con­ tempt . . . were in this face . . . it was as if these two contrast­ ing elements awakened com passion." Neither narrator nor hero will commit himself to an unqualified statement of fact; nothing

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is even really n am ed . T he n a rra to r s freq u en t use o f th e w o rd "som eth ing" fu n ction s to lim it d isclosu re to the re a d e r and to en ­ tice the r e a d e rs in terest th ro u g h an air of m y ste ry , b u t it also re ­ flects the im p recision of M yshkin's o w n p e rce p tio n s. T h e n a r r a ­ t o r does n o t exp ress his th o u gh t fully; M y sh k in c a n n o t. T h e re a d e r ca n n o t tell if the n a rra to r is w ith h old in g in fo rm a tio n , if he him self is p uzzled, o r if he is m ak in g his o w n lan g u age m a tch M y sh k in 's.11 T h is excerp t differs fro m the p rev io u sly q u oted p assages in its use of w o rd rep etitio n s. In ad d ition to "as if" an d "som ething" th e n a rra to r rep eated ly describes the p rin ce as bein g',?stru clcr~by ideas; the w o rd s "face" and "b eau ty" re c u r o ften as w ell. T h e ef­ fect o f the rep etitio n s is to em p h asize the m ain units o f m ean in g in the p assag e. A t the sam e tim e, these p a rticu la r w o rd s exp ress the prince's extrem e v u ln erab ility to a n y stim uli a ro u n d h im . B efore the reverie^ on the w a y to the EpancK m s' d raw in g ro o m , the p rin ce h ad told , in rap id su ccession , several a n ecd o tes de­ p ictin g the co lossal effects u p on h im of an e x e cu tio n , the b ra y ­ ing o f a d o n k ey , a w aterfall, the sto ry of a m a n w h o th o u gh t he w as en during his last m o m en ts u p on the scaffo ld , a p ain ting he h ad seen in Basel, an d his acq u ain tan ce w ith the p e asan t M a rie . N o w the n a rra to r sh o w s him in the v e ry a c t of b ein g seized b y an im p ression , o f w h ich the w o rd rep etitio n s p oin t up the essen­ tial ingred ients. T h e o v erall ten tativ en ess of the p assage fits fo rm to co n te n t: an im p ression istic, u nqualifying d ictio n d e­ scrib es the m o m en t of p ercep tio n before a n y b n a ïy s is of it has o ccu rre d . A s the p rin ce reen ters the d raw in g ro o m , h av in g co m p o se d his featu res, th e re ad er finds him self in league w ith h im ; th ey sh are a secret. T h e n a rra to r h as n o t h ith erto linked us w ith an y c h a ra c te r; h ere, w e k n o w th at M y sh k in h as assu m ed a m ask . O th e rs m a y m isread his facial exp ressio n , but w e shall n o t .12 Iro n ically , M y sh k in , w h o se ca n d o r h as so fa r o v erw h elm ed the re a d e r an d the o th er c h a ra c te rs , b eco m es the first ch a ra c te r to p rev en t his face fro m m irro rin g his em o tio n s. O n ly tE T m fü riate d G a n y a im m ed iately attrib u tes to M y sh k in the ab ility to a s­ sum e a m ask (V III, 7 5 ; 1 0 9 ). L a te r A d elaid a refuses to d ra w a p o rtra it o f the "p o o r knight" b ecau se his face is hidden b ehind a v is o r (VIII, 2 0 5 -2 0 6 ; 2 6 7 ) . H er w o rd s describe b o th M ysh k in an d Pushkin's p o o r k n igh t.

106

Dostoevsky and The Idiot T h e n a rra to r's n ext m a jo r e n try into the prince's m in d co n ­

tinues his tech n iq u e of re p o rta g e w ith o u t d isclo su re. A s M y sh ­ kin m o u n ts the stairs to N astasia Filip p ovn a's, the n a r r a to r o b ­ serves th at the p rin ce him elf co u ld find n o reassu rin g an sw er to w h y he w as goin g to h er h ou se and w h a t h e inten d ed to do th ere. "Still a n o th e r insoluble q u estion p resen ted itself to h im , o ne of su ch cap ital im p o rta n ce , th at the p rin ce w as ev en afraid to thin k ab o u t it; he co u ld n o t; he d ared n o t ev en ad m it it; he didn't k n o w h o w to fo rm u late it; b e blushed an d trem b led at the m ere th o u gh t of it" (V III, 1 1 4 ; 1 5 5 -1 5 6 ). T h e n a rra to r assum es the sam e ton es as b efo re in describing M ysh k in 's th o u g h ts; he uses indefinite p ro n o u n s instead of n o u n s; he m ystifies instead of enlightening the rea d e r. But a definite p a tte rn o f n a rra tiv e m o d es has n o w em erg ed . T h e read er exp ects the n a rra to r to en ­ te r M ysh k in 's m in d w ith seem ing d irectn ess, b u t h e d oes n o t really exp ect to learn m u ch . T h e n ext p a ra g ra p h stren gth en s th e read er's e x p e cta tio n s ab o u t the n a rra to r's d escrip tive h ab its. H avin g shifted his gaze fro m M y sh k in to N astasia F ilip p o vn a, the n a rra to r again re so rts to d escribing h er th ro u g h the refracted im age of T o tsk y 's v iew ­ p o in t, an d th e n a rra tiv e m o d e is p red icta b ly d istan ced and iro n ic. H e ch ats ab o u t the failure of N asta sia Filippovna's "edu­ c a tio n ." "In fa c t, to give an exam p le, if N a sta sia F ilip p o vn a w ou ld h a v e sud d en ly d isp layed som e kind of sw eet an d g racefu l ig n o ran ce o f the fa c t, fo r exam p le, th at p easan t w o m e n co u ld n o t w e a r fine ca m b ric u n d erw ear as she did, then A fa n a s y Iv a n ­ o v ich , it seem s, w ou ld h av e been extre m e ly p leased b y this. O rig in ally the en tire ed u catio n o f N astasia F ilip p o vn a h a d been g eared to the attain m en t o f these results a cco rd in g to a p ro g ra m o f T o ts k y , w h o w as a v e ry d iscrim in atin g m a n in this d om ain ; b u t alas! T h e results tu rn ed o u t stran g ely " (VIII, 1 1 5 ; 1 5 6 ). T h e sy n ta x h as rev erted to the co m p lex p attern s o f earlier iro n ic p a s­ sages. T h e n a rra to r's o w n sa rca sm h as b een in fected b y T o tsk y 's p oin t of v iew , resulting in a m ixtu re ~of T o tsk y 's th o u g h ts and the n a rra to r's p artial u n d ercu ttin g o f th em . A t the sam e tim e, the im plied a u th o r is seducing us, the re a d e rs, if o n ly fo r a m o m en t, into sm iling in ap p ro p ria te ly , im d lîe lh e r ë b y lm p lic a tes us in T o tsk y 's c rim e.

The main plot lines develop outside the passages in which the narrator assumes his various voices; much of the plot un-

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folds in th e strictly d ra m a tic scen es. T h ere the n a rra to r tones d o w n his o w n rep erto ire of v o ices an d b e co m es a re p o rte r of di­ alogu e an d a ctio n w h o lim its him self, fo r the m o st p a rt, to brief d escrip tive sen ten ces. C u rio u sly , despite th e cen tral ro le the p rin ce h as p lay ed in telling sto ries, in tercep tin g G an y a's intended slap o f V a ry a , and o th erw ise allow ing him self, a n ew co m e r, to co m m e n t u p on and judge the a ctio n s of the o th e r c h a ra c te rs, he d oes n o t fo rm a lly en ter the p lo t until ch a p te r 1 4 , d uring N astasia's n a m e d a y p a rty . U ntil then all his acts h ad been eth ical, springing fro m in­ n er sp iritu al an d m o ral co n v ictio n s ra th e r th an fro m a genuine, in v o lu n ta ry in v o lv em en t th at w o u ld link his life w ith o th ers. T h e cru cial m o m en t o f ch an g e, the m o m e n t w h en the p rin ce en­ ters the fra y despite his rep eated a v o w a ls th a t he is outsid e the circle an d th at he ca n n o t m a rry an y o n e , o ccu rs u n h erald ed and alm o st in p assin g. F erd ysh ch en k o is the unlikely m essen ger of this ch an g e: "Ferdyshchenko, perhaps, will not take you, Nastasia Filippovna, I am a candid man . . . but on the other hand the prince will take you! Here you sit and complain, but have a look at the prince! I've been ob­ serving him for a long time now . . . " Nastasia Filippovna turned to the prince with curiosity. "Is it true?" she asked. "It is true," whispered the prince. (VIII, 138: 184) E v en t fo llow s ev en t; th e p rin ce rev eals the fa ct o f his large in­ h erita n ce . Q u ick ly , u n o b tru siv ely , som e o f the read er's fu n d a­ m en tal im p ression s o f the h ero top p le w h en the p rin ce en ters the a ctio n as a rich su ito r. T h e n a rra to r, w hile supplying an ab u n ­ d an ce of h istories an d exp lan atio n s, h as sav ed the m o st excitin g fa cts fo r rev elatio n th ro u g h a p u rely d ra m a tic m o d e . T h u s b y the end of P a rt I a definite p a tte rn o f n a rra tio n has em erg ed ; th e re a d e r h as b e co m e acq u ain ted w ith the n a rra to r's v o ices an d h as acq u ired g rou n d s fo r exp ectin g w h en a p a rticu la r v o ice will ap p e a r. T h e n a rra to r will d escribe T o tsk y an d the g eneral in an iron ic m o d e, relyin g h eav ily u p o n p ublic opinions and ru m o rs. H e will use a sim ilar v o ice fo r the rest o f the E p an ch in fam ily , b u t th ere, in ad d ition , he has an eye fo r the details o f d o m estic life and m an n ers. T h o u g h entering the prince's m ind

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rarely, when he does so, the narrator bewilders the reader; he refrains from an ironic, distanced presentation of the hero. All this seems fitting and proper, and the readers trust in the narra­ tor's judgment, taste, and tact has been established. The narra­ tor's slight lapses of logic and taste have caused no serious offence. At the same time the reader knows the narrator is man­ ipulating him and sometimes withholding inform ation. How­ ever, the dramatic scenes counterbalance the effect of the nar­ rator's m ystifications. The narrator has successfully maintained the reader's bewilderment and curiosity about the plot and the characters, yet he has also endowed the reader with a sense of his own acuity by sharing ironies and witticisms with him. In Part II these narrative patterns become even more pro­ nounced. Here the narrator also reveals a new voice, a mode reminiscent of the Gothic novel. Although it was Leonid Grossman who first pointed out Dostoevsky's debt to the Gothic novel, he and others have rather stressed Dostoevsky's artistic debt to writers such as Sue, Soulié, Hugo, Dumas, George Sand, Poe, Hoffman, Balzac, Scott, and D ickens.13 But these writers themselves drew on the tradition of the Gothic novel as it developed in the works of Horace W alpole, Ann Radcliffe, M atthew Lewis, and Charles M aturin, and so did Dostoevsky; the themes and techniques explored by the Gothic novelists find a direct echo in his w o rk .14 But Dostoevsky raises the themes and techniques of the Gothic novelists to new heights, for he forges a metaphysical system out of a language which, in the hands of lesser novelists, remains merely a style, an effective fic­ tional point of view. The language of the Gothic novel and its themes offered Dostoevsky a powerful rhetoric for describing modern man's predicament. As a child and young reader Dostoevsky himself delighted in the "tales of terror." In 1863, on the first page of his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, D ostoevsky recalled his early love for the fiction of Ann Radcliffe, "when, during the long winter evenings, before I could read, I would listen, agape and rooted to the spot with delight and terror, as my parents read, at bedtime, the novels of Radcliffe; I would then rave deliri­ ously about them in m y sleep" (V, 4 6 ).15 Dostoevsky had ex­ pressed his earliest response to the Gothic novel in terms of the

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sublime —a mixture of terror and delight. Nevertheless, Dos­ toevsky's explicit references to Radcliffe in his fiction are slight and always ironic. (Ill [1972], 134; XV [1976], 158). But even though D ostoevsky had no real use for debauched m onks, mys­ terious castles, and the rest of the paraphernalia of the Gothic novel, he learned much from the "fantastic romanticism" of this genre. By linking some of Dostoevsky's techniques and themes directly back to this older genre of the Gothic novel rather than to the intervening traditions of the rom an-feuilleton, the histori­ cal rom ance, and the novels of rom antic realism, we can gain a m ore thorough understanding of Dostoevsky's narrative tech­ nique. In "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of O ur Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757) Edmund Burke wrote, "W hat­ ever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to ter­ ror, is a source of the sublime." Burke rigorously separated the beautiful from the sublime. One fills us with pleasure, the other with delight; the beautiful induces "in us a sense of affection and tenderness," but the sublime "is productive of the strongest emo­ tion which the mind is capable of feeling."16

The Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nine­ teenth century, though profoundly influenced by Burke's under­ standing of the terrible as a necessary part of the sublime, were not interested in reproducing Burke's entire aesthetic system: they did not attempt to separate the beautiful from the sublime.17 In­ stead, they described a world in which the beautiful and the sub­ lime were tightly entangled. "The discovery of Horror as a source of delight reacted in men's actual conception of Beauty itself: the Horrid, from being a category of the Beautiful became eventually one of its essential elements, and the 'beautifully horrid' passed by insensible degrees into the 'horribly beautiful.' "18 In his fiction Dostoevsky partakes of the "new sensibility" inherent in this Gothic tradition: his themes, plots, and characters all embody the heady mixture of the awful and the beautiful. As one might expect, in the Gothic novel descriptions of beauty and horror often coalesce in the same image: "By the side of three putrid half-corrupted bodies lay the sleeping beauty . . . She seemed to smile at the images of death around her."19

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O r "so he lay . . . in a kind of corpse-like beauty . . . A St. Bartholomew flayed, with his skin hanging about him in a graceful drapery—a St. Laurence, broiled on a gridiron, and ex­ hibiting his finely formed anatomy on its bars . . . even these were inferior to the form half-veiled half-disclosed by the moon­ light as it lay."20 The final description of Nastasia Filippovna at the end of The Idiot invokes, though to a lesser degree, the same responses from the reader. The sight of Nastasia's white foot protruding from the cover, the buzzing fly, and the moonlight emphasize both her deadness and her loveliness; they merge into one image. As Dostoevsky may have learned from the Gothic novelists, the death of a beautiful woman offered a powerful way of holding the reader's attention: the "death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably," as Poe observed, "the most poetic topic in the world."21 The Gothic novelists portrayed beauty surrounded by and merged with horror, while Dostoevsky has taken these same in­ gredients and given them a moral cast: he creates a "mysterious" religious sublimity out of the mixture of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly. Like Burke, Dostoevsky goes beyond the familiar notion of beauty as harmony to acknowledge the exis­ tence of another kind of beauty composed out of inherently contradictory elements. Indeed, in The Brothers K aram azov, Mitya's vocabulary for describing beauty precisely matches Burke's words for describing the sublime: "terrible," "awful," "indefinable," "mysterious" (XIV, 100). Like the Gothic novelists he makes almost a routine use of passionate highly-colored lan­ guage abounding in such phrases and words as "I can't bear it," "heart may be on fire," "secret," "the devil is fighting." Yet he has taken Burke's aesthetic observation and the vocabulary of the Gothic novelists one step further: the result is an extreme Manichean vision of man in whom acute, contradictory perceptions of the beautiful and the terrible battle with each other. If the mixture of good and evil, of ugliness and beauty is an axiom in the gèometry of the Gothic novel, then Dostoevsky expressed the baffling riddle of such a mixture but has also offered a moral and religious solution to it.22 Throughout his work Dostoevsky raised to a metaphysical level the Gothic tendency to mix the beautiful with the terrible. For the Gothic novelists it was sufficient to portray the paradox

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of this mixture, but Dostoevsky sought a resolution of the para­ dox. In The Id iot, for example, Myshkins doctrine of "double thoughts," a central theme of the novel, expresses man's capa­ city for simultaneous impulses of good and evil, for strivings toward beauty and toward corruption. Though he is plagued by his own "double thoughts," Myshkin urges acceptance of them in himself and in others; he urges that goodness be recognized even when it is surrounded by evil.23 The rise of the Gothic novel or tale of terror also paralled I the new value placed on sensibility —the capacity for refined 1 emotion, the readiness to feel compassion for suffering and to i be moved by the pathetic in literature, art, and life. The hero­ ines of these novels, who often grew up in solitude, had an un­ healthy predilection for things supernatural and sublime.24 Prince Myshkin shares this usually feminine tradition.25 He too, like many Gothic heroines, grows up in isolation, and his per­ sonality has been shaped by his sensibility, by his immense cap­ acity to respond to art and to life. Dostoevsky planned a similar childhood for the hero of his unfinished novel, The Life o f a G reat Sinner (P , II, 244-245, 258). Gothic heroes and heroines frequently reacted violently to portraits; this response was more than a stock device, for it could shape vast sections of the plot. Portraits could even come to life, erasing the boundaries between art and the real world. In The Castle o f O tranto (1765) a portrait quits its panel to pro­ claim a dreadful prophecy. In M elm oth the W anderer, M elmoth's portrait rivets John's attention: "There was nothing remarkable in the costume, or in the countenance, but the eyes . . . Had he been acquainted with the poetry of Southey, he might often have claimed in his after-life, 'Only the eyes had life ,—They gleamed with demon light.' " John gazes upon it with 'stupid horror" and finally" . . . as he turned away, he thought he saw the eyes of the portrait . . . m ov e . . ,"26 Veiled portraits and miniatures move along the plot of The M ysteries o f U dolpho, and Am brosio's fall from goodness in The M on k is precipitated by his response to a portrait of the M adonna that fills him with lust. Myshkin's reactions to the photograph of Nastasia Filippovna and to the Holbein painting of Christ after death help shape the plot structure of The Idiot.

All Gothic novels contain, as a main theme, the depiction of

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a hopeless anxiety with no possibility of escape.27 This anxiety is expressed by a breaking down of categories. Movement tends toward a union of opposites probably distantly related to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century love of the oxymoron. The pages of these novels are filled with hero-villains, corrupted beauties, the intertwining of the natural and the supernatural, the tragic and the comic, and the breaking of taboos —incest, cannibalism, unnatural marriages. The attempt to force unsuit­ able unions between characters results in much of the action. The Gothic novels, which often railed against the practices of the Catholic church during the Inquisition and against the Jesuits in general, called for a return to a more primitive, natural Christianity. Notions of an ideal education also figure in most of these novels, either through the portrayal of a character whose education misled him or through the development of one whose natural sensibility ultimately saved him.28 Dostoevsky makes use of all these themes in his fiction. For example, Valkovsky, Svidrigaylov, Rogozhin, and Stravrogin are hero-villains; Nastasia Filippovna and Grushenka are cor­ rupted beauties. The intertwining of the natural and the super­ natural occurs in such works as "The Landlady," "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," "Bobok," and The Brothers K aram azov. The mixture of tragedy and comedy, so prevalent in the Gothic novel, pervades all of Dostoevsky's fiction; attempts to force unnatural marriages and the breaking of taboos through rela­ tionships tinged with overtones of incest both occur frequently in Dostoevsky's works —witness the relationships between Netochka Nezvanova and her stepfather (in N etoch ka N ezvanova), Varvara and Bykov (in P o o r Folk), Dunya and Svidrigaylov (in Crime and Punishm ent), Nastasia and Totsky (in The Idiot), Maria Lebyadkin and Stavrogin (in The Possessed), or Grush­ enka and Samsonov or Fyodor Karamazov (in The Brothers K aram azov), to name only a few. The Gothic novelists consciously rejected the neoclassical literature of the eighteenth century and turned back to Shake­ speare; they admired the mixture of tragedy and comedy found in the Elizabethan drama in which events appeared differently to princes and to common people. An essential structural prin­ ciple of Dostoevsky's novels also involves contrasts of the ways in which different kinds of characters respond to the same

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event. Many of his famous "scandal scenes" consist largely of a catalogue of the reactions of various characters to a recent event. The Gothic novel could have been a model for such scenes, although of course Dostoevsky used Shakespeare and numerous other sources directly. Lewis's The M on k and Maturin's M elm oth the W anderer also contain remarkable contrasts of tragedy and comedy, of a style of heightened terror combined with extreme, even vulgar comic realism. The stereotype of the Gothic novel as only a re­ pository of underground labyrinths and craggy castles is under­ mined for anyone who actually reads either Lewis or Maturin.29 Instead, the reader finds in these works a description of a world in which the real and the supernatural exist together in a state of precarious balance. One would not readily identify the follow­ ing passages as coming from a Gothic novel, yet they are typical of this form after the early experiments by Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. "For my part, I never saw her [Elvira] do amiss, ex­ cept on the Friday before her death. To be sure, I was then much scandalized by seeing her eat the wing of a chicken."30 "His con­ science, like a state coach horse, had hitherto only been brought out on solemn and pompous occasions, and then paced heavily along a smooth and well-prepared course, under the gorgeous trappings of ceremony; —now it resembled the same animal suddenly bestrid by a fierce and vigorous rider, and urged by a lash and spur along a new and rugged road."31 Earthy comedy and wit often occur side by side with mysterious horrors. Dostoevsky's borrowings from the Gothic novel partook of this comic and realistic aspect as well as of its supernatural and terrifying side. Indeed it is precisely the mixture of the two that is significant, and that is what Dostoevsky transferred intact to the world of his novels. The ironic mode of the narrator in Part I of The Idiot, such as the voice that describes General Epanchin and Totsky, shares the tones —slightly garrulous, slightly ironic —often found in the Gothic novel. Of course the works of other writers, such as Gogol or Dickens, could have provided Dostoevsky with a similar model for this mixture of comedy and realism with the supernatural and the terrifying, but the in­ fluence of Gothic novel must be considered along with these other, more thoroughly examined sources.32 The Gothic novels also consciously hark back to Milton as

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much as to Shakespeare. The "sublime" Satan of Paradise Lost be­ comes the prototype of the hero-villains M ontoni, Melmoth, Ambrosio, and even of the Frankenstein monster. The dying Melmoth likens himself to Satan, "Mine was the great angelic sin —pride and intellectual glorying! It was the first mortal sin —a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge." The Franken­ stein monster exclaims, "Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; mis­ ery made me a fiend. M ake me happy and I shall again be virtu­ ous".33 These Satanic (Faustian) images find an echo in many of Dostoevsky's hero-villains, such as Ivan or Stavrogin. Ironically, even Myshkin stems partly from this tradition. He too, like Satan or the Frankenstein monster, feels an overwhelming sense of ex­ clusion from the beauty of the universe. But his feelings about this exclusion are decidedly ambivalent; like Satan he would like to participate in the beautiful festival of the universe; like Christ in the garden at Gethsemane he would withdraw if possible from its painful chaos (VIII, 256; 326). Mario Praz links the Miltonic hero-villain with another type found in the Gothic novel, the fatal hero. "What M anfred said of Astarte (1 loved her and destroy'd her') . . . was to become the motto of the 'fatal' heroes of Romantic literature."34 This could be Rogozhin's (or Valkovsky's, or Stavrogin's) m otto as well. Melmoth, who qualifies as both hero-villain and fatal hero (types that usually coalesce), remotely foreshadows Rogozhin: inter­ rupting a wedding feast, the terrible effect of his stare ultimately causes the death of the bride and the insanity of the groom. This complex of ideas reverberates through The Idiot : Rogozhin's stare persistently haunts Myshkin and his presence on the wedding day of Myshkin and Nastasia Filippovna results in the "bride's" death and the "groom's" madness. Persecuted maidens and fatal women also inhabit the Gothic novel; Praz links Nastasia Filippovna directly to the fatal type, "It is a type . . . which . . . ends by modelling itself on the women of Dostoevsky, among whom Nastasia Filippovna is the most characteristic example,"35 In fact several female Gothic types con­ verge in Nastasia Filippovna, who is at once the fatal woman and the persecuted maiden as well as a representative image of beauty mixed with horror, or of corrupted beauty. (Myshkin seeks to save her from becoming permanently embodied in any one of these categories.) Finally she has what Praz calls the fascination

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of a beautiful woman already dead. He associates this fascina­ tion with the influence of the vampire legend, a theme occa­ sionally present in the Gothic novel.36 The recurring intimations in The Idiot of the possibility that Rogozhin will slit Nastasia's throat join him remotely to the vampire legend. Nastasia's beautiful, pale corpse, disfigured only by a small wound, stretched out on a bed amidst her discarded finery, suggests the body o f the maiden ravished by the vam pire.37 Accom panying the G othic themes of the M yshkin-Rogozhin-Nastasia Filippovna plot, the narrator's voice too at times takes on the tones of a G othic novel. The narrator announces the Gothic mode, which will be a constant leitm otif throughout the novel, especially for portraying or heralding Rogozhin, in an almost musical way. Part II had opened with the narator's familiar ironic, de­ tached voice, a voice that repeatedly reminded the reader that he was reading a story. Predictably, the narrative centered around the Epanchin fam ily. The second chapter of Part II be­ gins in a tone of straightforwardly descriptive narration: the subject —again predictably —is the prince. He has arrived on the Petersburg scene once again, this time from the opposite direc­ tio n —from the heart of Russia. Suddenly a new narrative mode, the G othic voice, wafts in and then quickly subsides for several chapters. "No one met him at the station; but as he left the carriage suddenly it seemed to the prince that he felt a strange, burning glance from a pair of eyes in the crowd, which had gathered to meet the train. He looked around more atten­ tively, but he already could not make out anything m ore. O f course, it had only seemed that way; but an unpleasant impres­ sion remained. And even without that the prince was melan­ choly and pensive and seemed worried about something" (VIII, 158; 210). The narrative ingredients are reassuringly familiar to the reader, who finds that the narrator has entered M yshkin without really explaining his thoughts and observes that the prince, as before, is susceptible to "impressions." But a new, slightly fantastic element has crept into the narrator's tone. He does not undercut Myshkin's sense of premonition and forebod­ ing, nor does he relieve us with an explanation of what M yshkin is really sensing. This tone (almost a melodic prefiguring of a fragment to be later expanded) quickly dissipates, however, and the narrator reverts to his form er voices.

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The most extended passage in the Gothic mode that offers no moments of com ic realism occurs in chapter 5 of Part II. The narrative resembles the stereotyped half of the Gothic tradition, for the whole chapter, save the last two paragraphs, is like the tale of terror in its heightened mood and in the extreme use of the technique of arbitrary disclosure by the narrator. Fears merely intimated provoke a greater effect than ones that are fully described. Here M yshkin, having left Rogozhin's house, wanders in a state of feverish reverie through St. Petersburg. "Solitude soon became unbearable to him; a new impulse seized his heart feverishly, and for a moment the darkness, in which his soul was languishing, was lit up by a bright light. He took a ticket for Pavlovsk . . . but, now something was pursuing him, and it was something real, and not a fantasy, as, perhaps, he was inclined to think . . . Some time later . . . it was as if he suddenly remembered something, as if he had seized hold of something very strange, something that had already troubled him a long time . . . Then he would forget it . . . then suddenly again he would look around" (VIII, 186-187; 243-244). He finds the shop window with the sixty-kopek article in the window (Rogozhin's knife—not named here) and remembers the sensa­ tion of Rogozhin's eyes being fixed upon him. In what is now a fam iliar pattern, he tries to force this thought out of his mind; he thinks of the moment before an epiletic fit. "He thought of this, sitting on a bench, under a tree, in the Summer Garden . . . It was stifling, as if the weather were presaging thunderstorms . . . There was a certain appeal for him in his present contemplative state . . . he wanted at all costs to forget something, something real and pressing, but from his first glance around him he again immediately recognized his gloomy thought, the thought, from which he so wanted to escape . . . he gazed at the sky . . . Perhaps his epiletic condi­ tion was becoming more and more acute. The thunderstorm . . . was really advancing, although slowly. Distant thunder had begun already. It had becom e very stifling" (VIII, 189; 246-247). Having called at Nastasia Filippovna's in vain, he con­ tinues his reverie under the spell of Rogozhin's eyes: "A strange and terrible demon had finally attached itself to him and would no longer let him go. This demon had whispered to him in the Summer Garden" (VIII, 193; 251). At last, he sees Rogozhin on

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the other side of the street standing before him like an accuser and a judge. It appears that Rogozhin had hardly bothered to conceal himself. That simple disclosure of reality by the nar­ rator, after having been for so long in M yshkins mind, pro­ duces a more nightmarish effect than did the hero's shadowy inklings and forebodings. As M yshkin enters the gate of the hotel the storm finally breaks and he again catches sight of Rogozhin: " 'Now everything will be decided!' he thought to himself with a strange conviction . . . Those two eyes, those very ones, suddenly met his stare" (VIII, 194-195; 253-254). A typical narrator in a Gothic novel seeks to interest the reader by any means whatsoever, whether by making things look mysterious or by describing events in ghastly detail. In this chapter the narrator seeks to create an air of overbearing, allencompassing mystery in order to heighten Myshkin's premoni­ tions while clouding his rational faculties. The language is deliberately mysterious. The narrator has stretched his usual mode of describing M yshkin to its extreme. Previously he used the word "something" to describe Myshkin's imprecise thoughts; now he adds an aura of external mystery to his use of indefinite nouns. "Something" pursues M yshkin; a "demon" has attached itself to him. Myshkin's forebodings, in Gothic fashion, inexor­ ably come to pass, for the scene climaxes with Rogozhin's at­ tempted murder and with Myshkin's epileptic fit. The narrator vacillates between fantasy and reality, although, like Ann Radcliffe's narrator, at the end he offers a rational explanation for events. The reader finds himself in a world far removed from the easy ironies of the Epanchin household. A nother cliché of the Gothic novel is to link a character's mood to the current state of the natural world. Myshkin's sense of foreboding and his oncoming fit parallel the approach and breaking of a thunderstorm. Both the stifling weather and his own troubled, overwrought mental condition have a strange appeal to the prince. In The Mysteries o f Udolpho, Emily's reveries are enhanced by the weather: "Her m elancholy was assisted by the hollow sighings of the wind along the corridor and round the castle. [The gloomy skies] assisted the musings of her mind." A m brosio, in The M onk, finds that "The disorder of his imagination was increased by the wildness of the surround­ ing scenery." (Later in The Idiot M yshkin remembers the effect

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upon him of a similarly Gothic landscape in the Swiss A lps.) The narrator of Frankenstein muses, "These sublime and mag­ nificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation I was cap­ able of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it." The narrator of Melmoth heralds the approach of his demonic hero, "Nature, with every voice she could inspire from earth, or air, or water announced danger to her children. That was the moment the stranger chose to approach Immalee."38 A ll these passages share a concern with nature in its sublime, grandiose and most compelling m anifestations — m ountains, storms, winds, raging waterfalls. In the passage cited from The Idiot a similar, though urban, landscape pre­ vails. The corridors of the hotel become like the gloom y pas­ sages in a G othic castle.39 A primary concern of any narrator is to balance his tech­ nique of bewildering the reader with his use of dramatic irony. The reader's bewilderment spurs his interest in what he's read­ ing, but if it becomes excessive the reader will lose interest alto­ gether. Similarly, dramatic irony contributes to the appeal of a narrative because the reader finds pleasure in sharing a know­ ledge with the author or narrator which the character does not have.40 "As in most novels," writes Booth, "whatever steps are taken to m ystify inevitably decrease the dramatic irony, and, whenever dramatic irony is increased by telling the reader se­ crets the characters have not yet suspected, mystery is inevit­ ably destroyed . . . The author must, then, choose whether to purchase mystery at the expense of irony."41 In 1800, the M ar­ quis de Sade had already perceived this problem in almost the same way: M oreover, he related it to the narrative mode of the G othic novel in particular. Although he does not specifically formulate a notion of dramatic irony, he writes of the "incon­ veniences" caused by the style of writing used by Radcliffe and Lewis, "it was necessary to call upon hell for aid in order to arouse interest . . . But this way of writing presented so many inconveniences! The author of The M onk failed to avoid them no less than did M rs. Radcliffe; either of these two alternatives was unavoidable; either to explain away all the magic elements, and from then on to be interesting no longer, or never to raise the curtain, and there you are in the most horrible unreality."42

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A narrator's assumption of a mysterious voice and an arbi­ trary logic to govern what he will reveal and what he will keep secret produce the intended effect upon the reader's interest only if they are used with m oderation. The narrator of The Idiot ends the scene of the attempted murder and the epileptic fit with a sudden return to the real world when a hotel employee identifies M yshkin as a recently arrived guest, and "the confusion was fin­ ally ended very happily, thanks to a fortunate circumstance" (VIII, 196; 255). The narrator draws the reader out of the fan­ tastic world he has just been inhabiting by concentrating on Myshkin's epileptic fit rather than upon the fact that Rogozhin has just attempted murder. He dismisses Rogozhin with the con­ jecture that he had run off, overcom e by horror at the awful sight of the convulsed, screaming M yshkin. The shadowy corri­ dor is brought back to the real world as the narrator gives it concrete form : Myshkin had fallen down fifteen steps; five min­ utes later a crowd had gathered; Kolya emerges from the hotel restaurant where he had been drinking tea and listening to the organ; a doctor arrives; and the Gothic mood has vanished.43 It is commonplace for critics of the Gothic novel to make a distinction between the novel of "terror," as practiced by Radcliffe, and the novel of "horror," as practiced by Lewis and M aturin. Radcliffe herself initiated this classification scheme when she wrote, "Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and wakens the faculties to a high degree of life, the other freezes, and nearly annihilates them . . . neither Shakespeare nor M ilton by their fictions, nor M r. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one."44 Nevertheless, Burke too had been careful to point out that the danger or pain present in the em otion of the sublime must be a safe distance. "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight . . . but at certain dis­ tances, and with certain m odifications . . . they are de­ lightful."45 However much Dostoevsky assimilated elements of the horror novels of Lewis and M aturin, he seemed, throughout his career, to share Radcliffe's sense that the most sublime, the most moving effect is that which "expands the soul"; this atti­ tude accounts, I think, for the sudden deflation that occurs at the end o f some of his most terrifying scenes.

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In the Gothic novel the narrator's habit of capricious dis­ closure often mirrors the notion of an unjust fate. The reader of a G othic novel is at the mercy of the narrator's whims just as the character is at the mercy of fate. At moments of terror or excite­ ment the narrative often breaks off at crucial junctures; rela­ tions between characters frequently are not clarified until the end. Though these devices serve stylistically to interest or mys­ tify the reader, they also have a thematic function: they reflect an overall concept of the universe in which man must function on faith without having any real answers. Neither we, nor the characters in The Castle o f Otranto, The Mysteries o f Udolpho, The M onk , or Melmoth the Wanderer , or for that m atter in The Idiot and in all of Dostoevsky's work, ever learn why the inno­ cent must suffer for the deeds of the guilty. In the Gothic novels this mystery was ultimately cause for despair, whereas D ostoev­ sky transformed it into the bedrock of faith. I have commented at length upon the Gothic novel and its influence upon Dostoevsky and his narrative methods because an assessment of this influence has been largely neglected by those who have undertaken lengthy studies of the literary influ­ ences on Dostoevsky, except for Leonid Grossman and George Steiner.46 Grossman has properly emphasized that the Gothic genre, following the example of Cervantes, brought numerous untraditional modes of narration into the novel. An abundance of episodes was basic to the Gothic novel and to the novelistic genres it helped shape —the roman feuilleton, the historical novel, the adventure novel, and the novel of rom antic realism .47 The G othic novels also made heavy use of interpolated tales. Dostoevsky's debt to all these ways of broadening the narrative scope of the novel is obvious. In Russia the books of Radcliffe and Maturin enjoyed aston­ ishing popularity from the early nineteenth century on. Radcliffe's popularity caused the Russian translation of The M onk to be attributed to her. Sopikov, a dedicated librarian of the period, noted: "It is well-known that Lewis is the author of this book, but to make it sell better the Russian publisher printed it under the name Radcliffe."48 For the same reason De Quincey's Confessions o f an English Opium Eater came out under Maturin's nam e.49 Dostoevsky read all these novels, and he knew the works

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works of de Sade as well.50 Grossman stresses the special in­ fluence of Ann Radcliffe and Maturin upon Dostoevsky, who read their novels as a child, "and no matter how he related to these primitive depictions of horror subsequently, Ann Radcliffe and Maturin played their role in the development of his artistic taste."51 He finds that Dostoevsky borrowed from the Gothic novel both typical characters and plots, laden with catastrophes, coincidences, and overheard conversations, "It would seem that there is not a single feature of the old adventure novel which Dostoevsky did not use."52 Steiner discovers a special link be­ tween the Gothic novel and The Idiot : "Dostoevskyan realism —to use a phrase which he used himself in the drafts for the The Idiot —was 'tragicofantastic.' It sought to give a total and true picture by concentrating the nascent elements of the Russian crisis into moments of drama and extreme revelation. The tech­ niques through which Dostoevsky achieved this concentration were translated, in significant measure, from a rather shopworn and hysterical literary tradition [the Gothic novel]."53 Unfortunately both Grossman and Steiner have felt the need to apologize for Dostoevsky's reliance on the structures, ideas, and techniques of the Gothic novel. Steiner does admit that perhaps we and not Dostoevsky are the ones lacking in sensibil­ ity. "We have altogether lost the feel for a criterion of values by which Balzac, seeking to distinguish with high praise an episode in The Charterhouse o f Parma compared Stendhal's achieve­ ment to that of M on k ' Lewis and to the last volumes of Ann Radcliffe."54 But Steiner's admission seems to have been made with m ore pride than regret. Grossman rather ruefully asks, "How did it happen that the lowest genre of literary art turned out to be the most convenient expression for the creative ideas of an artistic philosopher who was a genius?"55 Similarly, Steiner excuses D ostoevsky by commenting that he was w ork­ ing in the mainstream of contemporary practice and by making the analogy that "There was a 'King Leir' before Shakespeare."56 But the G othic novel should not be dismissed as an amusing, if embarrassing parenthesis in the history of literature. It contains as many germs of the great nineteenth-century novel as do the unequivocally accepted works of Richardson, Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, and Sterne.

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Grossman emphasizes the "romantic principle of free novelistic form" in Dostoevsky's novels. In his view concern for maintaining the reader's interest was the prime cause for Dostoevsky's repudiating his earlier theory of prose in which form had been the most important attribute.57 He finds "the idea" to be at the center of all Dostoevsky's novels: "Having set up this philosophical core, Dostoevsky unleashed a whole whirlwind of events around the abstract concept which in­ terested him, not disdaining any of the devices of the cheap novel to maintain interest."58 But this form ulation of D ostoev­ sky's free use of devices ignores the rigorous attention to form we have seen so far in the narrative voices of The Idiot. True, a variety of voices narrates the novel, but instead of a whirlwind a definite order prevails. The narrator uses certain voices for certain subjects; the purely Gothic mode is merely a form that mirrors a content. Dostoevsky has sharpened rather than destroyed his youthfully exuberant formal considerations. The G othic novelists, whether they were depicting the quest for the numinous, the presence of all-pervading evil, an at­ mosphere fraught with appalling tension, or a virtuous maiden in distress, never lost sight o f the specific response they were trying to provoke in their readers. The G othic novel m ay be the "leaf mould" in which "more exquisite and stronger plants were rooted," or it may have provided "Romanticism with its first full set of swaddling clothes," but its authors were undisputed masters at holding their readers' attention.59 Coleridge wrote in his review of The Mysteries o f Udolpho that "curiosity is a kind of appetite, and hurries headlong on, impatient for its complete gratification." Scott observed, in his review of the same novel, that "it is not until the last page is read . . . that we feel ourselves disposed to censure that which has so keenly in­ terested us."60 Dostoevsky first enjoyed these literary devices as an avid reader; he later transferred the "electric" power they could generate into his own fiction. Having finished the first two parts of The Idiot , the reader has acquired a basic trust in the narrator's tact and in his ability to report the action of the novel. The varied modes of the nar­ rator have matched the depiction of appropriate subjects. At the same time, the reader senses that the narrator's voice does not

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coincide completely with that of the implied author; the nar­ rato rs powers of reasoning sometimes seem deficient. The clouds of rumors out of which he occasionally generates his nar­ rative do not always create the impression of an ironic, de­ tached narrator, but rather at times reduce him to the status of a town gossip. His tendency to beg off providing inform ation is often annoying because it is so obviously arbitrary. For exam­ ple, when Aglaya discovers that she has put Myshkin's note into Don Quixote, she bursts out laughing "for reasons unknown. N or is it known whether she showed her acquisition to either of her sisters. But as she read over the letter she had a thought" (VIII, 157-158; 209). The narrator does not report this thought. W hen the narration was purely dramatic or intentionally G othic, such m ystification was acceptable, but here it seems out of place. The instantaneous changes in point of view may have becom e slightly irritating to the reader by now; the narrator may not be unreliable, but he is blatantly, shamelessly manipulative. Sometimes in his role o f observer the narrator finds it dif­ ficult even to see properly: "Aglaya was finished, and it was dif­ ficult to tell by looking at her whether she was serious or laughing" (VIII, 207; 269). He will simply not report some things the reader wants to know: when the Epanchins first visit the convalescing prince at Pavlovsk, the narrator, seemingly ready to relate all the particulars of this dramatic scene, fails to tell us how M yshkin and Aglaya met each other again after their sixmonth separation and the prince's note to her. This coyness, so typical of Gogol's narrators and perfectly acceptable when the narrator had deliberately chosen to be w itty or ironic, under­ cuts the voice of supposedly reliable reportage. But the reader can forgive these failings because he has, at the same time, a growing sense of the narrator himself as a character in the novel. He is a chronicler who does not participate in the action, but who, nevertheless, has his own opinions. These opinions surface most clearly in the narrator's digressions, which give the reader a moment's glimpse of the narrator as another character in the novel. In the first chapter the digression about the "all-knowing gentlemen" showed that the narrator liked to typify what he saw, to put things in their place by giving them a name. After

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Myshkin's fit the narrator allowed himself another brief digres­ sion for the same purpose: fitting the raw data of experience into a mold created a reassuring, if illusory, sense of order. At least the terrible event we have just witnessed has conformed to a norm, even if a frightful one. "It is well known that epilepsy, especially the fits themselves, come on instantaneously. A t this moment the face becomes incredibly distored . . . A terrible, incredible scream, unlike anything imaginable, breaks forth from one's chest; and with this cry all resemblance to a human being seems suddenly to disappear . . . It is actually as if some­ one else was screaming inside the person. At least this is how many people have described their impression" (VIII, 195; 254). The vocabulary here resembles the mode of Gothic heightened terror —"incredibly distorted," "terrible, incredible scream ," "all resemblance to a human being seems suddenly to disappear." But because the narrator means to be clinical, the ef­ fect on the reader is completely the opposite. It returns him to everyday reality; descriptions of things terrible and unhuman serve to com fort and reassure. This digression serves as a transi­ tion passage from one mode to another: the language of the Gothic mode is transformed by the fam iliar tone of the chatty narrator. M oreover, the digression has revealed some aspects of the narrator's personality: he is a collector of the responses of other people, as an amateur sociologist or psychologist. He finds safety in what "is well known" and in numbers; the terror inspired by Myshkin's fit disappears when it becomes a phenomenon many others have described. Nor does he hesitate to allow his political feelings to show through the narrative. In his digression about the "all-knowing gentlemen" he had mocked politicians and journalists who made a career out of gossip, but his scorn for the "nihilist" crowd that enters the prince's veranda in Pavlovsk contains no trace of humor. In fact his dislike of them is partly caused by their own lack of self-irony, as he says in describing Burdovsky. "Not a trace of irony or introspection showed in his face; on the con­ trary, it expressed an absolutely blank enchantment with what he took for his rights, and at the same time some sort of craving to feel constantly insulted . . . the others acted stiffly as they entered, and seemed almost embarrassed; they looked as impor­ tant as they could, however, and were plainly in fear of losing

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their dignity somehow, a concern quite at odds with their reputation for denying useless social observances, prejudices, and almost everything in the world except their own interests" (VIII, 215; 278). The reader, in this case, agrees with narrator's assessment of the group, although later on he will feel a measure of sympathy for some of its members.

The narrator with his various voices vacillates between two roles, both of which emphasize his own dissociation from the action. Often he resembles a journalist or reporter concerned with citing all possible facts and circumstances; he favors words like "accurate" and "detail." At other times, he assumes the role of novelist; he frequently makes reference to "our story," "our hero," and "the reader." This "novelist" is terribly concerned about pacing his narrative; he often apologizes for "running ahead of events" and carefully reports the time periodically through each day. Most of his dramatic scenes observe the Aristotelian unities of time and place; yet ultimately his im­ posed order escapes him and the final effect is a jumble of events. The careful reader can go back and outline the number of months, days, and hours that have passed, but these demarca­ tions blur under the competing intensity of heightened dramatic moments following one after another in exhaustingly rapid suc­ cession. Thus the reader has a sense of a narrator, whether in the role of journalist or novelist —and the boumdaries between these roles are not fixed —struggling to organize something in­ herently uncontrollable. The real world of the narrator com­ petes with the more fantastic world of the implied author. But so far this competition has been healthy; it has not produced any open conflict between the narrator and the author. The reader draws on the sensations he derives from experiencing both these worlds.

4

The Breakdown of the Reader's Trust in the Narrator: The Narrative

,

Parts III and IV I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. They who hold by the other are charmed by the construction and gradual development of a plot. All this is, I think, a mistake, —which mistake arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree. If a novel fail in either, there is a failure in Art. —Anthony Trollope, An A utobiography (1883)

Alas! how deceitful and inadequate we feel the language of man . . . What a difference between w ord s w ith ou t m eaning, and that m eaning w ithou t w ords. —Charles Maturin, "The Tale of the Indians," in M elm oth the W anderer

he reader's confidence in the narrator begins to weaken as he becomes confused by the abrupt, unpatterned changes in the narrator's voice. To speak merely of "the reader's response" is no longer ade­ quate, for in its unfolding the narrative grows more complicated and fragmented, causing the reader's role to change drastically. How do the complex relations among the implied author, the narrator, and the reader arise out of the basically straightfor­ ward relationship that existed among them in Parts I and II of the novel? What is the purpose of this change? In Part III the easy rapport between the narrator and the reader, in all its forms, begins to undergo a strain. Although within this part of the novel the narrator enters most fully into his hero's being, his judgment becomes more suspect and he

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begins to forfeit the implied reader's trust. A s he turns less reliable, it becomes important to distinguish the narrator's point of view from that of the implied author who stands behind him. It becomes equally necessary, by analogy, to distinguish the responses of the narrator's reader (who reads for pleasure, in a chronological and unreflective fashion) from those of the im­ plied reader (who reads more carefully, attempting to discover the implied author's message). The overall structure of events in Part III invites a com ­ parison with Part I. In both, the following sequence occurs in the same order: M yshkin pays a visit to the Epanchin fam ily; later, in a larger crowd scene, he intercepts a violent gesture that a man, in a rage, has intended for a woman; he attends a nameday party at which there are numerous uninvited guests. One of them is Ferdyshchenko, who disappeared after Nastasia Filip­ povna's party and reappears "from nowhere" only to attend Myshkin's birthday party. "Remember Ferdyshchenko?" he asks. M yshkin arrives late for each party. Nastasia views her nameday as a demarcation point after which her life will change. M yshkin invites Rogozhin to celebrate with him: "I don't want greet my new life without you, because my new life has begun today, hasn't it?" (VIII, 304; 387). But neither life really changes. At each party some of the characters, but not the main ones, make confessions which the crowd receives with hostility. Each party climaxes with a scandal. Finally, both parts of the novel end with Rogozhin taking Nastasia Filippovna away to an unknown destination. In both parts M yshkin studies the living faces of Aglaya and Nastasia Filippovna as though they were portraits. These correspondences between Parts I and III of the novel serve ultimately to point up how things have changed. Part III opens with the first full-blown digression by the nar­ rator who is reporting a frequent complaint that despite the m any politicians, generals, and directors, "we don't have any practical people" (VIII, 268; 345). In the course of the digression the reader begins to wonder whether the narrator is being sar­ castic or an ironic author made him just a little stupid. The nar­ rator's Gogolian use of the qualifier "even" sounds odd as he clinches his point about the lack of practical people: "It is even

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said that there are no decent crews on some of the railroads" (VIII, 268; 345). He then gives a description of railway bridges collapsing and of trains spending five days in the snow while an inspector somewhere punches a m erchants agent in the nose. He diminishes the power of his argument by moving from the general to the particular in such a way that the triviality of the particular point receives unwarranted emphasis and eclipses the validity of the generalization it is supposed to illustrate. He becomes obsessed with describing all sorts of unnecessary details of the railroad; the reader feels that the narrator is ram bl­ ing without purpose and has unintentionally undermined the seriousness of his generalization. Yet the implied author stands behind the narrator; he has already set up a resonance about railroads in the novel. Thus Lebedev, in his interpretations of the Apocalypse, has found in the railroads a symbol for the deterioration of man's faith. (With his typical relish for grotesque hyperbole, he has even compared them to the star W orm w ood.) D oktorenko, the young nihilist, seeks a job on the railroads; General Epanchin, Evgeny Pavlovich, and Prince S h ch — have had business in­ volvements in the railroads; Prince M yshkin and Rogozhin and Lebedev first met on a train at the start of the novel. (O ther meetings have occurred on trains between M yshkin and General Epanchin, between M yshkin and Zalezhnikov, between M ysh­ kin and Prince Shch — . ) Thus, while the narrator rambles on about railroads and his reader follows after, relaxed by the digressive tone, the ideal, implied reader (to use W ayne Booth's term) is busy trying to remember how railroads have functioned so far throughout the novel. They are a symbol of economic and actual change; crucial meetings occur on them; they are a no-man's land where unlikely people can enter into conversa­ tions that may subsequently alter the course of their lives.1 In the course of this far-flung disgression, the narrator ad­ dresses his reader directly for the first time. He addresses him with the familiar form (VIII, 262; 345), although throughout this passage he has spoken of himself in a "we" voice: "However, we have begun to talk about civil servants in vain; we wanted to talk, specifically, about practical people" (VIII, 269; 346). The narrator thus places himself in a condescending relationship with his reader; he emphasizes his own superiority and ability to

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generalize by pompously calling himself “we" while at the same time addressing the reader with the familiar form of you. Had he merely addressed the reader familiarly without applying the royal "we" to himself, the effect would have been the opposite: the narrator would have seemed to be seeking a genuine closeness with the reader. This digression is really an essay that the narrator is writing, full of platitudes that he expects his reader to agree with. Like the underground man he finds that the world has always deemed a lack of originality to be the best recommendation for the practical man of affairs; ninety-nine percent of men have thought this while only one percent have looked at the m atter differently. He goes on to say that mothers and nurses wish their children to live in com fort without originality; he asks: "Having passed his examinations and having served for thirtyfive years, —who in our country can fail to become a general at last? . . . This is how a Russian achieves . . . the reputation of being a practical man" (VIII, 270; 346). Anyone who passes his examinations and remains in service for thirty-five years can becom e a general, and by definition, a practical man. The nar­ rator concludes his "essay." "In essence, not to becom e a general in our country is possible only for an original man, in other words, a restless man. Perhaps there is some misunderstanding here; but, speaking generally, it seems to be true, and our soci­ ety was completely right, in defining its ideal of the practical man. Nonetheless, we, all the same, have said too much that is superfluous; we wanted, in particular, to say a few explanatory words about the family already known to us, the Epanchins" (VIII, 270; 346-347). His conclusion muddies everything that went before, so that the reader may indeed suspect that there has been some misun­ derstanding. The narrator has already noted sarcastically that it is impossible for an unoriginal man not to becom e a general. But then he asserts that society's definition of the practical man has been correct. The structure of the narrator's logic is distinctly odd: he had begun by reporting society's complaints about the lack of practical men and ends by claiming that it is easy to be defined by society as a practical man and that society has de­ fined this ideal correctly. The narrator has contradicted himself: suddenly it seems that, far from bemoaning its lack of practical

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men, society is hailing its own version of the practical m an. In short, there is no logic. W hat precisely is the narrator advocat­ ing —a need for practical men or for original men? He has con­ cluded by defining a general as a "practical m an," (that is, as an unoriginal, placid type), but this is the very notion he had been trying to refute at the beginning. He has concluded, moreover, that society has correctly defined its ideal of the practical man, yet the original impetus for the digression had been the assertion that despite the many politicians and generals, society needed practical men. His conclusion has cancelled out his original hypothesis. By having his narrator's powers of reasoning fail, the implied author has warned the implied reader to beware of the narrator. The implied author and his reader can share an ironic view of the preceding mass of statements. But the nar­ rator's reader, simply responding to the temporal flow of the sentences, reads on without experiencing any particular confu­ sion. Each sentence by itself makes perfect sense. The slightly ironic voice that portrayed General Epanchin and Totsky in Parts I and II of the novel has degenerated into a voice which seems completely unaware of the muddle his sociological obser­ vations have created. A fter form ally ending his digression, the narrator proceeds with another lengthy description of the Epanchin fam ily. The implied author's reader is left on his own to m ake a connection between the digression about practical men and this subsequent descriptive passage. According to the narrator, the Epanchins suffer from a trait in exact opposition to the "virtues we have been discussing above . . . everyone else travels along the tracks, they [the Epanchins] constantly jump the rails" (VIII, 271; 347). None of the narrator's laboriously wrought generali­ zations from his just completed essay on practical men can ap­ ply to the Epanchins: the reader's expectations have been foiled. W hen, in the next paragraph, the narrator returns to the voice for describing the Epanchins that is reminiscent of the domestic no­ vel, his tone now carries a new note of sharpness absent from Parts I and II, for he punctures his humorous sketch of General Epanchin with the caustic observation: "But a certain dullness of mind, it seems, is almost a necessary quality if not for every pub­ lic man, at least for any serious moneymaker" (VIII, 271; 348).

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In his recent digression the narrator had clinched his general point about the lack of practical men with an unremarkable, trivial example, in a manner reminiscent of Gogol. Here, he again borrows another method from Gogol —the baffling, ridiculous, and eventually self-contradictory analogy. To il­ lustrate the groundlessness of Lizaveta Prokof evna's fears about the family he makes the following comparison: "but if someone has a wart on the forehead or the nose, of course it seems that everyone has only one thing in the world to do, —to look at your wart, to laugh at it and condemn you for it, although you might have discovered America" (VIII, 271; 348). The illustra­ tion does m ore than say that Lizaveta shouldn't worry. It both deflates the seriousness of her concern and gives the narrative an open-ended quality: the indecorous comparison of her worry to a wart lets in that very world of vulgar reality against which Lizaveta is trying to defend her family in her efforts to be proper and respected. (Here the narrator has used the formal "you" in a homely passage where, on the contrary, one would expect him to use the familiar form of the verb.) Thus both the narrator's ironic mode which relied heavily on reporting rumors and the mode which resembled the novel of manners have grown more bitter in tone than they were in Parts I and II. The narrator is at once more biting and more cynical and, at times, more illogical than previously. His range of language has broadened, and, consequently, the spectrum of his voices has widened. W hat are the effects on the reader of these changes in narrative tone? Has this widening also begun to pro­ duce a gap between the narrator and the implied reader? Must the implied reader now be constantly on guard? T o describe the impact of the narrative, it becomes useful, occasionally, to separate the implied reader's responses from those of the nar­ rator's posited reader, especially when they are in conflict with one another and when their opposite responses reflect themes important to the novel. The moments of pure narrative digression are the moments when the author-Dostoevsky is farthest removed from his real or actual reader. The narrator's reader responds to these digres­ sions as though they had come from the author; the implied reader presumably recognizes the presence of a narrative mask and tries to look behind it in order to maintain his sense of col­

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lusion with the implied author. Incorporating within him the responses of the other two readers, the real reader, sifting and sorting, reads eagerly on. Throughout the novel it is the purely dramatic scenes which are the unmediated province of the implied author, although he is also, of course, always present behind the narrator he has created. In the dramatic scenes, however, the narrator's role shrinks to one of strict reportage, for what the characters say is determined by the implied author. In the authorial structure of this first chapter of Part III the narrator's voice fades gradually into Lizaveta's consciousness and from her, we proceed to a dramatic presentation not ordered by any central con­ sciousness, except that of the implied author. The dramatic segment of this chapter —the conversation be­ tween the prince and Evgeny Pavlovich about the nature of Rus­ sian liberalism and about crime and recent criminal court defenses —really expresses a larger problem: the inevitable perversion or distortion of ideas (VIII, 276-280; 354-359). Later on in chapter 2 the implied author transfers this theme of the in­ evitable distortion of ideas out of the realm of a drawing-room discussion and into the depths of Myshkin's own soul, when, in an impassioned outburst he confesses to Lizaveta Prokof'evna, "in society I am superfluous . . . There are certain ideas, there are lofty ideas, about which I must not begin to talk, because I should certainly make everyone laugh . . . M y gestures are not appropriate; I have no sense of measure; my words do not co r­ respond with my thoughts, but only degrade them. And therefore I don't have the right" (VIII, 283; 362). Underlying thematic correspondences such as these between chapters give evidence of the structure of the novel as designed by the implied author. A complete analysis of this structure would be impossi­ ble; it would exceed the novel in length. But the implied reader is frequently invited by the implied author to respond to such correspondences as he reads. He follows the underlying theme of the inevitable distortion of ideas through its numerous manifestations. For example, when M yshkin says, "I don't have the right," the implied author's reader remembers that this sentence is the negative of the often repeated refrain of the nihilist Burdovsky and his crew: T have the right," Burdovsky says throughout. (The implied reader

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may also link Myshkin's outburst back to the digression in the previous chapter and conclude that a man who is "superfluous in society" must therefore have initiative and originality.) Aglaya's response to Myshkin's outburst parallels that of the ideal, implied reader. (She carries this role through much of the novel.) She proclaims Myshkin's superiority and says that none of those assembled are worthy of his words. But she too, in ad­ dressing herself to the problem of the distortion of ideas, distorts her own idea and ends by accusing him. "Why do you humble yourself . . . W hy have you twisted everything inside you? W hy have you no pride?" (VIII, 283; 362). Her rom antic ideal of him embodies its own distortions. The narrator, however, distances himself both from Myshkin's confession and from Aglaya's response. He interjects between them the sentence: "Everyone stood in painful bewilderment at this unexpected, m orbid, and in any case, quite unmotivated outburst. But the outburst did give rise to a strange episode" (VIII, 283; 362). The implied author has begun to endow the problem of the distortion or inability to express ideas with a metaphysical significance that will intensify throughout the novel. Meanwhile, the implied reader re­ peatedly forms new syntheses of the material as he reads. The narrator has by now begun to entwine all the modes we have seen previously. He does not break the pattern of expecta­ tion that the reader has developed; each of the narrator's voices still portrays its appropriate subject, but the tempo of the changes has increased. Bakhtin has written of the polyphonic ef­ fect created by the voices of the different characters in D ostoev­ sky's novel. Equally effective in maintaining the real reader's in­ terest, however, are the varied narrative modes. Here, and increasingly throughout the novel, the narrator's different voices rapidly interrupt and intersect each other to give the chapter as a whole a polyphonic texture. Just as any listener of music tries to respond simultaneously to the separate themes and to the general flow of a musical com ­ position, here the implied reader recognizes the complex inter­ twining of the separate narrative voices in chapter 2 while the narrator's reader merely responds to the overall effect of the narration. For example, the narrator begins in the dramatic mode with the prince's outburst about his lack of measure and

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his unsettling non-proposal of marriage to Aglaya ("Not for anything will I m arry you!" "I haven't asked you, Aglaya Ivanovna"); the party then sets off for the park. W ithin three pages the mood shifts from dramatic intensity to a bleakly com ic portrayal of family relations: after the perplexing "pro­ posal" scene between Aglaya and M yshkin in which M yshkin has assured her that he will never "want" to ask her, the general laughter seems forced and peculiar, especially because M yshkin himself joins in it wholeheartedly. Throughout the novel characters laugh inopportunely; this becomes an increasing problem for the reader. Suddenly the narrator begins to foreshadow events in a way he has not previously done: while arbitrarily holding back some inform ation, he begins to hint of what is to come. As the Epanchin party walks to the park he observes, "She [Aglaya], it seemed, was in a state of distraction, she answered inap­ propriately and sometimes not at all. But the riddles of Aglaya Ivanovna had still not finished for that evening. The last one was reserved for the prince alone" (VIII, 285; 365). In the first sentence the narrator has distanced himself; he is merely an observer. By the next sentence he has become a storyteller, seek­ ing to entice his reader by intimations of further mysteries. Then the narrator offers in his ironic "public" voice a brief digression about the Pavlovsk park and those who frequent it. He begins with , "As everyone knows, or at least, as everyone agrees," but by the next paragraph he has assumed the tones of the slightly ironic novelist of manners in order to describe how the Epanchin ladies take note of and remark upon the dress of the other women seated around the park bandstand. W hen in the following paragraph the narrator enters Myshkin's mind, the pattern is once more fam iliar, for, as usual, the prince sits on a bench in a reverie and the narrator adopts an omniscient and sympathetic stance. M yshkin dreams of a Gothic landscape, of a spot in the mountains from which he can look down at a waterfall and an old deserted castle. It would have been better "if they had not known him at all and this entire vision had only been a dream. Yes, and wasn't it all the same, whether a dream or reality?" (VIII, 287; 367). Fantasy and reality merge as he sits amidst the chatting group in the park. He gazes at Aglaya's face for a full five minutes as if it were a portrait. (The implied reader

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remembers the last time M yshkin thought about the border be­ tween dreams and reality; it was just before his epileptic fit and Rogozhin's attempted murder. Throughout that entire chapter the narrator had used the Gothic mode.) In harmony with Myshkin's thoughts, the narrator's tone grows gradually more nightmarish and fantastical. There is laughter all around; the narrator reports that the dreaming prince, "seeing, that she, and everyone else, was laughing, sud­ denly stretched apart his mouth and began to laugh. The laughter all around grew louder" (VIII, 287; 367). The prince hears Aglaya mutter to herself, "Idiot." The scene reads like a bad dream in which a normal situation has imperceptibly grown grotesque and unreal. Into the mood of mounting tension the narrator abruptly introduces the Gothic mode of heightened ter­ ror that heralds and reflects Rogozhin. The pale, dark stranger appears and disappears like a hallucination, "a certain face flashed for a moment, a pale face . . . it flashed and disap­ peared . . . from the whole apparition there only remained the impression of a crooked smile, the eyes, and a bright-green necktie . . . But a minute later, he suddenly quickly and restlessly began to look around him; this first apparition might be the herald and presage of a second apparition. It certainly must be so" (VIII, 287-288; 367-368).2 Later, when Rogozhin ac­ tually meets M yshkin again, he materializes suddenly out of the darkness. Typically, his appearance follows Myshkin's own musings about him. It is almost as if Myshkin's thoughts or moods could conjure up Rogozhin. In the midst of this fantastic Gothic narrative the narrator abruptly introduces his own everyday v o ice. He breaks the spell while promising worse to come, "the most careful man cannot defend himself at each moment from a brick falling from a neighboring house. This brick was now ready to fall on the respectable public who had gathered to hear the music" (VIII, 288; 368-369). A fter this brief ironic interlude, the narrator renders a dramatic account of the scandalous moment when the officer attempts to return Nastasia's blow . He then rapidly closes and deflates this scandalous scene in much the same way as he had ended the scene of Rogozhin's attempted murder: he withdraws from facing the magnitude of what has just occurred by describing instead the generalized reaction of the onlookers

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and by adding his own generalizing comment, "In a word the business ended in the usual manner" (VIII, 290; 372). The narrator's rapid shifts in voice in this chapter have a disturbing effect. Not only does the reader experience a growing sense that events will soon reach some awful climax to which these varied scandals are only a prelude, but a deeper unrest and tension are also being produced within him that are unrelated to the specific events of the novel. The feeling of tension is in large part caused by the general world of the novel, a world which is, as Dostoevsky meant it to be, fantastic but real.3 The narrator's constantly altering voices have created this world. Polyphony has modulated into cacophony. The narrative shifts continue unrelentingly, as the narrator, carrying out the implied author's intent, crams his account of clim actic events even more closely together. For example, the reader might logically expect to hear more about Ippolit's condi­ tion on the morning after his bungled suicide attempt, but in­ stead, after a short exchange about Ippolit between Aglaya and M yshkin, the narrator diverts the reader's interest to the rela­ tionship between Aglaya and the prince (Part III, chapter 8). Aglaya reveals that Nastasia Filippovna has been writing to her. In this jumble of clim actic disclosures, the narrator's reader finds himself forgetting about Ippolit's confession and becoming immersed in the new situation. The narrator veers rapidly from subplot to subplot at crucial moments; these narrative "bounces" (to use Forster's phrase) do not offer a respite in the form of comic relief, as they do, for example, in the novels of Dickens, but create an air of unrelieved tension. The implied reader, who unlike the narrator's reader does not simply read along, finds himself in a world where there is no escape from extreme, dif­ ficult situations. Perhaps, like M yshkin, the implied reader longs for escape; and yet, like M yshkin, he must delve further. The infrequent moments of relief when M yshkin is alone with his thoughts give the implied reader a chance to think about the foregoing events and to gauge Myshkin's changing condition. Yet it is for the narrator to verify that the prince is in love, perhaps passionately, with Aglaya; M yshkin has not yet admitted this to himself (III, 3). A fter Ippolit's confession, when M yshkin sits in the park

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awaiting his early morning rendezvous with Aglaya, the nar­ rator enters M yshkin's mind m ore totally than he has done before. He begins with his usual m ystifications: "for some reason" the empty bandstand seemed hideous to the prince; the prince "suddenly laughs aloud" and is "suddenly annoyed with himself"; "he longed to go away somewhere." But these preliminary distancings from Myshkin's mind give way as the narrator casts off his distance, his irony, his manipulative tech­ niques of disclosure and lovingly enters the soul of his hero. M yshkin remembers the "fly" about which Ippolit had written. (This same fly, a symbol for life and the unconscious natural world, reappears powerfully yet grotesquely at the end of the novel: a fly buzzes around Nastasia's corpse.) The fly "knows its own place and is a participant in the general chorus . . . [while] he alone [Myshkin] is a miscarriage [vykidysh ]" (VIII, 351; 442). This thought triggers a memory from Switzerland, where a brightly beautiful panoram a had made him weep. "The thing that tormented him was that he was a complete stranger to all this. W hat was this feast, what was this great eternal festival, to which there was no end and to which he had long, always, since childhood, been drawn, and in which he could never partake?" (VIII, 351; 44 2).4 Predictably, a few minutes later M yshkin falls asleep; he dreams of Nastasia Filippovna and awakens to Aglaya's touch. W e have already seen how the implied author linked disparate plot elements through the theme of the "distortion" of an idea. In one chapter, M yshkin and Evgeny Pavlovich discussed this notion theoretically as it related to Russian liberalism and to criminal court defense tactics; in the next chapter, M yshkin declared that because he could not find words and gestures with which to express his own most beloved ideas, he felt that he should give up and go away altogether. A similar thematic structure, whereby an idea is expressed and then dramatized in an unrelated context, is evident here. In chapter 7 M yshkin remembers a thought he had had long ago in Switzerland of "the feast of life" in which he could never take part. In chapter 8 the implied author dramatizes this idea through the prince's relationship with Aglaya. She is a physical embodiment of everything which has been hitherto inaccessible to the prince. His attraction to her represents an attempt to par­

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take of the feast from which he had always been an outcast. W hen Aglaya tells him he must sacrifice himself and go away with Nastasia Filippovna, he answers: "I cannot sacrifice myself thus, although I wanted to once and perhaps I still do" (VIII, 363; 455). He wishes to avoid lofty renunciations and yearns merely to partake in the general chorus, to give himself up to his feelings of love for Aglaya —the feelings of a man for a woman. Nastasia Filippovna is darkness; Aglaya represents to him the vision of a "new dawn."

The increasing frequency of such passages in which Myshkin is alone and the narrator bares his hero's thoughts to the reader points up the crisis growing within him. But at the same time, the narrator's new closeness to his hero dissipates the image of Myshkin that the reader had had in the first two parts of the novel. As we see him falling in love, the prince now seems less mysterious. Thus, while on the one hand the narrator creates tension in the reader by his rapid changes in voice throughout Part III, on the other hand he is drawing closer to the hero. In the middle of the confusion of events and narrative voices, the reader at least trusts that the narrator will periodi­ cally reveal the state of the hero's psyche; this provides the one stable point of reference from which the reader can chart the ef­ fect of the action on the prince. In the last chapter of Part III, when the narrator portrays Myshkin's thoughts upon reading Nastasia Filippovna's letters to Aglaya, the borders between dreaming and waking, between fantasy and reality break down and the narrator is closer to being one with Myshkin than he has been at any point in the novel. The way he talks about dreams is different from the other digressive paragraphs that have appeared so far: this digression does not distance the narrator and his reader from the action but rather draws them both closer to it. The narrator carefully avoids injecting irony or sarcasm into his voice. His thoughts are in fact indistinguishable from Myshkin's and could read as Myshkin's own interior monologue: These letters also resem bled a d ream . Som etim es one dream s strange d ream s, im possible and unn atu ral ones; upon aw akening, y o u [uy] rem em ber them clearly and are surprised b y a strange fa c t: y o u rem em ber . . . th at y o u r reaso n did n o t leave y o u . . . y o u even rem em ber that y o u acted cunningly and logically thou ghou t all th at

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long, long time when murderers surrounded you, when they were dissembling with you, hiding their intentions . . . you remember, how cunningly you finally deceived them, hiding from them; then you realize that they knew your whole deception by heart . . . you remember all this clearly . . . And why too, upon awaking from your dream . . . do you feel, . . . that you have left behind, together with your dream, something insoluble for you? You laugh at the absurdity of your dream, and you feel, at the same time, that in the interlacing of these absurdities is contained some thought, but a thought already real, something that belongs to your real life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart . . . Your impression is power­ ful; it is joyful or tormenting, but of what it consists and what was said to you —all that you can neither understand nor remember." (VIII, 377-378; 471)

The narrator uses the same language he has always used for describing M yshkin —"som ething," "dream ," "strange," "surprise," "impression," "absurdity." But he uses these words to clarify and explain rather than to mystify the reader. At the beginning of Part III the narrator had used the familiar and the polite forms of the second person verb form with the effect of distancing himself from the reader and from the action he was describing. (The familiar form was coupled with a condescending royal we; later, he had used the polite form in a homely passage where one would expect the familiar form to be used.) Here the entire passage is written in the second person plural. The form fits the content; the narrator's voice, serious and straightforward, brings the reader into the action and close to himself and to Myshkin by assuming that the reader understands, that he too has experienced such dreams. At this moment, the narrator's reader and the implied author's reader share an identical response, while the narrator and the hero seem almost to have merged. This abrupt change in distance may surprise the implied author's reader who has learned to expect a more ironic tone in the narrative digressions. One could explain this paragraph by asserting that here is a rare instance of the implied author himself speaking. But why should the implied author speak directly for one paragraph in the novel? The voice is recognizably that of the narrator; the passage as a whole resembles other sections of the novel in which the narrator has entered Myshkin's mind. Moreover, the

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narrator ends his digression with a typical qualification that de­ liberately reestablishes his old manner of narration: "It was al­ most thus after he had read these letters." That is, the narrator has still kept the reader from receiving an exact account; he en­ gages in some degree of m ystification even at his most candid moment. By the end of Part III reality has become completely fantas­ tical for M yshkin. The very fact of the existence of these letters "resembles a nightmare", a product of Nastasia's "mad dream." "But this dream had already come true" (VIII, 378; 472). The last chapter of Part III closes with a dream actually becoming real­ ity. The prince, after midnight, walks the road around the park from the Epanchins' house to his own, "Everything around him seemed like a dream. And suddeny, just as before, when he had both times awakened at the same apparition, this very appari­ tion again appeared to him . . . TMo, it isn't a vision' " (VIII, 381; 475). Nastasia Filippovna kneels before M yshkin in the street. His twice-dreamt dream has become reality. The narrator's distance from his novel, throughout Part III, has undergone strenuous shifts: at the beginning, in his digres­ sions, he was immersed in the trivia of everyday life; by the end he seems to have revealed a sincere affinity with his hero and to have cast off his various narrative masks. The implied reader, not lulled by the temporal flow of the novel and looking back on the spectrum of voices that have appeared throughout this part, m ay be disconcerted to see that the narrator who began Part III is the same one who has concluded it. Nevertheless the narrator has expected his reader to share his views throughout. The overall movement, orchestrated, of course, by the implied author, has been from a vision of everyday reality to one of fan­ tastic reality. In Part IV the narrator repeatedly discloses a new concern with the business of narration, of getting the story told. This has the effect of distracting his readers's attention from the events and forcing him to remember that he is only reading a novel. The sheer dramatic power of the climactic scenes in Part IV counterbalances the effects of this distancing. But the implied reader realizes that the narrator's new obsession with expressing the difficulties inherent in story-telling echoes a dominant the­

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matic concern of the implied author and of Myshkin: the theme of the inevitable distortion of the important idea. The narrator begins Part IV with a discussion of how diffi­ cult it is to typify the "ordinary." In the opening digression of Part III he had created a comic polarity between the practical, unoriginal man and the restless genius, finding that spciety nur­ tured the form er type while rejecting the latter. He now treats this same polarity between the original and the ordinary man from the point of view of the novelist. "There are people about whom it is difficult to say anything that would represent them immediately and fully, in their most typical and characteristic aspect; these are the people who are usually called ordinary' people, 'the m ajority' and who, in reality, make up the great m ajority of any society. W riters in their novels and tales try for the most part to take types from society and to present them vividly and artistically, —types, that are extremely rarely met in reality and who are, nevertheless, almost more real that reality itself" (VIII, 383; 479). The narrator goes on to cite Gogol's Podkolyosin (and Molière's George Dandin) as an example of the typical ordinary man. As in the digression at the beginning of Part III, the narrator gets carried away with the elucidation of his specific example. But while the narrator is busy describing the panic of the prospective bridegroom Podkolyosin, the im­ plied reader begins to think that a wedding in the novel may be imminent.

Dwelling on the difficulties of depicting the ordinary man signals a change of pace. In his role as a novelist the narrator so far has not had problems connected with the portrayal of ordin­ ary men. The narration of Part HI was full of extraordinary events and extraordinary people and ended with a merging of the fantastic and the real world. Now the narrator manifests an interest Jn_the_ordinary man and in the everyday world: Nevertheless, for all that, the question remains before us: what does the novelist do with ordinary people: and how can he present them to the reader in order to make them at all interesting? To leave them out completely in the story is impossible, because ordinary people are at every moment, by and large, the necesary link in the chain of worldly events; leaving them out, therefore, destroys verisimilitude. To fill a novel only with types or, simply, for the sake of interest, with strange and unheard of people would be improbable, yes, and perhaps, unin­

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teresting. In ou r opinion, the w riter m ust try to find interesting and in­ structive nuances even am on g o rd in ary people. (VIII, 3 8 8 -3 8 9 ; 4 8 0 )

Is the narrator making a comment about his own narrative up to this point? Does he feel that he has made the extraordinary seem commonplace and boring by presenting a world unrelievedly full of such original characters? The reader's bewilderment increases. It is tempting here to assume again that the author-Dostoevsky (or the implied author) is speaking, especially since Dos­ toevsky himself made similar statements about the need for in­ teresting the reader. But this is still unmistakably the voice of the narrator, although he does undoubtedly, at this moment, share the author's point of view. The language is flatter, simpler than Dostoevsky's language would be. He uses phrases like "the great writer" for Gogol. He has shown his characteristic ten­ dency to overburden his main point with lengthy examples; his ironic tones later in this passage are consistent with the voice we have heard throughout the novel: "It is enough for some of our young women to cut their hair, to put on blue-tinted glasses and call themselves nihilists, for them to be immediately convinced, that, having put on glasses, they have forthwith acquired their very own convictions' " (VIII, 384; 481). In this digression the narrator describes a class of ordinary people who delude themselves into thinking that they possess an ■idea. They do not even perceive the real paradox: that the expression of the idea is its most difficult aspect. Here the narrator has begun to examine the problem of being a novelist and throughout Part IV he will consider the problem o f trying to convey what has happened; he becomes increasingly concerned with the role of the reader. By expressing all these concerns the narrator echoes Myshkin's own frustrated preoccupation with The expression of important ideas. The narrator's remarks about the difficulty of narration probably reflect the trouble that Dos­ toevsky himself was having with his novel at this point. But this coincidence is, in the end, unimportant, for the narrator's voice, however much it echoes Dostoevsky's, is self-consistent. M ore­ over, as Dostoevsky's notebooks for the novel have shown, he planned that the narrator should step aside from and comment upon the action towards the end of the novel.

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The narrator makes his first apology to the reader by con­ fessing that he has not sufficiently explained the "ordinary" peo­ ple, like Varya, G anya, and Ptitsyn. The reader does not know what to expect next, because the n arrators sudden desire to por­ tray ordinary men runs contrary, to „what .his ..inclinations have been throughout the rest of the novel. Clearly, the narrator has grown nervous: he has begun to talk about the problems inher^ e n F ln wnfing"novels and about his readers; he has apologized. The narrator remembers Pirogov in Gogol's Nevsky Prospect, "The great writer was forced, finally, to thrash him for the sake of satisfying the offended moral feelings of the reader, but, see­ ing that the great man only shook himself off after the ordeal and consumed a small layered pastry to fortify himself, he threw up his hands in amazement and thus left his readers" (VIII, 385; 481). T h at is, the events of the work escaped the "great" novelist's control. By citing the respectable precedent of Gogol's story, the narrator is preparing the reader .fop his own abdication of responsibility. The implied reader should pick up this warning, while the narrator's reader, unconcerned, follows the flow of the narrator's humorous literary criticism: "I have al­ ways regretted that Gogol gave the great Pirogov such a humble rank" (VIII, 385; 481). In the course of his digression the narrator ultimately con­ tradicts himself, as he had done at the beginning of Part III. Having just said how difficult it is to typify the ordinary charac­ ter, he then proceeds to do precisely that. He begins his long sketch of G anya, "One character in our story, Gavril Ardalionovich Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of 'much cleverer' [but still ordinary] people; al­ though, from head to toe, he was infected with a desire for orig­ inality" (VIII, 385; 482). The entire description continues in terms of G any a's typicality within this second category of "more clever" unoriginal men. But in the next few chapters the narrator does carry out his intention to describe ordinary characters. Ip­ polit and Ganya devour each other, each accusing the other oF m ediocrity, and M yshkin, Aglaya, Rogozhin, and Nastasia Filippovna, the "original" characters, are only referred to indi­ rectly. O nly after some twenty pages does the reader finally en­ counter the prince in an interview with General Ivolgin. But even then, the narrator has not picked up the dangling threads

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left by the climactic events at the end of Part III and by the hints in the opening of Part IV. Has M yshkin really proposed to Aglaya? If so, how did this come about? W hy is the prince sud­ denly reported to be happy when he was so miserable at the end of Part III? Throughout the earlier parts of the novel the narrator did not thrust his presence forward overmuch, except for the few in­ serted passages where he psychologized or gave his own opin­ ions and except for the various voices which he used in a pre­ dictable manner. In Parts I, II, and III the reader could expect, at the beginning of each section, to hear the narrator's voice di­ rectly; then, as the dramatic intensity of events augmented, his voice, as a rule, quickly dropped out. But in Part IV this pattern breaks down; the narrator obsessively expresses his difficulties with the business of narration and does not let the reader forget his presence. He becomes didactic at times. "Let us not forget, that the reasons for human actions are usually infinitely more complicated and varied than we always subsequently explain them to be, and they can rarely be outlined definitely. Some­ times it is best for the narrator to limit himself to a simple expo­ sition of events. And this is what we will do in our subsequent explanation of the present catastrophe with the general [Ivolgin]; for, whatever we do, we have been placed under the decided obligation to devote even to this secondary character of the story somewhat more attention and space than we had orig­ inally supposed" (VIII, 402; 501-502). The material of the novel has escaped the narrators control. He tries to rectity this^situationlay corTihmglTmsHfTo^simple explanations, although he has just asserted that the reasons for human actions are more complicated than the subsequent ex­ planations of them. On the one hand the narrator is paving the way for freeing himself from any obligations to his reader. On the other hand, we are witnessing another typical example of his tendency for self-contradiction, for in the next few pages he tries to do what he has just said should not be done —to outline the course of events and to explain the reasons for them. He does not limit himself to a simple exposition of the action but instead continues his old manipulative ploys for enticing the reader's in­ terest through broad authorial hints: "Even at this very moment he [Lebedev], perhaps, had he wished to sincerely, could have

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told the prince a certain piece of news of the highest interest to the prince, but he gloomily remained silent and did not tell it" (VIII, 406; 507). The narrator also seems impatient simply to finish the story; there is a prevailing sense of narration after the fact, of wrapping things up. Overwhelmed by the bulk of his material he resorts to hasty summary: "But we have already seen that the general caused some kind of trouble at Lizaveta Prokof'evna's too. Here we cannot go into the details, but let us observe briefly that the essence of the meeting consisted in the fact that the general had frightened Lizaveta Prokof'evna" (VIII, 418; 521). Yet the narrator has deliberately misled the reader. After some forty pages of reporting rumors and hints about the prince's engagement to Aglaya, and after having had Varya say to Ganya that the prince was formally engaged to Aglaya (IV, 1), the nar­ rator begins chapter 5 with an offhand denial of those rumors: "In truth, Varvara Ardalionovna had in her conversation with her brother somewhat exaggerated the exactness of her news about the engagement of the prince to Aglaya Epanchina" (VIII, 420; 524). He has masked his own bewilderment and loss of control with chatty digressions, speculations, and apologies. In chapter 5, as the narrator still cites rumors about the possi­ bility of the prince's engagement to Aglaya even though he has al­ ready denied their validity, the reader finds himself without any facts. The narrator asserts that everyone at the Epanchins was suddenly struck by the thought that Aglaya's fate was being decided, but, he adds, as to how this came about, "this is very dif­ ficult to set forth in order" (VIII, 420; 524). He further distances the reader from the action by telling him through description and by using phrases like "one might wonder why," "let us note in parentheses," rather than through dialogue. Much later, in the climatic scene when Myshkin breaks the Chinese vase, the narrator continues to maintain a distance from the action. Previously he had rendered all the other scandalous scenes of the novel dramatically, although he had allowed himself to comment upon them afterwards. Here the entire dreaded event is muffled in a blanket of narrative asides; Myshkin is merely an "orator," "a young man." The narrator has moved far away from him: "But here suddenly occurred a certain event, the speech of the orator was interrupted in the most unex­

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pected manner. All this feverish tirade, all this outpouring of passionate and restless words and exalted ideas . . . all this foretold something dangerous, something particular in the mood of the young man who had so suddenly flared up for no apparent reason . . . However, all this and 'the whole scandal' could have been resolved in the most usual and natural way, perhaps, even after a single minute . . . But the affair turned out another way" (VIII, 453; 563-564). It is hard to believe that this is the same narrator who had recently entered his hero's mind with compassionate intensity. As the vase finally crashes to the floor the narrator demurs, "oh, it is difficult and perhaps almost even unnecessary to describe what the prince felt then! But we must not fail to mention one strange sensation which came over him at that very moment" (VIII, 455; 565). The narrator has separated himself from his novel in Part IV by his preoccupation with the m atter of narration. He further asserts his lack of involvement by tampering, for the first time, with the chronology of his novel. The first two chapters pro­ ceeded forward in time until a Lear-like General Ivolgin placed his curse on Ptitsyn's house anTrushed out into the street. In the next three chapters the narrator provides the background and summary leading up to this event. He interweaves the recent past and the present. But the event he is really leading up to is the evening party at the Epanchins; the narrative fully reenters the present only when a messenger from Kolya finally informs the prince of General Ivolgin's stroke, and M yshkin arrives at the Epanchins' party (IV, 6). Until this point the implied reader must himself separate the past from the present, for they are en­ twined. The implied reader notes that this entanglement under­ lines the truth of what the narrator has been asserting all along —that it is difficult to portray what has happened, that narration, telling, can never be complete. The narrator's sudden abandonment, after some five hundred pages, of strict chrono­ logy jolts the reader as much as does the narrator's relentless presence throughout Part IV. The narrator further exasperates the implied reader's expec­ tations by manifesting a growing impatience with his hero. In Part III he had surprised the reader by drawing much closer to M yshkin than he had in the first two parts of the novel. Now, in an unsympathetic manner, he begins to portray some of M ysh-

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kin's failings. This growth of the narrator's impatience coincides with the onset of Myshkin's own loss of his grip on reality. A fter his proposal to Aglaya, sfiTT^gsThis forgiveness for persisting in this nonsense "which, of course, cannot have the slightest conse­ quence." The narrator comments: "but the prince, it seems, did not understand these words and was experiencing the highest degree of happiness . . . W ho knows, perhaps he even noticed the meaning of the words, [Aglaya's] but, being a strange man, perhaps, he was even pleased by those words" (VIII, 429; 535). The narrator dissociates himself from the action with phrases like "who know s," "perhaps." M yshkin is dismissed with the epithet "strange m an." Later on during the evening of Myshkin's actual proposal, Aglaya flares up and exclaims that she has no intention "just yet, of replacing anyone's mistress." Again the prince responds in a peculiar, distanced manner. "But the prince, for all that, was not confused by anything, and he continued to be in a state of per­ fect bliss" (VIII, 431; 537). The narrator's tone contributes to the sense that we are witnessing an eerie scene from afar, "it is diffi­ cult to describe the degree to which the prince grew animated and cheerful on that evening." M yshkin begins to talk contin­ uously, just as he had six months before during his first meeting with the Epanchins. The implied reader perceives his talkative­ ness as a danger signal showing that M yshkin is clearly out of touch with reality. In the first part of the novel the narrator was eager enough to report Myshkin's parabolic anecdotes, but here, without bothering to transcribe what M yshkin has said, he merely observes that M yshkin talked the whole evening. "All of these were such serious, even, at times, abstruse thoughts. The prince even presented some of his own views . . . so that it all could have been ridiculous if it had not been so 'well put,' as all who heard him agreed afterward" (VIII, 429; 535). The narrator describes Myshkin's appearance but gives the reader no access to his hero's thoughts. Even at the critical m o­ ment after Myshkin's proposal, wFen Aglaya and her family have left the room , the narrator gives no indication of the prince's feelings. He has begun to withdraw from his.hero. In Part I, where events were yet to happen, the implied author had the narrator transcribe Myshkin's anecdotes because they were to provide a paradigm for understanding subsequent occurren­

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ces in the novel. Here we know only that among other things, the prince told several "amusing anecdotes." The implied reader has a sense that whatever Myshkin actually says is no longer im­ portant, because, regardless of his words or deeds, some inevi­ table climax is drawing near. Yet Aglaya, Desdemona-like, con­ tinues to hang upon his every word. In the next chapter (chapter 6) the implied author further heralds the widening gap between M yshkin and the world as M yshkin increasingly annoys Aglaya (and the reader) by his in­ appropriate use of language; his inability to express his thoughts spreads even to the realm of everyday conversation. W hen Aglaya warns him that, at the party the next night, he must be silent and avoid breaking the Chinese vase, M yshkin keeps an­ swering her with schoolboy expressions, "it seems to me that you are afraid that tom orrow 111 flub the test" [ne srezalsia] (VIII, 435; 542). His schoolboy expression infuriates her: "How can you use such words . . . that is a lousy w ord, a vulgar w ord." "That is a —schoolboy's w ord." [shkol'noe slovo] "Yes, a schoolboy's word! A lousy word! You intend, it seems, to speak tom orrow with such words." (VIII, 435; 543)

Later he inadvertently uses the same schoolboy's word again (VIII, 436; 543). At last he concludes: "You know what: better that I don't come at all tom orrow ! I will re­ port sick, [otraportuius bol'nym ] and there's an end to it!" "Youll do beautifully. You just said, '111 report sick,' from where in fact do you get such expressions? W hy do you talk to me with such words? Are you teasing me, or what?" "I'm sorry; that is also a schoolboy's word; I won't use it again." (VIII, 436; 544)

Myshkin's irresistible attraction to words that will upset Aglaya foreshadows his inevitable "flubbing the test" the next evening. His inability to find the right words almost antagonizes Aglaya, who, throughout the novel, usually provides the implied reader with a model for his own responses. But she controls her anger and says instead that she hopes he will not reproach her later for her rudeness. The prince's dreaded^ arrival at the party takes place in the

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middle of a long paragraph where the narrator is describing the concern and fuss over the dying General Ivolgin (VIII, 442; 550). During the course of the party the prince grows more un­ familiar to the reader. Throughout the novel, whatever his other failings, Myshkin's impressions had been keenly accurate and his judgments astute, but the narrator now presents the prince as deluded and seduced by the trappings of society. Myshkin's untimely release from his habitual feelings of fear and doubt induces fear and doubt in the reader. The first alarm sounds as M yshkin rejects his fam iliar fantastic view of reality; he notes that the people "did not resemble either the apparitions with which Aglaya had frightened him yesterday, or the night­ mare figures he had dreamed of at night" (VIII, 442; 551). The narrator maintains his new-found distance from his hero, even increasing Myshkin's isolation from the reader and the other characters. The reader watches the scene unfold through the wrong end of a telescope. The narrator returns to his cynical mode for depicting soci­ ety, but this time, significantly, he does not exempt M yshkin from being described by this harsher voice. The narrator ob­ serves that M yshkin is anxious to penetrate this "charmed circle of people," a circle which, from the first, seemed to him "fasci­ nating." It even seems to M yshkin that he is rejoining these peo­ ple after a short separation rather than meeting them for the first time. The narrator observes, sarcastically, "He could not have arrived at the thought, that all this forthrightness and nobility, wit and high personal dignity were, perhaps, only a magnificent artistic veneer" (VIII, 442; 551). The prince is "under a spell"; "The charm of the elegant manners, the simplicity, the seeming candor were almost magical" (VIII, 442; 551).5 The prince takes the counterfeit society "for the most pure coin, for the purest gold." W hen he hears an old hackneyed story, he responds to it as to something fresh and original. Throughout the novel he had heard numerous narratives and confessions and responded to each by seeking its core, trying to understand the idea each narrative sought, however clumsily, to express. Now he re­ sponds to a false narrative that has no genuine impetus from an idea as to something brilliant and wonderful. The narrator's reader can admire the eloquence with which the narrator portrayed both society and Myshkin's false reading

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of it. But the implied reader nervously wonders where the hero's delusion will lead; under the "magnificent artistic veneer" of the narration he senses the tragic crumbling of the hero taking place. The scene ends with a four-and-one-half page paragraph. The only other paragraph that is comparable in length is in chapter 6 of Part I, where the entire chapter consisted of a single para­ graph. In both cases the action occurs at the Epanchins, but in Part I Myshkin himself narrated the entire chapter, thus impos­ ing his vision on the novel. Here (IV, 6) the focus has changed radically. M yshkin is subsumed by his surroundings and is ob­ served, from a safe distance, by the narrator; he no longer acts but is acted upon. Descriptive narrative replaces a dramatic un­ folding of events.6 At last the awful climaxes come in close succession: M ysh­ kin's passionate outburst in which, by trying to express his ideas directly, he only succeeds in making them seem ridiculous; his breaking of the Chinese vase; and finally, his second epileptic fit. (IV, 7). During the entire party scene the reader is experienc­ ing contradictory responses. The narrator's reader dismisses Myshkin's ideas about atheism, Roman Catholicism, Russia, and the great mission of the aristocracy as mad ramblings; he waits impatiently for the inevitable smashing of the Chinese vase. But the implied reader sees in the prince's monologue the logical climax of Myshkin's stated beliefs.7 He realizes that he is witnessing Myshkin's attempt to express an idea directly (to state, in Dostoevsky's words, a "sacred conviction") and that, al­ though this attempt is doomed to failure, he must at least seek to understand it and to offer M yshkin the same understanding that M yshkin himself has extended to other characters who sought and failed to express their own ideas. Like Aglaya, the implied reader might have wanted to warn Myshkin not to talk, but when he does talk, the reader must re­ spond. He must accept the full impact of Myshkin's meaning. Myshkin's lack of gesture and measure, his inability to impose coherence on his thinking, are literalized in the breaking of the Chinese vase. In this respect, the breaking of the vase embodies a Shakespearean rather than a classical notion of tragic fate: it is a physical extension of Myshkin's personality rather than a rev­ elation of some outside notion of fate. Although the implied reader understands this, the narrator's reader is invited to feel

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that an external prophecy has come true. The degree of M ysh­ kin's own delusion at this point is reflected in his own belief that "the prophecy had come true!" Yet M yshkin continues to talk, and, deeply moved by what seems to him to be the extraordinarily generous forgiveness of his clumsy act, he goes on trying to express his ideas. Ignoring the requests that he calm himself and talk about all this "another tim e," M yshkin, although admitting that his words and gestures are inadequate, decides to go ahead with uttering his most cher­ ished beliefs, relying on the power of his own sincerity to see him through: 'Yesterday Aglaya Ivanovna forbade me to talk and even named the topics about which I mustn't talk; she knows that I'm absurd when I do! I'm twenty-seven years old, and yet I know that I am like a child. I don't have the right to express my ideas . . . I am always afraid that my ridiculous manner will compromise my thought and the main idea. I have no sense of gesture. My gestures are always exactly wrong; and this makes for laughter and degrades the idea. I also have no sense of measure, and this is the main thing; it is even the most important thing . . . I know, that it is better for me to sit and be silent . . . I gave Aglaya Ivanovna my word that I would be silent all eve­ ning." "VraimentT smiled the old man. "But sometimes I think that I'm wrong in thinking that: sincerity is always worth more than gestures, isn't it? Isn't it?" "Sometimes." (VIII, 457-458; 568-569) The tragedy for both M yshkin and the implied reader is that M yshkin is wrong. M oreover, he has confessed to the wrong audience. The old man's trite "VraimentT mercilessly points up Myshkin's error. Myshkin's faith in the power of sincerity is un­ dercut before he has had time to express it. His lack of gesture and measure have undone him. W hen, earlier in the novel, he spoke indirectly in Christ-like parables and anecdotes, he could convey his message powerfully. W hen he tried to make the shape of his life a model he could also succeed. But the direct ex­ pression of his idea leads to failure. Ideas must be embodied in their proper form or they cannot be expressed at all. The implied reader finds the key to the narrator's own devi­ ous multiple voices here; were the implied author simply to ex­ press his own idea directly as M yshkin has done, it too would

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fail. The implied author needs a mask; he needs the narrator to shoulder the burden of seemingly direct expression for him. Myshkin's tragedy is that even though he knows the world is one in which ideas cannot be directly expressed, he cannot re­ strain himself from attempting to do so. M yshkin continues to reject the truths he knows. He says, "Listen! I know that it is not good to talk: it is better simply to set an example, better simply to begin" (VIII, 459; 570), yet he goes on trying to explain his idea about why all men should be happy. General relief for M yshkin, the reader, and the other characters comes in the drastic conclusion of an epileptic fit. The narrator quickly reverts to his familiar voice "wrapping things up." The implied author most wants his implied reader to accept the hero precisely during the moments of Myshkin's greatest iso­ lation and oddity. At these moments the implied author invites his reader to reject the narrator's ironic point of view and to un­ derstand the truth Myshkin is expressing by his awkward exam­ ple. That is, Myshkin's tormented attempt to state an idea di­ rectly reveals the universal truth of the impossibility of such expression. Unlike Don Quixote, M yshkin has no guise of mad­ ness to act as his protective shield, as his excuse. He has only vague hints of idiocy and illness that no one can really define. He is the good man unadorned and doomed to failure. The narrator returns to his former, more sympathetic and dramatic voice to portray M yshkin on the morning after his fit and during the hysterical evening meeting between Aglaya and Nastasia Filippovna in the presence of Rogozhin and the prince (IV, 8). He continues, nevertheless, to interject forebodings and foreshadowings of an imminent conclusion to the events of the novel. But he begins chapter 9 in a new tone of voice. Tw o weeks have elapsed: this is the first significant passage of time that occurs in the chapter-to-chapter movement of the novel. All other real breaks in time have neatly occurred between parts of the novel. For the second time in Part IV the narrator has varied his time scheme in a m ajor way. His summarizing at the beginning of this part had, by its confusing compression of events, disoriented the reader; now, by allowing two weeks to pass after the momentous scene between the two female rivals, the narrator has distanced the reader still further.

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C h a p te r 9 begins alm ost as if it w ere a n ew p a rt an d , indeed it h erald s th e n a rra to r's m o st cru cial ch an ge in attitu d e to w a rd his h e ro . T h e n a rra to r retu rn s to the them e of the difficulties of n a rra tio n an d to th e p ro b lem of satisfyin g his p osited read er, b u t this tim e his fo cu s is on the m ain ch a ra c te rs of the s to ry :

The situation of the characters of our story had changed so much, that it is extremely difficult for us to enter upon a continuation without special explanations. And yet, we feel, that we must limit ourselves to a simple statement of the facts as much as possible without special ex­ planations, for a very simple reason; because we ourselves, in many cases, find it difficult to explain what happened. Such a forewarning on our part must seem very strange and unclear to the reader: how can one narrate events about which you [fy] have neither a clear under­ standing, nor a personal opinion? In order not to place ourselves in an even more false position, let us try to explain ourselves by an example, and, perhaps, the kindly inclined reader will understand in what pre­ cisely lies the difficulty, all the more as this example will not be a disgression, but, on the contrary, a direct and immediate continuation of the story. (VIII, 475-476; 589) Earlier the narrator had apologized for neglecting to portray or­ dinary men; he had speculated on ways to make the narration interesting to the reader; he had complained about the difficulty of ordering events and describing the emotions of his central characters. But here, the narrator seems to be abdicating re­ sponsibility for his story as a whole, saying that he has no clear understanding or personal opinion about the events of his novel. He admits that his position before the reader has become false and beseeches the reader to understand his predicam ent.8 This passage takes some of the traits observed earlier in the narrator to their extremes, especially his vagueness and ten­ dency to contradict himself. He begins by saying that before he will continue, he must give special explanations. However, he wants, as much as possible, to avoid special explanations be­ cause he cannot explain what happened. He decides to illustrate his problem with an example, but then he adds that this example will be a continuation of the story. In other words, he will be entering upon a continuation without special explanations (di­ gressions). Yet he had originally asserted that such a continua­ tion would be extremely difficult. But this continuation turns

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out to be the reportage of a tangle of rumors. The implied reader begins to distrust the narrator as his logic becomes more perfectly circular. The narrator knows no more than the others about events or even about M yshkin. "And here, if were asked for an explan­ ation . . . of the degree to which the proposed marriage satis­ fied the real wishes of the prince, of what precisely the prince's wishes were at that moment, of how precisely to define the con­ dition of the soul of our hero at the present moment, etc., etc., and things of this sort —then we, we confess, would be hard put to reply" (VIII, 477; 591). He gives a few facts about the planned wedding, and then he adds, "But beyond these, extremely pre­ cise circumstances, some other facts are also known to us which decidedly throw us off, precisely because they contradict the foregoing ones" (VIII, 477; 591). Even the facts ultimately be­ come useless to the narrator; 'Th ere are many strange facts be­ fore us, but they not only do not explain, they, in our opinion, even obscure an interpretation o f the affair, no m atter how m any are brought forth, but, let us give yet another example" (VIII, 478; 592). By disclaiming knowledge of the hero and of the events and facts of the novel, the narrator certainly makes a convincing point in his theme of the difficulty of narration, but he also places the reader in a peculiar position. It was easy for the reader to gloss over an occasional complaint about the difficulty of telling the story, but here the narrator has abruptly called the whole basis of narration into question. As the narrator's reader reads on, sympathizing with the narrator's predicament amidst the jumble of events, the implied reader begins to question the meaning o f the very act of reading. W hat is he reading if the hitherto basically reliable narrator has disavowed both a per­ sonal opinion and a knowledge of the facts? Is he reading a col­ lection of misrepresentations and lies? The narrator, the implied author's vehicle for the expression of his central idea, seems at this point to have proved unreliable and to be incapable of getting the whole story properly told. But the implied reader senses that the narrator's sudden unreliability is a fictional construct, a ploy of the implied author to force his reader to w ork and to uncover the implied author's intent inde­ pendently. The implied author has made the narrator echo,

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through the form al medium of narration, Myshkin's tragic in­ ability to express his idea. Finally, the narrator openly turns away from his hero and joins in the general indignation at the mess M yshkin has made: "In presenting all these facts and refusing to explain them, we do not wish at all to justify our hero in the eyes of our readers. M ore than that, we are fully prepared to share in the indigna­ tion which he had awakened even among his friends . . . But of all this we shall speak later. In general, we fully and to the high­ est degree sympathize with some quite forceful and indeed psy­ chologically profound words of Evgeny Pavlovich, which he ex­ pressed directly and unceremoniously to the prince in friendly conversation" (VIII, 479; 594).9 Joseph Frank also placed special emphasis on this passage and found the narrator's m oral sensi­ bilities to be seriously lacking. "How is one to interpret this dis­ concerting volte face of the narrator? Certainly not as a renunci­ ation of his hero by D ostoyevsky, but rather as a logical result o f the shift in narrative stance from one of omniscience to that of ignorance and incomprehension . . . The moral profundities of the Prince's conflict are thus distorted and reduced to the level of spiteful tittle-tattle and current clichés over female em ancipation; and the narrator's declared agreement with Radomsky only adds to the melancholy irony of the Prince's total isolation."10 It is at this moment in the novel that the role of the reader becomes essential; he is now drawn into the circle of events and compelled to make some evaluation of them. He is indirectly asked by the implied author to relinquish the typically safe role of a passive observer and to m ake, alone, a difficult moral judg­ ment about the hero and about goodness and evil in general. Here the notion of the three readers (the narrator's reader, the implied reader, and the real or actual reader) becomes most useful for analyzing the narrative structure of the novel. The narrator's reader shares the narrator's bafflement and an­ noyance with M yshkin and agrees with Evgeny Pavlovich's subsequent criticisms of the prince's behavior. M yshkin has created a web of unhappiness; he has failed Aglaya, the woman he loves; he has been, as Evgeny Pavlovich notes, too suscepti­ ble to impressions. The maze of indecisive intrigues has hovered in the balance for too long.

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How m ay we describe the reactions of the implied reader at this difficult moment? The responses of Evgeny Pavlovich pro­ vide the key. Evgeny Pavlovich eloquently expresses his own frustrations, allowing the implied reader to share them and then himself go on to judge the prince more generously. Evgeny sees in M yshkin a virtuous knight, a tragic Don Quixote, who had read too many superb books about Russia: "The point is, dear prince, was this [your feeling for Nastasia Filippovna] the truth, was your feeling sincere, was it natural or was it only an in­ tellectual enthusiasm?" (VIII, 482; 597). But Evgeny Pavlovich's generous, compassionate criticisms of M yshkin remain in the end a condemnation of him .11 Should the implied reader stop at this judgment, however tactfully it has been formulated? No, for the implied reader is expected to continue to respond to the implied author's manipu­ lation of him behind the narrator and his posited reader. This more discerning reader refuses to give in to the general indigna­ tion and feels instead the extreme pathos and isolation of M ysh­ kin's position. Thus the implied reader has learned to see in a new way, independently of the narrator and his reader. The im­ plied author, then, has exploited our partial rejection of the nar­ rator. The crucial point, however, is that the actual or real reader of the novel is concurrently both readers —the narrator's reader and the implied reader. He recognizes the simultaneous respon­ ses of both within him at this moment of their clear divergence: that is, one reader condemns and the other forgives M yshkin. Through the mechanism of reading the real reader undergoes an experience parallel to that of the characters. Throughout, M yshkin has described modern man's inevitable propensity for double thoughts. The real reader realizes, at this crucial juncture of the novel, when the judgment of the hero hangs in the bal­ ance, that he too inevitably experiences these double thoughts. The method of narration in the novel has taken this notion out of thé safe realm of fiction and put it into the reader himself. A collision has occurred between the narration —the words of the novel —and the reader; this collision produces the meaning of the novel when it arises within the reader as he responds to the impact of the narrative fabric.

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Throughout the last chapters the narrator never regains his former closeness to M yshkin, although he does sympathize with him. He reports that the prince seemed to look upon the wed­ ding as a form ality, "he valued his own fate too cheaply" (VIII, 490; 607). There is a prevailing sense that he is telling things after the fact, in phrases like "these last days" and "people de­ clared afterw ard." Even the story of the wedding day is told in the form of what he has distilled from the accounts of other peo­ ple, as though he himself had not been present: "the whole fol­ lowing anecdote about this wedding has been told b y people who were present, and, it seems, it is correct" (VIII, 492; 609). The last chapter before the conclusion is à narrative tour de force in its own right; it is a tersely dramatic rendition of the final meeting between Rogozhin and M yshkin and an account of their vigil beside Nastasia Filippovna's corpse.12 As D ostoev­ sky's notebooks and letters have shown, he had planned this scene long before, while working on Part II of the novel. He knew all along that it would be effective. In fact, nearly a decade after he wrote the ending of the novel, Dostoevsky wrote in one of his notebooks, "It is the public and not the critics who have always supported me. W ho among the critics knows the ending of The Idiot —a scene of such power, which has never been repeated in literature? Well, but the public knows it" (IX, 419-420). In this last chapter in which M yshkin searches for Nastasia Filippovna and at last joins Rogozhin by her dead body, the narrator returns briefly to his sympathetic and straightforward voice for portraying his hero. Myshkin's discovery of an open copy of M adame Bovary in Nastasia Filippovna's empty apart­ ment m ay suggest to the implied reader the tragic direction in which the novel has moved. The idealistic vision of D on Qui­ xote (as D ostoevsky understood it) has been replaced by the m ore narrow world of Madame Bovary. Curiously, although D ostoevsky never discussed Flaubert in his works or letters, he was probably reading M adame Bovary while he worked on The Idiot.13 The scene around Nastasia Filippovna's corpse does recall, in some superficial ways, the scene around M adame Bovary's dead body. In different ways both women are symbols of corrupted beauty. Charles, like Rogozhin, does not want to

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part from the dead body. And as the priest and the pharmacist, Homais, doze opposite each other in their vigil, "united after so much dissension, in the same human weakness," the image they create grotesquely prefigures M yshkin and Rogozhin as they lie motionless, face to face, until daylight. The narrator presents this final scene in his role of omniscient narrator-observer. Only at the very end does he interject his own voice to draw the reader out of the action and into the more manageable realms of a concluding chapter. He remarks that if Schneider himself had come from Switzerland he would certainly find his form er pa­ tient to be "an idiot!" In the conclusion the narrator carefully distances both him ­ self and the reader from the novel. All the characters diminish in stature; the narrator observes, either ominously or ironically, that K olya may turn out to be a man gifted for "practical" af­ fairs. Aglaya, now a pathetic Desdemona, has married a fake Polish émigré count who had fascinated her by the nobility and anguish of his soul. Evgeny Pavlovich and Vera Lebedev have entered upon a rom ance. They and Lizaveta Prokof'evna resem­ ble the exhausted, unremarkable, but good people left to carry on at the end of Shakespeare's tragedies. Criticism about The Idiot supports the notion (which m ay at first glance seem to be tautological) that the act of reading The Idiot is crucial to uncovering the meaning of the novel; that is, the meaning does not exist in the work itself but can only be fashioned by a reader with his own personality. Though this generalization holds for any serious novel, it is especially appar­ ent here. M ost critics of The Idiot can be divided roughly into two categories: those who respond m ore spontaneously to the narrator's rendition of events and those who incline toward the implied author's point of view (see Appendix A ). T o support my own scheme of the three simultaneous readers I shall, like the narrator of The Idiot, give an example which, I hope, will not be a digression but a continuation of this chapter.14 In Dostoevsky's notebooks for the novel we witnessed his search for a balance between a concise, factual narrative and an enigmatic one relying either on rumor or m ystification. The re­ sult in the novel has been a multiplicity of narrative voices. In commenting upon Dostoevsky's "highly unnatural mixture of

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omniscience and limitation," Booth adds that his work bears up well on subsequent readings because it gains instead of loses in dramatic irony.15 This mixture of omniscience and limitation has helped account for the widely varying readings of the novel.16 Both Robert Lord and Joseph Frank, for example, stressed the im portance of narrative style in shaping their response to a work by D ostoevsky, yet they have each responded very differ­ ently to The Idiot . Lord has noted: "There is not a single thought, idea, view, or sentiment in Dostoevsky which is not embedded in and intimately bound up in discourse . . . The same thought in two different harmonic settings becomes two different thoughts. It is not the thought which ultimately counts, but its mode of expression."17 Frank also emphasizes the im portance o f narration and describes the harm ony existing in the novel between form and content. "The Idiot possesses a kind of wayward charm and narrative spontaneity that is not artisti­ cally inharmonious with its thematic emphasis on the moral im­ portance of impulsive sympathy and emotive frankness."18 Both critics call for careful readings of the novel. Lord writes, "As for the novel itself, a careful and objective reading is called fo r."19 Frank entitles his essay "A Reading of The Idiot." But their care­ ful readings draw them to opposite conclusions. For Lord, Myshkin's charm is fraught with cunning and am­ biguity; he considers the novel to be divided into three ill-fitting sections which, in turn, contain three M yshkins.20 In his scheme the M yshkin of section I retains m any of the sinister character­ istics evident in the drafts of the novel; by section II, "Myshkin has shed much of his charm and simple candor. Overnight he has been transformed into an open sore, a paranoiac introvert."21 In section III (that is, part IV of the novel), which is an "altogether patched up affair," D ostoevsky has taken "extrav­ agant measures to emphasize and exploit the more redeeming aspects of his hero." Lord discovers "cant" and "artificiality" jos­ tling with each other, and all this is "superimposed on an en­ tirely unconvincing narrative."22 Lord's responses parallel, albeit roughly, the reactions of the narrator's reader; he has judged M yshkin rather harshly. Frank takes M yshkin more seriously, as a man who is "tom apart by the conflict between the contradictory imperatives of his apocalyptic aspirations and his earthly lim itations."23 He

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manifests a "discontinuity that springs from a total surrender of self in each human encounter, arid an irresolution that becomes sublime in its aspiration towards a universality of love."24 Although Frank recognizes that there are significant differ­ ences in narrative texture between the parts of the novel, he does not artificially condense the novel into three sections the way Lord does, but follows, instead, the novel's own divisions. W here Lord found that the Myshkin of Part I retained many sinister characteristics of the notebook Idiot, Frank, on the con­ trary, has found Part I to be written under the avowed inspira­ tion to create a "perfectly beautiful m an." For him M yshkin em­ bodies a total lack of vanity or egoism ,25 and the "first part of The Idiot was conceived and written as a self-contained unity, which m ay perhaps be read as an independent novella." 26 In Part II, after the first five chapters, Frank notes a change in the narrative perspective. M yshkin is seen in a new way for which there has been no foreshadowing. Both Lord and Frank find the most dramatic change in the narrative in Part IV. But while Lord dismissed this fourth part as a "patched up affair," Frank found the shift in narrative stance to be of pivotal significance for the novel. "Up until these [last three] chapters, the omniscient narrator had usually been able to describe and explain what the prince was thinking and feel­ ing. Now, however, the narrator confesses that he is unable to understand Myshkin's behaviour and must confine himself to a L»are statement of the facts.' "27 Frank's response to the narrative shift in point of view in chapter 9 of Part IV corresponds to what I have described as the reaction of the implied reader. (Unlike Frank, however, I have not found the narrator's aboutface to be quite so disconcerting; the narrator has been grad­ ually preparing for it through Parts III and IV of the novel.) Frank believes that Dostoevsky has used the guise of a baffled narrator to express Myshkin's own loss o f the ability to distinguish between his vision of universal love and the limiting choices of life. Thus for Frank the change in the narrator does not signify a renunciation of his hero by Dostoevsky, but results logically from a change in Myshkin's situation. Frank has separated the implied author from the narrator and hence he does not view the shift in narrative stance as an indication of the failure of the

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novel. In other words, the narrator's new coldness in portraying M yshkin reflects Myshkin's growing isolation. W hen reading The Idiot , as I see it, one experiences both Lord's impatience with and Frank's acceptance of the narrative's vagaries and its hero's oddities. The resulting conflict among one's reading selves m ay well have been Dostoevsky's precise aim in creating his narrator-chronicler. Ia. O . Zundelovich provides the most extensive, specific treatment of the narration in The Idiot.28 He too finds that the key to this novel lies at the narrative level. He posits three narra­ tors in the novel: 1. the voice of the pure author, 2. the voice of the narrator, 3. a voice that combines both the author and nar­ ra to r—the author-narrator.29 The author narrates the objectivized narrative; he is omniscient and cannot become annoyed. The narrator is limited in vision: because he only knows what he witnesses, he makes superficial evaluations. Dostoevsky created him because he had doubts about Myshkin's effectiveness and even about his beauty. "These doubts forced Dostoevsky to put on the mask of a man who observed from the side and who could not penetrate to deep meanings."30 The voice of the authornarrator is the voice we hear most often throughout the novel. It is "the voice of the authentic artist, for this voice has within itself both spontaneity of narration from the narrator and depth and penetration of narration from the author, yet it is free from the narrowness and empiricism of the pure narrator and from the direct tendentiousness of the pure author —it is a voice, rich with lively intonation, a voice which gives the novel life."31 Zundelovich attributes the digression at the beginning of Part IV (about the writing of novels and about ordinary men) to the voice of the pure author Dostoevsky. He hears in this digres­ sion the voice of D ostoevsky the ideologist and thinker. "Here D ostoevsky directly and clearly expresses his own relation to ordinariness."32 I disagree with Zundelovich on this point; the voice that narrates this section has shared, as we have seen, the outlook and habits of speech which the reader has consistently identified with the narrator throughout the novel. The fact that, at moments, the narrator's opinions coincide with Dostoevsky's own ideas is irrelevant. But the particulars of Zundelovich's form ulation are not as im portant as his central notion that the voices of the three nar­

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rators conflict with each other; for him, it is only through un­ derstanding this conflict that the reader derives the meaning of the novel. T o describe the discord among the narrators is a com ­ plex task, because at times the narrators are in agreement —all three for example are joined in their hatred o f the ordinary m a n —but on more crucial m atters they may disagree, for the author asserts and the narrator can deny the prince's beau ty.33 The figure of the author-narrator, for Zundelovich, provides the key to Dostoevsky's style and to The Idiot. This figure is an expression of Dostoevsky's sense of the problem atic relationship between his idea and its artistic fulfillm ent.34 Zundelovich finds that the various methods of narration in The Idiot, all these mixtures of voice, are explained by the wish of the pure author to portray M yshkin convincingly to the reader.35 Zundelovich separates Dostoevsky the artist from D ostoev­ sky the thinker. In the case of The Idiot Dostoevsky the artist strove to embody the good (Myshkin) in a defined place and time. Dostoevsky the thinker had an idea of a timeless Christlike figure, an idea without real roots in the earth, which he tried to transplant into a realistic novel.36 There is a struggle be­ tween what the thinker posits and what the artist can actually portray. In The Idiot as in all Dostoevsky's novels the result is a complexity of narrative manner, as the author wishes to express himself clearly and to prove his supposition but is thwarted by the demands of the artist, who knows that he must portray the real w orld.37 Zundelovich's notion of the author-narrator describes the synthesis Dostoevsky made from these contradic­ tory intentions. Zundelovich gauges the effect of this kind of narrative upon the reader and arrives at the conclusion that D ostoevsky in­ tended to m ake his readers w ork while he manipulated them. 'T h e author sometimes gives the view that he has no such firm point of view; sometimes he really doesn't have it. He makes as if to let the reader decide what is true and not true, and therefore gives' definite appearances and estimations all at once (simultaneously) in various aspects; he forces the reader, for the sake of his peace of mind, to choose one or another variant of a perception of what has been portrayed."38 At the end of the novel, in the case of Rogozhin, the reader has the "difficult duty" of understanding what Rogozhin has done. Zundelovich finds

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that D ostoevsky has brought the reader to the realization that in the terrible world of ordinary men there is no place for either great men or great sinners —that both are miscarriages {vykidyshi) .39 M yshkin and the author-narrator do not decide the question of Rogozhin's guilt; the reader is forced to decide this issue and to perceive M yshkin as an idiot. Finally, Zundelovich observes that the pure author, who would m ake such a judgment, must unwillingly yield to the author-narrator who refrains from such judgments.40 Zundelovich's scheme differs from my own considerably. I find his hypothesis of three narrators intriguing but inaccurate, because the voice he identifies as Dostoevsky's embodies the same prejudices and weaknesses in logic as the narrator's voice, which the implied author seems to hold up to ridicule. His con­ ception of an author-narrator becomes hazy when actually ap­ plied to the text of the novel and seems to be a catch-all for those parts of the novel that cannot be attributed, in his system, to the author or the narrator. For me Zundelovich's author and narrator are in fact the same figure: the narrator. His authornarrator, like Booth's implied author, never speaks directly, but he is ever-present, manipulating the narrator, the characters, and the shape of the plot with equal ruthlessness. Zundelovich and I do agree that the business of understanding the narrative is the key aspect of reading The Idiot , and, significantly, he does not attribute all these layers of narrative to the result of chance and blunder on Dostoevsky's part. He sees a struggle among the different narrative voices and posits a reader who must perceive that struggle and choose his own stance. Thus, these three varied readings of The Idiot —Lord's, Frank's, and Zundelo­ vich's —have all found solutions to the riddles posed in the novel by examining its narrative structure and by assessing the effects of that structure upon the reader. The narrator's voices in The Idiot shape the reader's response to the novel as much as do the voices of any of the characters or any of the events in which they are entangled. The narrator's changing relationship with the reader, his predict­ ability which gradually grows into unreliability, his ultimate abandonment o f his hero at the moment when the hero most needs his sympathy —all these elements contribute to the mean­

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ing of the novel at its most essential level. But that meaning can only take final shape in the collision between the novelist and the reader, for the novel (indeed, any novel) is the bridge link­ ing the novelist's idea and the reader's readiness to uncover the existence of that same idea within himself. By positing the cohabitation of a narrator's reader and an implied reader within the real reader, I have been able more easily to describe the possible effects and implications of the varied narrative tones in the novel. W hen the implied author and his reader reject the narrator and his reader's perception of the events of the novel, they have left the words of the novel and its fictional world behind; they have found a means of com ­ munication beyond words. Yet only with the inevitable distor­ tion of the idea by the narrator through his inadequate words and only with the real reader's partial acceptance of those words, in his role as narrator's reader, can the eventual com ­ munion between the implied author and reader take place. The •form of the novel has perfectly represented its basic idea: the wholly beautiful character has been portrayed and apprehended even amidst the sordid facts of everyday life. The inadequate vehicle for such a portrayal —words —in the end prove ade­ quate. Myshkin's failures among the characters turn out to be irrelevant for he has succeeded in a more important sphere: he has made the real reader of the novel face, however briefly, his own responsibility as forgiver and judge. The reader, through enacting his simultaneous roles of narrator's reader and implied reader, has transplanted the ideas of the novel into his own being.

The Clash of Truth and Falsehood: The Inserted Narrative Parts I and II

,

I have no doubt that a great part of Fielding's reason for the in­ troduced story, and Smollett's also, was, that it is sometimes really impossible to present, in a full book, the idea which it contains (which yet it may be on all counts desirable to pre­ sent), without supposing the reader to be possessed of almost as much romantic allowance as would put him on a level with the writer. —Charles Dickens, letter to. John Forster (1856)

There should be no episodes in a novel. Every sentence, every word, through all those pages, should tend to the telling of the story. Such episodes distract the attention of the reader, and always do so disagreeably. —Anthony Trollope, An A utobiography (1883)

n The Id iot, as in all Dostoevsky's fictional works, inserted narratives help shape the overall nar­ rative. These fictitious articles, diaries, poems, tales, and anecdotes are products of a structural and tonal irony that differs from the irony often present in the voices of the nar­ rator. While the narrator-chronicler can control his portrayal of a particular character, he cannot alter what that character actu­ ally says. The ironic portrayal of the characters is the province of the narrator, but the narratives related by the characters are the province of the implied author. It is he, and not the nar­ rator, who determines their content. The narrator-chronicler is limited to reporting the content of these interpolated passages and to describing the manner of their delivery. The irony in these narrated passages is less explicit than the irony discernible in some of the narrator's voices, but it is equally fundamental,

I

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for it operates by duplicating or varying the thematic as well as the structural bases of the novel. Inserted narratives have formed a part o f the novel since Cervantes' Don Quixote.1 Since the eighteenth century, too, their presence has provoked debate. In 1795 Richard Cumber­ land described a lengthy interpolated tale in Tom Jones as an "excrescence that offends against the grace and symmetry of the plot: whatever makes a pause in the main business, and keeps the chief characters too long out of sight, must be a defect."2 Forseeing the possibility of just such reproaches, Fielding, in his role as narrator of Tom Jones , derided any 'little reptile of a critic" who presumed "to find fault with any of the parts of the novel without knowing the manner in which the whole is con­ nected."3 D ostoevsky was an inveterate user of the inserted narrative. His use of that device lies squarely within the tradition of the western novel, although predictably Dostoevsky adjusts it to serve his own ends. His characters relate confessional and bio­ graphical narratives, and these tales directly shape the reader's perception of the present action. Unlike Cervantes and Fielding, who most often employed this device to create contrasts to the main action, D ostoevsky usually had these passages function as analogues to the main action. The inserted narrative becomes a means of bypassing the voice of the narrator-chronicler and of allowing the implied author ("Dostoevsky") a m ore direct com ­ m unication with the implied reader. Both Leonid Grossman and M ikhail Bakhtin discussed Dostoevsky's use of interpolated narratives. Grossman has fre­ quently pointed out the whirlwind quality of Dostoevsky's style —a whirlwind that revolves around a philosophical core or idea —and he described, in particular, Dostoevsky's effort to subordinate the polar elements of the narrative to a unified philosophical intention. "To combine in one artistic creation philosophical confessions with criminal adventures, to include a religious drama in the plot of a boulevard tale, to bring through all the peripeteias of the adventure narrative to the revelation of a new mystery —these are the kinds of artistic tasks which ap­ peared before Dostoevsky and stimulated him to his complex creative w ork."4 In discussing the ties Dostoevsky's works have with the

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Socratic dialogue and the Menippean satire, Bakhtin noted that Dostoevsky's interpolated passages in particular contain vestiges of the latter form .5 Bakhtin stressed the role that other forms of rhetoric and discourse play in shaping the menippea. "The menippea characteristically makes wide use of other genres: novellas,letters, oratory, symposia, etc.; the mixture of prose and verse diction is also characteristic. The inserted genres are presented at various distances from the author's ultimate position; i.e ., with various degrees of parody and objectivization. The verse parts are almost always to a certain degree parodical."6 D ostoevsky regarded his "menippean" tendencies with more ambivalence than does his critic Bakhtin. He never abandoned them or tried seriously to change his style. One can even argue convincingly that these "tendencies" form an essen­ tial part o f his version of the novelistic form . Nevertheless, in 1871 he wrote to Strakhov, "You have pointed out the main de­ ficiency terribly aptly. Yes, I have suffered and am suffering from this; I haven't known at all, up to now, how to get control of my means. I have squeezed together a great number of sepa­ rate novels and tales into one novel, so that there is neither measure nor harmony" (P, II, 358).

Dostoevsky has himself foreshadowed Henry James's famous accusation that "Tolstoi and Dostoevsky are fluid pud­ dings, though not tasteless." "But there all sorts of things to be said of them [Tolstoy and Dostoevsky]," James wrote, "and in particular that we see how great a vice is their lack of composi­ tion, their defiance of economy and architecture, directly they are emulated and imitated; then as subjects of emulation, models, they quite give themselves away. There is nothing so deplorable as a work of art with a lea k in its interest; and there is no such leak of interest as through commonness of form. Its opposite, the fou n d (because the sought-for) form is the abso­ lute citadel and tabernacle of interest."7 This criticism would have been especially bitter to Dostoevsky because he shared James's unshakeable preoccupation with holding the reader's in­ terest. Despite their obvious differences as novelists, Dostoev­ sky and James used similar strategies to secure that interest. Both wrote about the importance of presenting events dramati­ cally; both often placed, although in different ways, an intelli­ gent but somewhat bewildered consciousness at the center of a

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novel. James explicitly stated the effectiveness of this device; Dostoevsky's deliberate choice of the figure of the narratorchronicler demonstrates an implicit understanding of the effec­ tiveness of the intelligent but not wholly omniscient narrator. Although D ostoevsky undoubtedly expressed himself sincerely to Strakhov, it is easy for his readers to find that the "great number of separate novels and tales" do in fact contribute to "the measure and harmony" of his novels. In The Idiot the in­ serted narratives and the anecdotes that the characters themselves choose to relate develop further the implied author's obsession with the effects of narration in this novel. The characters manifest a concern with the problem of narration, of how an event can be portrayed, if at all. The characters, like the narrator, assume varied voices in trying to express themselves; they all share a belief in the power of narrative while at the same time they perceive that, to some extent, to narrate is to lie. Part I of The Idiot contains parables, anecdotes, and confes­ sions. Myshkin's parabolic anecdotes herald the main themes of the novel and provide the most concise, unproblematic state­ ment of them. From the moment that M yshkin arrives at the Epanchin household he begins to speak in parabolic language. Dostoevsky's notebook form ulation, "Prince Christ," has found its logical narrative extension. W hile waiting to meet General Epanchin, M yshkin tells the general's valet about the execution of a prisoner he witnessed a month before in Lyons. The prisoner, Legros, wept from fright. M yshkin, like Christ, challenges the severity of the law: "It is said: T h o u shalt not kill'; so that, because he has killed shall he in turn be. killed? No, this must not be." (VIII, 20; 43). For M yshkin, the most terrible aspect of the execution is the cer­ tainty of death which the condemned man must face. "And there is no suffering on earth greater than this . . . W ho says that human nature is in a condition to bear this without slipping into madness? W hy this ugly, unnecessary, useless outrage?" (VIII, 21; 44). Myshkin's anecdote foreshadows Ippolit's confession of his agony; it reveals that he shares Ippolit's perception of the horror of certain death.8 Myskhin's narrative also first reveals his obsession with time —with the moment before death —which plays so crucial a role throughout the novel.

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When Madame Epanchin first meets Myshkin she asks him to sit down by the fire: "I want to know how youll narrate something. I want to be completely convinced . . . Well, then, tell something" (VIII, 47; 75). Her assessment of Myshkin shall hinge upon his abilities as a narrator. Myshkin obliges her with an account of his first impression of Switzerland: a donkey braying in the Basel marketplace had cheered him and helped clarify his muddled thoughts. "Through this donkey suddenly all Switzerland became pleasing to me, so that my former melancholy passed away completely" (VIII, 48; 76). Later Adelaida jokingly asks the prince to teach them to see and to be happy. She remarks that he is a philosopher. M yshkin responds with another narrative: the story of a man sentenced to death who received a sudden reprieve at the scaffold.9 As in the story he had just told to the generals valet, M yshkin strains to perceive the impact of certainty upon the flow of time. "He [the prisoner] said, that those five minutes seemed to him to be an endless period of time, a tremendous richness; it seemed to him that in these five minutes he would live so many lifetimes that there was still no reason even to think about the final m o­ m ent." But the condemned m ans conviction that if life were given back to him he would turn each moment into a century, tortures him more than the knowledge of his approaching death. (Again Myshkin's narrative has prefigured Ippolit's state­ m ent.) M yshkin abruptly ends his anecdote, "He said that this thought finally enraged him so that he wanted them to shoot him as quickly as possible" (VIII, 52; 80). He apologizes to the Epanchin women for preaching to them and for talking so strangely, but nevertheless admits that he believes he can live more intelligently than everyone else. W e see M yshkin as an apologetic but didactic narrator consciously seeking to teach others by means of his tale. Aglaya reacts to his narrative as might a troubled (or im­ plied) reader. "And don't w orry, please, that you are preaching at us. From your point of view there is no reason for exultation. W ith your quietism one could live a hundred years in happi­ ness. Show you an execution and show you a little finger, you will draw the same praiseworthy thought from the one as from the other, and, what is m ore, you will remain contented" (VIII, 53; 82). Her healthy cynicism towards his narrative allows the

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real reader of the novel a m ore sympathetic response, for her skepticism minimizes the reader's need to express his own doubts about M yshkin. A few moments later M yshkin paints an excruciatingly vivid verbal picture of the face of a condemned main a moment before the blade of the guillotine falls. The condemned man's brain is throbb.ingly alive; it races 'like a machine at full speed" (VIII, 56; 85). (Later Ippolit uses a similar vocabulary.) At the end of this passionate narrative the Epanchin girls do not re­ spond to what M yshkin has told them but to how he has told it. They judge M yshkin as a narrator rather than allowing them­ selves to be carried away by what he has said. Adelaida remarks that the moment he starts telling something he stops being a philosopher. That is, for her, his didactic, programmatic intent subordinates itself to his power as an artist —his power to in­ terest his audience through sheer narrative skill. Rather than focusing on Myshkin's narrative prowess, Aglaya concentrates on the moment when he suspends his nar­ ration: the moment in fiction when the implied author becomes an ordinary man again and the bond between implied author and implied reader is severed. "As soon as you finish narrating anything you immediately become ashamed of what you've been narrating . . . why is that?" (VIII, 57; 86). The prince gives her no answer; he merely begins another story, his longest, about the Swiss children and the peasant M arie. His tale of the peasant M arie has obvious analogues to the Gospels and to the subsequent events in the novel and also pro­ vides a bridge between them. Although this narrative is not part of the plot, it serves to introduce the hero in a field of action which the reader can easily compare to the activities of Christ. M arie resembles a vilified M ary Magdalene redeemed by the Christ-like M yshkin. The story also foreshadows the NastasiaTotsky-Rogozhin-M yshkin plot in which M yshkin will seek to redeem another woman who had been wronged. Myshkin's so­ journ in Switzerland gave him the experience and narrative material for his time in Petersburg. By means of this narrative, M yshkin presents himself to the Epanchins and to the reader as a "positively good m an," as a Christ come to Russia. M ore interesting, however, than the obvious thematic links between M ary Magdalene-Marie-Nastasia and Christ-M yshkin

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is the attitude towards narration and towards the audience that emerges from Myshkin's rendering of personal experience. Just as the subject m atter of the tale of M arie provides a model for subsequent events, so does Myshkin's belief in the sheer power o f telling introduce a dominant preoccupation which the im­ plied author continues to develop. M yshkin wins the hearts of the Swiss children through his ability as a narrator, through his storytelling. O f course, as M yshkin tells the Epanchin girls of his previous conquestthrough-language he is also, at that moment, winning over both Aglaya and the reader of the novel. His account of the power of tale-telling exerts a new force as it is being told. This is one of the many examples throughout Dostoevsky's canon of the fruit­ ful mechanism by which good travels through the world: Myshkin's good deed in Switzerland becomes the seed for awakening compassion in a new set of people. The irony is that M yshkin himself tells his own good deed. His double role as doer of good and as narrator of that same good becomes prob­ lematic. Consequently, characters in the novel mistrust him when he is absent; they cannot define his role. Like O thello, M yshkin values his strength as a narrator. He tells the Epanchin daughters that the children in his Swiss village always asked him to tell them stories: "It seems to me I narrated well, because they very much loved to listen to me. Conse­ quently I would study and read just so that I could then tell them things, and for three years I told them about everything" (V lli, 61; 91). The adults in the village scolded him for his nar­ rative honesty to the children. But for M yshkin it was essential that the truth be told to his audience, the children. "One can tell everything to a child," he exclaims (VIII, 58; 87). He converts the children's contempt for M arie into love by the strength of his words, "Little by little we began to talk to each other; I hid nothing from them; I told them everything. They listened with curiosity and soon began to pity Marie" (VIII, 60; 91). Myshkin's story functions as a parable for the Epanchin sisters: he presents them with a model of how to live. Earlier they had asked him if he had come to teach them, and he had acknowledged that perhaps he had. But the implied author in­ jects a structural irony into the anecdote: if Myshkin's story functions parabolically, that is, in some sense indirectly, the en-

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tire thrust of its content is in the opposite direction —one must be direct and tell everything explicitly. The content of the tale is explicit, yet its intention or function is implicit. Later, near the end of the novel at the Epanchins' soirée, M yshkin again tries to "tell everything" and fails m iserably. He converts no one and succeeds only in making himself ridiculous. In the tale of M arie, M yshkin has set up a standard that no one —not even he —can realize. In fact, a hidden deception lies at the core of this narrative despite its sincere concern with the appropriateness of telling the truth. M yshkin admits that he did tell the children one small lie: "It seems to me that my love for M arie was an excruciating pleasure for them, and so in this aspect alone of my life did I deceive them. I did not undermine their belief that I loved M arie, that is, I was not in love with her at all, but only greatly pitied her" (VIII, 61; 92). Yet this small lie distorts the crux of the m atter. M yshkin has allowed the children to believe a fantasy. The mechanism of their compassion for M arie was inspired by their belief that "Leon" loved her. Although Myshkin's small lie served the cause of a more encompassing goodness or truth, the fact remains that the truth m ay, then, Contain an area of silence or even of deception. M yshkin pretends love for M arie in order to awaken the children's pity for her. W ere he merely to ask for their pity, he would call forth only their indifference. For the children the pleasure lay in the romance of the affair —in clothing her, in standing guard at the 'lovers' trysts," in caring for her as she lay dying. M yshkin's parabolic anecdotes, especially this tale of the peasant M arie, establish him as a good man and a sincere one; yet even he, as a narrator, cannot always speak the absolute truth. Though his stories are not "false narratives" —in the teile of M arie he readily admitted his own falsehood —they reflect the perplexity of the constantly shifting boundaries between truth and lies. Myshkin's narratives seem to flow from him with great readiness and unusual spontaneity. But, in fact, as a narrator he displays a constant concern for order, for strategy. He starts to tell the Epanchins a story of a man who spent twelve years in prison; he interrupts himself and observes that he had better tell them of a different encounter. M oments later, he alludes to a

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painting he had seen in Basel and says that someday he will tell Adelaida about it. His directness and abruptness contribute to a notion of him as a spontaneous narrator, but actually his anec­ dotes are highly structured and deliberate. Before he begins his story about M arie, he tells Lizaveta Prokof'evna that he knows her daughters' faces as well as she does. W hen asked what he knows, he replies that he will tell them afterwards. As he is concluding his narrative about M arie with a description of the children's farewell to him, the end of the story suddenly opens out into the present. "And I also looked [back at them] . . . Listen, when I came here earlier and looked at your sweet faces —I now observe faces very care­ fully — and heard your first words, I felt easy in my heart for the first time since then" (VIII, 65; 95-96). The themes of his nar­ rative extend into the world of the novel through his linking of the Epanchin girls to the Swiss children. M yshkin has carried out his promise to describe their faces, although his deliberate intention seems to have arisen by chance out of his rom antic narrative. Yet even M yshkin is at pains to deny the notion of his spontaneity: "And don't think that I have said all this so openly now to you about your faces out of simplemindedness; oh no, not at all! M aybe I have something in mind" (VIII, 65; 96). Like the narrator, M yshkin tantalizes his audience by trying to mys­ tify them. He too is a shameless manipulator.

Aglaya, the critical member of the audience, again ignores the content of what the prince has related and speculates instead about its intention or function. While Lizaveta Prokof'evna praises Myshkin's words, Aglaya points out that the prince himself has acknowledged a secret purpose and was not speak­ ing openly. Adelaida and Alexandra, voicing the responses of narrator's readers, find the prince to be "a bit too simple"; Aglaya, corresponding to an implied reader, disagrees. As a narrator, Myshkin can even use the truth deceptively. Later that same morning he deliberately recasts the content of his narratives in order to avoid and mislead Ganya, Myshkin shows himself to be a wily narrator who turns on and off the ef­ fects of his words at will. While they walk home together, Ganya asks what Myshkin had talked about with the Epanchins that had made them like him so quickly:

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"At the very beginning . . . we began to talk about Switzerland." "Well, the hell with Switzerland!" "Then about capital punishment." "About capital punishment?" "Yes, apropos of . . . then I told them how I lived there for three years, and a story about a poor country girl." "Well, the hell with the poor country girl."

(VIII, 74; 107)

The misrepresentation lies in Myshkin's condensation of par­ ticular truths into uninteresting, generalized form s. The braying donkey which had com ically recalled M yshkin to his senses has becom e "Switzerland." The man facing the blade of the guil­ lotine has become "capital punishment." The violated child has become "a poor country girl." In the process of summarizing the content of his narration, the truth becomes a deception. The final irony for the reader occurs when Ganya adds, "and he doesn't know how to narrate anything!" (VIII, 75; 108). The opposite movement occurs in the two brief narratives related by General Ivolgin in the next two chapters. In both cases, his blatant, free-flowing lies contain a significant amount of truth and goodness. M yshkin, who receives his first un­ equivocal welcome from the general, is not "put through an examination" as he was by the Epanchin women. Instead, the general goes so far as to provide M yshkin with a fictive biography: he does not even hesitate to contradict M yshkin on the few facts about his past of which M yshkin himself is certain. For example, the general insists that Myshkin's m other died not from a chill but from grief for her husband, the prince. The general describes his own participation in a preposterous near­ duel with Myshkin's father: "the prince cried out: she's yours. I cried out: she's yours! In a word . . . in a word . . . you have come to live . . . with us?" (VIII, 81; 116). Having invested M yshkin with a colorful biography, he welcomes the prince into the bosom of his fam ily. "But we are always glad to have you. However, there is tragedy in m y house!" (VIII, 81; 116). The notes of truth ring out through the blur of lies. Ivolgin's biography of M yshkin further underlines for the reader the queer fact that M yshkin is singularly, even eerily without a past. (All the anecdotes he has related have been only from his recent past). So far, the reader has been presented with short biographies of the other main characters —Rogozhin, Nas-

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tasia, and Aglaya. Ivolgin's ramblings do elicit the few facts of Myshkin's biography that the reader ever learns. These facts are provocative: Myshkin's father died awaiting trial, but for what? M yshkin doesn't know. Later, General Ivolgin tells Nastasia Filippovna an anecdote about tossing a lady's lapdog from a train window. He has plagiarized the whole adventure from a popular Brussels news­ paper L'Indépendance Belge , but succeeds, nevertheless, in tell­ ing much about himself that is true. He has revealed his despair at the loss of his dignity. The telling of the story works in two contradictory ways; it is both an attempt to recapture that dig­ nity through assuming the character of the not-to-be insulted traveler and an attempt to fling it more irrevocably away. On a more prosaic level his narrative reveals that Ivolgin laments his rupture from the Epanchin fam ily. Both his narrations, the fictive biography and the anecdote about the lapdog, seek to establish the teller's sense of honor — in the first by a failed rom antic duel and in the second by an ac­ tual com ic one between the pale-blue lady and the cigar­ smoking traveler. Nastasia Filippovna exposes his anecdote as a fiction. Ivolgin's purity of intention, to welcome the new lodger and to assert his own dignity, is counterbalanced by the inap­ propriateness of his tales; his idea is true, but its mode of m anifestation is false. Nastasia Filippovna, a critical and more ruthless listener than Aglaya, insists that a fiction must be presented as such. A tale in a magazine is acceptable, but not when it is appropriated as autobiographical truth by a sad old man. At Nastasia Filippovna's nameday party, the reader en­ counters a third variation in the mixture of truth and falsehood embodied in the inserted narratives: the truth functions in the service of a lie. Ferdyshchenko, who serves as a herald of dis­ order and of brutally-arrived-at truths, presides over the uneasy group of guests as a master of cerem onies.10 He is accepted as a court jester or fool with special privileges to blurt out the truth. "It was understood that Ferdyshchenko was allowed to play the role of jester" (VIII, 117; 159). Ironically, he presents himself as a jester without any redeeming wit: "everyone has wit; but I have none. In compensation I have obtained permission to speak the truth, for, as everyone knows, only those who have

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no wit speak the truth" (VIII, 117; 159). Ferdyshchenko's words have an impressive, symbolic ring; they sound like a confession, but they are false. "Everyone" does not have wit, nor does "everyone" know that truth is spoken only by those who have no wit: in fact quite the opposite is true. Ferdyshchenko then proposes "the petit-jeu in which each person must confess his worst action." It is no surprise that under Ferdyshchenko's aegis the confes­ sional form will be heartily misused. W hen Ganya notes that everyone will be certain to lie, Ferdyshchenko answers, "yes, and the entertaining thing is just how a man will lie" (VIII, 121; 164). The confession becomes a mode of titillation for bored guests who want "cheering up." Their desire for originality has decayed into a hunger for anything provocative. Even Nastasia Filippovna has been infected; when the uninvited M yshkin ar­ rives, she insists that he must not apologize for his intrusion, for that would spoil all the "quaintness" and "originality." Later, when Ferdyshchenko proposes the confessional parlor game, she agrees, merely on the ground that its "terribly original." Thus the confessions of Ferdyshchenko, General Epanchin, and Totsky begin in an atmosphere of cynicism and hunger for the sensational. As Totsky notes, "Truth is possible here [in this game] only by accident, through a certain kind of boasting of the worst kind, which is unthinkable and completely indecent here [at the party]" (VIII, 122; 164). In his earlier works Dostoevsky had already treated the con­ fession as a problem atic, double-edged form . In Dostoevsky's work the truth will out in various ways, but it rarely finds un­ adorned release through the mode inherently concerned with the utterance of truth, the confession, defined as a statement or written document of some length which is narrated to someone else and usually reveals a dark secret or crime. As such, we may expect to see the confession functioning simultaneously as an expression of pride and an experiment in humility. Indeed, the terms become interchangeable. Pride masquerades as humility and vice versa. Confessions m ay seek to provoke, titillate, or lie; the narrator may expose, disguise, justify, or lacerate himself. But rarely does the confession consist of a simple, repentant declaration of wrong-doing or moral weakness. D os­ toevsky's scrutiny and critique of the literary confession fre­

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quently assumed the form of a veiled polemic with Rousseau and with his C on fession s.11 At times Dostoevsky even allowed the veil to drop, and, through his characters, named his adver­ sary. Dostoevsky singled out two episodes from the C onfes­ sions —one in which Rousseau wanders the streets at night and the other in which he falsely accuses a defenseless girl of the theft of a ribbon —as offering particularly rich opportunities for parodie variation in his own fiction.12 The confessions told at Nastasia Filippovna's nameday party contain a bracing mix of vanity, self-justifications, and lies. In his narrative Ferdyshchenko confesses to having pocketed a three-rouble note left on his hostess' work table. He then showed much kindness to the maid who was falsely ac­ cused of the deed and tried to persuade her to admit to the theft, assuring her that she could count on the leniency of her mis­ tress. T felt an extraordinary pleasure, particularly from the fact that I was preaching while the note lay in my pocket" (VIII, 124; 167). He spent the money that evening on a bottle of wine. When the audience responds with disgust, Ferdyshchenko again shows his understanding of what is typically most appreciated in a narrative, "Bah! You want to hear the worst act of a man and you demand that there be something shining in it. The worst acts are always filthy" (VIII, 124; 167). As a narrator he refuses to give the audience what they want, although he involuntarily seeks their approval. His con­ tempt for the confessional genre does not exempt him from wishing that its effects would be pleasant all the same. The nar­ rator takes wry note of Ferdyshchenko's enraged loss of com ­ posure when he observes his audience's disgust, "Strange as it may be, it is very likely that he expected a completely different success for his story" (VIII, 124; 168). Ferdyshchenko has cyni­ cally toyed with his audience's expectations, but he cannot di­ vorce himself from his need to be accepted.

Earlier Ganya and Totsky had insisted that confessions of one's worst acts would prove to be either expressions of vanity or mere lies. Ferdyshchenko understands that those who listen to a confession often expect to find something ennobling in the admission of guilt. The implied author has expressed his own mistrust of the confessional genre through the voices of these second and third rank characters.

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With this anecdote Dostoevsky has engaged in one of his most direct polemics with Rousseau. Although Ferdyshchenko does not openly refer to The C onfessions (as, for example, the underground man does), his anecdote recalls one of its principal episodes in which Rousseau himself discusses the nature of the confession. (Dostoevsky also probably used his own previous work as a source here. Ferdyshchenko s pleasure at his suc­ cessful framing of the servant girl and his delight, at the same time, in pretending to preach to her with dignity and kindness, resemble Luzhin's failed attempt to frame Sonya in Crime and Punishment.) In this early episode Rousseau describes a crime which has tormented him for forty years. He once stole a pink and silver ribbon and when it was discovered on him, he falsely accused the young cook of the household, Marion, saying she had given it to him. Ferdyshchenko's similar false accusation of the maid left him singularly free from remorse (indeed it gave him "ex­ traordinary pleasure"), whereas it was remorse that prompted Rousseau to write his confessions. Nevertheless Ferdyshchenko follows Rousseau in regarding this as the worst action of his life and the subject of his confession. Rousseau writes, "The burden, therefore, has rested till this day on my conscience without any relief; and I can affirm that the desire to some extent to rid myself of it has greatly contributed to my resolution of writing these Confessions."13 (The underground man, for all his alleged rejection of Rousseau, admitted the same motive for his con­ fession.) But Rousseau's analysis of his deed reveals a certain selfsatisfaction and unnerving self-confidence. He does not admit the possibility of a lie: "I have been absolutely frank in the ac­ count I have just given, and no one will accuse me, I am certain, of palliating the heinousness of my offence. But I should not ful­ fill the aim of this book if I did not at the same time reveal my inner feelings and hesitated to put up such excuses for myself as I honestly could. Never was deliberate wickedness further from my intention at that cruel moment."14 In fact, by the end of his account he seems to be positively proud of his crime. "So the memory tortures me less on account of the crime itself than be­ cause of its possible evil consequences. But I have derived some benefit from the terrible impression left with me by the sole

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offence I have committed. For it has secured me for the rest of my life against any act that might prove criminal in its results. I think also that my loathing of untruth derives to a large extent from m y having told that one wicked lie . . . I have little fear of carrying the sin on my conscience at death."15

Here is a brand of vanity not even dreamed of by such masters of confession as Valkovsky in The Insulted and Injured, or the underground man, or even Ferdyshchenko. Rousseau ex­ onerates himself with unshakeable impunity. His C onfessions provided the model for this genre throughout the nineteenth century. The resemblance of Ferdyshchenko's anecdote to this seminal episode in the C onfessions alerts the reader to the presence of a serious parody and critique of the confessional form. Everyone, from the implied author and reader to the characters themselves, has been duly warned that the confession is a morally bankrupt form .16 General Epanchin, the next participant in the petit-jeu, relates an incident that occurred thirty-five years earlier when he was a poor second lieutenant. Late one afternoon he cursed an old woman, his former landlady, for appropriating his soup bowl as payment for a broken pot. She sat facing him with no response. Later, he learned that she had been dying at the very time he had been swearing at her. To assuage his guilt, fifteen years ago he had provided for two ill old women; he is even considering the establishment of a permanent endowment at the public hospital. W hen Ferdyshchenko, now no longer a narrator but a mem­ ber of the audience, responds, "And instead of your nastiest deed, your Excellency, you have told one of the good deeds of your life; you have cheated Ferdyshchenko!" (VIII, 127; 171), the reader may at first agree with him. Certainly the general's in­ tention (whether successful or not) in this confession of a "worst deed" has secretly been to narrate a "best deed." Yet the general, contrary to his intent, has perhaps unknowingly narrated his worst deed after all —a personal evil deed which he sought to erase by an act of impersonal good in the form of "a permanent endowment by providing a capital fund." Throughout the novel the implied author explores the ways in which goodness travels through the world; he establishes a consistent opposition be­ tween effective acts of goodness and the ineffective, even harm ­

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ful results of institutionalized beneficence —philanthropy (chelovekoliubie ). (Compare Lebedevs later image of the disparity between real and spiritual bread.) General Epanchin's confession also resembles the episode from Rousseau's Confessions of which Ferdyshchenko made use. But where Ferdyshchenko's anecdote reflected the content of Rousseau's tale about the stolen ribbon while detaching itself from Rousseau's emotional stance, the general mimics Rousseau's attitude toward the deed, that is, his stance of guilty but lofty sincerity. The general notes that though the action oc­ curred long ago (thirty-five years, as compared to Rousseau's forty), he cannot recall it without experiencing a pang, Tn a word, the more time goes by, the more I think of i t . . . W ithout doubt, I am guilty, and, although I have already regarded my deed for a long time with the passing of years and with the change in my nature as being the deed of a stranger, I neverthe­ less feel sorry" (VIII, 126-127; 170). Rousseau expressed a similar sentiment, "I took away lasting memories of a crime and the unbearable weight of a remorse which, even after forty years, still burdens my conscience. In fact, the bitter memory of it, far from fading, grows more painful with the years."17 O f course the general's easy "after-dinner" attitude towards his crime does not have the ring of sincerity that Rousseau's lament does: in­ stead, his words both re-create and ridicule the structure of Rousseau's confession. M oreover, both Rousseau and General Epanchin end by being the ones to bestow forgiveness upon themselves. Rousseau assures himself that "really my crime amounted to no more than weakness."18 General Epanchin takes these selfassurances even further. "So that, I repeat, it seems strange to me, all the more that if I am guilty, I am not completely guilty" (VIII, 127; 170). He manages finally to blame the old woman for letting herself die at that unfortunate moment. Furthermore, each confidently proclaims that the evil deed has yielded a measure of good. W e have already encountered Rousseau's in­ sistence that his "sole offense" had "secured him for the rest of his life against any act that might prove criminal in its results . . . Poor M arion finds so m any avengers in this world, that, however great my offense against her may have been, I have lit­ tle fear of carrying the sin on my conscience at death."19 In like

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spirit General Epanchin describes his subsequent acts of philan­ thropy. Totsky's account of his worst action arouses interest in the reader and the other characters because they all already know one of his worst deeds. Indeed, the results of his violation of Nastasia Filippovna have generated the plot of most of the novel so far. So T o tsk y s choice of an anecdote must provide a com m entary on what is already known about him. He narrates an incident that occurred twenty years earlier in the country. He presented a bouquet of red camellias to the young wife of the Marshal of the Nobility, delighting the couple greatly. But he got the flowers by means of lies and deceit, for the wife's wouldbe lover had confided to Totsky where he had planned to get the camellias for the ball that evening, and Totsky rushed out to acquire them him self.20 The despairing lover, in true Lerm ontovian fashion, volunteered for action in the Caucasus and was killed. Totsky himself admits that "it came out decidedly like a novel." For Totsky there can be no worst deed because immorality does not exist for him. He cares only for beauty, taste, and originality; it is impossible for him to make a genuine confes­ sion. Ferdyshchenko again cries that he has been cheated. In fact, the narrator remarks as Totsky begins his narrative, that this is another of his "sweet [m ilyi ] stories." Totsky freely admits that he has committed a motiveless act. Although Dostoevsky rarely mentioned Rousseau in his writings, his involvement with the C onfessions was particularly intense.21 For D ostoevsky, a character's use of the confessional mode was always problem atic. A confession could register and convey the condition of the inner man but, like a giant ther­ mometer measuring the temperature of a single drop of water, the fact of the confession —the measurement of this condition — falsified or changed the substance being measured. W hen D os­ toevsky's characters —for example, the M ysterious Stranger in The Brothers K aram azov —do manage to confess the truth, often no one believes them. Ironically, both Belinsky and Strakhov, two ideologically opposed critics, compared Dostoevsky to Rousseau, although D ostoevsky himself so often took issue with him. Belinsky wrote in 1846: T am now reading The C onfessions —in all my

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life, few books have acted on me as powerfully as this one," but in a later letter he remarked, "I have a great loathing for this man. He so resembles Dostoevsky."22 Strakhov, in denouncing his own biography of Dostoevsky at the time of its publication, wrote to Tolstoy, "I cannot consider Dostoevsky either a good or happy man (which, in essence, is the same thing). He was spiteful, envious, dissolute, and spent all his life in a state of agi­ tation that made him appear pitiful and would have made him appear ridiculous if he had not at the same time been so spiteful and so intelligent. Like Rousseau, however, he considered him­ self the best and the happiest of men."23 Strakhov's comments would have especially embittered Dostoevsky, for it was precisely Rousseau's habit of self­ justification through confession that Dostoevsky held up to scrutiny time and time again. One cannot imagine Dostoevsky saying as Rousseau does: "So let the numberless legion of my fellow men gather round me, and hear my confessions. Let them groan at my depravities, and blush for my misdeeds. But let each one of them reveal his heart at the foot of Thy Throne with equal sincerity, and may any man who dares, say, 1 was a bet­ ter man than he.'"24 Without some kind of irony or qualifica­ tion, Rousseau's faith in his own sincerity is unnerving.25 Dos­ toevsky, whom one may tentatively, gingerly equate with Myshkin in this respect —although it is, of course, always dangerous to make such equations between authors and char­ acters —always acknowledged his "double thoughts"; he never claimed such "pre-eminence in sincerity." In Part I of The Idiot the narratives related by the characters covered many points along the spectrum from true to false. The reader has confronted genuine and parodie exempla. The exemplum, traditionally told by a medieval preacher, sought to il­ lustrate a general truth through a particular instance or story, which was usually considered to be true. Myshkin's several tales functioned as genuine exempla; he constructed models for how one should live. Because each of his anecdotes exhibited a con­ cern with time or a moment in time, they also foreshadowed the narrative structure of the novel which itself focuses on impor­ tant moments.26 Moreover, his parables expounded the ideals and spiritual foci of the novel. The confessions at the end of Part I are false exempla, both

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in theme and in intent. Them atically, their text —to describe one's worst act —turns the norms of the exemplum upside down. No moral is pointed out; instead, something immoral is elaborated. The impact of their immorality is compounded by the fact that two of these worst actions prove to be lies, for they do not in fact depict the character's worst deed. The audience knows it has been deceived and mocked. General Ivolgin's bio­ graphical narratives also lied. But his unreliable narrations had a purity of intention, while these confessions, though bio­ graphically accurate, served hypocritical ends. All these in­ serted narratives have shared a preoccupation with the truth and with time —with revealing or concealing the truth, and with apprehending and comprehending time, either through eternal­ izing a moment or by remembering and reinventing the past. In Part II of the novel the inserted narratives continue to manifest a concern with time and with the re-creation of the past. Lebedev's anecdote about the Countess du Barry crying out "just one m oment!" as she's dragged to the guillotine parodies Myshkin's first parable about the execution of Legros. Both Myshkin and Lebedev (and later Ippolit) perceive the ab­ solute certainty of death as the greatest misery man must en­ dure. Lebedev remarks, "Do you know what the word misère means? W ell, that's exactly what misère is. W hen I read about the countess' cry for just one moment, I felt as if my heart had been seized in a vise" (VIII, 164; 217). Lebedev seriously and piously concludes that he prays for the Countess du Barry and for all other sinners; in the next breath he deceitfully misnames himself to M yshkin, who has absentmindedly forgotten Lebed­ ev's first name and patronym ic. Lebedev will reveal himself in his narrative, but in the business of daily living he lies continually. His nephew accuses him of being well-read (a vice Lebedev shares with the Epanchin sisters and with Nastasia and which thus alerts the reader to the probability of Lebedev's importance later in the novel). Lebed­ ev's brief story about the countess signals to the reader that the preoccupation with death and the moment before death of Part I will continue in Part II. The reader also sees, through Lebedev's choice of narrative subject, that however much of a buffoon he is, he shares to an uncanny degree Myshkin's visions of life and death.

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As in Part I the action of Part II begins with M yshkin ar­ riving by railroad into Petersburg, paying calls, and delivering parabolic, autobiographical anecdotes. He visits Rogozhin's house for the first time. While on his way out, M yshkin sees the copy of the Holbein painting of Christ being taken down from the cross. Rogozhin suddenly asks M yshkin if he believes in God. M yshkin evades answering; then, about to depart, he blurts out, "as for faith I, last week, in two days, had four dif­ ferent encounters" (VIII, 182; 239). He begins a parabolic nar­ rative composed of four distinct parts. First M yshkin tells of meeting a well-known atheist on a train and finding that this man, like other atheists whose works he had read, never really discussed his disbelief in God. M ysh­ kin intimates that such a discussion is impossible. "He doesn't believe in God. Except one thing struck me: he didn't seem to be talking about that at all . . . even formerly, however much I have met atheists . . . it has always seemed to me that they speak and write about something else though on the surface it seems to be about that" (VIII, 182; 239). No disbeliever can ex­ plicate atheism, because he relies upon reason and logic, which in turn depend solely on the use of language, to talk about something ineffable. (Later, Ippolit's confession takes up the question of the role of reason and logic in making a protest against God's world.) It is not surprising, then, that Myshkin's narrative begins with a rejection of language. T o understand the next three epi­ sodes he relates, the reader (and Rogozhin), must engage other, irrational faculties of perception. The implied author wields his novelistic theme about the inability of language to convey an idea accurately: even as M yshkin talks about the inadequacies of rational discourse and the atheists' overreliance upon it, the implied author does not exempt M yshkin from the same overreliance upon such discourse. M yshkin tries to meet the atheist on his own terms by arguing with him. The result, predictably, is that Myshkin's words also fail to convince, "I expressed this to him at the time, but, perhaps, unclearly, or else I did not know how to express it, because he understood nothing" (VIII, 182-183; 239). But M yshkin goes on to use language in a nonrational, parabolic way. In fact, this opening anecdote about the atheist represents his own rejection of rational discourse; he has taken a personal experience of his own in which he had at­

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tempted to use such discourse and has incorporated it into a plea for another means of com m unication.27 Continuing his narrative, M yshkin tells how he spent that night in a hotel where, the night before, a peasant had murdered his friend for his silver watch. The peasant had prayed, as he raised his knife, "God, forgive me for Christ's sake" (VIII, 183; 239). The next morning M yshkin meets a drunken soldier who urges him to buy a "silver" cross which they both know is tin. A n hour later he comes across a peasant woman with a baby and witnesses the baby's first smile at his m other. These three episodes illustrate the essence of Myshkin's religious feeling. At the Epanchins he had already revealed himself to be a deliber­ ate, strategic narrator, despite his seeming spontaneity. Here again he lays bare the painstaking structure of his parable as he concludes, "Listen, Parfyon: you asked me earlier; here is my answer: the essence of religious feelings doesn't depend on any reasoning, nor upon any wrongdoings or crimes, nor upon any kind of atheism. There something is not right and will be eter­ nally not right. There is something else there and there will be forever; there is something which the atheists will forever glide over, and they will forever be talking not about that" (VIII, 184; 240-241). As a narrator of an exemplum or parable knows, the raw data of experience have more impact than does a simple statement of the truth the story seeks to illustrate. Myshkin's philosophical conclusion has gathered power and escaped boring didacticism because of the compelling stories that pre­ ceded it. Throughout his tale a double irony operates: one must suc­ cessfully use words to express an idea that cannot be expressed by words. As M yshkin finished his account of these four events, he had returned to a description of his encounter with the atheist. The last three sentences of Myshkin's indirect answer to Rogozhin's question —"do you believe in God, or not?" —reflect how he, while using words, tries to escape from their descriptive and therefore limiting power. I quote them again, this time from the Russian, to show this effect more clearly: "tut chto-to ne to, i vechno budet ne to; tut chto-to takoe, obo chto vechno budut skol'zit' ateizmy i vechno ne pro to govorit'!" One must instantly recognize the essence of religious feeling. The implied author here may have indulged in a parodie echo of the Russian representative of reason, Chernyshevsky. He has M yshkin ex­

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claim to Rogozhin, "Est' chto delat', Parfen! Est' chto delat' na nashem russkom svete, ver' mne!" (VIII, 184; 241). ("There is much to be done Parfyon! There is much to be done in our Rus­ sian world, believe me!")

The anecdotes Myshkin related to the Epanchin family in Part I dealt with the quality of time in the real world and with the terror inspired by the approach of death. The eternal quali­ ties of time and death illustrated the transience of this world. In the four anecdotes which he has just narrated, Myshkin speculates about the nature of the next world. Aspects of every­ day life provide analogues for understanding eternity and time. As in Part I, his stories depict incidents from daily life, but here Myshkin makes his experiences serve as fables for elucidating the mysteries of God and faith. Myshkin telescopes into one story the four different en­ counters which occurred consecutively throughout two days. While his parables in Part I were separate incidents, here several discrete events form a whole. The rational atheism of the wellknown man is countered wryly, ironically, by the peasant's bit­ ter prayer for forgiveness as he slits his friend's throat. His prayer is uttered automatically (that is, without reason or logic), but it may prove to be the spark that will ultimately ig­ nite his genuine repentance. The drunken soldier who exultantly sells Myshkin the tin cross may be, as Myshkin speculates, the husband of the peasant woman with the baby. She eloquently and simply imparts her comprehension of God to Myshkin, the eager student and missionary of Russian faith. The mother's joy at her baby's first smile and her inspired comparison of her joy to that of God upon viewing the sincere prayer of a sinner en­ compass and make forgivable all those who went before —the atheist, the murderer of a friend, the drunken soldier. Myshkin does not answer Rogozhin's question about his be­ lief in God directly. Instead he connects these events to show Rogozhin that his faith exists, even thrives, amidst the grim re­ alities of Russian life. Myshkin's faith consists of his acceptance of the whole range of human activity; the baby's smile does not undo the murder or the swindle, but it exists and manages to exert its force of joy in spite of them. Myshkin's faith manifests itself, both in the stories he tells and in his relations with the other characters, as a sad acceptance of the coexistence of evil

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with good and of the inevitability of double thoughts. For him, one genuine spark of goodness can illuminate the whole and render it precious. Nevertheless Myshkin remains, as in Part I, a crafty nar­ rator. The order of these four events is crucial to his argument. The atheist cannot talk about God because his atheism is caused by his rational response to evil and to injustice, while faith exists as an instinctual response to life. The two spheres do not in­ tersect; the outrage and indignation of the atheist, for Myshkin, cannot penetrate to the realm where faith functions. Thus, the atheist cannot effectively challenge the believer who may, who must, share that very outrage with him. Typically, D ostoevsky as a polemicist eagerly conceded as much as possible to his opponent's argument and then, having given much, deftly appropriated all.28 Here the implied author has endowed M yshkin with skills at the same technique: the murderer and the swindler become evidence for the existence of God and for the miracle of faith. The murderer's prayer gen­ uinely, though inexplicably, atones for his deed even as he com ­ mits it, while the drunken soldier cheats his customer but in­ advertently becomes a "peddler of Christ" (VIII, 183; 240). The m other and baby provide the final illuminating analogy. For M yshkin all experience serves to illustrate the existence of God; thus in his view the atheist cannot draw his arguments out of life. Yet how fortunate for M yshkin, here the narrator and proselytizer, that those four encounters happened in the order they did. Had they occurred in reverse order, for example, the baby's smile would have been buried under the weight of blood and dishonesty. It would not gleam through the dark with its sudden revelatory power, but would instead seem to be evidence for the atheist's conviction. The atheist's inability to talk about his sub­ ject would end the tale, with the audience sympathizing with him and feeling that somehow he must be right.

Most important, these anecdotes show the reader how Myshkin perceives his own experience. He constantly con­ solidates the events of his life into an object (or form) which he can then give as a gift, a gift of insight; he changes his own life into art. All the stories he has told have derived from his own experiences, yet he has transmuted them into symbolic myths. He manages even to give the events of the previous week an an-

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tique coating. "You see, at that time, I was always asking ques­ tions" (VIII, 183; 240). Time in its everyday sense has no mean­ ing for M yshkin, for whom a moment can be eternity and the events of a week before can seem to have occurred long ago. M yshkin has imparted an allegorical, metaphysical flavor to these four events. One wonders what his diary would be like; he would, no doubt, endeavor to endow each moment with equal, timeless significance. M yshkins narratives in Part I chronicled, in part, man's inevitable failure at living in the world —at making no more than a few moments of his life into eternal moments. This second set of incidents complements the first as M yshkin moves from minute analysis of important moments to a brief, unelaborated acceptance of mystery.

Myshkin's anecdote contains a mix of plot elements that quickly reappear in the novel. Myshkin and Rogozhin trade crosses and Rogozhin attempts to murder Myshkin with a knife in a hotel. Overarching all the events of the novel are elements from the beginning and end of his tale that haunt Myshkin unceasingly: the inevitable failure of words to convey an impor­ tant idea and his repeated attempts to recognize the essence of religious feeling in the Russian heart. Despite the stories he tells and despite his thorough involve­ ment with the other characters, Myshkin remains a mystery to both the reader and the characters. By the middle of Part II the reader may have grown impatient to know his hero better. Myshkin's mysteriousness in Part I was well and good, but by Part II the reader and the characters want to be able to fix him in some way. The two longest inserted narratives in Part II —the Pushkin poem recited by Aglaya and the newspaper article read by Kolya —have little in common in form or point of view with each other, but they share an urgent concern with describing Myshkin and offer the reader respectively a spiritual and a temporal biography of him. Aglaya introduces the theme of M yshkin as the "poor knight," who believes in an "image of pure beauty." She para­ phrases lines from two poems by Pushkin, "K ***" (1825) and 'There lived in the world a poor knight" (1829) ("Zhil na svete rytsar' bednyi"). Aglaya recites the later, shorter version of this second poem, which appeared in 1835 as part of "Scenes from the times of Chivalry" ("Stseny iz rytsarskikh vremen"). D os­

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toevsky took the text of the poem from volume seven of A n­ nenkov's edition of Pushkin which came out between 1855 and 1857.29 The longer 1829 version of the poem was not published because the censors had objected to Pushkin's direct naming of the subject of the knight's ideal: "The Holy Virgin/the m other of the Lord" ("Sviataia deva/Mater' gospoda"), and because the word "demon" {bes) appeared. (The demon, upon the knight's death, announced that the knight's soul belonged to hell, because he had pursued the m other of Christ in an improper w ay.) Surprisingly, not only during Pushkin's life, but even un­ til recently, the full text of this poem was not published.30 Aglaya creates an image of M yshkin that merges the figures of Cervantes' Don Quixote and Pushkin's poor knight. D ostoev­ sky has given her the expression of his own precious, revelatory form ulation of his hero that he had earlier shared with M aikov and his niece Sonya Ivanova. He has Aglaya say, "The poor knight' is the same Don Q uixote, but only serious and not comic" (VIII, 207; 269).31 She describes the poor knight with his vision of pure beauty who wears a rosary instead of a scarf, with the initials A .N .B . on his shield. Aglaya's substitu­ tion of the letters A .N .B . for those that really occur in the poem, A .M .D . (Ave, Mater Dei), embarrasses the prince (A .N .B . = Ave, Nastasia Barashkova). W hen Aglaya actually recites the poem, she substitutes instead the initials N .F.B. (Nastasia Filippovna Barashkova) and presents the prince'with “a painfully obvious riddle. Later, M yshkin sees Aglaya's recitation as a clear-cut exam­ ple of "m ans propensityTor d bïïbîëïh bu gh ts."~He thinks, "how Tröüld such sincere, beautiïuPfëëlîhg be jo in ecf with such un­ m istakable, and malicious m ockery?" (VÏÏÎ, 209; 272). All of M y sh k in s Activity in the novel centers around trying to make characters accept the inevitability of precisely this mix of sincerity with m ockery, of beauty with malice within them­ selves; he tries to make others acknowledge that sincerity and 'beauty do exist despite their proxim ity evil. Nevertheless, when he discovers this blend in Aglaya's narrative, he cannot explain the reason for it. That was a "question he found it im­ possible to answer" (VIII, 209; 272). Aglaya's rendition of the poem exemplifies a clash between form and content. The beautiful, sincere content and formal

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structure of the actual poem are oddly framed by its outer form: the double-edged manner of Aglaya's recitation. But, and this is what seems crucial to me, the poem exerts a transforming in­ fluence over its narrator. "All the initial affectation and pomposity with which she had begun to recite she concealed with such seriousness and with such penetration into the spirit and meaning of the poetic w ork, she pronounced each word of the verse with such meaning, she uttered each word with such high simplicity, that at the end of the reading she not only held the general attention, but, by rendering the lofty spirit of the ballad it was as if she had even partly justified that exaggerated, affected importance with which she had so solemnly stepped to the center of the veranda" (VIII, 208; 270). That is, Aglaya has deviously concealed her affectation behind a serious tone. But her layers of deception eventually cancel each other; her irony becomes indistinguishable from sincerity; in spite of herself she renders the poem perfectly. Her narration, then, embodies both the clash between sincerity and malice and displays the mysterious victory of goodness which M yshkin yearns to make others recognize. Aglaya's role throughout the novel constantly changes. Not only does she often becom e a mouthpiece for the implied author, but also at times indicates the proper response for the implied reader, as for example when she criticizes the prince for presuming to judge those around him. At times, acting hysteri­ cally and abandoning her critical faculties, she disappears into the thick of the plot. The narrator carefully avoids committing himself to a definite characterization of her m otives. A fter she has described the poor knight, the narrator observes, "it was dif­ ficult to tell by looking at her whether she was serious or laughing" (VIII, 207; 269). (Nevertheless, both she and Nastasia, the two bookish heroines, had instantly perceived M yshkin to be a heroic figure with a mission.)

Aglaya had partly explained the meaning of Pushkin's poem before she recited it, but her explanation had merely baffled Lizaveta Prokof'evna. Throughout Aglaya's narration Lizaveta and the reader find themselves excluded from a secret shared by the others. All of them, even the prince, already seem to know about the poor knight. (The reader does know that Aglaya had placed the prince's note in her copy of D on Q uixote and had

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later burst out laughing for "reasons unknown.") By having Aglaya explicate the poem before its delivery, the implied author can immediately after her recitation pass on to the dramatic response the poem provokes. The narrator underlines the importance of the poem to the whole story by commenting that afterwards the prince was troubled by it for a long time and that he was to recall details of its recitation later. Amidst the flurry of reactions to Aglaya's delivery and the subsequent con­ versations, the implied author succeeds in avoiding what the reader perhaps most desires: a discussion of the meaning of that recitation for Aglaya herself and for the prince. The implied author maintains the mystery as long as possible; only when the reader has forgotten about it and is preoccupied with new mysteries does he suddenly offer a solution. (This takes place some one hundred and fifty pages later when Aglaya tells M yshkin, rather unclimactically, that she had recited the poem in order to show him that she understood him .) A fter the reading of the poem, the conversation moves on to smaller m at­ ters: the buying of an edition of Pushkin's works and the significance of Evgeny Pavlovich's appearance in civilian dress. W hen Lizaveta asks about the poor knight, Prince Shch — explains that there is a strange Russian poem about such a char­ acter, "a fragment with neither a beginning nor an end" (VIII, 206; 267). The editors of the recent Soviet edition of D ostoev­ sky's works noted that Prince Shch — 's labeling of the poem as a fragment proves that Dostoevsky knew that the version of the poem appearing in the Annenkov edition was not complete. They assert that in 1866 one unpublished stanza of the ballad, the third, did becom e known to D ostoevsky.32 This verse described the exact vision of the poor knight, who actually saw the Virgin M ary at the foot of a cross while he was traveling on the road to G eneva.33 In the version of the poem transcribed in the novel, however, the nature of the knight's vision remains shadowy. Even in the shorter, published version of the poem to which D ostoevsky had access, the knight's holy vision renders him mysterious and untypical; he dies, faithful to his vision, but silent, m elancholy, and insane {bez prichast'ia ).34 The poem proves painfully prophetic; M yshkin returns to his remote Swiss refuge, silent, sad, and an idiot.35

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The Pushkin poem prefigured an uncanny spiritual bio­ graphy of the mysterious hero, M yshkin. Later in the same scene Kolya reads aloud a newspaper article written by Keller, which presents a physical biography of M yshkin. The effect of Pushkin's timeless ballad disappears amidst the confusion generated b y the satiric and slanderous portrait of M yshkin painted in the article. Nevertheless both narratives share a single aim: to offer an image of the prince to the prince himself. In both cases his role is that of subject and of unwilling, em bar­ rassed, and captive audience. In moving from a narrative in ballad form to a newspaper article the reader might expect to find a corresponding and fitting shift in biographical content, but in both narratives a disharmony remains between the subject matter and the means of its narration. While Pushkin's lyric ballad was recited by an initially mocking Aglaya, the ponderously satiric article is read by the devoted and sincere Kolya. He becomes the unwilling ve­ hicle for the transmission of abuse. Aglaya's mocking attitude clashed with the spirit of the poem she was reciting and the poem proved victorious. Here too the m atter being read eclipses its narrator, Kolya. The force of his good will is outweighed by the malice of the article. In both cases the power of art, which can determine its own rhetoric (whether true or false), super­ sedes the surrounding reality; it is the most dangerous of wea­ pons, for, as we have seen through Myshkin's use of art as well (in his carefully structured narratives), it is a powerful tool of persuasion. The newspaper article weaves an intricate web of truth and slander for Myshkin's biography; it also parodies some of the most serious ideas in the novel. By the time Aglaya had finally recited Pushkin's poem, nearly everyone seemed already familiar with the poor knight, and the poem itself was explicated before it was read. A similarly curious inversion of reading and response accom ­ panies the reading of Keller's newspaper article. Everyone ex­ cept the prince seems to have had some premonition of the ex­ istence of the article beforehand; only M yshkin is baffled. M oments before Ippolit, Burdovsky, D oktorenko, and Keller burst in, Aglaya announces cryptically, "You must acquit yourself triumphantly —and I'm terribly glad for you before­ hand" (VIII, 213; 276). In both narratives the reader is deliber­

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ately left out of things; despite his long, careful reading sud­ denly there seems to be an abundance of fully formed subplots and events about which he knows nothing. Furthermore, the article is preceded by false foreshadowing. Lebedev depicts the young men about to enter as having gone further than the "nihilists." He compares them to businessmen and adds, "they don't express themselves in some sort of little newspaper article, but, directly, in action" (VIII, 213; 277). The m otley group that arrives are anything but businessmen; their sole and excruciatingly inept means of expression has been a 'lit­ tle newspaper article" which they themselves subsequently repu­ diate. They are incapable of any direct action; they cannot even force themselves to exit in a forceful, appropriate manner.

As before, when Lizaveta had demanded that Aglaya recite the poem, now she insists that Kolya (though her first choice was the prince) read the article aloud. The article, which ap­ peared in one of the weekly humor newspapers,36 further under­ lines the extent to which Dostoevsky endowed Myshkin with details from his own biography. Here, for instance, Dostoevsky carried into the novel his five year old journalistic polemic with Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Sovremennik over the nihilists. A cruel epigram about M yshkin appears in the article. The editors point out that it parodies a satiric epigram from "Childhood Tales and Poems" called "Self-sufficient Fedya" ("Samonadeiannyi Fedia"), which appeared in 1863 in Svistok. The epigram, written by Saltykov-Shchedrin even before their polemic over the nihilists began, read as follows: Fedya did not pray to God, All right, he thought, just so! He grew lazier and lazier . . . And he made a fool of himself! Once he toyed carelessly With Gogol's "Overcoat," — And he filled Time (pun on Dostoevsky's journal Time] With his usual drawn-out proceedings. Fedia bogu ne molilsia, "Ladno, mnil i tak!"

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I popal vprosak! Raz bespechno on "Shinel'iu" Gogolia igral, — I obychnoi kanitel'iu Vremia napolnial . . . (IX, 443-444)

The similarity to the epigram in the novel is painfully obvious. Little Lyova toyed for five years With the overcoat of Schneider And he filled time With his usual drawn-out proceedings. Returning in his tight gaiters, He inherited a million, He prays to God in Russian, And he has robbed students. Leva Shneidera shinel'iu Piatiletie igral I obychnoi kanitel'iu Vremia napolnial. Vozvratias' v shtibletakh uzkikh, Million nasledstva vzial, Bogu molitsia po-russki,

A studentov obokral. (VIII, 221; 285)

It is intriguing that Dostoevsky chose to share a humiliating epigram with his character. While readers might admire his autobiographical account of a near-execution,37 he could not have brought back an already forgotten, cruel epigram for the same effect. In endowing Myshkin with a past, the article caters to the general curiosity about Myshkin's biography. More important, however, the article seeks to turn the mysterious hero into a type. The vague details of his biography become fodder for spurious generalizations: A strange incident has happened involving one of the scions of our defunct landed gentry (de profundisl), one of those scions, however,

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whose grandfathers completely ruined themselves at roulette, whose fathers were forced to serve as subalterns in the arm y, and, who, as usual, died while on trial for some innocent error in a fiscal sum, and whose children, like the hero of our story, either grow up as idiots or become involved even in criminal cases, in which, however, they are acquitted by the jury on the pretext that they have been edified and bettered in the process; or else, at last, they end up by creating one of those incidents which astound the public and disgrace our already suf­ ficiently disgraceful times. (VIII, 217; 281)

The reader has already learned from Myshkin himself that his father, a second lieutenant, had died in an army hospital while awaiting trial, which is all that Myshkin knows of the cir­ cumstances of his father's death. The article utilizes these same fragments of information and distorts them. Moreover, it seems that the "revolutionary nihilists" who supposedly are behind the \ article, are really prudes who hate any public scene; their sup- j posed scorn for convention is nonexistent. In the most conven­ tional way, they themselves mock the notion of idiocy, calling it an "interesting illness" and wonder, "can there be any treatment for idiocy? Just think of such a thing!" (VIII, 217; 281). They even deride the leniency of the new jury system. Despite its ridiculous treatment of them, the article does raise m any of the central concerns of the novel: the theme of how best to carry out a good deed, the theme of universal dig­ nity despite man's fallibility, the theme of the effect of the in­ dustrial revolution upon the spiritual nature of Russia, and even the theme of idiocy —of the impossibility of defining what it is and what it is not. M ost im portant, the article parodies the idea that genuine consciousness of having committed a crime and j genuine justice exist outside the laws, outside the jurisdiction of the courts. Thus Keller and his crew put forth the preposterous thesis that Burdovsky is the bastard son of Pavlishchev, Myshkin's deceased guardian, and urge M yshkin to share his in­ heritance with "the injured Burdovsky." They demand Burdovsky's rights, but not in the name of charity or justice through 'legal obligation." D oktorenko insists that they are appealing in the name of "natural human rights, the right of com m on sense and the voice of the conscience" (VIII, 223; 287). Their call for» M yshkin to respond with "good conscience" burlesques | Myshkin's own endeavors throughout the novel.

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Like the narrator of the novel, the narrator of the article labels Myshkin "the hero of our tale"; that is, he emphasizes the fictive nature of his discourse. (The creation of a deceptively fic­ tional atmosphere was also a convention of the feuilletonist.) But of course both narrators have used this technique of creating a false distance from their subject in order to convey the opposite idea in the end —the reality, the veracity, of their narrative. The article goes on welding truth to falsehood. It gives a faithful account of Myshkin's return to Russia six months earlier in inappropriate dress for the Russian autumn, but lies in re­ counting that Myshkin concealed from his doctor the death of Pavlishchev, his benefactor. But the article is not interesting for its innumerable outlandish lies; it is the large amount of truth in it that gives it power. The article exemplifies the effect of form upon content: the derisive tone, the waves of facile social and political commentary inevitably recast Myshkin's image and present a weirdly alternative view of him. Thus, taken as a separate narrative, the article gives a parallel text for the events of the novel so far. The implied reader's reaction against this atrocious, paltry narrative and against its distortion of the events is to reaffirm his perhaps wavering loyalty to Myshkin at this point in the novel. The reader's impatience with Myshkin's lack of biography and with his generally troublesome opaqueness is perhaps overruled by his rising indignation at the injustice of the article. The implied reader's loyalty to Myshkin is thus won, partly by default, and he may even be ready to forgive Myshkin his subsequent illjudged handling of the affair. (Myshkin insults and humiliates Burdovsky by publicly offering him help despite the proved un­ suitability of his claim.) This article, then, is a false narrative from every point of view (except Keller's). It lies about the prince (and about Bur­ dovsky); it is narrated unwillingly and with shame by Kolya; it does not even represent the interests of the "nihilists" who sup­ posedly bear the responsibility for its publication. Amidst the general embarrassment following the reading the narrator observes, "Strangest of all, Ippolit and 'Pavlishchev's son' also appeared to be rather surprised at something; Lebedev's nephew was also evidently displeased. Only the boxer [that is, Keller]

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sat completely serenely" (VIII, 221; 286). Ippolit asserts he had not even known of the article and Doktorenko insists that he would not have advised its publication. D oktorenko goes on to defend their cause in the name of human rights. In his reply Myshkin returns to his own pre­ occupation with the inability of words to express the truth, or rather, to separate truth from falsehood; the two persist in ex­ isting side by side. He concedes that Doktorenko is more than half right, "and I would be completely in agreement with you if you had not left something out of your speech. Exactly what you've left out here, I haven't the strength and I'm not in a con­ dition to express to you exactly, but something is surely lacking in your words for them to be perfectly true" (VIII, 224; 289). The implied author elaborates the theme of the inseparability of truth from falsehood in as many ways as possible, having Ip­ polit take up the theme next. In criticizing the style of Keller's article he too allows Keller to be "half in the right," but his "right half" differs from M yshkin's. However, Ippolit agrees with Keller in supporting Burdovsky's right to make public his claim. Absurdly, they both lose track of the fact that the substance of Burdovsky's appeal is untrue. The mockery of the serious themes of the novel by Keller's article continues as its author, in defense of his piece, un­ consciously parodies Myshkin's own belief that good intentions count for much and can help atone for evil. Myshkin's com ­ plicated and compassionate notion that man's "double thoughts" must be accepted and forgiven finds a monstrous echo in Keller's justification of his false narrative. Keller declaims, "As far as certain inaccuracies are concerned, little hyperboles, so to speak, you must agree that first and foremost initiative is the important thing, first and foremost is the goal, the intention; the beneficial example is im portant; afterward one can investigate the individual cases. And finally, there's the question of style here, the question of, so to speak, humorous effect, and finally — everyone writes like th a t,—you must agree yourself. Ha! Ha!" (VIII, 225; 290).38 M yshkin, too, has celebrated the importance of good m otives and intentions, that is, the idea behind the presentation of it. His anecdotes have all been parabolic, even Christ-like at­ tempts to present the truly "beneficial example." He knows too

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that the question of style can determine all and repeatedly laments his own lack of gesture, his inability to find words to express his idea. But just as the article twisted and mangled the details of Myshkin's biography, Keller's "theoretical" defense of his work distorts Myshkin's own cherished belief. Keller prac­ tices a dangerous form of a grotesque parable —one that aims for effect, but is really exemplifying not a truth but a lie. He claims to serve "the public good" through humor and beneficent example; he pleads for the right of author's license —all in the service of a cause based on a petty lie. He takes the serious con­ cerns of art and renders them insane. Ippolit has another position on the ambiguity of truth and falsehood. Despite his fantasy of being able to spread the truth from his window through words, he fears the terrible power of persuasive words (rhetoric, art) when they are used in the ser­ vice of a lie. "Yes, nature is iro n ic a l. . . why does she create her very best beings only to laugh at them later? She takes, then, the only being recognized on earth as perfect —she does this, and having shown him to mankind, she predestines him to say that which has caused so much blood to flow that had it flowed all at once, then mankind would have certainly choked! O h, it's good I'm dying! I too might have uttered some kind of terrible lie; nature would have had it happen" (VIII, 247; 315). Ironically, soon after he says this Ippolit sits down to compose his own narrative, his "essential explanation."

Part II closes with the prince still shrouded in mystery. The two inserted narratives which sought to define him rendered him more elusive than ever, though these narratives touched upon, both sincerely and satirically, the ideas most important to Myshkin. They each described ways of doing good, of devotion to a cause. Both narratives were delivered for their effect on an audience; both conveyed a portion of the truth in spite of con­ scious efforts at mockery and blatant lies. Together, they pre­ sent an impressionistic, though partially accurate, portrait of the prince. The overall effect may be likened to that of a single figure being reflected in a series of distorting circus mirrors. Each framed distortion carries with it its own particular em­ phasis of some initially true characteristic of the subject. Words are lies, but somehow they are also, in spite of themselves, true. Lebedev, who associates truth with action and lies with

The Clash of Truth and Falsehood

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words, expresses a problem atic connection that runs through the novel. It is problem atic because, taken together, the w h ole— composed of lies and truth —forms a truth of its own. "W ell, here, to you, and only to you, will I tell the truth . . . both words and action and lies and truth —all are in me to­ gether, and all perfectly sincerely. Truth and action are my gen­ uine repentance . . . but words and lies are in the infernal (and always present) thought, as if to catch people up, as if to win an advantage even through my tears of repentance" (VIII, 259; 330). Thus in Part II the question of the sincerity and falsity of narratives, of words, torments nearly all the main characters; their narratives are at once embarrassingly transparent and troublingly opaque. Even though he found it an unwieldy form for the novel, Dostoevsky's own preference for the first-person form of narra­ tion is well known. Narratives like Myshkin's parables, or the confessions related at Nastasia Filippovna's party, offered a way for the novelist to employ, however indirectly, that preferred narrative mode. But such inserted or interpolated first-person narratives necessarily assumed a dimension which they did not possess when Dostoevsky used them in the short story, for they are themselves reported by the narrator-chronicler of the novel, a being who is midway between a simple vehicle of omniscience and a character subject to the vagaries of his own limited vision. M oreover, the inserted narratives within the novels always serve a definite purpose, for they are each related at a certain time to a particular audience. However personal and private they m ay be, they always seek, in part, to use biographical ex­ perience, an anecdote, or another work of art to affect and in­ fluence others. Thus, each secondary narrator shares, finally, the tendentious concerns of the narrator, the implied author, and the novelist himself.

6

The Search for a Binding Idea: The Inserted Narrative Parts III and IV

,

It is for words to serve and follow, and let Gascon get there if French cannot. I want the substance to stand out, and so to fill the imagination of the listener that he will have no memory of the words. —Michel de Montaigne, "Of the Education of Children"

A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like every other organism, and in proportion as it lives, it will be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. —Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"

I

n the second half of The Idiot the inserted nar­ ratives continue their preoccupation with the in­ ability of words to express an idea. The situation has become more irrevocably confused as the main characters face problems that seem to have no appropriate solutions. Cor­ respondingly, the inserted narratives are concerned with deter­ mining whether an idea that binds men together can exist in contemporary society. But given the problems inherent in ex­ pressing ideas directly, statements about the existence of this binding idea are almost impossible to make. As the effects of Myshkin's goodness become more problematic, he loses his skill as a manipulative, strategic narrator. O f the others, Lebedev, the interpreter of the Apocalypse, tries, grotesquely, to use the tools öf reason to express his intuitions. But it is Ippolit, Myshkin's ideological opponent, who makes the most profound "statement" of many of Myshkin's own beliefs. All of the in­ serted narratives continue to suggest to the implied reader that each inserted narrative contains a different mixture of truth and lies, of sincerity and deception.

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In Parts I and II of the novel Myshkin's own narratives ex­ erted a significant influence over the other characters; they pro­ vided a set of models for action. The other inserted narratives were often about him. Thus throughout the first parts of the novel Myshkin occupied the dominant position: narratives were usually either by or about him. (The confessions told at Nastasia Filippovna's nameday party offered the main exception to this pattern, but they did present an illustration of Myshkin's doctrine of "double thoughts." In confessing their worst deeds, the characters, in varying degrees, sought to exonerate them­ selves.) In the second half of the novel this unifying pattern breaks down. The incipient unease of the narrator starts to grow pro­ nounced in Part III. The flow of the inserted narratives reflects both the narrator's altered stance and the pervasive, unrelieved mood of urgency and tension. Myshkin no longer provides nar­ rative models nor himself functions as a subject of inserted nar­ ratives, and he can no longer offer a unified vision to the other characters. His good intentions are eclipsed by their problematic results; his innocence is overwhelmed by the rapid flow of events. Toward the end of the novel, the narratives of Lebedev and General Ivolgin abandon all pretense of verisimilitude. An apocalyptic vision reminiscent of Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" (where "the centre cannot hold" and "the ceremony of innocence is drowned") influences the structure of the inserted narratives. Myshkin himself has lost confidence in his ability as a narra­ tor: "You must take what I say even now as coming from a sick man . . . There are certain ideas, there are certain lofty ideas, about which I must not begin to talk, because I should certainly make everyone laugh . . . My gestures are not appropriate; I have no sense of measure; my words don't correspond with my thoughts, but only degrade them" (VIII, 283-284; 362). Even as he says this, Myshkin painfully illustrates his own point, for Aglaya cries out at the very inappropriateness of his confession to such an audience: "Why do you say this here? . . Why do you say that to them ? To them?" (VIII, 283; 362). With the reappearance of Ferdyshchenko, absent since Nastasia Filippovna's nameday party, at the prince's birthday party, the implied reader can expect to witness more confessional nar­

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ratives. Ippolit's "M y Essential Explanation" follows in due course. His narrative is preceded, however, by Lebedev's strange "tale of long ago" in which he interprets the present in the light of his knowledge of the Apocalypse and his notions of medieval history. Lebedev narrates his tale, a kind of parody of an exemplum, to illustrate his point of view in an argument with Ganya and Ptitsyn. Evgeny Pavlovich and Lebedev dispute with the others over the meaning of the phrase derived from the Apocalypse, "the source [or fount] of life" (istochnik zhizni).1 Ganya and Ptitsyn argue that the "source of life" can be found in the univer­ sal necessity of living, in the law of self-p reserv ation : Evgeny Pavlovich and Lebedev, on the other hand, call for a definition of the phrase "the source of life" that emphasizes its m o r a l b a s is. (This is, of course, the essential Dostoevskyan argument.) For Evgeny Pavlovich and Lebedev the law of s,eh-pi£seryation__is negated by the existence of its antithesis which is equally strong: tfap la w o f splf^ dpstrnrripn . Lebedev adds, "there's already been Malthus, a friend of hum anity. But a friend of humanity with shaky moral principles is a devourer o f humanity" (VIII, 312; 396). Whereupon Lebedev abruptly begins his narrative: "The point lies in the following anecdote from past times, for I must tell an anecdote from past times" (VIII, 312; 396). Lebedev tells his anecdote in the style of a lawyer presenting evidence to the jury for his defendant, a twelfth-century Russian driven to cannibalism (antropofagiia) during the successive fam ­ ines occurring throughout his life. The old man freely an­ nounced that "in the course of his long and miserable life he had killed and personally eaten, in the deepest secrecy, sixty monks and some children of the laity —about six, but not m ore, that is, unusually few compared with the number of clergy consumed by him. Adult laymen, it appeared, he never laid a hand on for that purpose" (VIII, 312; 396-397). Lebedev tells the tale of a real cannibal to underline the worse horror existing in a spiritual cannibal (Malthus). (The spectre of M althus pervades Ippolit's confession as well, though in a different w ay.) Lebedev's at­ tempts to be precise render his narrative absurd: the man had "personally" killed others, including children, "about six, but not m ore." His reasoning is also absurd, for he aims to construct his logical argument from facts that have no bearing on the case: his

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main concern is to contrast the consumption of clergy with the consumption of children and adult laymen. Lebedev places his criminal in a historical context. "A most magnificent and a most true thought! For he didn't even touch laymen, not a single lay­ man in sixty clergy, and this is a terrible thought, an historical thought, a statistical thought, finally; and, from such facts his­ tory is reconstructed by those who know how; for it proves with arithmetical exactitude that the clergy lived at least sixty times more happily and more freely (privol'nee) than all the rest of humanity at that time. And, perhaps, they were at least sixty times plumper than the rest of humanity" (VIII, 314; 398). An absurd hodgepodge of gastronomy, nutrition, psychology, and m orality is brought to bear in defense of the "client." Lebedev seeks to prove that the cannibal was a religious man of conscience who thought to reduce his sin by switching his diet from the clergy to the laity. Lebedev proves his client's motives were m orally based, "for had it been only for gastro­ nomic variety, the figure six would be too insignificant; why only six and not thirty? (I'm taking half, thirty of each.) [polovinu na polovinu ]" (VIII, 314; 399). M oreover, nutritionally, the canni­ bal would be forced to eat more lay babies to equal the caloric value of one clergyman so that "while the sin, if it were lessened on one hand would, in the end, be increased, on the other hand, not by quality so much as by quantity" (VIII, 314-315; 399). As in the previous narratives (except for M yshkin's), Lebedev's manner of narration belies the content of his tale. He uses all the trappings of logic, arithmetic, rationality, and scientific termi­ nology, albeit in a ridiculous way, to convey the opposite —the miraculous, spontaneous force of a binding idea, the idea that drove the cannibal to make his free confession.

At the same time the implied reader suspects that Lebedev is mimicking the defense at the Zhemarin trial, in which a young man had been accused of murdering six people. The young, man's lawyer also used psychological and environmental argu-j ments to defend his client. (This trial had already been men­ tioned several times by other characters, such as Myshkin, Doktorenko, Evgeny Pavlovich.) In his own story Lebedev has used a rational, environmental argument to serve the opposite pur­ pose—to illustrate his own assumption that confession and con­ sciousness of sin spring freely from men even when their horn-

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fying environment would seemingly justify their crimes Evgeny Pavlovich reacts to Lebedev as a stylist; while describing Lebed­ ev as a madman he acknowledges, "I expect a glorious parody" (VIII, 314; 398). Lebedev's mad argument leads directly back to the defini­ tion of the "sources of life." In this respect the structure of his narrative resembles Myshkin's earlier anecdotes —all are exempla discussing general questions which suddenly, surprisingly, re­ turn to the original question existing outside the narrative and in the present world of the novel. Both M yshkin and Lebedev seek to restore man's consciousness of and belief in a general unifying idea through the medium of parabolic narrative. Lebedev, of course, simultaneously revels in the dualities of his own nature and exuberantly denies the existence of a binding idea (sviazuiushchaia my si1) in m odem times. For Lebedev, the cannibal's free confession of his sin reflected the spirit of his time —a time, un­ like the present age, in which a binding idea did function as the universal "source of life:" "Here is the solution! . . . There must be, there must have been an idea (mysi) stronger than all the ca­ lamities, the crop failures, the tortures, plague, leprosy, and stronger than all that hell, which mankind could not have en­ dured without that idea binding and guiding their hearts and making fruitful the sources of life!" (VIII, 315; 399). Ultimately Lebedev pleads a case for the medieval cannibal's century versus the nineteenth century. Although the argument refutes, how­ ever crazily, the idea that the plea of a terrible environment can be used as evidence to justify a crime, ironically the concluding message is the celebration of an environment —the environment of the Middle Ages —where a binding idea could survive. Lebed­ ev insists that his peculiar historical anecdote is the "unvar­ nished truth"; he asserts the fantastic quality of reality, 'let me observe that almost any reality, though it may have its own im­ mutable laws, is almost always improbable and implausible. In fact, sometimes, the more real it is the more improbable" (VIII, 313; 397). (Dostoevsky, of course, is well known to have shared this belief [IX, 449].) Only the prince takes Lebedev's words completely seriously, though later in the novel Aglaya shows that she too has the same awareness of the often striking im probability of reality. She attempts to use her understanding of the bizarreness of real­

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ity to make her own lies seem more plausible —to make a false narrative seem true. "Do you know why I lied just now? . . . Be­ cause when you are lying, if you skillfully put in something not quite ordinary, something eccentric, well, you know, some­ thing that very rarely or never happens, then the lie becomes much m ore probable. I have noticed this. Only in my case it came out foolishly, because I didn't know how to" (VIII, 360; 451). Preposterous lies masquerade as truth to make a less flam­ boyant lie seem more plausible. The initial theme of the impossibility of expressing an idea directly in words continues to fragment into endless variations throughout the second half of the novel, and the characters comment repeatedly on the inevitable distortions of ideas and on the air of fantasy that prevails over all. Lebedev's anecdote and the subsequent inserted narratives add to the atmosphere of fantasy and distortion that culminates in the final climax and in the collapse o f all the m ajor characters. M yshkin, meanwhile, disappears as a narrator and becomes, more often, a member of the audience. Like Pushkin's poor knight, he grows more silent. Near the end of the novel, at the Epanchins' soirée , when he does try to resume his narrative role and state directly his ideas about what should bind men together, he fails miserably.

Ippolit's confession follows Lebedev's anecdote as the next entertainment at Myshkin's birthday party. Like the narratives at Nastasia Filippovna's party, this one consciously attempts to be literary; it draws upon numerous other works for inspira­ tion. But like Lebedev's medieval tale, it expresses a searing, apocalyptic consciousness of a terrible void in the life of nine­ teenth-century Russia. Lebedev and Ippolit, opposites in so many respects, share a vision of despair at the lack of a "binding idea" in contemporary Russia. Lebedev interprets the present through his knowledge of the Apocalypse and Ippolit through his knowledge of the princi­ ples of reason, but both share an obsession with trying to tell the truth. Lebedev concluded that, "everything has grown soft; everything has rotted and everyone has rotted" (VIII, 315; 400).2 Ippolit is overwhelmed by his perception of corruption. He de­ cides to kill himself from "repulsion." "It is impossible to go on living, to remain in a life which assumes forms so strange and

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offensive to me . . . I haven't the strength to submit to the dark force which assumes the form of a tarantula" (VIII, 341; 430). Though they choose different paths, both Lebedev and Ippolit wish to assert man's freedom. Lebedev's cannibal confesses his sin freely despite the possible rationalizations he could have made for it and despite his certainty of not being caught. Ippolit chooses suicide as a way of asserting his freedom from the laws of nature, though he ignores Lebedev's and Evgeny Pavlovich's equation of the laws of self-preservation and of self-destruction. Ippolit's confession is the third document to be read in The Idiot and the first to be presented by its own author. Harmony prevails among its form , content, and manner of delivery. The spontaneous form of Ippolit's statement, in which he allows himself a free reign of association, reflects his overall intention of describing how he came to have his 'last conviction" that he must commit suicide. Ippolit's manner of delivery, an agitated reading where his moods range from unveiled anguish to cyni­ cism to cool self-observation, is appropriate to the content and form of his statement. The essential falsity of this narrative then, unlike the previous inserted narratives, does not lie in some clash among its elements. Instead, Ippolit's confession is a prelude to an unperformed act, to a failed suicide. The state­ ment must ultimately stand as a false document because it at­ tests to a deed uncommitted. Despite its deviation from the pattern, the content of Ippolit's statement encapsulates and presents variations on the central themes of the novel. Ippolit shares Myshkin's preoccu­ pation with assessing the quality of time, with weighing the value of hallucinatory experience, with understanding how good can be enacted in the world, with the question of charity, with the pain of insoluble banishment from "the feast of life," with the image of corrupted beauty in the world, with truth, and with the expression of truth.

Ippolit frames his confession with bitter observations on time. He feels himself to be under a "death sentence"; thus the passage of time takes on, for him, an insistent horror. He bor­ rows lines from the Apocalypse; he uses time imagery both to portray his self-predestined fate and to produce a theatrical ef­ fect. He wakes up after Lebedev has finished his anecdote and asks, "What time is it? But, never mind, it's not necessary; I

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k n o w w h at tim e it is. T h e h o u r h as arriv e d . N o w the h o u r is at h an d [tep er s a m o e v r e m ia ]" (VIII, 3 1 8 ; 4 0 3 ). W h e n the p rince suggests th a t Ippolit read his article to m o rro w , he an sw ers by p arap h rasin g the A p o ca ly p se , "T o m o rro w 'there will be no m o re tim e' . . . H o w e v e r, don't w o rry 111 read it th rou g h in fo rty m inutes, well —in an h ou r" (VIII, 3 1 8 ; 4 0 4 ) .3 H e v eers from etern al tim e to e v e ry d a y tim e, fro m w on d erin g a b o u t the h o u r of the d ay to k n ow in g , m eta p h o rica lly (th o u g h e rro n e o u sly ), th at his "h o u r is at h a n d ." Ippolit h as m ad e it the tim e, in e v ery sense of the w o rd , to re a d his co n fession ; he h as ad o rn ed his con fession w ith all the trap p in gs o f high d ra m a . Ippolit entitles his con fession "M y N e ce ssa ry E xp lan atio n " ("M oe n e o b k h o d im o e o b ia sn en ie ") an d gives it the ep igrap h , "A p rès m o i le délu ge!"4 H is ch o ice signals to the re a d e r that Ippolit will attem p t to cu t him self off fro m respon sib ility to h i s c fellow m an . W ith his ep igrap h he h alfh earted ly attem p ts to d en y the significance o f tim e after his d eath . T h e them e o f tim e ru n s th ro u g h Ippolit's entire statem en t. Ippolit p o rtra y s him self as !T m an~w R oH ias o n ly tw o w eeks to live, an d b ecau se o f the sh o rt tim e rem ain in g to h im , decides to tell the tru th . "H o w ev er, I w ro te in v ain the w o rd s 'the final an d solem n tru th '; even w ith ­ o u t th at it's n o t w o rth telling lies fo r tw o w eeks, b ecau se it's n ot w o rth living fo r tw o w eeks; th at is the v e ry best p ro o f th at I will w rite o n ly the tru th " (V III, 3 2 2 ; 4 0 8 ). Y e t in the subsequent p a ra g ra p h s, in a p atte rn w h ich co n tin u es th ro u g h o u t his sta te ­ m en t, Ip p olit_ques.tLQHsJûs-Qwmproposition and even begins to w o n d er if tw o w eeks is all the tim e he h as left. W h en Ippolit calls him self a m an co n d em n ed to d ea th , the im plied read er rem em b ers M ysh k in 's p ara b le a b o u t such a m a n . B o th Ippolit an d the p riso n er in M yshkin's sto ry feel th a t those w h o are alive w aste life's rich es w a n to n ly . But Ippolit does n ot sh are the o th e r co n d em n ed m an's sense th a t the tim e rem aining to h im , h o w e v e r sh o rt, is co m p o sed of se p a ra te , lon g, enduring m o m en ts to be sav o re d one b y o n e. In stead Ippolit is ra ck e d b y b ittern ess; fo r h im , the tw o w eeks (o r m o n th ) rem ain in g to him a re an insult, a tim e in w h ich he ca n acco m p lish n o th in g .5 In P a v lo v s k , w hen he an d his cre w h ad co n fro n te d the p rince, Ippolit b ecam e co n v in ced th at the sh o rt p eriod of tim e left to h im m ad e life w o rth less. Iro n ically , at the sam e m o m en t w hen he exp erien ced this "final co n v ictio n " Ippolit h ad the idea of

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m ak ing an effo rt to live. H is am b ivalen ce thus co n ta in e d tw o sep arate, m u tu ally exclu sive co n cep tio n s of tim e: th a t tim e w as w orth less an d th at tim e w as v alu ab le. H is d ouble attitu d e to ­ w a rd tim e m ad e him b o th indifferent to and cu rio u s a b o u t the

[teper vse ravno]" (VIII, 3 2 6 -3 2 7 ; 4 1 2 -4 1 3 ): the lack of tim e left to live a b ­

w o rld . H e rep eats the p h rase "n o w it is all the sam e

solves him fro m all respon sib ility, y et he "b ecam e so interested in a n y ru m o rs, th a t, it seem s, I b ecam e a gossip" (V III, 3 2 6 ; 4 1 2 ).

Later in the confession (although earlier in the actual chro­ nology of events related by Ippolit), he remarks cynically to Bakhm utov that in choosing a good deed to do, he would, for lack of time, be forced to choose one within his means. "You do agree that this is an amusing idea (mysl 0?" (VIII, 3 3 6 ; 4 2 5 ) The desperation evoked by the short amount of time remaining him drives Ippolit into an even deeper cynicism; he realizes that he could commit any crime and the courts would have no way of punishing him (VIII, 3 4 2 ; 4 3 1 ). Ippolit ridicules the theme sounded by M yshkin, Lebedev, and Evgeny Pavlovich that, for one reason or another, the courts cannot adequately punish a crim inal. Like L eb ed ev, he uses c o u rtro o m te rm in o lo g y ; he re c o g ­ nizes th at he shall be judged w hen he is a "deaf an d dum b defen­ d an t"

(VIII,

342;

4 3 1 -4 3 2 ).

Ippolit

presen ts

his

ca se —his

justification o f his right to co m m it suicide —in term s o f tim e, "H ere, first of all is a stran g e idea: w h o , in the n am e of w h at rig h t, in the n am e of w h at m o tiv e , w ou ld take it into his h ead to q u estion m y right to these tw o o r three w eeks of m y te rm ? . . . C an it be in fact th at an y o n e will be offended th a t I d on't w an t to w ait fo r tw o w eeks?" (V III, 3 4 2 -3 4 4 ; 4 3 2 -4 3 3 ).

Ippolit does admit the existence of an afterlife but feels that both earthly law and divine law should permit his suicide. A l­ though he claims a belief in Providence, his quarrel is that man can understand neither Providence nor its laws. He is not an atheist, but like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, he demands to be given answers and reasons. He believes but has no faith. W hen Myshkin related his anecdote about the atheist who was not really talking about atheism, he was perhaps trying to por­ tray a character not unlike Ippolit. By failing to acknowledge that man's law must be perceived as a reflection of God's law in

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order to exert any force, Ippolit forces the reader to link his selfdefense with the argument of the lawyer defending the Zhemarin murderer. Both discuss murder only in terms of temporal law. Ippolit protests against the short time remaining him by at­ tempting to make that time still shorter. He concludes his state­ ment by announcing that suicide is the only act he has time to complete with his own free will. Yet even as he grandly renoun­ ces worldly time, he is, touchingly, still its slave: he has care­ fully timed his statement so that it should end with the rising of the sun. (He alludes to Lebedevs apocalyptic interpretations about the source or fount of life by calling the sun the source of power and of life.) Ippolit's narrative has disclosed that he and Myshkin share the same preoccupation with time. But for Ippolit certain mo­ ments cannot be worth "all of life"; he desires only to experience the flow of time in its everyday sense, in terms of days, months, and weeks; he cares nothing for Myshkin's heightened mo­ ments. He presents an eloquent challenge to Myshkin's notions of time and his words, because they are spoken by a dying man, carry weight. Perhaps in the end Myshkin's apotheosis of the moment remains the luxurious, titillating notion of a man who need not yet face the fact of death. The content of Ippolit's narrative inverts other important ideas and concerns of Myshkin. Both Myshkin and Ippolit jux­ tapose the laws and the overpowering force of nature to faith and beauty. Ippolit, overcome by repulsion at the ugliness and ever-present mortality in nature abandons even reason in for­ mulating his resolution to die. Myshkin too battles with appari­ tions, like Ippolit's tarantula, both metaphoric and real. (The hallucinations of the two men are inspired by the demonic Rogozhin.) But he makes the opposite choice; he struggles to disseminate his visions of faith and beauty even in the face of encroaching idiocy, which is a spiritual death in life. Both men feel excluded from "the feast of life", from participating in what beauty and joy the world of nature does have to offer. ^ Ippolit and Myshkin are the two characters seriously con­ cerned with the question of how good deeds can be enacted in the world. Ironically, except for Myshkin's tale of the peasant Marie, Ippolit's narrative about the doctor and his family pro­ vides the only instance in the novel of a good deed carried out

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from start to finish. (While already suffering from acute con­ sumption, Ippolit had returned a lost wallet to a man who was in obvious financial distress. Upon learning the details of the man's case, he proceeded to help him and in the end effectively saved the doctor and his family from certain ruin.) Both deeds occurred before the events of the novel began and appear in the novel as inserted narratives. Ippolit praises individual charity but tries to reduce it to a "law of nature." "There will always be individual good because it is a need of personality,—a living need for the direct influence by one personality on another" (VIII, 3 2 5 ; 4 2 3 ).

It is to Ippolit, the sympathetic "enemy," that Dostoevsky gives his precious formulation of the miraculous means by which the seeds of good acts spread through the world: How do you know, Bakhmutov, what significance this communion of one's personality with another will have in the latter's fate? Here, in­ deed, is a whole life with an infinity of ramifications which are hidden from us . . . In sowing your seed, in sowing your "charity," your good deed in whatever form, you give away part of your personality and you receive into yourself part of another; you are mutually commun­ ing with one another; . . . and you will be rewarded with knowledge, with unexpected discoveries. Without fail you will come at last to look on your activity as on a science; this science will take hold of your whole life and can fill your whole life. On the other hand, all your ideas, all the seeds sown by you and maybe already forgotten by you, will take root and grow; the one who received from you will give to another. And how will you know what part you will have in the future resolution of the fate of humanity? If this knowledge and a whole life of this work raises you at last so that you are in a condition to sow a colossal seed, to bequeath the world a colossal idea, then . . . And so on. I talked a lot at that time. (VIII, 336; 424)6

Here, the despairing Ippolit unconsciously offers an optimistic answer to Lebedev's anecdote. For him the "source of life" has not been completely polluted; there does remain a binding idea —a possibility of mutual communion —since people, in spite of themselves, pass on the joy and radiance emanating from good deeds. Ippolit has expressed in words the idea of which Myshkin has tried to make his life an example. But in his formulation Ippolit hopes to adorn his idea with all the para-

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phem alia of rationality. He tries, as it were, to make a "law of seed sowing." He calls this activity a "science." And as he goes on, he gradually corrupts the purity and beauty of his own idea: the seed of charity, of a good deed, swells into a "colossal seed" (grom adnoe semia), and a "colossal idea" (gromadnaia my si). Ippolit becomes like the unoriginal men described by the nar­ rator; he possesses the typical yearning to bequeath the world a great and new idea. He has passed, imperceptibly, from dup­ licating M yshkins heroic intention to echoing the laments of Ganya and to reflecting the truths of the narrator's own digres­ sions about the anguish of unoriginal men. Nevertheless, if the reader strips these layers of banality from Ippolit's pronounce­ ments, he rediscovers the seed of the "binding idea" in all its irra­ tional glory. ^ Ippolit's narrative has directly, although inadvertently, described the means by which Myshkin hopes to enact good. In this passage the implied author has expressed his own idea about how good deeds can be enacted in the world. A husk of narrators' voices protects the kernel of the implied author's vo ice:7 the narrator has transcribed Ippolit's narration; Ippolit retells and disparages an old idea of his own which he had once narrated to Bakhm utov. This is not Dostoevsky the polemicist strategically placing good arguments in the mouth of his straw man; this is Dostoevsky the novelist witnessing, in spite of him­ self, in his own fiction, the very miracle about which he is trying to write. The idea has exerted its own narrative force and found its own natural form . The indestructible, eternal seed of good­ ness can be found anywhere, even in the heart of the man who most seeks to deny or to separate himself from it. And so it is. Tragically, in the novel the sowing of good does not work, except perhaps for the reader. For the seeds that M yshkin so lovingly tries to sow do not take root in Aglaya, Nastasia Filip­ povna, or Rogozhin. He manages only to precipitate or to hasten the ruin of those he loves best. Even within Ippolit's nar­ rative we see that the seed imagery can serve as a m etaphor for the working out of evil as well as of good. O n the very night that he talks so rapturously to Bakhm utov about the sowing of seeds of charity and goodness, Ippolit acknowledges that, "on that night were sown the seeds of my last conviction' " (VIII, 337; 425).

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The good done to the doctor is counterbalanced by the pain Ippolit causes his neighbor Surikov, whose child has died of cold and hunger. In seeking to spread his own despair, Ippolit says that Surikov "has only himself to blam e." Ippolit tries to re­ mind other characters of their own guilt, but in spite of his malicious intent, or perhaps because of it, he infuses others — even Surikov —with a sense of their own dignity. M yshkin, on the other hand, in trying to preach forgiveness often makes the I other characters feel guiltier than ever. (Rogozhin and Nastasia, ' especially, cannot accept the burden of M yshkins forgiveness.) Ippolit's n a rra tiv e rev eals a fu rth er b o n d w ith M y sh k in in his resp o n se to R ogozh in 's c o p y o f the H olbein p ain tin g th a t d isp lays the d ead C h rist w ith g rap h ic detail. Ippolit's respon se to the p ain ting b rings to g eth er the them es o f tim e, o f the law s of n a tu re v ersu s faith , an d o f the m ech an ism w h ereb y g o o d an d evil are sp read th ro u g h the w o rld . T h e ra v a g e s o f p h ysical d eath on C hrist's b o d y — the result o f six h ou rs o f a g o n y on the cro ss — n egate fo r Ippolit the possibility of C hrist's etern al resu r­ re ctio n . T h e law s o f n atu re h a v e gained d o m in atio n o v e r b eau ­ ty an d o v e r C h rist's d ivin ity itself.

Ippolit describes the inevitable response to this sight: "Here unwillingly comes the understanding that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature are so powerful, then how can one over­ come them? How can one overcome them when even He did not vanquish them?" (VIII, 339; 428). For Ippolit, nature has defeated beauty and faith: "Upon looking at that picture, nature appears in the form of some kind of huge, implacable and dumb animal, or, to be more accurate, much more accurate, although it is strange —in the form of some colossal machine of the newest design which unconsciously has seized, crushed, and swallowed up, deafly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being —a being who is alone worth all of nature and all its laws, all the earth —an earth perhaps created solely for the appearance of that being!" (VIII, 339; 428). M yshkin and Ippolit, though ideological opponents, have both conceived similar images o f a nature which has been bereft of beauty; they have shared a vision of a reality that can crush faith. M yshkin can maintain his faith, his belief in the possible jl resurrection of beauty even in the face of such a painting, but ' Ippolit cannot. The Holbein painting of the dead Christ sows an

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evil seed in him, "with this picture it is as if this understanding of a dark, insolent and mindlessly eternal force, to which every­ thing is subject, is expressed exactly, and it conveys this to you involuntarily [nevol'no ]" (VIII, 339; 428). Ippolit believes the evil idea imparted by the painting is so strong that Christ might perhaps have refused to mount the cross if he had seen it. "This question also involuntarily comes to mind when you look at the painting" (VIII, 339; 428). Ippolit gives the reader a complete and devastating m etaphor for the portrayal of the corruption of beauty and for the lack of spiritual strength, because all these thoughts have come to him precisely while gazing on the representation o f Christ's face, the supposed source of that beauty and strength. The dumb being of nature appears on the very countenance of Christ. Although the prince and Ippolit value beauty equally, the prince is able to perceive it while Ippolit is harassed by its absence, and the perception of this absence or ugliness of form is what drives him toward death. Ippolit, like the prince, is governed by powerful impressions that may occur in a single moment. M yshkin, j however, experiences moments of harmony, while Ippolit ex­ periences terrible moments of wrenching disharmony. T h e p ain tin g , th en , is an exam p le o f a d an gero u s a rt, w hich is unlike the o th e r p ain tings and p o rtra its in the n o v e l. T h ese, w hile co n v ey in g suffering, alw ay s also co n ta in e d som e grain s of spiritual b e a u ty . O n e m u st ask w h eth er the tab leau at the end of th e n o v el in w hich the read er is p resen ted w ith the eerie c o m p o ­ sition of the idiot M ysh k in an d the m a d R og ozh in beside the j d ead N asta sia Filip p ovn a is a n o th e r exam p le o f this kind of d an g ero u s a rt in w h ich the law s of n a tu re h a v e d efeated the g o o d an d the b eau tifu l. T h e tab leau asks p icto ria lly the ques­ tion th a t the im plied a u th o r ca n n o t exp ress in w o rd s.

The form of Ippolit's narrative embodies his intention of telling the truth: it is an uncorrected manuscript written the day and night before its actual presentation. As Ippolit presents his narration, he is also rereading it for the first time. His one for­ mal rule of composition has been not to correct a single line, even when he notices that he contradicts himself repeatedly (VIII, 322; 408). Ippolit states outright what the other inserted narratives have expressed indirectly through their various in­ adequacies; "But, however, I add, that in any brilliant or new

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human thought, or simply even in any serious human thought, born in anyone's head, there is something which always re­ mains, which it is impossible in any way to communicate to other people, even though you were to write whole tomes and explain your thought for thirty-five years; always something will remain, which will not be coaxed out of your skull for anything and which will remain with you forever; you will even die with it, not having communicated to anyone, perhaps, the most essential part of your idea" (VIII, 328; 414). Thus Ippolit's narrative contains the fullest verbal expression of two of Myshkin's most essential beliefs: the belief in the effectiveness of good deeds (the seed imagery passage) and the belief that words, in the end, fail to express the idea behind them. Ippolit never loses sight o f his audience; he punctuates his frequent addresses to them with pauses of self-criticism, which in turn modulate into anger at his listeners, "Oh, do you sup­ pose that I don't know how I have humiliated myself . . . with my 'Explanation?' . . . But let them laugh and say that these are all fairy tales!" (VIII, 327; 413). Even before he begins to read Ip­ polit displays a shrewdness about how to manipulate his au­ dience which rivals the skill of the narrator. He taunts his rowdy listeners with his mysterious looking document and ac­ knowledges that if he hadn't sealed the envelope there would be no effect: "Ha, ha! That's what it means —a m ystery. To break the seal or not, gentlemen?" (VIII, 318; 404). The narrator and Ippolit often seem to share a common consciousness —not just of how best to narrate and to intrigue their audience. Here the narrator says of Ippolit, "that he could not have turned paler than if a death sentence had been read to him" (VIII, 319; 405): later Ippolit repeatedly describes himself as a man under sentence of death. O r, at the end of Ippolit's statement, the narrator disgresses on the hysterical reactions of a nervous man, "He throws himself on people, having at the same time an unclear but firm goal of flinging himself down from a belfry a minute later and by this to resolve all the bewil­ derments, if such there turn out to be" (VIII, 345; 434). Several pages later Ippolit asks the prince if he had ever jumped off a belfry. These correspondences and shared perceptions between the narrator and Ippolit are notew orthy because it is Ippolit who echoes the narrator's turns of phrase and not vice versa. It

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is stan d ard p ra ctice fo r a n y n a rra to r to ap p ro p ria te k ey phrases of his ch a ra c te r in subsequent d escrip tion s o f th at c h a ra c te r. But it is unusual (excep t p erh ap s, in the w o rk of G ogol) for a c h a ra c te r to e ch o , alm ost v e rb a tim , the sen tim en ts exp ressed b y a n a rra to r of w h o m the ch a ra c te r is su p p osed ly u n a w a re .

Ippolit's narrative addresses several audiences —first and most im portant, Ippolit himself as both critic and reader. Ippolit the author first addresses Ippolit the reader, "I must hurry and finish all this 'Explanation' without fail before tomorrow. That means I will not have time to reread and to correct; I will reread it tom orrow when I shall read to the prince and to two or three witnesses whom I expect to find at his house. Since there will not be a single word of falsehood here, but only the truth, the final and solemn truth, then I am curious beforehand to know what impression it will produce on me at that hour and at that very moment when I begin to reread it" (VIII, 322; 407-408). The effect of his reading on the other members of his au­ dience rebounds back upon him. The author communicates his thoughts to the listeners, but in this case their reaction to the narrative conveys an equally important message back to the author: "I have been told positively that consumptives in the last stage sometimes go mad for a time. Check this tomorrow at the reading by the effect on the listeners. Solve this question without fail with the fullest accuracy; otherwise it will be im­ possible to undertake anything" (VIII, 322; 408). Their response will determine for him the question of his own sanity. Yet a few moments later Ippolit is embarrassed by his own narrative; he breaks off his reading and apologizes for writing too much that is personal. Ippolit the reader (in the sense of the performer) and critic is as indecisive as Ippolit the author; he is also equally belligerent. "I'm not forcing anyone to listen" (VIII, 325; 411).8 B efore Ippolit begins to read , he d isp arages the "stupid epigrap h " ap p en ded to the title. H e w a rn s the o th ers that ev ery th in g th at follow s m a y be stupid n on sen se. A m o m en t earlier he h ad lured his au d ien ce w ith the d evice of the p o rte n ­ to u s seal. N o w he assu res ev e ry o n e th at his m an u scrip t co n tain s n oth in g m y sterio u s o r forb id d en . Ippolit the a u th o r veered fro m o n e idea to its o p p o site during the co u rse of his con fession . H ere Ippolit the critic d oes the sam e.

As the narrative continues, Ippolit's conception of his au-

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dience changes. He addresses his statement less to himself or to the immediate circle and more to a general audience to be reached through a single man. He bequeaths a message to all his readers via this single reader who will supposedly pass on his manu­ script, "Let him into whose hands my 'Explanation' falls and who has the patience to read it through, let him take me for a madman or even for a gymnasium student, but most certainly for a man condemned to death to whom, naturally, it has seemed that all people, except for him, have not valued life enough . . . And what then? I announce that my reader is mistaken and that my conviction is completely independent from my death sen­ tence" (VIII, 327; 414). The implied reader realizes that Ippolit has here bequeathed a false message to his audience; the bulk of Ippolit's "Explanation" demonstrates that his last conviction has arisen solely because of his "death sentence." M ost of all he want his audience to remember him as an original man: "I suspect that everything that I'm saying now so resembles the most general phrases that they will certainly take me for a pupil of the lowest form, presenting his composition on 'The Sunrise'; or they will say, perhaps, that I want to express something, but with all my wishing to I was not able to . . . 'develop my idea' " (VIII, 327; 414). Ippolit attempts a general statement about man's condition; he may delude himself as his own reader. But he cannot delude the rest of his audience upon whom the urgency of encroaching death exerts less force. Like M yshkin he is forced to admit the impossibility of directly ex­ pressing his "idea." Ippolit obsessively refuses to give his audience a single thread to hold on to. He tells his audience to interpret his words one way, and in the next sentence, insists that they not do so: "To me, of course, everything will be all the same [vse ravno], but now (and perhaps only in this moment) I wish that those who will judge my deed will see clearly out of what a logical chain of deductions my last conviction' has emerged. Now I have just written above that the final decision . . . was produced in me not from logical deduction, but from some kind of strange shock, from a certain strange circumstance, perhaps quite un­ connected with the course of the affair" (VIII, 337; 425). Ippolit is the proponent of reason who rejects God and his world be­ cause they will not provide him with reasons. He demands that

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his listeners use their o w n faculties o f reaso n but also ab an d on them an d subm it to his w h im . H e create s, th rou g h n a rra tiv e , a rep lica of his o w n p ercep tio n o f P ro v id e n ce . D espite his belief in re a so n , he m u st ad m it th at resp on ses a re a lw a y s illogical and ir­ ra tio n a l. H is an aly sis o f R ogozh in 's p ain tin g also illu strates Ippolit's unusual n o tio n a b o u t w h o is th e m o st significant m em b er of the au d ien ce fo r a w o rk o f a rt. Just as Ippolit is the m o st im p o rta n t m em b er of the au d ien ce at his o w n read in g , fo r him C hrist's o w n resp o n se to the p ain ting o f H im w ou ld h a v e been the cru cial o n e. Ip p olit, m o re th an a n y ch a ra c te r in the n ov el, sub­ m its to ta lly to the v ic a rio u s exp erien ce engendered b y a w o rk of a rt. In this sense he is th e re a d e r p a r excellen ce.

Ippolit postulates other audiences for his narrative: the police, people interested in psychology, and anyone else who cares to read his manuscript. Typically, in the next breath he seeks to narrow the wide audience he has just allowed, "I would not wish, however, that this manuscript be given to the public. I request the prince to keep a copy for himself and to give another copy to Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin. Such is my will" (VIII, 342; 431). Then, two paragraphs later he reconstitutes his audience to consist of the world at large; he plans to leave his manuscript that it may speak to all those who would judge him after he has died. Ippolit's statement represents the ony serious attempt at confession that occurs in this novel, yet he is most careful to disassociate himself from any confessional m otivations. He asserts that his statement is a free reply that contains within it no m otive of self-justification (VIII, 342; 432). Like Lebedev's cannibal, he confesses freely. Ippolit, who may be the most acute reader in the novel, seeks also to be its shrewdest nar­ rator. He tries to make himself invulnerable to the charges that he has used his confession to inspire sentimental feelings and to make himself seem better in the eyes of his audience, even if that has been his intent. W h e n Ippolit finishes his "E xp lan ation " b o th he and his a u ­ dien ce are in a state of extrem e in d ign ation . W e to o h av e been m em b ers o f th e au d ien ce; the im plied re a d e r m a y find him self resenting M ysh k in 's la te r respon se to the n a rra tiv e , even thou gh M y sh k in , b y d eclarin g to A g la y a th a t Ippolit w a n te d to m eet

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with people one last time to win their respect and love, has described the underlying purpose of Ippolit's narrative precisely. Once again Aglaya's response may m irror that of the implied reader; she accuses the prince of judging Ippolit with truth but without tenderness (VIII, 354; 445). Ippolit himself, in typical fashion, apologizes to his au­ dience and withdraws that apology in the same sentence, "I understand, gentlemen . . . that I may merit your personal resentment, and I'm sorry that I have tormented you with this delirium [he pointed to the manuscript], or rather, I'm sorry that I haven't completely tormented . . . [he smiled stupidly], tormented . . . Evgeny Pavlovich . . . were you tormented or not?" (VIII, 345; 435) As the others taunt Ippolit, who begins to regret having read his statement, Evgeny Pavlovich offers him a solution. Just as he had earlier expected a "glorious parody" from Lebedev, he now advises Ippolit to, as it were, transform his sincere confession into a parody: to refrain from shooting himself in order to spite his audience. T h e au d ien ce w aits av id ly fo r the clim ax o f the open -en d ed statem en t. U nlike the o th er inserted n a rra tiv e s, Ippolit's exp la­ n atio n is n o t an a n ecd o te ab o u t so m e p ast o ccu rre n c e b u t ex­ tends d irectly into the w o rld o f the n o v e l. B y attem p tin g suicide and failing, Ippolit underm in es the intent of his a rticle ; the final syllable o f Ippolit's n a rra tiv e sh ou ld h a v e been sp ok en b y the p istol. But if he h ad fo llow ed E v g en y P a v lo v ich 's su g gestio n , Ip­ p olit w ou ld h a v e altered the fo rm o f his en tire co n fession an d thus ch an g ed the co n ten t as w ell. Ip p olit, like the o th e r ch a ra c te rs, fails in th e end to express his idea co m p letely . N everth eless, as in the o th e r inserted n a rra ­ tives, the idea em erges in spite of itself. Ippolit has sow n his seed; his failu re to co m m it suicide fu n ction s as a tra g ic fo o tn o te to the them e sounded in his statem en t ab o u t the im p ossib ility of ach ievin g co m p lete self-exp ression . Ippolit's bungled suicide co m p lem en ts the o th e r failed acts in this n o v e l: the failed ab d u ctio n of N a sta sia F ilip p o vn a, the failed m u rd er of M y sh k in , M yshkin's failed gestures of ch a rity an d forgiv en ess, the failed en gagem en ts of A le x a n d ra , A g la y a , and N a sta sia , an d th eir failed m arriag e s. A ll these in com p lete events h av e m o re im p act on the w o rld of the n o v e l an d on the read er th an th ey w ou ld h a v e h ad h ad th e y been successful.

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M y sh k in s failed gestures p ro v e his g ood n ess neverth eless; R ogozh in 's failed m u rd er still co n v e y s the full ran g e of his pas­ sion; the failed m arriag es b etw een A g la y a an d M ysh k in o r be­ tw een N a sta sia an d M y sh k in u n d ersco re m o re p ow erfu lly the lo v e existing th ere. E ven the n a rra to r's o w n failu res, his ten ­ d en cy to desert his h ero an d to disclaim k n ow led ge ab ou t ev en ts, p erh ap s serve in the end to affect the re a d e r m o re p o w erfu lly th a n a u n ifo rm ly sy m p ath e tic an d con sisten t n a r­ r a to r co u ld h av e d o n e. A fte r Ippolit's co n fession the sheer w eight o f the clim axes in th e p lo t an d the n a rra to r's increasin g lo q u aciou sn ess tak e o v e r m o st o f the sp ace o f the n o v el; th ere are few inserted n a rra tiv e s. N asta sia Filip p ovn a's letters to A g la y a do a p p e a r in fragm en ted fo rm ; th e im plied re a d e r w atch es M ysh k in him self b eco m e a re a d e r. In the co u rse o f read in g them M ysh k in d isco v ers th a t he h ad a lre a d y k n o w n , in a n ig h tm arish w a y , th a t these letters ex­ isted. H is read in g b rings him n early to delirium , "it even seem ed to him th a t he h ad alread y re a d all this a lon g, lon g tim e ago" (V III, 3 7 8 ; 4 7 2 ). Like all n a rra tio n in this n o v el, excep t p erh ap s M yshkin's n a rra tiv e s, N a stasia's letters blend tru th an d lies. H er search for a binding idea tak es the fo rm of a to rtu re d search fo r a m od el, ToiT soihe^hh p erfect b efo re w h o m she ca n ab ase Herself. She w rites to A g la y a , "y o u are fo r m e —p erfe ctio n ! . . . th ou gh I d on't judge y o u ; I h av en 't arriv ed at th e n o tio n th at y o u are p erfectio n th ro u g h re a s o n ; 1 h a v e c o m e t o believe it. B ut th ere is in më~êvierTa^sirTbefore ÿB ü T T T ôv ë~ ÿ ôu T T )n e m u st n o t love p erfectio n . . . A lth o u g h lo v e equalizes p eop le, don't w o rry , I h a v e n o t m ad e m yself y o u r eq u al, even in m y m o st secret th o u gh ts" (V III, 3 7 9 ; 4 7 2 ). N astasia's d e cla ra tio n of lo v e is also a d e claratio n o f h a tre d b o th o f herself and o f A g la y a . R ené G irard's fo rm u latio n o f trian g u lar desire p ro v id es a w a y of an aly zin g N astasia's letters. In his sch em e a ch a ra c te r desires an o b je ct, b u t in this desire the c h a ra c te r is m o tiv a te d b y an ev en g re a te r desire: to im itate his m e d ia to r o r m o d el. The m e d ia to r d eterm in es the o b jects desired b y the ch a ra c te r. (D on Q u ixo te's m e d ia to r is A m ad is o f G au l, a n e a rly p erfect knighte rra n t; his o b ject is to live a ch iv alric existen ce. M ad am e B o v a ry 's m ed ia to rs are the ro m a n tic h ero in es a b o u t w h o m she re a d in pulp fictio n .) In D o sto ev sk y 's n o v els the m odel or

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m e d ia to r co m es into the w o rld of the n o v e l; fo r m o st of the ch a ra c te rs in T he Id io t , M ysh k in is the m e d ia to r. T h e trag ic co n flicts arise b ecau se he is sim u ltan eou sly a co n cre te o b ject of desire, a figure to be im itated (th at is, a m e d ia to r o r m o d el), a figure him self subject to desire, and a figure w ith his o w n m e d ia to r — fo rtu n ately o u t of the im m ed iate en v iro n m en t o f the n ov el — C h rist. In N a s ta s ia s letters several trian gles o f desire o p e ra te . A g la y a is b o th N a sta sia s m ed ia to r and h er riv a l in real life. A s G irard o b serv es, "true jealou sy . . . alw ay s co n ta in s an elem ent o f fascin atio n w ith th e insolent riv a l."9 A t the sam e tim e M ysh k in is a n o th er m e d ia to r fo r N astasia ; she w ishes to be like him . M y sh k in , the m ed ia to r fo r b o th w o m e n , is also the o b ject of their desire. T h a t is, b o th w o m en , inspired b y his p resen ce, seek to im itate his goo d n ess; b o th w o m en also desire to h a v e sole possession of h im .10 N a sta sia s letters give the read er his only ch a n ce to h e a r h er v o ice d irectly fo r a n y length of tim e. F o r the m o st p a rt, th ro u g h o u t the n ov el the rea d e r m u st co n stru ct his o w n im age of N astasia fro m bits of co n v e rsa tio n b y an d a b o u t h er, fro m ru m o rs, an d fro m his o b serv a tio n o f the p assio n she h as in v o k ed in o th ers. H er letters give the re a d e r m o re clues to h er p erso n ality . M o re im p o rta n t, th e y re v e a l N a s ta s ia s o w n co n scio u sn ess of the in tricate trian gles o f desire w h ich to rm e n t the m ain ch a ra c te rs. Inserted n arra tiv e s p la y a m in o r role in th e last p a rt of T he Id iot. G eneral Ivolgin's p rep o stero u s tale o f h avin g been a p age of N ap o leo n rep resen ts his last d esp erate a tte m p t to re c o v e r fam e and d ig n ity . T h o u g h the g e n e ra ls fan tasies h a v e re a ch e d a w ild p itch , his n a rra tiv e resem bles in kind his earlier a n e cd o te s. Ivolgin's false n a rra tiv e s h a v e all em b o d ied a painful tru th : the g eneral seeks to p resen t him self as a dignified an d h o n o ra b le m an , but his o n ly m eth o d fo r d oing so in v o lv es him in an a b ­ surd w eb of self-in crim in atin g lies. Y e t, as he him self o b serv es to M ysh k in w hile accu sin g L eb ed ev o f lying ab o u t h av in g h ad his leg b lo w n off b y a Fren ch soldier, "A n in n o cen t lie fo r the sake o f a cheerful lau g h , even th o u gh cru d e , does n o t offend the h u m an h e a rt. S om e p eop le will even lie, if y o u w ill, m erely ou t of friendship in o rd e r to give satisfactio n to the listener" (VIII, 4 1 1 ; 5 1 3 ). Such are Ivolgin's lies, lies of friendship an d o f a

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desire to p lease. H e tak es the n o tio n th a t ideas m u st b e e x ­ p ressed in d irectly to

the e xtrem e: he uses lies to m ak e a

b eneficial p o in t. (Lebedev's g ig an tic lies to Ivolgin , on the o th er h a n d , sou gh t to c o n v e y d isrespect an d m o c k e ry .) Ivolgin s lies p a ro d y the im plied au th o r's seriou s n o tio n of fa n ta stic

re a lity .

Ivolgin

describes

his

fictitiou s

role

as

N ap o leo n 's p age as o ne o f th ose in stan ces w h ere, "T ru th often seem s im possible . . . if a n ov elist g o t to w o rk o n this affair, he w ou ld w e a v e fables an d im p rob ab ilities" (VIII, 4 1 2 ; 5 1 5 ). (The p rin ce ag rees, citin g fo r su p p o rt the exam p le o f the Z h em arin m u rd e r: if an a u th o r h ad in v en ted it, M ysh k in asserts, critics w ou ld h a v e insisted o n its im p ro b ab ility , but b ecau se it a p ­ p eared in the n ew sp ap er ev e ry o n e easily a cce p ts this stran ge s to ry as re a l.) Ivolgin's o b se rv a tio n is tru e , but he applies it to his o w n m a d lies; he uses his u n d erstan d in g o f the fa n ta stic n a tu re of reality to c o n c o c t a n a rra tiv e o f tra n sp a re n t lies. O f special n o te , h o w e v e r, is the final b io g ra p h y o f M ysh k in n a rra te d to him b y Iv an P e tro v ic h , the elderly A n glop hile at the E p an ch in s' so irée. In a sense the w heel h as co m e full circle h ere; in P a rt I M y sh k in resp o n d ed w ith alm ost ingen u ou s w a rm th to L eb ed ev an d Ivolgin w hen th ey sou gh t to supply him w ith a p a st. H ere the p rin ce o n ce again resp o n d s o v e re a g e rly ; he listens w ith "delight an d em o tio n " and replies w ith an "e x tra o r­ d in ary w a rm th "; his resp o n se leads h im d irectly into his tragic tirad e again st R o m a n C ath o licism , ath eism , and the m ission of the R u ssian a ris to c ra c y . T h e result, o f co u rse , is the scan d alo u s scene in w h ich M y sh k in b reak s the C hinese v ase and h as his sec­ o n d ep ilep tic fit. T h e terrible iro n y of M yshkin's tirad e is th a t he con fesses, clu m sily an d w ith in ap p ro p ria te w o rd s an d gestures, his m o st ch erish ed beliefs to a false au d ien ce, an au d ien ce w h o se v alu e he h as m isread in his o v e r-re a d y desire to see goodn ess an d b e a u ty . M ysh k in 's e rro r in jud gm en t co m p letes the d o w n w a rd spiral o f the inserted n a rra tiv e s th ro u g h o u t the n o v e l. H is h opeful p arab les, w hich g av e the o th e r c h a ra c te rs m od els fo r possible actio n s, an d his p ro fo u n d exem p la w h ich reflected o n v a rio u s h u m an p ro b lem s, reap ed n o fruit in the subsequent a ctio n o f the n o v el. N o o th e r c h a ra c te r w as able to d u p licate, eith er in actio n o r n a rra tiv e , M ysh k in 's sin cerity . T o w a rd the end o f the n ovel M y sh k in , still a g o o d h ero b u t exh au sted an d d rain ed , has lost

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his ability to persuade through highly organized, strategic nar­ rative. By the very end he has completely lost the faculty of speech. All that remains to him are sincerity and good will, but for a narrator these virtures are not enough.

Conclusion

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a cer­ tain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of oppor­ tunity . . . With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; . . . Here and there a cygnet is reared uneas­ ily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is bom a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognisable deed. —George Eliot, Prelude to M iddlemarch

We shall never be again as we were. —Kate Croy in The Wings o f the Dove, Henry James

ostoevsky, the shameless manipulator of his readers, the relentless meddler in disclosure and effect, in the end left the last word to his readers.1 His machina­ tions stop short of final pronouncements; he allows the reader the dignity of making his own decision about what has oc­ curred. Dostoevsky attributed as strong a role to the reading public as he did to the writer in shaping a definition of good art; he described the sympathy that a poet aroused in his audience as the "measuring rod" for determining what is good in art and what is inappropriate to it. But Dostoevsky's tacit trust in his reader's judgment did not prevent him from assuming a didactic role: he continually tested his readers, forcing them to realize their own moral and spiritual inadequacies. The close reading of The Idiot which has filled

D

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these pages has sought to describe the unrelenting and varied paces through which Dostoevsky put his reader. To capture the reader and make him his own Dostoevsky used a device of hav­ ing two readers coexist within the real one. This penchant for creating "divided selves" was hardly limited to the characters and readers he created, for Dostoevsky even fragmented the author himself into three parts: the poet who had the "idea" for a work, the artist who executed that idea, and the entertainer who insured that the idea and its artistic execution would immedi­ ately tantalize the audience. Of course Dostoevsky's delineation of these three created selves within the author implies a notion about the phenom­ enology of reading. First, the reader's curiosity is engaged. Once his attention has been caught, his aesthetic faculties come into play —he admires the work for its formal beauty. Gradually, through the reader's apprehension of the formal properties of the work, he begins to proceed to its meaning. It is the implied reader who responds at last to the poet's idea; the narrator's reader, through his curiosity, has been the vehicle for achieving this desired response. The border between these two readers becomes fuzzy in the middle realm of artistic execution, where the poet and the entertainer must also collide. Or rather, Dostoevsky's own separation of interest from artistic execution was a false division, for the first is merely a category of the sec­ ond. Although Dostoevsky believed theoretically that ideas had forms that organically corresponded to them, he nevertheless found the search for that proper form excruciatingly difficult. He struggled with the plans and the beginnings of his novels, that is, with the fixing of the proper narrative strategy for ex­ pressing a particular idea. Endings came much easier; by then the question of narrative stance had already been solved. Dostoevsky realized that real authors could not simply speak directly to real readers and be understood. He stressed in his letters that one could not say "the very last word"; he quoted Tyutchev's aphorism, "The thought spoken is a lie." But at the same time he believed that the ultimate goal of art was to create a perfect channel of communication from the author to the reader. Somehow, the writer does speak the last word; he and the reader must finally achieve a state of complete under­

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standing with each other so that "the reader understands the writer's idea as well as the writer has understood it himself when creating his work." This formulation is very close to Wayne Booth's thesis. Although Booth emphasizes the role of the reader in this rela­ tionship, he also stresses the necessity of final agreement (or, as he writes, "complete agreement") between the writer and the reader in order for a work to succeed. Because Booth seems to share Dostoevsky's point of view about the nature and the pur­ pose of the novel form, I have not hesitated to apply his critical method to Dostoevsky's work. Although Booth's belief that a novelist has a moral obligation to his readers as well as an aesthetic one may make him unfashionable among some of his peers, it makes him a perfect critic for Dostoevsky's work, for they both weld moral and aesthetic questions into facets of the same problem. "The moral question is really whether an author has an obligation to write well in the sense of making his moral orderings clear, and if so, clear to whom;"2 it is not enough, then, merely to have honorable intentions. Dostoevsky believed, moreover, that pure literary confession for oneself alone was impossible; in spite of himself an author always writes for an audience. Booth has likewise dismissed the possibility of the ex­ istence of fiction without an implied audience as a "convenient but ultimately ridiculous" notion, for every writer at least writes for a more "public" version of himself, a self who is "subject to the limitations that other men are subject to when they come to his books."3 For Dostoevsky and for Booth literature is finally a public not a private form; interesting literary questions must be those that involve rhetoric and moral persuasion. Despite the distance between Dostoevsky's three notebooks for The Idiot and the actual novel, these notes provided an in­ triguing case in point for Dostoevsky's general ideas about nar­ rative and audience. The first two notebooks, containing notes mostly for an unwritten version of The Idiot, reflected Dostoev­ sky's search for an idea and his decision, at last, to let go of an old and cherished idea —to portray a completely beautiful man —and try to put it into words. Though the first two notebooks to the novel were primarily notes for another of Dostoevsky's great unwritten novels —like A theism and The Life o f a G reat Sinner—they still offered definite clues to

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Dostoevsky and The Idiot

Dostoevsky's creation of The Idiot. As Dostoevsky searched for his idea he increasingly stripped away his hero's particular bio­ graphy to create a more mysterious, allegorical, even m ythical hero. He rejected his previous psychological explanations for the Idiot's personality and chose instead to make his narrative deliberately mystifying to the reader. In the process of discarding biographical and psychological explanations for the portrayal of his hero, Dostoevsky deliber­ ately turned to a narrative style that emphasized enigma. But all his attempts forced him to reject the initial idea, which was to portray a vengeful, Iago-like Idiot. Because he could not find the proper form for the expression of that conception, he made a "sacrifice" by deciding to use his precious idea of portraying a positively beautiful man. But both the Iago-like and the Christlike Idiots shared a quality of enigma: they were both to be presented to the reader as sphinxes for whom no rational, psychological explanation of their acts could exist. The first two notebooks, then, showed Dostoevsky's search for an idea; the actual discovery, or, as Dostoevsky put it, the decision to use an old, already discovered idea, does not exist within the pages of notes. The notes were, nevertheless, a necessary prelude to that discovery. The fully embodied idea, once found, exerted its own power, "I wrote the first part entirely in twenty-three days" (P, II, 72). In the third notebook, written after Part I of the novel had been published, Dostoevsky struggled with the problems of nar­ ration and plot. He consciously developed a narrative strategy that would juggle the effects of enigma and of explanation upon the reader. Though all novelists attempt such a balance, D os­ toevsky's notes showed, surprisingly, how many of the most heightened, passionate scenes in the novel grew out of a deliberate balancing of the techniques of baffling the reader and explaining things to him. He sought to join enigma to explana­ tion. Ultimately the narrator-chronicler provided the perfect device for realizing this aim: explanations served to create even larger mysteries; the narrator-chronicler pretended accurate reportage while presenting a tangle of rumors. D ostoevsky himself realized that the greatest difficulty in his idea of portraying a positively beautiful man lay in the realm of narrative —how to make such a character "sympathetic" to the

Conclusion

227

reader. Dostoevsky wrote about the portrayal of this idea, that there was "nothing m ore difficult than this in the world, and es­ pecially in our time" (P, II, 71). Dostoevsky's solution —to por­ tray a "Prince Christ" —is, in fact, as much a narrative as a the­ m atic solution: Christ revealed himself only indirectly through example and parable. He too was a "sphinx." Dostoevsky thus found both his idea and the proper mode for its expression in the example of Christ as he appeared to readers of the Gospels through parable and example. The Idiot has often been regarded as Dostoevsky's "great failed novel" because of the way in which the events of the novel seem to escape the control of both the author and the narrator. But the contents of the third notebook reveal that Dostoevsky had long intended the narrator to change his stance abruptly and that he had planned for the prince to be isolated and re­ jected near the end. While he was writing Part II, Dostoevsky was already working out the rejection of M yshkin by the other characters and sketching the outline of the narrator's subsequent denial of responsibility. Though the narrator abdicated respon­ sibility for his novel and its hero, Dostoevsky did not. Rather, he planned a plot and a narrative strategy that would force the reader to examine his own notions of responsibility to his fellow man. In the first two parts of The Idiot , the narrator shaped the reader's expectations; the reader could anticipate the use of a particular voice to describe a particular character or group of characters. W hile slight failures of judgment and tact on the part of the narrator were noticeable (he was often pompous or bla­ tantly manipulative), at the same time the reader still was asked basically to trust the narrator. At the beginning of the novel the reader found himself in a pleasant state of collusion with both the narrator and the implied author. Throughout these first parts, then, the reader's expectations about the narrative tone were satisfied. The narrator presented the general and T otsky reflected through the public's view of them; he relied upon opinion and rumor. He described the de­ tails of the Epanchins' family life in a cozy domestic voice, which rapidly became inappropriate when it branched into a de­ scription of the N astasia-Totsky relationship. However, the reader quickly discovered that his collusion with the narrator

228

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

was not merely soothing; his jovial response to the narrator's witty portrayal of Nastasia Filippovna's tragic history made his collusion with the narrator less innocent. The reader's entangle­ ment in the moral questions of the novel had begun. In the second part of the novel Dostoevsky gave his narra­ tor a voice usually associated with the Gothic mode of narra­ tion, to portray the triangular relationship between Rogozhin, Nastasia, and Myshkin and to give form to some of Myshkin's reveries. These reveries actually revealed little about the hero; Dostoevsky held fast to the decision he had made in the notebooks to abandon psychological and biographical explana­ tions of his hero. But the narrator cleverly presented passages that seemed on the surface to be journeys into the hero's soul. By the end of the first half of the novel, then, the reader found himself at the mercy of a manipulative narrator, who was for the most part reliable. The narrator's rapid changes in point of view, while irritating did not constitute any serious offense. Rather they functioned as a sprightly means of further insuring the reader's entertainment. Indeed, the very manipulativeness of the narrator increasingly forced the reader to conceive of him as a sub-character in the novel, as a chronicler who did not par­ ticipate in the action but who still was subject to rapid changes of opinion. Here in The Idiot Dostoevsky had begun seriously to develop his narrator-chronicler; a similar figure would later narrate The Possessed and The Brothers K aram azov. This nar­ rator, omniscient and vague, garrulous and concise, ironic and sentimental, comic and tragic, proved the best vehicle for the narration of Dostoevsky's big works. In the second half of the novel all the unities between the narrator's voices and the reader's expectations break down. The effect on the reader of this breakdown is to bring out various as­ pects of himself and temporarily elevate them into full-fledged reading selves. Thus the real-life reader of the novel becomes a figure who combines within him the narrator's reader and the implied author's reader. This fragmentation of one's reading self could lead, if successful, to the kind of reading of The Idiot that Dostoevsky intended: in the course of the novel, the act of reading develops from an activity fueled by interest and enter­ tainment into a highly charged re-creation of moral experiences in which the reader finds himself inextricably involved.

Conclusion

229

In Part III of the novel, the reader witnessed the narrator's simultaneous movement in contrary directions. On the one hand, the narrator's ironic voices became more caustic and il­ logical, so that the implied reader began to mistrust the narrator's judgments in a fundamental way. Though the implied reader grew suspicious, the narrator's reader continued to be cheerfully amused by the narrator's humor. But on the other hand, in the passages where the narrator described Myshkin, he seemed, for the first time, to share Myshkin's consciousness; his observations became indistinguishable from Myshkin's own in­ terior monologue. At these moments, the narrator's reader and the implied reader responded as one. Beginning in Part IV, when the narrator finally revealed his obsession with the business of narration, he dramatized the im­ plied author's hypothesis that one inevitably distorts important ideas by trying to express them. Dostoevsky's letters have shown that he believed this paradox all his life. In The Idiot he created a narrator who, by shouldering the burden of direct ex­ pression for him, could take responsibility for distortions and inadequacies of communication. The implied author "Dostoev­ sky" could safely engineer the indirect expression of his ideas through the large relationships between chapters and parts of the novel, through the ordering of events, through his balancing of dramatic with decriptive passages, and through his use of in­ terpolated or secondary narratives. The fact that one of his most important ideas was a notion about the impossibility of ex­ pressing thoughts forges a fine, though ironic, harmony be­ tween the content (the idea of inevitable distortion) and its form (the layers of reliable and unreliable narrative). The implied reader's response to the text echoed the thoughtful character's response to his universe: each must accept the whole on faith and find for himself the seeds of goodness or beauty existing amidst the deceptions and moral corruptions. The moment when the novel seems irrevocably to escape the narrator's control is exactly the moment when the implied author is most deliberately exercising his own authority and forcing the real reader to feel the contradictory responses of the implied reader and the narrator's reader. Precisely when the im­ plied reader is sensing Myshkin's tragic failure to express his ideas about goodness and beauty in the real world, the nar­

230

Dostoevsky and The Idiot

rator's reader is giving himself up to righteous indignation at the confusion and unhappiness Myshkin has precipitated. The inserted narratives, although they have been reported by the narrator-chronicler, offer the implied author a way to re­ state, vary, and develop the major themes of the novel without filtering them through the consciousness of the narrator. As such, these narratives act as a kind of counterpoint to the voices of the narrator-chronicler. Moreover, these interpolated narra­ tives, each in its own way, point up the complex relationship between truth and falsehood, sincerity and mockery. Dostoevsky fervently believed that "the spoken word is a lie." But each of the inserted narratives in the novel, no matter how much it sought to lie, revealed a truth. In all these second­ ary narratives distorting words finally expressed the idea of the speaker. Hence, as the interpolated narratives show in their re­ lation to the events of the novel as a whole —and the reader must make these discriminations and analogies —Dostoevsky al­ so believed that "the spoken word is a truth." The knife, as al­ ways, cut both ways. By examining the secondary narratives and their relationship to the characters and events in the novel, one may, through a relatively minor device of Dostoevsky's fic­ tion —the interpolated narrative —discern a belief that each of his works, his whole career, asserted. The word may lie, but, for Dostoevsky, it is also man's greatest tool for disseminating, exploring, and expressing an idea. The narrator's voices in The Idiot shape the reader's re­ sponse to the novel as much as do the voices of any of the char­ acters. The kaleidoscopic mode of narration in The Idiot forces the reader to work. He must separate the narrator's overview of events from the events themselves and proceed to meaning in the novel by a delicate process of accepting some of the nar­ rator's renderings while rejecting others. In all his works Dostoevsky compels his characters to accept responsibility for the consequences of their acts, acts they have freely chosen to commit. By the device of his reliable, yet unreliable narrator he has forced the real reader into a similar situation: when the real reader recognizes the coexistence of the implied reader and the narrator's reader within him, he also acknowledges the presence within himself of a heady mixture of those two Dostoevskyan catchwords, guilt and responsibility. Usually the real reader's

Conclusion

231

guilt consisted of no more than the tendency to slip into an easy irony and an attitude of condescension. But at times his par­ ticipation as a narrators reader brought him to the brink of judging and condemning a suffering, good man. It involved him in the same web as the characters of the novel. The complex and at times admittedly cumbersome division of the reader into three separate, unequal selves, provided a way of talking about the meaning of the novel. The implied reader —who responds properly to the implied author's serious manipulation of him, who learns Myshkin's lessons and thus re­ frains from judging, but who forgives and pities instead —can­ not shape the real reader's entire vision of the novel. Instead, the real reader pulls back from his collision with the narrative, from his reading, both humbled and inspired. He has recognized, through reading, the simultaneous existence of good and evil within him and, for a moment, his world and Dostoevsky's "fantastic" world have become one.

Appendix A The Novel and the Critics

early every critic of The Idiot has shared Dostoevsky's complicated, often ambiguous evaluation of it. In 1871, for example, the radical novelist and critic Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, with whom Dostoevsky had long been embroiled in bitter polemic —even within the pages of The Idiot —expressed guarded admiration for the novel. In Dostoevsky's attempt to create a "wholly beautiful m an," Saltykov-Shchedrin saw a task "before which all the possible questions about female labor [zhenskii trud ], about the distribu­ tion of wealth, about freedom of thought, etc., grow pale." Predictably, Saltykov-Shchedrin takes Dostoevsky to task for his m ockery of the so-called nihilists. But his most serious reser­ vation about the novel is aesthetic rather than political. He writes that Dostoevsky himself undermines his work by pre­ senting, in an unfavorable light, those characters whose ideas most closely coincide with the author's.1 W hat SaltykovShchedrin regarded as a serious defect in the novel, however, may instead be one of its greatest strengths. The Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who valued D ostoevsky to an astonishing degree, closes his book about him (1923) with this grand assertion: "So great is the worth of Dostoevsky that to have produced him is by itself sufficient justification for the existence of the Russian people in the world; and he will bear witness for his countrymen at the last judgment of the nations."2 Nevertheless, Berdyaev dismisses The Idiot because M yshkin "is an unearthly figure without its full comple­ ment of human attributes and cannot be considered as explaining any aspect of the human tragedy at all."3

N

The Novel and the Critics

233

The first serious study of The Idiot was completed by A. P. Skaftym ov in 1924. Skaftym ov was also the first critic to attri­ bute to Dostoevsky a harmony between intention and result. For Skaftym ov "the teleological principle" in an artist's work contributes to the form ation of each aspect of his novel. The critic's job, then, is to surrender completely to the artist.4 Skaf­ tym ov discovers in each m ajor character in The Idiot a struggle between pride and an ideal of love or moral sensitivity, between egoism and the desire to overcome it. M yshkin alone under­ stands that vanity stifles compassion. His double love for Aglaya and Nastasia Filippovna creates terrible conflict not within him but in the rivals themselves. It is this immovable bedrock of pride which, in Skaftym ov's scheme, generates both the inner drama of the characters and their relations with each other.5 Vyacheslav Ivanov, like Berdyaev and unlike Skaftym ov, used D ostoevsky as a touchstone for explicating his own philosophy, but his book on Dostoevsky ranks, nevertheless, among the best. Ivanov emphasized how M yshkin and The Idiot grew logically out of Raskolnikov and the ending of Crime and Punishment, in which the author had meditated on portray­ ing the goodness of one who was meek and Christian.6 Ivanov scrutinizes Myshkin's "literary genealogy" and finds him to be descended from Don Quixote, from the "pure fool" of medieval legend, from Ivan-the-Tsarevich, and, above all, from "the type of a spirituality that descends, that seeks the Earth . . . Myshkin is in love with Earth, and sees in her something that he has beheld in the celestial regions."7 Despite his admiration for The Idiot, however, Ivanov shares the view of Saltykov-Shchedrin and Berdyaev that the novel is great but seriously flawed. "Dos­ toevsky has in this work dropped anchor in such depths that he cannot completely raise it again. To clear his vessel, he had to cut more than one cable." But for Ivanov, the magnitude of what D ostoevsky nevertheless achieved in this novel is "incom­ parable in its power and inspiration."8 Tw o of the greatest students of Dostoevsky's work, Leonid Grossman and Konstantin M ochulsky, have both stressed the fact of Dostoevsky's own dissatisfaction with his novel. Grossman expresses his tacit agreement with Dostoevsky by praising aspects of the novel while remaining silent about the

234

Appendix A

success of the whole. "The novel's principal scenes are forceful and dramatic . . . " "fragments" of the whole "reveal Dostoev­ sky's mastery as a great realistic portrayer of the human heart, as a profound psychologist and inimitable lyricist."9 Mochulsky sees the reasons for Dostoevsky's difficulty with the novel in aesthetic terms. He calls the depiction of a "posi­ tively beautiful individual" "a prodigious task," but finds that "Art can approach it, but not solve it, for the beautiful in­ dividual is a saint. Sanctity is not a literary theme . . . Sanctity is a miracle; the writer cannot be a miracle-worker. Christ only is holy, but a novel about Christ is impossible. Dostoevsky was facing the problem of religious art which tormented poor Gogol to death."10 Nevertheless, Mochulsky's analysis of the The Idiot reveals his profound involvement with its ideas. He comes to a vision of the novel as a tragedy depicting the fate of beauty in the world. "Thus, according to the author's design, the idea of beauty is embodied in the two images of his heroines. The prince believes that beauty will save the world. Tragic experi­ ence shows him the reverse. In a world of evil, it is necessary to save beauty."11 R. P. Blackmur has also viewed this novel as a kind of trag­ edy, but a tragedy of goodness rather than of beauty. Mochul­ sky located the failure of The Idiot in an aesthetic para­ dox—that an artist cannot portray saintly beauty. Blackmur discovers a similar insolvable paradox in the novel, but the diffi­ culty for him emanates from Dostoevsky's particular concep­ tion of goodness, "his conception of goodness was lodged, actually, like his conception of evil, in the image of its own dou­ ble: which is to say, its own ruin. He was mistaken in thinking that the idea of pure goodness could be dramatized so as to dominate the kind of good and evil men and women he could create; but his imagination went beyond the mistake of his in­ tellect and overwhelmed it."12 Mochulsky has found that at the core of Dostoevsky's art "ideas are embodied in people and dialectic is transformed into tragic conflict." Thus, in The Id io t, for example, "Objections are raised against the prince's 'thesis' by his friends-enemies —Ippolit and Rogozhin."13 Blackmur names precisely this tendency to portray ideas as the key reason for the failure of The Idiot. He writes of "the intrusion of Dostoevsky's ideas upon his story . . .

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There could be no clearer example than this of a great sensibility violated by an idea, no sharper case of a theme being sur­ rendered by the author to a mere thesis, and, then wrenched back by violence to safety."14 Murray Krieger shares Blackmur's emphasis on The Idiot as a tragedy about goodness; both critics have described at length the devastating effect of the hero's goodness upon the other characters. Biackmur characterizes Myshkin as "a positive hero," "a complete image," an "idol or ikon, before whom oth­ ers, as they are drawn to him, must in the end abase and humili­ ate themselves."15 Kriegers interpretation of the effects of Mysh­ kin's goodness and humility is nearly identical: "through his Christian humility . . . Myshkin has refused to give his beloved humanity the human privilege of sinning, of being offensive and arousing moral indignation . . . By assuming himself worse than others, he gives them a greater moral burden than in their human weakness they can carry. They break under it and be­ come worse than without Myshkin they would be."16 Both Biackmur and Krieger also assess the effects upon the reader of this "rage of goodness," this "curse of saintliness." Biackmur, in describing the "confused and even bewildering treatment" of certain themes in the novel and the author's "false economy," elaborates the role of the reader. "You have to think back, to feel back, later, to see what the scene ought to have meant at the time of its delivery."17 Krieger decides that Mysh­ kin's conversation, near the close of the novel, with Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky "furnished us with crucial commentary . . . It is significant that Dostoevsky seeks to make certain that we take Yevgeny seriously, in part at least as his spokesman . . . But there seems to be no irony in the credentials our author gives Yevgeny . . . O f course it is possible that our author is posing as a worldly, sensible narrator who cannot but sympa­ thize with Yevgeny—although Dostoevsky is hardly the sort of novelist who plays tricks with 'point of view.' "18 Biackmur has lamented the need for the reader, in his confu­ sion, "to think back," "to feel back," yet it is my belief that here precisely lies Dostoevsky's intent with respect to his readers —he wants them "to think back," "to feel back." Krieger turns to the crucial conversation between Evgeny and the prince and decides that Dostoevsky would not "play tricks with 'point of view.' "

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Yet the meaning of the novel hinges on just such a trick of point of view, and more than any other scene in the novel, this is the scene to which the reader must repeatedly "think back" and "feel back" in order to shape his own stance towards the difficult problem of Myshkins goodness-^nd its effect in the world. Edward Wasiolek has also responded to The Idiot as to a work of failed greatness. He describes Prince Myshkin as "Dos­ toevsky's great love," as his "attempt to conquer that seemingly impossible task of creating a good man who is dramatically in­ teresting and believable." Although Wasiolek concludes that Myshkin fails to become "the dramatic center of interest," he concedes Myshkin to be "one of the great limited successes of lit­ erature."19 Wasiolek's reaction to the novel is complicated; he seems to double back upon his doubts and ultimately to defend the novel and its hero. "When critics charge him [Myshkin] with being a failure, they seek what is dramatically unbelievable and morally impossible. The Prince cannot change the universe, but a universe of Myshkins might."20 Perhaps we are witnessing in Wasiolek's reaction a clear instance of the conflict within one reader between his aesthetic and moral response to the novel. And The Idiot itself is, like most of Dostoevsky's novels, largely about questions of aesthetics and morality and their interrela­ tionship. Vladimir Etov has understood Myshkin as the embodiment of two opposing "hypostases": Myshkin's tendency towards spontaneous compassion, towards contemplation and universal love conflicts with his desire to be a teacher of life, a proponent of the ideas of the men of the soil (p och v en n ich eskie) and of Christian ideas, an opponent of Catholicism and Western influ­ ences. For Etov, as for so many other critics, Myshkin too often becomes a mouthpiece for the author's ideas and thus ceases to be a convincing character.21 Nevertheless, Etov carefully distin­ guishes between Dostoevsky the artist and Dostoevsky the thinker. His distinction becomes crucial in his analysis of the cli­ mactic scene near the end of the novel in which Myshkin holds forth at the Epanchins' soirée, "Dostoevsky, together with the Slavophils believed in the significance of the nobility, in its role of moral leadership . . . Such is the hidden subtext of Myshkin's speech. At the same time, in this scene the reader at first ob­ serves Myshkin-the-ideologue in all his magnitude and under­

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stands that his appeals are fruitless. It is not the reader's job to make the fine calculations of the author; he sees only one thing —the failure of the hero. And this is perceived as striking evidence of the triumph of the writer-realist over the limited moralist."22 Another Soviet critic, Mikhail Gus, follows Mochulsky's lead in comparing Dostoevsky's ideals in this novel to those of the later Gogol (as in his Selected Passages from C orrespon­ dence with Friends). Gus observes that Dostoevsky wanted to realize a Gogolian ideal in a Pushkin-like ("the poor knight") manner (po-pu shkin ski realizovat'gogolevskii ideal).23 Gus's as­ sessment of the novel ultimately resembles those of Blackmur and Krieger: for him the novel is a tragedy in which goodness brings about evil. "But the real significance of The Id iot, lies precisely in the fact that not only has Myshkin not conquered evil by his methods, not only has he not brought happiness to people, but he has ruined both those people and himself."24 As one can see from this selection of responses to The Idiot, most criticism of the novel has focused on its thematic and ideo­ logical aspects. Such an approach typifies much of the writing about Dostoevsky's work, although important exceptions exist in the writings of Leonid Grossman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Viktor Shklovsky, A. S. Dolinin, Robert Belknap, Joseph Frank, la. O. Zundelovich, and in the current writings of Julius Kirai, Arpad Ko vacs and others. Some of these critics, most notably Bakhtin, Belknap, and Frank, have offered more direct confirmation of my own reading of The Idiot and inspiration to the main body of this text.

Appendix B The Phenomenology of Reading

tudies of readers and readerships are fashionable today, and some of them have proved relevant to my understanding of The Id io t. Although nearly every school of criticism has touched upon the assigned role of the reader in a work, recently the reader has received special emphasis; he has even become at times the sole object of critical attention, to the exclusion of the work itself. The constructs for describing reading rival in intricacy those that critics have been making for years to analyze authors, narrators, characters, plot and im­ agery. The current attention to the reader is hardly surprising in view of the passionate emphasis on communication in the last two decades. The media are the message and novels are means of communication. For some critics, the author and the reader are engaged in a dialogue; no longer does the novelist impart something to the reader. The reader too brings his whole per­ sonality, locked in his time and place, to his reading of a work. The meaning in the novel lies in the collision between these two equally important entities: the "author" and the "reader."1 In the measure that reading has become democratized, the reader's position has skyrocketed in dignity. In fact, the novel and its meaning could not even exist without him. This new "ideology of criticism," in which the author can come dangerously close to being secondary to the critic, has both helped and hindered my effort to understand the narrative structure of The Idiot. At its best, criticism that focuses on the role of the reader emphasizes the work of art itself as the arena in which the author and the reader may engage in dialogue. (But

S

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there are, of course, many aspects of both the writer and the reader, and those critics who do not differentiate among them often generate more confusion than they dissipate. Among the readers, for example, there may be the implied reader, the reader posited by the narrator, and the actual person who sits down to read; there is the self he becomes as he reads; and, fin­ ally, there is the historical notion of a readership, a figure to be carefully defind by time and place.) At its worst, when criticism based on the phenomenology of reading allows itself to bypass the author and even the work in order to present its own partic­ ular response as the only object of significance, it becomes a sub-art form that ranks as neither criticism nor philosophy. It is appropriate here to offer the reader of this book a lim­ ited discussion of the "new" interest in reading as well as some of the theoretical implications of such an approach. My ambiva­ lence about the final value of concentrating upon the figure of the reader should become clear. I have resorted to my own terminology for describing authors, narrators, and readers with trepidation, often sensing the admonishing presence over my shoulder of H. W. Fowler and his words about novelty hunting: "there being nothing new in what I have to say, I must make up for its staleness by something new in the way I say it. And if that were all, if each novelty-hunter struck out a line for him­ self, we could be content to register novelty-hunting as a useful outward sign of inward dullness, and leave such writers care­ fully alone. Unluckily they hunt in packs, and when one of them has a find they are all in full cry after it, till it becomes a v o g u e w o r d , to the great detriment of the language."2 It is dif­ ficult to determine whether or not the words "reader" and "reading" have yet qualified as vogue words. Some critics who see the reader as a new discovery—both in his role as a literary creation of the author and as a real pres­ ence—have sought to separate themselves from all but a few worthy critics of the past. Wallace Martin, for example, turns against the previous generation of "hermeneutic critics" and writes, "Until critics can be talked out of the hermeneutic circle that they have somehow been talked into, further discussion of interpretative theory is pointless."3 Walter Slatoff begins his book: "One feels a little foolish having to begin by insisting that works of literature exist, in part, at least, in order to be read . . .

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Appendix B

Yet certainly if one were to judge from the dominant modes of literary study and literary theory and from much of the teaching of literature, it would seem as though readers and the act or ex­ perience of reading were peripheral if not entirely irrelevant considerations."4 He cites the guilty parties as "the new critics" and modern criticism in general. Stanley Fish, Slatoff's opponent in many respects, shares with him the role of the champion of the reader: "curiously enough when it comes time to make an analytical statement about the end product of reading (meaning or understanding), the reader is usually forgotten or ignored. Indeed in recent liter­ ary history he has been excluded by legislation."5 Fish finds W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley most guilty of such legisla­ tion: they have created what Fish calls "the Affective Fallacy Fal­ lacy." He quotes their book, The Verbal Ico n : "The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)."6 The critic, they feel, should concentrate only on the poem. For Fish the opposite is true: the sentence or poem is an event; it "happens to" the reader and is not an object in itself. Wolfgang Iser, less insistent than the others that he is ad­ dressing a totally new concern, does feel a need to emphasize that the reader must participate in forging the meaning of a snovel, which cannot exist without the reader. He clarifies his ex­ planation with a delightful quotation from Northrop Frye, "It has been said of Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended as a sneer at Boehme but it is an exact description of all works of literary art without excep­ tion."7 Jorge Luis Borges has argued that "a book is more than a verbal structure . . . a book is the dialogue with the reader."8 More recently, Walter J. Ong has seen critical concern with the role of the reader, as opposed to authorial concern with the reader's role, as something new; he finds that the problem of the audience has not been fully examined. "The standard locus in Western intellectual tradition for the study of audience responses has been rhetoric."9 According to Ong, the question of the reader, as separate from that of the generalized audience, has received even less treatment. However much critics may be engaged in rediscovering and

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redescribing the reader, authors have never lost sight of him. Ar­ istotle, Cervantes, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy —most serious philosophers, poets, and novelists have considered, both as writers and as critics, the im­ portance of the reader's responses. The rediscovery of the reader, is an illusory event, for no one will admit to ever having lost sight of him. Roger Fowler makes a hesitant attempt to discover a shared belief about "readers" among Michael Riffaterre, Roland Barthes and Stanley Fish. He ventures "a collective generaliza­ tion" that they share a "growing dissatisfaction with the readerexcluding premises of classic formalist criticism in both the Anglo-American and Russian/Prague/French traditions."10 But a contributor to Fowler's collection of essays, Jonathan Culler, finds one advocate for the role of the reader among the formalist critics: Viktor Shklovsky. Certainly Shklovsky's notion that the artist's goal is to achieve the effect of "ostranenie" (a "making strange," or a "defamiliarization") expresses a view of literature in which the manipulation of the reader's expectations lies at the center of the author's creative endeavor, and Culler does describe Shklovsky as "one of the few to have realized that investigation of the construction of the novel and the short story is an attempt to explicate the structural intuitions of readers by studying their formal expectations."11 The critic's task is stated in terms of his duties to the reader rather than in terms of his obligations to the text itself. "The analyst's task is not simply to develop a metalanguage for the description of plots but to bring to the sur­ face and make explicit the 'metalanguage within the reader himself.' "12 The harder one searches for the villains who have undervalued or excluded the reader, the more one happens upon his friends. The "new" emphasis on the reader and on the phènomenology of reading often resembles a nineteenth-century brand of highly personalized, subjective criticism which has been refur­ bished with the trappings of jargon and technical terminology. More important, this emphasis on the reader carries with it a re­ jection of the premise that criticism should confine itself strictly to a perusal of the inner boundaries of a work.13 But if he stresses the role of the reader and his responses, the critic must then deal with the difficult matter of different readings, with the inevitabil­ ity of varied responses.

242

Appendix B

Not all the critics who write about the role of the reader have felt that he was previously ignored or excluded. John Pres­ ton, Iser, and Ong, for example, acknowledge the attention that writers have always paid to their readers. But they suggest that there is a need for a historical study of the assigned role of the reader. Preston s book The C reated S elf focuses precisely on the role of the reader in eighteenth-century fiction.14 Iser presents a detailed elaboration of the posited reader for several novelists from the eighteenth century to the present. Both Preston and Iser rely heavily upon Booth's hypotheses about the existence of the implied author and his implied reader. Ong carries out a similar survey in his article; in addition, he specifically calls for a history of audience response.15 But Preston, Iser, and Ong are each more concerned with understanding the reader's role in terms of a particular text or moment in history than in establish­ ing an overall model for the phenomenology of reading. Al­ though they make statements about readers and reading in gen­ eral, their conclusions derive from a close historical analysis of the changing roles of readers and of writers' notions about read­ ers. For example, Iser finds distinct changes in the assigned role of the reader in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. Though the reader of an eighteenth-century novel was cast by the author into a specific role, "so that he could be guided —di­ rectly or indirectly, through affirmation or through negation — toward a conception of nature and reality, in the nineteenth century he had to discover the fact that society had imposed a part on him, the object being for him eventually to take up a critical attitude toward this imposition."16 But the reader of the modern novel is even more isolated, "he is expected to strive for himself to unravel the mysteries of a sometimes strikingly ob­ scure composition. This development reflects the transforma­ tion of the very idea of literature, which seems to have ceased to be a means of relaxation and even luxury, making demands now on the capacity of understanding because the world pre­ sented seems to have no bearing on what the reader is familiar with. This change did not happen suddenly."17 The most convincing descriptions of the reader's responses lead back to broader questions of morality and ethics. Every reader is to learn something about the world through his read-

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ing; he does not merely respond to a structure and stop there. He extracts meaning, a specific meaning, from the work; he may even seek to uncover the author's intent and modify the commandment of the previous generation of critics to avoid the "intentional fallacy." Frye has given a concise definition of the intentional fallacy: "The failure to m ake, in practice, the most elementary of all distinctions in literature, the distinction be­ tween fiction and fact, hypothesis and assertion, imaginative and discursive writing, produces what in criticism has been called the 'intentional fallacy,' the notion that the poet has a pri­ mary intention of conveying meaning to a reader, and that the first duty of a critic is to recapture that intention."18 Iser, for ex­ ample, has described literary criticism as an attempt to discover what is concealed in the text, "When we have been particularly impressed by a book, we feel the need to talk about it; we do not want to get away from it by talking about it —we simply want to understand more clearly what it is in which we have been entangled . . . Perhaps this is the prime usefulness of liter­ ary criticism —it helps to make conscious those aspects of the text which would otherwise remain concealed in the subcon­ scious."19 Although Booth does not advocate the revocation of the intentional fallacy, he rephrases and resolves the problem by linking aesthetic to m oral questions. "The 'well-made phrase' in fiction must be much more than 'beautiful'; it must serve larger ends, and the artist has a m oral obligation, contained as an essential part of his aesthetic obligation to 'write well,' to do all that is possible in any given instance to realize his world as he intends it."20 Some structuralist critics have also concerned themselves with defining the role of the reader. Their reader, unlike the readers of Booth, Ong, Iser, and others, does not direct his pri­ m ary efforts towards deriving a notion of the meaning of the work. Semantic considerations remain secondary. In Tzvetan Todorov's form ulation, the reader himself chooses to emphasize the aspects of a work that seem crucial as a m atter of personal judgment separate from the intent of the author. There is no single "right" reading for any complex literary work; instead readings are more or less rich.21 Likewise Roland Barthes sepa­ rates the reader's task from the discovery of meaning: "Litera­ ture is a system of signs; its being lies not in the message, but in

244

Appendix B

the system. This being so, the critic is not called upon to recon­ stitute the message of the work, but only its system."22 Robert Scholes has pointed out that in recent years Barthes and Tod orov have paid more attention to the question of the reader and that structuralist criticism in general has been forced to justify itself by asserting its applicability to individual texts.23 In fact, Barthes book The Pleasure o f the Text, in its idiosyn­ cratic and personal exposition of the phenomenology of read­ ing, implicitly presents a portrait of the reader. The text, which engages the reader's attention and gives him pleasure, also ideally reengages the reader with the outside world. "To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have m y best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else."24 A nother struc­ turalist, Michael Riffaterre, has developed the notion of a superreader of whom Scholes writes, "Riffaterre's superreader is not (like that of Stanley Fish) simply a modest extension of himself. No, it is an attempt at quantification of responses in order to move from those responses really stimulated by the poem back to the verbal structures responsible for them ."25 Georges Poulet abandons himself to the text while reading it; he emphasizes the power of the text over the reader rather than stressing the idea of a reader who tries to reconstitute a preexisting structure. "As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot to the omnipotence of fiction."26 However, he steers clear of stating that literature imparts knowledge; rather, it en­ gages the reader who, through a process of recognition, trans­ mutes his everyday self as he reads. "It [reading] might rather be called a phenomenon by which mental objects rise up from the depths of consciousness into the light of recognition . . . Read­ ing, then, is the act in which the subjective principle which I call 1, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I . . . This I who thinks in me when I read a book, is the I of the one who writes the b o o k ."27 This form ulation bears a remarkable resemblance to Booth's ideal, implied reader who, in reading, becomes a modi­ fied version of his everyday self and resembles instead the ideal,

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implied author of the work. (Booth had remarked that the au­ thor creates his implied reader and that "the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement.")28 Nonstructuralist critics have likewise emphasized the reader's role both in discovering for himself the meaning of the text and in responding to the author's intentional manipulation of him. Slatoff, Fish, Preston, Iser, and Ong, following Booth's model, have suggested generalized definitions for the figure of the reader. Slatoff postulates an ideal reader who is engaged but disengaged.29 This reader leans towards his own responses and never becomes a creation of the author. For Slatoff, all works, however firmly designed, leave the reader a great deal of free­ dom. He feels that Booth overestimates the extent to which a reader must becom e an implied self corresponding to the author's implied self.30 Thus his ideal reader, unlike Poulets, does not deliver himself bound hand and foot to the world of the work, nor does he follow to the extreme limit Coleridge's dictum to suspend disbelief. He always retains a degree of con­ trol. Unfortunately, Slatoff overargues his case: "virtually no critic even admits —in print, at any rate —that his reading of a work m ay in any way be affected by his own nature, experi­ ence, training, temperament, values, biases, or m otive for reading."31 Far more dynamic than this pallid figure of the reader are the formulations of the reader sind of the phenomenology of reading made by Fish, Preston, Iser, W olf Schmid, and Ong. For Fish, the reader is the "informed reader," a hybrid who com ­ bines competency in the spheres of language, literary under­ standing, and semantic knowledge.32 Fish avoids the difficult question of dealing with the inevitable different readings of "in­ formed readers" by claiming that the problem doesn't exist: "This, it seems to me is a pseudo-problem. M ost literary quar­ rels are not disagreements about response, but about response to a response . . . It is only when readers becom e literary critics and the passing of judgment takes precedence over the reading experience that opinions begin to diverge."33 In short, for Fish, the sheer experience of reading is identical among all "informed readers." Preston derives a model for the reader and the reader's in-

246

Appendix B

volvement with his reading from Laurence Sterne. "Sterne . . . offers the completest and most revealing portrait of the reader. He shows how, like an actor, the reader is simultaneously both involved and detached, intimately engaged in creating the fic­ tions, but coolly critical at the same time, taken out of himself, yet in the end in a position to find himself."34 Preston argues that though the reader m ay be in a "pseudo-situation," he is in a "real relationship." "He really does make contact with another mind, he does enter into a dialogue. He is not passive, at least at his best he is not: he brings his own experience and expectations to the w ork." For Preston, the literary text functions to "enlarge the readers experience."35 Iser's ideal reader is an "entangled reader" who labors to formulate the meaning of each work he reads. The entangled reader of a novel experiences ambivalent reactions. W hile dis­ cussing the role of the reader in Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Iser creates a model for most serious fictional works from Fielding on, "And so the meaning of the novel is no longer cm indepen­ dent, objective reality; it is something that has to be formulated by the reader."36 This reader's activity does not resemble that of the structuralist readers of Todorov and Barthes, despite their similar belief that there is no one objective, inflexible reality that the reader must find. The structuralist reader seeks to uncover a system and is not troubled by the question, "Is this the right reading?" Iser's reader seeks to uncover meaning; for him, there is a right reading, one intended by the author, even though the author leaves the actual form ulation of the meaning up to the reader. W riter and reader have a mutual responsibility to each other. Iser quotes "Fielding," the narrator of Tom Jones : "If the writer has strictly observed the rules above-m entioned, he hath discharged his part; and is then entitled to some faith from his reader, who is indeed guilty of critical infidelity if he disbelieves him ."37 Iser finds the author-reader relationship to be a constant feature of narrative prose, giving the reader the impression that he and the author "are partners in discovering the reality of hu­ man experience."38 Even in the m odem novel, where the novelist supposedly no longer tries to project his own unambiguous view of the world onto his reader, the relationship between writer and reader as partners in discovery still holds. The writer tries to diversify the

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reader's vision, "in order to compel the reader to view things for himself and discover his own reality."39 This diversified vision is shared by both author and reader. For Iser, as for Preston, the act of reading embodies in miniature the process of life: "As the literary text involves the reader in the form ation of illusion and the simultaneous form ation of the means whereby the illusion is punctured, reading reflects the process by which we gain experi­ ence."40 W olf Schmid shares Iser's theoretical concern with how a prose work functions as a communicative symbol within the collective consciousness of a particular readership at a particu­ lar tim e.41 He has worked out a diagram which takes into ac­ count different historical times and readers within those times to show the interrelationships between a given individual reader and his historical situation. This com bination of elements ap­ pears to the author as his reader-public. For understanding to occur between this "concrete author" and his "concrete reader," the author must address his audience in a known code (that is, shared speech norms, social values, world views, and aesthetic canons).42 But in the course of history the public and its codes change, whereas, of course, the concrete author is a single, his­ torical person who cannot change. Thus, though the work re­ mains as a symbol that moves through history, interpretations of it necessarily change. Schmid also postulates an "abstract author" and an "abstract reader." These two figures are primarily ideal personifications of the collective structure of the w ork.43 This author and his reader correspond to Booth's implied author and implied reader, and indeed Schmid cites Booth in this passage. (Later, he equates Booth's epithet "implied author" with the Russian term obraz avtora [the image of the author].)44 Schmid, like Booth, differenti­ ates the abstract author and reader from the narrator (and, by extension, his fictive reader).45 He observes that a work possess­ ing a narrator has a double-layered structure: the world por­ trayed by the author embraces both the narrator and the narra­ ted world, which is the product of the n arrator.46 In turn, the narrator can himself advance secondary, tertiary (and so forth) layers of narration, as for example, in the reportage of another character's direct speech. These secondary narrators invoke a world that exists in meaningful opposition to the world evoked

248

Appendix B

by the narrator, just as the various levels of narration stand in opposition to each other.47 In his book Schmid undertakes to show how in Dostoevsky's work the reader is summoned out of his passive attitude and called upon to decode the represented world. Such a decoding becomes quite complex because the perspective of moral values does not always correspond directly to the aes­ thetic organization of the w ork.48 In this respect Schmid's thesis closely resembles my own, al­ though I believe that the crucial step for the reader is not merely an act of "decoding." Dostoevsky's genius as an author lies one step beyond that: he forces his readers into episodes of moral (and aesthetic) recognition which, though generated by the fic­ tional world, are finally felt by the reader in his real world. Put in another way, Dostoevsky implicates his reader in the occur­ rences of his fictional world in a way that inevitably affects the reader's judgments in real life. O f course, all great fiction has this effect. In Dostoevsky's work, however, this result is often achieved by a fine and devious narrative sleight of hand, so that notions of readers and narrators prove to be especially useful. Ong, following the pattern set by Booth, Preston, and Iser, emphasizes that the author creates his reader. The process of creating a posited reader is inextricably linked to the course of literary history. Readers change, but only because authors change them. Only the great author, however, can effect such an alteration: "If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers, and so on back to the dawn of written narrative. If and when he becomes truly adept, an 'original writer,' he can do more than project the earlier audi­ ence, he can alter it."49 On the one hand, the audience or the reader determines the author's ultimate success or failure, for if an author does not imagine his audience successfully he cannot hope to have readers. For Ong, the question of determining his audience is the most basic literary task before the author.50 On the other hand, despite the all-powerful position of the audience as the determining factor in a work of fiction, Ong's reader is less free than the other ideal readers discussed here; he is always

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a creation of the author. He must accept the role in which the writer has cast him, even though it "seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life."51 Thus the range of ideal readers extends from a reader free to impose his own reading on a work and who brings with him and never relinquishes his own preconceptions and experiences (Todorov, Slatoff to some extent) to a reader who is created by the author and who, while reading, is totally immersed in the work at hand (Ong, Poulet). Interestingly, this spectrum does not parallel membership in a particular critical school: for example, the formulation of Poulet, a structuralist, resembles that of Ong, who emphasizes the significance of history and tradition in the authors determination of his audience. In the middle range, the formulations of Fish, Preston, and Iser seem the most useful. For them the reading of a work occurs on a common meeting ground between author and reader; the reader brings his experience with him but enters into a genuine partnership with the author for the duration of the reading. T heir collision —and collu­ sio n -p ro d u ces the meaning of the work. Hermeneutic critics, such as Leo Spitzer and Emil Staiger, en­ vision the readers response to a work in spatial terms. That is, having read a piece of narrative prose, the reader responds to it as to a whole entity. For Spitzer, the critic or reader is "to work from the surface to the 'inward life-center' of the work of art" and back again. "The scholar will surely be able to state, after three or four of these 'fro voyages,' whether he has found the life-giving center."52 To understand the whole the reader seeks to elucidate an observed detail, the choice of which, of course, presupposes an understanding of the whole. Staiger describes his response as a reader or critic to a work in similar terms: the process of inter­ pretation —of moving back and forth between presentiment and text —results at last in a precise understanding of the work. 'This feeling, a vague presentiment still obscure even to myself, I clarify and bring toward exact conception. If my feeling was false, the object [that is, the work —a thoroughly spatial descrip­ tion of it] itself will raise an objection . . . If, however, my feeling was right, I experience that precious happiness that can befall the interpreter: each observation, everything that I acquire in knowledge about the text corroborates my first dim presenti­ ment."53

250

Appendix B

Slatoff, throughout his book, also tends to talk about read­ ing spatially; that is, reading is a response to the work as a whole. Here Fish disagrees with Slatoff's notion of the reader: "In his analyses, response is something that occurs either before or after the activity of reading. W hat concerns him is really not response, in the sense of the interaction between the flow of words on the page and an active mediating consciousness, but a response to that response."54 As might be expected, Fish stresses above all the temporal quality of reading. He understands the sentence as "an event , something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader . . . this event, this happening . . . is . . . the meaning of the sentence."55 This model can be extrapolated on up in larger units to the paragraph, page, and work. The reader's responses develop in relation to words as they succeed one another in time. Fish directly com bats the idea of literature as a spatial form. "Literature is a kinetic art, but the physical form it as­ sumes prevents us from seeing its essential nature, even though we so experience it."56 T o view a work as an object, as critics like Spitzer and Slatoff have done, is, for Fish, to misinterpret a temporal experience as a spatial one.57 Iser describes this same flow that occurs in reading at the level of the sentence. But he creates a synthesis between the tem­ poral and spatial views of reading: "the activity of reading can be characterized as a sort of kaleidoscope of perspectives, prein­ tentions, recollections. Every sentence contains a preview of the next and forms a kind of viewfinder for what is to com e; and this in turn changes the preview' and so becomes a viewfinder for what has been read."58 Donald Fänger, in a discussion of Gogol's story "The O ver­ coat," has also compared the activity of reading to looking through a kaleidoscope. His eloquent account of being Gogol's reader suggests a way to describe the reading of any complex, rich text. "Reading the story is thus like looking through a ka­ leidoscope: the constituent elements of the changing patterns are limited in number; one can recognize them, wonder at the variety, while noting how the recurrence of certain patterns ap­ pears more than fortuitous, but less than primary. In this kaleid­ oscope's successive patterns we see images that prompt reflec­ tion; these are related, we may come to realize, to other, less ar­

The Phenomenology of Reading

251

resting images. Each turn contributes to a growing familiarity with the separately enigmatic shapes, and so intensifies the search for that perpetually elusive yet constantly potential pat­ tern which might fix them all in positions of analyzable beauty."59 Iser emphasizes that the m otion of this "kaleidoscope of per­ spectives" is not always smooth; an interruption in the flow oc­ curs when one sentence has no clear relationship to its predecessor. This gap produces surprise or indignation in the reader which he must in some way overcome in order to con­ tinue his reading. Reading thus combines temporal and spatial attributes: it is an "active interweaving of anticipation and retro­ spection."60 The anticipation and retrospection extend forward and backw ard in time, but the reader's act of interweaving cre­ ates an object out of what he has read. True, this object con­ stantly changes as he reads; objects are constantly discarded, but they are made. The temporal qualities of reading still out­ weigh the spatial for Iser: he defines the act of reading by using a string of verbs. "As we read, we oscillate to a greater or lesser degree between the building and the breaking of illusions. W e look forward, we look back, we decide, we change our de­ cisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their nonful­ fillment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject; this is the dynamic process of recreation."61 But the final metaphor for this activity is spatial: the reader achieves a re-creation of experi­ ence. He can only achieve this re-creation, however, through the temporal collection of responses. In the second half of The Idiot the implied author entangles his reader in a complicated maze of events which the reader must perceive, through his reading, both temporally and spa­ tially. The reader finds himself partaking of all the roles as­ signed to him by these various students of the phenomenology of reading. A t times he is carefully manipulated by the implied author and allowed little freedom of response; at other times he is left shockingly alone; he is sometimes informed, sometimes misinformed; he must struggle to achieve his "partnership" with the author, a partnership which the author, nevertheless, wants him to accept.

Appendix C Characters and Family Constellations

After a long stay in Switzerland where he has been undergoing medical treatment for a mysterious nervous condition at times resembling idiocy, the saintly, childlike, and epileptic Prince Lev Nikolaevich M yshkin returns to Russia. On the train he meets Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, a strange and passionate man who is obsessed with a beautiful and hysterically unpredictable woman, Nastasia Filip­ povna Barashkov. W ithin a day of his arrival M yshkin has become deeply involved with Rogozhin and Nastasia Filip­ povna, with the second heroine, Aglaya Epanchin, and with two families —the Ivolgins and the Epanchins. In the course of the novel M yshkin becomes both suitor and confidant to each heroine. He also becomes both rival and spiritual brother to Rogozhin, who even attempts, early on, to murder M yshkin. Although M yshkins actions and intentions are good, they create conflicting expectations and passions in the other characters and help generate scandals and tensions that end in disaster. At the end of the novel, when confronted by Rogozhin and by the body of Nastasia Filippovna, whom Rogozhin has just murdered, M yshkin, after an all-night vigil with Rogozhin by her corpse, lapses into a state of idiocy and is sent back to the clinic in Switzerland. The three main characters are without family affiliations. Tw o of them, M yshkin and Nastasia Filippovna, grew up as or­ phans; the third, Rogozhin, has a senile mother and a brother, who does not appear as a character in the novel. The rest of the

Characters and Family Constellations

253

characters are for the most part members of three families or in some way connected to them. General Ivan Fyodorovich Epanchin and his wife Lizaveta Prokof'evna have three daughters, Alexandra, Adelaida, and Aglaya. A fanasy Ivanovich Totsky (Nastasia Filippovna's guardian and seducer) seeks to marry Alexandra. Adelaida's suitor is Prince Shch — , and Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky ex­ presses interest in Aglaya. M yshkin himself is distantly related to the general's wife. The Epanchins are the most prosperous of the families in the novel. General Ardalion Ivanovich Ivolgin and his wife Nina Alexandrovna have three children: G anya, Varya, and Kolya. G anya, General Epanchin's secretary, is in love with his employer's youngest daughter, Aglaya, but General Epanchin and Totsky plan to m arry him to Nastasia Filippovna. Varya (who eventually marries Ivan Petrovich Ptitsyn) does not play a significant role in the plot except as the bearer of news. Kolya, the younger son, becomes deeply attached to M yshkin. His other close friend is Ippolit Terentiev, the son of General Ivolgin's mistress. Ferdyshchenko is a boarder in the Ivolgins' apart­ ment. A recent widower, Lukian Tim ofeevich Lebedev has four children, the youngest an infant and the oldest a daughter, Vera. (At the end of the novel the narrator hints that she and Evgeny Pavlovich have fallen in love.) Lebedev's nephew is Vladimir D oktorenko. He and his acquaintances Keller (the retired boxer) and Antip Burdovsky ("Pavlishchev's son") cause the prince much distress.

Note on Citations Notes Index

Note on Citations

Of the many complete and partial collections of Dostoevsky's writings I have used principally: Pis'ma, ed. A. S. Dolinin, 4 vols. (Moscow: 1928-1959), abbreviated when cited in the text and notes as P, followed by volume and page numbers.^ P oln oe sobra n ie k h u d oz h estv en n y k h p roizveden n i, ed. B. V. Tomashevsky and K. I. Khalabaev, 13 vols, (Moscow: GIXL, 1926-1930), abbreviated in the notes as S obran ie, followed by volume and page numbers. I frequently cite vols. XI and XII of this collection, which include D n evn ik pisatelia, and the English translation of this work by Boris Brasol, T he D iary o f a Writer, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949). I also refer to vol. XIII of S o b ra ­ nie, parts of which appeared in English as D ostoevsky's O ccasion al Writings, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Random House, 1963). The ongoing Soviet edition of Dostoevsky's complete works, P oln o e s o ­ branie sochin enii v tridsati to m a k h , 30 vols. (Leningrad). I often refer to vol. VIII, Idiot (1973), and to vol. IX (1974) containing notes and plans for T he Id­ iot, edited and prepared by T. P. Golovanova, G. M. Fridlender, I. V. Serman, I. A. Bitiugova, N. N. Solomina, and V. V. Dudkin, who are collec­ tively referred to as "the editors" in the text and the notes. References to P oln oe sobran ie in the text are to volume and page number. All the translations from this work are my own. When the reference is to T he Idiot, I also provide a sec­ ond page number directing the reader to a good recent English text of T he Id­ iot, trans. Henry and Olga Carlisle (New York: New American Library, 1969).

Notes

Introduction 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, P roblem s o f D ostoevsky's P oetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 158. * 2. Wayne C. Booth, The R h etoric o f Fiction (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1961), p. 151. For a general discussion of the implied author and the implied reader see ibid., pp. 137-144. The idea of the author's second self is not new: Wolfgang Iser has cited Kathleen Tillotson's work, T he T ale an d the T eller, in which she points out that E. Dowden, in 1877, had already made a similar separation between the real author and that self who writes the novel; Dowden found the narrator of George Eliot's novel to be "that second self who writes her books." See Wolfgang Iser, T he Im plied R ead er: Patterns o f C om ­ m unication in P rose Fiction fro m Bunyan to B eckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 103. 3. Booth, R h eto ric, pp. 137-138, 304. 4. Booth noted how a narrator may act as a foil for the failures of an au­ thor: "the author who attributes the style of his work to a narrator who is to some degree unreliable can get away with murder in this regard, providing himself with a pat excuse if we find weaknesses: T hey are characteristic of my narrator, not of me' " (R h eto ric, p. 147). Whatever weaknesses one ultimately finds in T he Idiot, Dostoevsky has not blamed his narrator for them. As the notebooks for the novel clearly show, he carefully planned the narrator's tone as an intricate part in the overall strategy of the novel. 5. Booth, R hetoric, pp. 147, 119-149, 138. 6. This conception of a reader of Dostoevsky's novel derives from and shares Booth's belief that a reader must contemplate the moral aspect of any narrator's point of view, for that is always, to some degree, a matter of m oral definition. It is only fair to note, however, that this stance has been criticized, and well, by Norman Friedman; see his F orm an d M eaning in Fiction (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1975), pp. 142-143. Friedman criticizes Booth for his dislike of moral ambiguity in fiction: "Booth confuses . . . art and life rather badly: as a man, I must make up my mind about such matters . . . but as a writer and reader, I must be constantly experimenting" (p. 164). But Friedman's avowedly "relativist," "pluralist" outlook, despite its usefulness

258

Notes to Pages 5-12

as a critical tool, prevents him from experiencing the shock of moral recogni­ tion and understanding that great fiction so often engenders in us. 7. Numerous critics proposed schemes for characterizing all the possible points of view or angles of vision from which an author can choose to narrate his work. See, for example, Booth, R hetoric, pp. 149-169; Friedman, Form and M eaning in Fiction, pp. 134-167; Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, T he N ature o f N arrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 240-282; René Wellek and Austin Warren, T h eory o f Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), pp. 212-226. 8. Donald Fänger, "Gogol and His Reader," in L iterature an d S ociety in Im perial Russia, 1800-1914, ed. William Mills Todd III (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 94. 9. For Leonid Grossman, unity in Dostoevsky's novels stems from the au­ thor's philosophical intentions. A concise statement on Dostoevsky's use of di­ verse narrative forms to express his philosophical ideas may be found in Tskusstvo romana u Dostoevskogo" in P o etik a D o sto ev sk o g o (Moscow, 1925), pp. 174-175. 10. Bakhtin, P roblem s, pp. 89-93, 108-113, and passim. % 11. Bakhtin proposed that the author (Dostoevsky) and the hero are en­ gaged in a dialectic: 'The new artistic position of the author vis-à-vis the hero in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is a con sequ en t and fu lly realized d ialogical position . . . For the author the hero is not lie' and not 1;' but a full-fledged 'thou', that is, another full-fledged T (Thou art')" (P roblem s, p. 51). Bakhtin, however, does not address himself to the narrator's own polyphony of voices except in his discussion of "The Double" (P rob lem s, pp. 174-185), and here the narrator's voice is directly related to that of Golyadkin's double. It is not a sep­ arate consciousness with its own inherent contradictions as is the case with the narrator-chroniclers of Dostoevsky's later novels. 12. Lionel Trilling labeled "all prose fiction" a "variation on the theme of D on Q uixote"; see "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," in T he L iberal Im agina­ tion : Essays on Literature an d S ociety (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), p. 209. But he did specifically call Madame Bovary "the sister, at threecenturies' remove, of Don Quixote" (ibid., p. 211). Ian W att has described M a­ d am e B ov ary as the "classic equivalent" of D on Q u ixote "as regards the effects of the novel"; T he Rise o f th e N o v el: Studies in D efoe, R ichardson , an d Field­ ing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 205. Harry Levin has presented his discussion of M ad am e B ov a ry under the subtitle "The Female Quixote," in T he G ates o f H orn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 246. Although acknowledgment of the kinship between Don Quixote and Madame Bovary is a commonplace of modem criticism, it is exciting to find Dostoevsky making artistic use of this relationship to underscore the tragic ending of his own novel.

1. The Narrative Imperative 1. I have not attempted a general statement about Dostoevsky's aesthet­ ics or his philosophy of art. Readers interested in these questions should con-

Notes to Pages 12-17

259

suit Robert Louis Jackson, D ostoevsky's Q uest fo r Form : A Study o f His Phil­ o s o p h y o f A rt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966). 2. P, III, 227-228. The specific work to which Dostoevsky is referring in this passage is his 1876 article on Russia's mission; see "Vostochnyi vopros," in Dnevnik pisatelia, in S obran ie, XI, or "The Eastern Question," in The D iary o f a W riter, I, 358-360. "The thought spoken is a lie" comes from Tyutchev's fa­

mous poem "Silentium." 3. F. M. Dostoevsky, "Riad statei o russkoi literature: I. Vvedenie," S o­ branie, XIII, 44; or "Five Articles from T im e: I. Introduction," in D ostoevsky's O ccasion al Writings, pp. 58-59. 4. P, I , 1 February 1846, p. 86. Dostoevsky did not compare himself only

to Gogol. The emerging writer propelled himself, in his fancies, into the com­ pany of other established writers. "I am finishing a novel the size of Eugénie G ran det ; the novel is quite original" (P , I, 30 September 1844, p. 73). He com soled himself over having to rework P o o r P eo p le : "I don't know if Chateaubri­ and's A tala was his first book, but he, I remember, rewrote it 17 times. Push­ kin made the same kind of revisions even with his short verse. Gogol polished his marvelous creations for two years at a time, and, if you read V oy ag e sen ti­ m en tal of Sterne —a little book—you'll remember what Walter Scott said in his notice about Sterne . . . [i.e., that Sterne's servant claimed Sterne had made extensive revisions and condensations of the book]" (P, I, 4 May 1845, P- 77). For a discussion of the relationships of Lermontov and Gogol with their respective, equally unsophisticated, reading publics, see Donald Fänger, "Go­ gol and His Reader," in Literature an d S ociety in Im perial Russia, 1800-1914, ed. William Mills Todd III (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 65. Fänger quotes Lermontov's preface to A H ero o f O ur Tim e, "Our public is like a provincial who, overhearing the conversation of two diplomats belonging to hostile courts, remains convinced that each of them is deceiving his own gov­ ernment in favor of a mutual and most tender friendship." Fänger also calls at­ tention to the authorial asides of D ead Souls in which Gogol "confronts the unreadiness of the Russian reader of his time to recognize the conventions of fiction; the implicit contract between writer and reader simply could not be taken for granted." 5. F. M. Dostoevsky, S obran ie, XI, 188. 6. P, II, 1 /1 3 January 1868, p. 71. Dostoevsky's observations on how Don Quixote and Pickwick affect the reader closely resemble Ivan Turgenev's ideas in "Gamlet i Don Kikhot" in P oln o e so bra n ie soch in en ii i pisem v dvadtsati v o s ’m i to m a k h , S ochin en iia, VIII (Moscow, 1964) 171-192. This essay, written in 1860, had assumed the importance of a manifesto by the time Dos­ toevsky was writing T he Id iot. Rufus Mathewson has written about Turgenev's assessment of the effect of the Don Quixote character type on the reader, 'The ultimate purpose of the 'comic envelope' is to release a 'reconciling cleansing force' through laughter. And Turgenev adds: W hom you laugh at you forgive and are ready to love.' Turgenev has mediated between the image and the reader, and has brought this encounter to a typically literary resolu­ tion." Rufus W . Mathewson, Jr., T he P ositive H ero in Russian Literature, 2nd

260

Notes to Pages 17-31

ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 107. Although he feared for the successful outcome of his experiment, Dostoevsky consciously tried to transcend Turgenev's categories of comedy and tragedy as defined in "Hamlet and Don Quixote." 7. For Dostoevsky's account of this scene, see D n evn ik pisatelia, S obranie, XII, 29-33, or T he D iary o f a W riter, II, 584-588. 8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, T he N o te b o o k s fo r A R aw Y outh, ed. Edward Wasiolek, trans. Victor Terras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 128-129. 9. Anna Dostoevsky, R em iniscences, trans, and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York: Liveright, 1975), p. 296. Anna Dostoevsky has quoted Dostoev­ sky's letter to S. D. Yanovsky in P, III, 17 December 1877, pp. 284-285. 10. Dostoevsky, "G-n — bov i vopros ob iskusstve," in S obran ie, XII, 91; or "Mr. — bov and the Question of Art," in D ostoevsky's O ccasion al Writ­ ings, p. 131. 11. Dostoevsky, "Knizhnost' i gramotnost'. Stat'ia pervaia," in S obran ie, XIII, 107-108; or "Pedantry and Literacy. First Article," in D o sto ev sk y ’s O c­ casion al Writings, p. 155. 12. Ibid, p. 106; pp. 152-153. 13. Dostoevsky, "G-n — bov," p. 93; "M r.— bov," p. 134. 14. Ibid. 15. F. I. Evnin, "Plot Structure and Raskolnikov's Oscillations," trans. Natalie Bienstock, in F. M. Dostoevsky, C rim e an d Punishm ent, ed. George Gibian, trans. Jesse Coulson (New York: W . W . Norton, 1964) p. 676. This ar­ ticle was translated from Evnin's book, T v orch estv o D o sto ev sk o g o (Moscow, 1948), pp. 165-172. 16. P, II, 491. Dolinin cites three other letters of Dostoevsky which make a similar juxtaposition between the poet and the artist; P, II, 1 5 /2 7 May 1869, pp. 189-197; 24 March 1870, pp. 257-260; 2 /1 4 December 1870, pp. 297-300. 17. Georgy Chulkov, K a k ra b o ta i D o sto ev sk ii (Moscow, 1939), p. 207. 18. Leonid Grossman, "Kompozitsiia v romane Dostoevskogo," in S o b ra ­ nie sochin enii v piati to m a k h , II (Moscow, 1928), 13. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 14. See also Chulkov, K a k ra bo ta i, p. 223. 21. Dostoevsky, "Knizhnost' i gramotnost'. Stat'ia vtoraia," in S obran ie, XIII, 113; or "Pedantry and Literacy. Second Article," in D ostoevsky's O cca­ sion al Writings, p. 165. 22. "Knizhnost'," p. 133; "Pedantry," p. 194. 23. "Knizhnost'," p. 134; "Pedantry," p. 195. 24. Ibid. 25. "Knizhnost'," p. 125; "Pedantry," p. 182. 26. "Knizhnost'," p. 140; 'Pedantry," p. 205. 27. Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" (1888) in H enry Jam es: S elected Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1953), p. 591. 28. Wayne C. Booth, T he R h etoric o f Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 49-50. Booth here quotes Henry James, "The Novels of George Eliot," A tlan tic M on thly, October 1866, p. 485.

Notes to Pages 31-45

261

29. Booth, R hetoric, p. 125. 30. Ibid., pp. 131-133. E. M. Forster makes a similar, abbreviated com­ ment about the interest of a work, although he finds the notion of interest to be a less serious consideration than do Dostoevsky, James, and Booth. He does not examine it as a separate aspect of the novel. “Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of de­ mand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot." A spects o f the N o v el (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927), pp. 108-109. 31. Dostoevsky, D n ev n ik pisatelia, in S obran ie, XI, 147-148; or, T he D iary o f a W riter, I, 160. Dolinin has cited this passage in his notes for P, III, 358. 32. P, IV, 28 August 1880, p. 198. At this time Dostoevsky was consider­ ing whether to start issuing T he D iary again. 33. Dostoevsky, "G-n — bov i vopros ob iskusstve," p. 72; or, "Mr. — bov and the Question of Art," p. 101. Magarshack has here translated khu dozhestven n ost' as "high artistic quality," whereas throughout this chapter I have most often translated it as "artistic execution." We are, I hope, both right. In the quotations which I have translated, Dostoevsky was emphasizing aspects in the pro cess of creativity; in the passages translated by Magarshack, Dostoevsky is speaking about a finished product and how it is perceived by a reader. The O x ford Russian-English D iction ary has translated kh u d oz h estv en ­ nost' as both "artistry" (process), and "artistic merit" (product). 34. Dostoevsky, "G-n — b o v ,"p . 72; or, 'M r .— bov," pp. 100-101. 35. Dostoevsky, "G-n — bov," p. 95; or, "M r.— bov," p. 136. 36. Dolinin, in noting the emphasis Dostoevsky placed upon finding a successful beginning for a novel, has cited the letters in which Dostoevsky touches upon this subject. P, III, 331. 37. Forster, A sp ects o f th e N ov el, pp. 94-95. 38. Ibid., p. 169. 39. The following observation by Tolstoy typifies the kind of criticism to which Dostoevsky was often subject. T always write in the morning. I was pleased to hear lately that Rousseau too, after he got up in the morning, went for a short walk and sat down to work. In the morning one's head is particu­ larly fresh. The best thoughts most often come in the morning after waking, while still in bed or during the walk. Many writers work at night. Dostoevsky always wrote at night. In a writer there must always be two people —the writer and the critic. And, if one works at night, with a cigarette in one's mouth, although the work of creation goes on briskly, the critic is for the most part in abeyance, and this is very dangerous." T alks w ith T olstoy, ed. A . B. Goldenveizer (1922), trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf (1923), quoted in Miriam Allott, N ovelists on the N ov el (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 150. 40. P, II, 358. Dostoevsky's self-accusation about his writing sounds re­ markably like Myshkin's more basic criticisms of his own lack of measure and harmony.

262

Notes to Pages 47-53

2. The Notebooks for The Idiot 1. See P oln o e so bra n ie, IX, 339. Dostoevsky feared a search at the Rus­ sian border when they returned from their sojourn abroad. Anna Dostoevsky has written of the fate of this manuscript, "Sad as I was to part with the manu­ scripts, still I had to yield to Fyodor Mikhailovich's insistent arguments. We lit a fire in the fireplace and burned the papers. Thus perished the drafts of The Id iot and T he Eternal H u sb an d " See Anna Dostoevsky, R em iniscences, trans. and ed. Beatrice Stillman (New York: Liveright, 1975), p. 167. 2. P. N. Sakulin and N. F. Bel'chikov, eds., Iz ark h iv a F. M. D o sto ev s k o g o : Idiot, n eizdann ye m aterialy (Moscow, 1931), p. 3; and P oln o e so b ra ­ nie, IX, 339. See also the English edition of these notebooks, T he N o te b o o k s f o r T he Idiot, ed. Edward Wasiolek, trans. Katherine Strelsky (Chicago: Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 9. 3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The N o te b o o k s fo r A R aw Y outh, ed. Edward Wasiolek, trans. Victor Terras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 31. 4. Robert Louis Jackson, D ostoevsky's Q uest f o r F orm : A Study o f His P h ilosop h y o f A rt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 166. 5. Dostoevsky, T he N o te b o o k s fo r T he Id iot, p. 9. 6. For example, see Robin Feuer Miller, "Myshkin and Alyosha: The Genesis, Premature Birth, and Fruition of the Positively Beautiful Man," (Mas­ ter's thesis, Columbia University, 1974), pp. 72-107. 7. As the 1974 editors explained, 'This division [into plans] does not con­ cur with the more fragmented and impulsive authorial articulation of the material; it insufficiently sets off important changes of an ideological and ar­ tistic order"; they find that Bel'chikov's and Sakulin's divisions provide only a provisional orientation to the material (IX, 340). 8. Anna Grigor'evna wrote that Dostoevsky was preoccupied with the Umetsky case in the autumn of 1867 and that he wished he were in Russia so that he might follow it more closely. See Sakulin and Bel'chikov, Iz arkh iv a , p. 204. Dostoevsky read about the Umetsky case in the fall issues of G o lo s (The V oice) and M o sk v a {M oscow ). He had already begun work on T he Id io t be­ fore he heard of the case, but then quickly incorporated it into the notes. Mig­ non, another early version of Nastasia Filippovna, became Olga Umetsky, the would-be arsonist whose parents had beaten her and their other children mer­ cilessly yet were not severely punished. Olga was acquitted but the Russian public feared for her future after her parents' release from prison, and faith in Russia's newly established jury system was undermined (ibid., pp. 205-208; IX, 340). 9. Elizabeth Dalton finds that though the "painful and dangerous Umet­ sky material is emphatically repressed" in the novel, "the themes of the vio­ lated child and the sadistic father are nevertheless present." Dalton compares the effect of the Umetsky case in the genesis of the novel to the way in which "the day's residue works in the creation of a dream . . . Before it could enter the novel it had to be buried and transformed: barred from direct expression . . . it undergoes that 'proliferation in the dark' of which Freud writes, helping

Notes to Pages 53-66

263

to create the web of organic connections that make up the emotional texture of the novel." U nconscious Structure in T he Id iot: A Study in Literature an d Psy­ choan alysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 200. Yet Dos­ toevsky's preoccupation with the Umetsky case may derive partly from the fact that this case reflected and affirmed themes already present in his earlier published fiction. 10. The 1974 editors also suggest her kinship with Hero in Shakespeare's M uch A d o A b o u t N othing (IX, 352). 11. Wasiolek notes that Ganya and Ptitsyn are the only proper names re­ tained in the published text that appear in the early notes (Dostoevsky, The N o te b o o k s fo r T he Idiot, p. 78). In fact toward the end of the second note­ book in the entry for 1 1 /3 0 November Kolya's name also appears. 12. P oln oe so bra n ie, IX, 167; Sakulin and Belchikov, Iz arkh iv a , p. 39. Unfortunately the English version of the notes mistranslates the "Memento"; "the chief point of the novel is the Uncle and the son, these two characters" (Dostoevsky, T he N o te b o o k s fo r T he Idiot, p. 81). 13. Dostoevsky, The N o te b o o k s fo r A R aw Y outh, pp. 72-7A 14. L. N. Tolstoy, S obran ie sochin en ii v d v ad tsati tom a kh , IV (Moscow, 1961), p. 33. 15. Of course as Arthur O. Lovejoy has pointed out, the image of the great chain of being, in which everything had its place and every deed rever­ berated through the world, has long occupied a dominant position in men's conceptions of their universe. See T he G reat Chain o f Being: A Study o f the H istory o f an Idea, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). Dos­ toevsky and Tolstoy were both drawing upon an idea that was "in the air." 16. P, II, 18 February/l March 1868, p. 79. In this letter Dostoevsky praises W ar an d P eace, but he also criticizes it for having too many petty psychological details. But Tolstsy had already begun to publish W ar an d P eace in R usskii V estnik in 1865 (Book l, Parts I and II) under the title "1805." Dostoevsky had certainly read these early parts as they came out. 17. Dalton, U nconscious Structure in T he Idiot, p. 187. 18. Mikhail Bakhtin, P roblem s o f D ostoevsky's P oetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), pp. 150-228. 19. The 1974 editors stress in particular the sense of the word "idiot" as used in the Middle Ages; an idiot was thought to possess a deep spirituality; his wisdom stemmed from this rather than from any bookish knowledge (IX, 394). 20. The editors also emphasize this meaning of the word "idiot" (IX, 394). 21. Dostoevsky has quoted The General Epistle of James, 2, 19. 22. James H. Billington, The Icon an d the A x e: A n In terpretive H istory o f Russian Culture (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 60. 23. George P. Fedotov, T he Russian R eligious M ind, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), II, 318-319. 24. Ibid., p. 320. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 322. 27. Ibid., p. 327.

264

Notes to Pages 66-89

28. Ibid., p. 336. 29. Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed. and trans., M ed iev al Russia's Epics, C hron ­ icles, an d Tales (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), p. 249. 30. George P. Fedotov, A Treasury o f Russian Spirituality (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1948), p. 13, and Donald Attwater, T he Penguin D iction ary o f Saints (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 306. 31. Fedotov, The Russian Religious M ind, p. 202. 32. Ibid., p. 184. 33. Ibid. 34. Helen lswolsky, Christ in Russia (London: Morrison and Gibb, 1962), p. 142. 35. Dalton has likened the rejections, transformations, and remoldings of these roles to a process "very like the repression, condensation, displacement, and secondary vision that go on in the formation of a dream. Moreover, by that law of conservation that operates in the unconscious, virtually none of the ideas in the notebooks is lost. The violent, sexual, incoherent material Dostoevsky consciously rejects turns up later in the novel, disguised and bur­ ied, but animating The Id iot with the power of repressed idea and impulse." Dalton, U nconscious Structure in T he Idiot, p. 186. 36. Sakulin and Bel'chikov, Iz arkh iv a , p. 203. 37. In the last entry of the second notebook for 1 1 /3 0 November the 11 refers to December 11 new style (not to 11 November), so this one entry did occur, according to Sakulin, during the crucial period of rewriting and re­ thinking (ibid., p. 244). However, the entry provides no substantial clues to the formation of the novel; it is primarily a rehash of old material in which the Umetsky family plays the dominant role. 38. Dalton, U nconscious Structure in T he Idiot, p. 173. 39. Sakulin and Bel'chkov, Iz arkh iv a, p. 198. 40. The 1974 editors also stress the importance of the phrase "Prince Christ." They find this idea to be an old one of Dostoevsky's. In April 1864 just after the death of his first wife Dostoevsky revealed his understanding of the commandment to love your fellow man as yourself. "He wrote, 'the highest usage which a man can make out of his own personality, out of the complete­ ness of his own I is to destroy that 1, to give it back as a whole to all men and to each man separately and wholeheartedly.' In these words the writer formu­ lated his highest moral ideal, the fullest incarnation of which was attained, from his point of view, only by Christ" (IX, 365). 41. On 16 May 1868, Dostoevsky's first-born daughter Sonya died. The second entry after Sonya's death, on 24 May, reflects Dostoevsky's desire to be done with the novel. Here he has outlined an ending in which a rehabilitated Nastasia has married the prince, whose house is turned into a school. Every­ thing generally comes out well. But this outline reflects a poignant desire to be finished with the tormenting work rather than a possible solution to the prob­ lems raised in the novel. Dostoevsky quickly rejected the entire plan (IX, 268-270). 42. The 1974 editors, in a comparison of T he Id iot with C rim e an d Pun­ ishm ent, draw a similar conclusion and find that "all these features of the po-

Notes to Pages 89-91

265

etic style of T he Id io t receive further development in T he P ossessed , A Raw Youth, and T he B rothers K aram azov" (IX, 410).

3. Shaping the Reader's Expectations 1. Mixing of modes is not peculiar to Dostoevsky; it prevails in the works of most great novelists. In disagreeing with Percy Lubbock's emphasis on the p oin t o f view in a novel, E. M. Forster finds that for him this question resolves itself into "the power of the writer to bounce the reader into accepting what he says —a power which Mr. Lubbock admits and admires, but locates at the edge of the problem instead of at the centre. I should put it at the centre." See his A spects o f the N o v el, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927), pp. 78-79. His example is B lea k H o u se: "Logically, B lea k H ouse is all to pieces, but Dickens bounces us, so that we do not mind the shiftings of the viewpoint" (ibid., p. 79). The lack of a single consistent point of view enriches rather than diminishes the novel; the multiplicity of narrative modes in a work serves to make a novel more real. "Indeed this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting view-point is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge: —I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life. We are stupider at some times than others; we can enter into people's minds occasionally but not always, because our own minds get tired; and this intermittence lends in the long run variety and colour to the experiences we receive" (ibid., p. 81). Dostoevsky takes this method of shifting viewpoint to its extreme limits, so that the reader is often rudely jolted rather than bounced. 2. The reactions of the reader I know best, myself, did not correspond to the enriching, interlacing layers of response that repeated readings of great novels usually produce, but were, instead, opposite, mutually exclusive re­ actions. At a first reading I felt Dostoevsky had failed in his creation of Mysh­ kin as a "positively beautiful man." I located this failure in the fact that vestiges of the vengeful Idiot of the notebook remained in the novel. A second reading convinced me of Myshkin's authentic goodness. A comparison of Robert Lord's with Joseph Frank's readings of the novel yields the same extreme variance but for both, it is precisely the experience of being a reader of The Id iot that becomes the most crucial aspect of this novel. See Robert Lord, "An Epileptic Mode of Being," in his D o sto ev sk y : Essays an d P erspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 81-102, and Joseph Frank, "A Reading of T he Id io t,” Sou thern R eview , 5 (April 1969), 303-332. 3. Leo Spitzer has characterized criticism as a "to and fro voyage from certain outward details to the inner center and back again to other series of de­ tails." See his Linguistics an d Literary H istory: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), pp. 19-20. Criticism can claim for itself no scientific methodology; to understand the whole you must seek a detail or a part which will illuminate the whole. But the critic's happy choice of a produc­ tive part to examine presupposes some understanding of the whole, and Spit­ zer aptly quotes Pascal's God, "Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m'avais pas déjà trouvé" (ibid., p. 24). My own study of the narrative manner in The Idiot

266

Notes to Pages 91-103

and its effect upon the reader has assumed the qualities of a "to and fro voyage" and should not be construed as an effort occurring under the banner of any particular critical ideology. 4. Joseph Frank, "Dostoevsky as Journalist: 1847", B oston University Journal, 2 (1975), 13. Frank cited Belinsky's "shrewd comment" on the nature of the feuilletonist. He "is a chatterer, apparently good-natured and sincere, but in truth often malicious and evil-tongued, someone who knows every­ thing, keeps quiet about a very great deal but definitely manages to express everything, stings with epigrams and insinuations and amuses with a lively and clever word and a childish joke." Belinsky has offered here a prophetic de­ scription of the tone often adopted by Dostoevsky's narrators in his novels. 5. Booth has asserted that an implied author typically does not allow his narrator complete omniscience, "very few 'omniscient' narrators are allowed to know or show as much as their authors know." See Wayne C. Booth, The R h etoric o f Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 160. He uses the example of Henry James's notebooks and essays to assert that the nov­ elist "discovers his narrative technique as he tries to achieve for his readers the potentialities of his developing idea" (ibid., p. 165). Most often, Booth finds, the novelist discovers that what is at stake is the establishment of the degree to which the narrator shall lack omniscience. "The hard question is: Just how in­ conscien t shall he be?" (ibid.). 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, P roblem s o f D ostoevsky's P oetics, trans. R. W . Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 19. 7. Ibid., pp. 142-143. 8. Lionel Trilling has best defined the relationship of manners to what we usually consider our more "serious" concerns. "What I understand by manners . . . is a culture's hum and buzz of implication —I mean the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made. It is that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value." See Trilling, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," in his T he L iberal Im agination (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), p. 206. 9. Although Dostoevsky most certainly did not have Jane Austen in mind when he created the narrative voice that describes the Epanchin house­ hold, his portrayal plays with these conventions and renders them grotesque. The reader abruptly finds himself in a decidedly "unDostoevskyan" environ­ ment of a middle-class family with three daughters who read novels and try to find literature in life. The narrator's tone is one of ironical amusement even when he describes the villainous Totsky. The implied author's preoccupation remains, as always, intensely moral, and the reader is constantly aware of the amusing discrepancy between the facts and their appearance to many of the actors. 10. Walter Allen characterizes Jane Austen's novels as a feminization of Fielding's: 'The world they show has undergone an enormous contraction . . . the world of the parlour, the world of ladies to which Tom Jones is not admit­ ted or, if admitted, so much on his best behaviour as to be unrecognizable." See his T he English N ov el: A S h ort Critical H istory (Harmondsworth, Eng. : Penguin Books, 1954), p. 110. Myshkin's appearance in the world of these ladies represents an even greater breach of form.

Notes to Pages 105-109

267

11. As the novel progresses, the theme of the nonexpression of an idea, either intentionally or through an inability to do so, ceases to be a mere narra­ tive device and assumes a metaphysical significance. Later in the novel Mysh­ kin condemns himself for this constant habit of not completing or admitting his thoughts: "Conviction of what? . . . 'Say it if you dare, conviction of what?' he kept sayiing to himself, in challenge, in accusation. 'Put it into words, dare express your full thought clearly, precisely, without hesitation! Oh, I am dishonorable!' " (VIII, 194; 252). Myshkin's wording is interesting in the light of Dostoevsky's own reservations about expressing his ideas fully and directly. 12. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 of Part I contain many face readings. Myshkin suggests to Adelaida that she draw the face of a condemned man a moment be­ fore the guillotine blade falls, and he reads the physiognomies of Adelaida ("you have a happy face") and Alexandra ("There is something special about your face that reminds me of the Holbein Madonna in Dresden.") Interest­ ingly, Dostoevsky himself had recently seen a copy of this picture for the first time and did not like it. See René Fülöp-Miller and Dr. Fr. Eckstein, eds., Madge Pemberton, trans., T he D iary o f D ostoevsky's W ife (New York: M ac­ millan, 1928), pp 11-12. Myshkin also reads Lizaveta Prokof'evna's face and concludes mysteriously, "And don't think I have spoken all this so openly about your faces from simplicity! oh no, not at all! It could be that I have my own idea" (VIII, 65; 96). He says of Aglaya that she is "almost" as beautiful as Nastasia Filippovna, "although her face is quite different" (VIII, 66; 98). The action of the chapter revolves around an embodiment of Nastasia's face—her photograph. 13. Leonid Grossman, "Kompozitsiia v romane Dostoevskogo," in S obran ie sochin enii, II, 9-59; Bakhtin, "Characteristics of Genre and Plot Composition in Dostoevsky's Works," in his P roblem s o f D ostoevsky's P oetics, pp. 83-150; Konstantin Mochulsky, D o sto ev sk y : His L ife an d W ork, trans. Michael Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Donald Fänger, D o sto ev sk y an d R om an tic R ealism : A Study o f D o sto ev sk y in R ela­ tion to Balzac, D ickens, an d G o g o l (Chicago-. University of Chicago Press, 1965). 14. See Robin Feuer Miller, 'Dostoevsky and the Tale of Terror," in The Russian N ov el, ed. John G. Girrard (New Haven: Yale University Press, forth­

coming). 15. See also Dostoevsky's letter of 1861 to Yakov Polonsky (P, I, 302). Moreover, as a student in engineering school, Dostoevsky had read to his friends from the works of Maturin (See Leonid Grossman, S obran ie sochinenii, II, 73). See also Vsevolod Setchkarev, "Ch. R. Maturins Roman 'Melmoth, the Wanderer und Dostojevskij," Z eitschrift fü r slavische P hilologie, 30 (1951), 99-106. 16. Edmund Burke, A P h ilo sop h ical Enquiry into the Origin o f O u r Ideas o f the Sublim e an d B eautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), pp. 39, 51, 39. Burke was not the first to associate the sublime with greatness of dimension or to analyze the psychological effects of experiencing the sublime. He was, however, the first to attempt a "physiological explanation" of the sublime and the first to convert the link be­

268

Notes to Pages 109-111

tween sublimity and terror into a system. See Boulton, "Introductory Essay," p. lvi, in Burke, A P h ilosop h ical Enquiry. 17. The impact of Burke's essay was almost immediate —the phrase "the sublime and the beautiful" quickly entered everyday speech (ibid., pp. xcvixcvii, xcii), and "it became commonplace among both writers and readers to consider the emotions of terror and awe as sources of 'the Sublime'—a ready conduit to ideas of Divinity, Omnipotence, and all Final Things." See Joel Porte, "In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Ficition," in T he G oth ic Im agination: Essays in D ark R om anticism , ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman, W ash.: Washington State University Press, 1974), p. 43. In Dostoevsky's N otes fro m U nderground the underground man does battle with countless writers, thinkers, and catch-all phrases —among them "the sublime and the beautiful." Although this phrase has often been linked to Schiller as well, the editors of the ongoing Soviet edition of Dostoevsky's works have turned back to Burke and Kant (V [1973], 102; 383). 18. Mario Praz, "Introductory Essay," in T hree G oth ic N ov els: The Cas­ tle o f O tran to, V athek, Frankenstein, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 10. Burke himself had briefly suggested that

the qualities of the sublime and the beautiful could be "sometimes found united" both in nature and in art, despite the fact that one is "founded on pain, the other on pleasure." Burke, A P h ilo sop h ical Enquiry, p. 124. 19. Matthew G. Lewis, T he M o n k (New York: Grove Press, 1952), pp. 363-364. 20. Charles Robert Maturin, M elm oth th e W anderer: A T ale (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 322. 21. Edgar Allan Poe, P h ilo so p h y o f C om p osition , quoted by Mario Praz in his The R om an tic A g on y , trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed. (New York: Ox­ ford University Press, 1970), p. 27. Throughout the chapter 'The Beauty of the Medusa" (pp. 23-53) Praz gives other examples of the mingling of Beauty and Horror, and he later cites Mitya's famous speech in T he B rothers K aram azov that begins, "Beauty is a terrible and awful thingl" (ibid., p. 350). He does not link this passage directly back to the Gothic novel, however, but forward to the language of Baudelaire. 22. Indeed, T he B rothers K aram azov is largely a b o u t the miraculous

power of single acts of good, single beauties, single seeds, amidst a world stocked with evil, ugliness, and seeming death. 23. In The B rothers K aram azov Dostoevsky again had merged images of beauty and horror to make a similar philosphical statement. Although Dmitri lamented the presence of the "mysterious" and the "terrible" in beauty, Alyosha learned to accept this dichotomy in beauty and to find, by virtue of this accep­ tance, a higher kind of harmony. When the elder Zosima died, everyone had expected "something extraordinary" to happen; least of all had they expected an odor to arise from his holy corpse. Alyosha's eventual acceptance of the fact that Zosima's body had decomposed expressed his realization that God's ways are unpredictable and that nature itself is sinless so that man should not read his own moral notions into its processes. Alyosha's full acceptance and perception of nature led him to a miraculous experience of sublimity, a sublimity which was, paradoxically, devoid of the terrible.

Notes to Pages 111-113

269

24. See Comte Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Justine (1791), in T he M arquis d e S ad e: T he C o m p lete Justine, P h ilo so p h y in th e B ed room , an d O th er Writings, trans. and ed. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 459; Ann Radcliffe, T he M ysteries o f U dolpho (1794), (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 5; Lewis, T he M on k, p. 39; Maturin, M elm oth , p. 215. 25. The new value placed on sensibility in the Gothic novels also reflected the growth of a female reading audience. See Ian W att, "The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel," in T he R ise o f the N o v el: Studies in D efoe, R ichardson an d Fielding (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1957), pp. 35-60, and Mario Praz, "Introductory Essay," in Fairclough, T hree G oth ic N ovels, p. 9. Jane Austen's narrator, presumably a woman, in N orthan ger A b b e y (1818)—which is itself a parody of the Gothic novel —describes the reading habits of the heroine, Catherine Morland. "But from fifteen to seven­ teen she was in training for a heroine: she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventual lives." But the emphasis so many critics place on the female reader should not eclipse the fact that men read these novels too. I hope we do not share Catherine's amazement at the sensible hero, Henry, when he praises T he M ysteries o f U dolpho: "But I really thought before young men despised novels amazingly." "It is am azingly; it may well suggest am azem en t if they do —for they read nearly as many as women. I, myself, have read hundreds and hundreds" Jane Austen, N orthan g er A b b e y (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1972), p.122. 26. Maturin, M elm oth, pp. 13-14; p. 14. The clearest influence of this passage can be seen in Gogol's story, The P ortrait. The young artist Chartkov purchases a similarly demonic portrait of an old man in which the eyes are alive. Setchkarev finds a "suspicious" parallel here; he claims that Gogol knew Maturin's novel. See Vsevolod Setchkarev, G o g o l: His L ife an d W orks, trans. Robert Kramer (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 127. 27. Praz, "Introductory Essay," in T hree G oth ic N ovels, p. 20. 28. Of course many novelists —from Cervantes to Jane Austen to Dickens —have depicted characters who had to unlearn their educations in order to discover their true moral sensibilities, but the Gothic novelists allow their characters to suffer unspeakable misfortunes along the way. 29. A typical definition of the Gothic novel is given by Wolfgang Iser: "a form of the novel that had arisen specifically out of reactions against the morally oriented novels of the eighteenth century. The Gothic novel restored to the genre the element of the mysterious and the uncanny which the moral novels of the eighteenth century had tried to eliminate." He cites Fielding's dislike of the form of the Gothic novel and of the unnatural Gothic novelist himself ("their brains the chaos where all their materials are selected"). Wolfgang Iser, T he Im p lied R ead er: Patterns o f C om m u n ication in P rose Fic­ tion fro m Bunyan to B eck ett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 81. 30. Lewis, T he M o n k , p. 314. 31. Maturin, M elm oth, p. 334.

270

Notes to Pages 111-118

32. In recent years there has been a small but serious revival of interest in the Gothic novel and in the study of its direct influence upon such writers as Dickens, Melville, Hardy, Conrad, Kafka, and Faulkner. See, for example, Virginia Hyde, "Kafka and Gothic Iconography," in T he G oth ic Im agination, pp. 128-150; James Keech, "The Survival of the Gothic Response," Studies in the N ov el (Summer 1974), pp. 130-144; Robert D. Hume, "Gothic Versus Romantic," PM LA, 84 (March 1969), 282-290; Robert L. Platzner, " 'Gothic Versus Romantic': A Rejoinder," PM LA, 86 (March 1971), 266-274; Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman, "Gothic Possibilities," N ew L iterary H istory, 8 (Winter 1977), 279-293. These articles vary in their definitions of the Gothic novel, but they all tend to view the Gothic primarily as an emo­ tion, first expressed in the author's "Gothic" impulse and then reflected in the reader's response. These modem critics have followed the lead of the earliest contemporary commentators on the Gothic novel such as Scott and Coleridge, who from the outset viewed the Gothic as a "response," and therefore saw it as an occasion for a scrupulous analysis of the role of the reader. Curiously, however, none of these critics, past or present, has commented upon the com­ edic response produced in these novels by the mixture of comedy and tragedy, of the vulgar with the supernatural. 33. Maturin, M elm oth , p. 380; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, quoted in T hree G oth ic N ovels, p. 364. 34. Praz, The R om an tic A g on y , p. 76. 35. Ibid., p. 209. Cleopatra represents the personification of this

algolagnie type; Gautier, Dumas, and Pushkin incarnated her as the type of the Fatal Woman (ibid., pp. 211-215). 'In accordance with this conception of the Fatal Woman, the lover is usually a youth, and maintains a passive at­ titude; he is obscure, and inferior either in condition or in physical exuberance to the woman, who stands in the same relation to him as do the female spider, the praying mantis, etc., to their respective males" (ibid., p. 215). The relation­ ship between Nastasia Filippovna and Myshkin reflects some of these stereotypes: his physical condition is weaker than hers; he accedes to her wishes; and, most important, his compassion for her is heavily counterbal­ anced by his fear of her. Dostoevsky consciously links her to the Cleopatra type; as Nastasia Filippovna emerges onto the porch in her wedding finery, an anonymous voice in the crowd outside quotes a line from Pushkin's Egyptian Nights, "A princess! For a princess like that I'd sell my soul," some clerk cried out, and he sang, Tor one night of love I'd give up my life' " (VIII, 492; 610). 36. Praz, T he R om an tic A g on y , p. 219. 37. In his next novel, T he P ossessed, Dostoevsky links, albeit ironically, Stavrogin to the vampire legend (X, [1974], 40 1 ). Even the

narrator-chronicler's first full physical description of Stavrogin suggests the qualities of a vampire: his hair, "a little too black" (ch to-to uzh)', his complex­ ion, "a little too white," the redness of his cheeks, which was "too bright," his "coral lips," and the fact that there was "something repellent" about his beauty (X, 37). 38. Radcliffe, The M ysteries o f U dolpho, p. 240; Lewis, T he M o n k , p. 417; Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 360; Maturin, M elm oth th e W anderer, p. 241.

Notes to Pages 118-120

271

39. Another striking instance of the coincidence between the weather and the plot occurs near the end of T he P ossessed. At dawn after their night together Liza observes to Stavrogin, "It ought to have been light an hour ago by the calendar, and still it's almost like night" (X, 398). As Liza walks toward the fire in the town and toward the mob that will soon murder her the narrator brings all of nature to bear in the depiction of his climactic scene. "A light rain penetrated the whole country, swallowing up every reflection, every nuance of colour, and transforming everything into one smoky, leaden, in­ distinguishable mass. It had long been day, yet it seemed as though dawn had not yet broken" (X, 411). At this moment Stepan Trofimovich appears and the Gothic mood is abruptly deflated by tragicomedy. 40. Booth, R h etoric o f Fiction, p. 175. 41. Ibid., p. 255. 42. Comte Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Id ée sur les rom ans (Bordeaux: Ducros, 1970), p. 53. 43. Similarly, in T he P ossessed in the scene where Liza is murdered, the narrator dissipates the mood of terror at the very moment of most heightened drama: as she is being beaten by the mob, the narrator is already deflating the scene. In T he M on k, M elm oth the W anderer, and The W andering Jew (Eugène Sue) such scenes of murder by a mob occur, and while they are terri­ ble, they at least conform to some notion of "rough justice"—to use Sholokhov's chilling phrase. But Dostoevsky used this Gothic scenario to il­ lustrate the tragic complexity of all that has transpired. The narrator suddenly becomes an observer; he acts as a kind of ballast to the macabre scene (X, 413). He later testifies about what he has witnessed in a deliberately low-keyed manner. His perhaps too rapid return to the rational world resembles the voice of the narrator in T he Id iot after Rogozhin's attempted murder of Myshkin and again at the close of the novel. 44. Posthumous article by Radcliffe in N ew M on thly M agazine, 7 (1826); quoted by Hume, "Gothic versus Romantic," pp. 284-285. 45. Burke, A P h ilosop h ical Enquiry, p. 40. 46. Grossman, "Kompozitsiia v romane Dostoevskogo," in S obran ie sochinenii, II, 9-59; George Steiner, T olstoy o r D o sto ev sk y : A n Essay in the O ld Criticism (New York: Random House, 1959), pp. 192-214 and passim. See also Setchkarev, "Ch. R. Maturins Roman Melmoth, the Wanderer' und Dostojevskij" pp. 99-106. 47. Grossman, "Kompozitsiia", pp. 21-22. 48. Ibid., p. 24. 49. Ibid., p. 32. Similarly, the Gothic novel in England invited bogus "translations from the German." See Devendra P. Varma, T he G oth ic R a m e (London: Arthur Baker, 1957), pp. 31-32. In France, the situation was much the same. See Maurice Lévy, "English Gothic and the French Imagination: A Calendar of Translations, 1767-1828," in T he G oth ic Im agination, p. 151. Gothic novels had taken Europe by storm —Lévy describes them as having been "read to pieces." Walter Scott wrote of the rage for The M ysteries o f U dolpho in similar terms, 'The volumes flew and were sometimes torn from hand to hand" (quoted by Varma, p. 94).

272

Notes to Pages 121-136 50. P oln oe sobran ie, XV (1976), 546. 51. Grossman, "Kompozitsiia," p. 22. 52. Ibid., pp. 51-52. Grossman puts the Gothic novel in the category of

adventure novel; the Gothic novel is a later manifestation of this type of literature, but is not separate from it. "But Dostoevsky's immediate teachers in composition were not so much Cervantes and Le Sage as a whole pleiad of later representatives of 'adventure' literature" (ibid., p. 22). He goes on to name Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Steiner, T olsto y o r D o sto ev sk y , p. 210. Ibid., p. 194. Balzac's admiration for Maturin is also well-known. Grossman, "Kompozitsiia," p. 58. Steiner, T olstoy o r D o sto ev sk y , pp. 204, 207. Grossman, "Kompozitsiia," pp. 17, 16. Ibid., p. 19. Varma, The G oth ic Flam e, p. 3; Barton Levi St. Armand, "The

'Mysteries' of Edgar Poe: The Quest for a Monomyth in Gothic Literature," in The G oth ic Im agination, p. 65. 60. Varma has quoted Coleridge and Scott, in T he G oth ic Flam e, p. 104.

4. The Breakdown of the Reader's Trust in the Narrator 1. In 1874 Dostoevsky wrote a vignette about railroad travel reminiscent of the narrator's digression at the beginning of Part III. Here he also touches upon the lack of "talented people among us"; he portrays a character, a type not unlike Lebedev, who "knows all." Lebedev too had first been described while on a train. See Dostoevsky, "Malen'kie kartinki. (V doroge)," in S obran ie, XIII, 457-473, or "Small Sketches during a Journey," in D ostoevsky's O ccasion al Writings, pp. 255-283. Robert Hollander has called attention to three letters Dostoevsky wrote to Maikov between August and October 1867 expressing hope in the future of the Russian railways. He notes that Dostoevsky's attitude toward the railroads later changed: they came to symbolize an outlook of "get rich quick, and you may do as you please." Robert Hollander, "The Apocalyptic Framework of Dostoevsky's The Idiot," M osaic, 7 (1974), 131. He finds the railroads in T he Id iot to be associated with mercantilism and a general spirit of political cor­ ruption: as Lebedev calls them, "the artistic pictorial expression" of the emp­ tiness of mercantilism (ibid., p. 133). 2. Nastasia Filippovna's letter to Aglaya uses the same Gothic mode for describing Rogozhin. She describes his "two terrible eyes, which constantly look at me, even when they are not present before me. These eyes are silent now (they are always silent), but I know their secret. His house is dark and dreary, and there is a secret in it. I am certain, that in a cabinet he has a razor hidden, wrapped in silk, like that murderer in Moscow . . . I would kill him from fear . . . But he will kill me first" (VIII, 380; 474). 3. N. Zhinkin has written about Dostoevsky's narrative technique (in Crim e an d Punishm ent) of inducing and maintaining a constant state of ten­ sion in his readers. He notes that the reader's sense of oppressiveness is never

Notes to Pages 136-155

273

allowed to relax; he points out that Dostoevsky purposefully leaves gaps in his narrative. For example, Dostoevsky doesn't explain how Raskolnikov arrives at certain ideas, because he wants the reader to be tormented by riddles and to be forced to work out his own solutions. N. Zhinkin, "Dostoevskii i chitatel'," S lavia (Prague), 15, no. 4 (1938), 526-538. Zhinkin points out that it is much easier to be a reader of P ère G oriot, a novel which addresses itself to similar problems, than of Crim e an d Punishm ent (ibid., p. 541). 4. This is Myshkin's most direct expression of longing for normal sexual experience and for participation in everyday human existence. The editors note that the source of the phrase about the "feast of life" is from Malthus' essay, On the Principle o f P opu lation as It A ffects th e Future Im p rov em en t o f S ociety, and that Aleksandr Herzen also used the phrase "the feast of life" in From the O ther S h ore (IX, 452). 5. The narrator continues to develop this atmosphere of magic. After Myshkin breaks the case, "he stood as if he were a person apart, . . . like an in­ visible man in a fairy tale" (VIII, 454; 565).

6. In this chapter the narrator's barbs against society resemble Dostoev­ sky's own tone in much of his journalism. 7. The editors cite various letters in which Dostoevsky himself expressed identical views (IX, 457). Here, however, the important thing is not the substance of the arguments, but the inappropriate time and place in which they are expressed. 8. Joseph Frank, in his brilliant article, "A Reading of the Idiot," discovers a similar pivotal change in the narrator at this point in the novel. He finds here "a significant shift in narrative point of view" which is "closely correlated with the unprecedented predicament arising from Myshkin's remarkable character." Joseph Frank, "A Reading of T he Idiot," Sou thern R eview 5 (April 1969), 328. V. A. Tunimanov has also described the narrator's increasing distance from the hero; he notes the growth of uncertainty in the voice of "the authornarrator." V. A. Tunimanov, "Rasskazchik v 'Besakh' Dostoevskogo," in Issledovan iia p o p o e tik e i stilistike, ed. V. V. Vinogradov (Leningrad, 1972), p. 107. Tunimanov remarks how the narrator sinks into a swamp of im­ probable rumors and leaves "the reader to discover the true verdict for himself" (ibid., p. 107). Although Tunimanov's article is for the most part a study of the narrator in T he P ossessed, he offers an excellent analysis of the effect on the reader of the narrator's style in T he Id iot (ibid., pp. 106-112). 9. Curiously, the narrator-chronicler of T he B rothers K aram azov uses nearly identical language at an equally critical moment in his narrative.-After Alyosha rushes out of the dead Zosima's cell in despair, the narrator observes, "I would only beg the reader not to be in too great a hurry to laugh at my young hero's pure heart. I am far from intending to apologize for him or to justify his innocent faith on the grounds of his youth . . . Don't you see, though I declared above, and perhaps too hastily, that I would not explain, apologize for, or justify my hero, I see that some explanation is necessary for the undertaking of the rest of my story." But here, the narrator's assertion that he need not justify or apologize for his hero serves as an explicit d efen se of Alyosha rather than as an abandonment of him. Indeed, the narrator em-

274

Notes to Pages 155-159

phasizes that "on the contrary . . . I have a genuine respect for the qualities of his heart" (XIV, 305-306; or T he B rothers K a ra m a z o v , ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, trans. Constance Garnett [New York: W . W . Norton, 1976], p. 317). It is typical of Dostoevsky's economy and genius as an artist that the narratorchroniclers of T he Id io t and T he B rothers K aram azov could use such similar language for such different purposes. But, fittingly, Dostoevsky has entitled the chapter of the novel in which this passage occurs "A Critical Moment" ("Takaia minutka"). The points of congruence and contrast among the narrator-chroniclers of The Idiot, T he P ossessed, and The B rothers K aram azov might some day be "the subject of a new tale." 10. Frank, "A Reading of T he Id iot, p. 329. 11. Tunimanov finds that Evgeny Pavlovich has reached the highest "worldly" interpretation of the events (Tunimanov, "Rasskazchik," p. 109). 12. The narrator had ended the scene between Aglaya and Nastasia (Part IV, chapter 8) with a tableau of Myshkin and Nastasia Filippovna that fore­ shadowed the final view of Myshkin at the end of chapter 11. He sat next to her, "he looked at her and stroked her on the head and face with both hands, as if she were a little child. He laughed at her laughter and was ready to cry at her tears. He said nothing . . . he began to stroke her head" (VIII, 475; 589). At the end, Myshkin sits with Rogozhin. "The prince sat motionless next to him . . . and every time, at the cries or ravings of the sick man, he hurried to pass a trembling hand over his hair and cheeks, as if he were caressing and soothing him" (VIII, 507; 628). He is frozen within this final role as comforter, for by now he had become an "idiot." The implied author has created a visual image almost as chilling as Holbein's painting of the dead Christ. 13. In Baden, during the summer of 1867, a few days after Dostoevsky's famous but obscure argument with Turgenev, Anna Dostoevsky writes how they came to purchase M ad am e B ov a ry despite their acute lack of funds. See René Fülöp Miller and Dr. Fr. Eckstein, eds., T he D iary o f D ostoevsky's W ife (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 255. Later she comments that she finds the novel "extraordinarily interesting" (ibid., p. 256); she may even have attemp­ ted a translation of the novel, for two weeks after the purchase of M ad am e B ov ary she started, "for sheer lack of occupation . . . translating a French book" (ibid., p. 301). The extreme poverty of the Dostoevskys during this trip abroad is well known. According to Anna Grigor'evna they bought almost no books during this trip, so the purchase of M ad am e B ov a ry is significant. 14. In his remarkable essay on the final scene of the novel, Allen Tate made a passing comment about the structure and the narration of T he Id iot which I hope all readers of this study will wholeheartedly reject: "Of the three great novels of Dostoevsky, T he Id io t has perhaps the simplest structure . . . there is very little summary or commentary by the author; here and there a brief lapse of time is explained, or there is a 'constatation,' a pause in the action in which the author assumes the omniscient view and reminds us of the posi­ tion and plight of the other characters, who complicate the problem of the hero." See Allen Tate, 'The Hovering Fly," in C o llected Essays (Denver: Allen Swallow, 1959), p. 146. 15. Wayne Booth, The R h etoric o f Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 285.

Notes to Pages 159-163

275

16. Critics from Grossman to Fänger have stressed that Dostoevsky used many different narrative devices to make his works interesting to the reader. M. G. Davidovich even listed and discussed ten narrative devices Dostoevsky employed to maintain the reader's interest. See his "Problema zanimatel'nosti v romanakh Dostoevskogo," in T v orch eskii Put' D ostoev s k o g o , ed. Nikolai Brodskii (Leningrad, 1924), pp. 104-131. But this abun­ dance of of devices has increased the narrative complexity of Dostoevsky's novels as well as their interest, and the way a reader is invited to respond to the resulting complexity should also be taken into account. 17. Robert Lord, D o sto ev sk y : Essays an d P erspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 227-228. 18. Frank, "A Reading of T he Idiot," p. 312. 19. Lord, "An Epileptic Mode of Being," in D o sto ev sk y : Essays, p. 81. 20. Ibid., p. 86. For Lord, section 1 = Part I; section 2 = Parts II, III, and the end of Part IV; section 3 = Part IV. ♦ 21. Ibid., p. 88. 22. Ibid., p. 90. At the same time, Lord has given some scrutiny to the texture of the narrative itself. He realizes the precarious and crucial role of the reader and does admit that "when «ill is said and done, the total impression of Myshkin, despite the way the presentation of his character is fragmented, is a profound one" (ibid., p. 91). But for Lord, Myshkin's profundity lies ultimately in his resemblance to Dostoevsky himself. Myshkin provides clues to his creator's biography; he is profound not as a literary creation, but as an echo of a real man. "It is my contention that his novel is primarily an exploration of the epileptic mode of being, which was also Dostoevsky's own" (ibid., p. 101). 23. Frank, "A Reading of T he Idiot," p. 304. 24. Ibid., p. 305. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 313. 27. Ibid., p. 328. 28. la. O. Zundelovich, "Svoeobrazie povestvovaniia v romane 'Idiot'," in R om an y D o sto ev sk o g o : S tat’i (Tashkent, 1963), pp. 62-105. 29. Ibid., p. 62. 30. Ibid., p. 65. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 64. 33. Ibid., pp. 66-67. 34. Ibid., pp. 70-71. 35. Ibid., p. 77. 36. Ibid., p. 78. 37. Ibid., p. 82. Zundelovich's analysis closely parallels Dostoevsky's own view of his artistic endeavors. In chapter 1 we have already witnessed Dostoevsky's sense of the conflict within him between the artist, who por­ trays, and the poet, who has the idea. Zundelovich substituted the term "thinker" for "poet," but otherwise the relationship between these two aspects of the writer is the same. 38. Ibid., p. 89. 39. Ibid., pp. 100-101.

276

Notes to Pages 163-169 40. Ibid., p. 101.

5. The Clash of Truth and Falsehood 1. This is not to say that the inserted or interpolated narrative is a device that every novelist has employed. Such "pure" writers as Jane Austen and Flaubert have not made particular use of it. René Wellek and Austin Warren dismiss this narrative mode as either "the attempt to fill out the size of a work" or "as the search for variety"; T h eory o f Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), pp. 221-222. But the inserted narrative, in one form or another, was basic to the narrative technique of such novelists as Cervantes, Fielding, Steme, Dickens, and Dostoevsky. 2. Richard Cumberland, H enry (1795), Vli, quoted by Miriam Allott, N ovelists on th e N o v el (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 228. 3. Henry Fielding, T he H istory o f T om Jon es: A Foundling (1749), Xi. The tale of "The Man of the Hill" in T om Jon es became the signpost for a *■ debate about the ideal structure of the novel in the late eighteenth and nine­ teenth centuries. See Allott, N ovelists on th e N ov el, pp. 164-173; 227-241 and Wolfgang Iser, T he Im p lied R ead er: Patterns o f C om m u n ication in P rose Fic­ tion fro m Bunyan to B eckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 50. Walter Scott focused on the same interpolated tale to express his dislike of this technique. He found 'The Man of the Hill" to be an "episode which, in compliance with a custom introduced by Cervantes and followed by Le Sage, Fielding has thrust into the middle of his narrative, as he had formerly introduced the History of Leonora, equally unnecessarily and artificially, into that of Josep h A n d rew s." See "Henry Fielding," in Walter Scott, Lives o f the N ovelists (1827), quoted by Allott, N ovelists, p. 231. 4. Grossman, "Iskusstvo romana u Dostoevskogo," in P o etik a D o sto ev s k o g o , (Moscow, 1925), p. 174. See also his essay "Kompozitsiia v romane Dostoevskogo," in S obran ie sochin en ii (Moscow, 1928), II, 20. 5. For a discussion of the attributes of this particular fantastic genre, see Mikhail Bakhtin, P roblem s o f D ostoevsky's P oetics, trans. R. W . Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), pp. 92-100. "Menippean Satire" and "Menippea" are both Bakhtin's epithets for a form derived by Menippus, a Cynic philosopher of the third century B.Ç ., whose satires were celebrated and imitated by his ad­ mirers, most notably Lucian. 6. Ibid., p. 97. 7. Henry James, letter to Hugh Walpole (19 May 1872), from S elected Letters, quoted by Allott, N ovelists on the N ov el, p. 235. 8. Of course we know from the notebooks that Dostoevsky had not even planned the existence of Ippolit at the time that he wrote Part I of the novel. But that does not mean that we cannot talk about unities of construction in this novel. As readers, after having read a work, we inevitably gauge its im­ pact upon us as a whole. Prophecies and fulfillments exist within a work; one cannot deny them simply because the writer at the beginning of his undertak­ ing did not himself know the exact shape that his work would assume. 9. The obvious autobiographical import of this anecdote has already

Notes to Pages 169-179

277

been thoroughly treated in many other critical and biographical works about Dostoevsky. 10. Bakhtin wrote of the carnival-like worlds of "Bobok" and of The Id io t: "People appear for a moment outside the normal situations of life, as on the carnival square or in the nether world, and a different —more gen­ uine —sense of themselves and of their relationships one to another is revealed. Such, for example, is the famous scene of Nastasya Filippovna's nameday party (T he Id io t) . . . Ferdyshchenko (a petty mystery-play devil) proposes a petit-jou e [sic] . . . [which] helps to create the carnival-square atmosphere." P roblem s o f D ostoevsky's P oetics, p. 120. 11. Yury Lotman described Dostoevsky's reaction of simultaneous at­ traction and repulsion to Rousseau and has compared Dostoevsky's lifelong argument with Rousseau to his relationship with Belinsky. See "Russo: russkaia kul'tura XVIII-nachala XIX veka," in his Z h an -Z h ak R usso. T raktaty (Leningrad, 1969), pp. 603-604. Dostoevsky condemned Rousseau's philan­ thropy (c h elo v ek o liu b ie) as well as his habit of confession. In the notes for A R aw Y outh he wrote, "He hates Genevan ideas (that is, philanthropy; that is, virtue without Christ)"; L iteratu m oe n asledstvo, (Moscow) 77 (1965), 80. Joseph Frank has explained the significance of the term c h elo v ek o liu b ie in the 1840s as signifying "the application of Christian moral-social ideals to worldly existence." It had no specific theological content, and this is how Dostoevsky continues to use it; D o sto ev sk y : T he S eed s o f R evolt, 1821-1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 193. 12. See Robin Feuer Miller, "Rousseau and Dostoevsky: The Morality of Confession Reconsidered," in W estern P h ilo sop h ical System s in Russian Literature, ed. Anthony M. Mlikotin (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1979), pp. 89-101, which traces, beginning with T he Insulted an d Injured, Dostoevsky's interest in these two episodes from Rousseau's C on ­ fession s. 13. Rousseau, The C on fession s, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 88. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 89. 16. Nevertheless Dostoevsky felt a continual attraction to the confes­ sional mode. Grossman notes that in addition to Rousseau's C on fession s Dostoevsky read the confessions of St. Augustine, Soulié's C on fession générale, Musset's C on fession d u n en fan t du siècle, De Quincey's T he C on fes­ sion o f an O pium Eater, and George Sand's C on fession d'une jeu ne fille (Grossman, "Stilistika Stavrogina," in S ob ran ie sochin en ii, II, 143). Dostoev­ sky always had a "decided inclination" for this literary genre. 'The abundance of workings-out of themes in the first person, the unquestionable predilection of Dostoevsky for the type of the 'Ich-Erzälung'—from P o o r P eop le, N eto ch k a N ezv an ov a, and A Christm as Tree an d A W edding to T he G am bler, The D evils, and A R aw Y o u th ,—all this shows his attraction to that form" (ibid., p. 144). Grossman finds that part of Dostoevsky's attraction to the confes­ sional form derives from the fact that at the center of a confession there usu­ ally lies a tale of a secret crime.

278

Notes to Pages 180-189

17. Rousseau, T he C on fession s, p. 86. 18. Ibid., p. 89. 19. Ibid. Stavrogin's confession in T he P ossessed contains further echoes "of Rousseau's false accusation of the servant Marion. This time Dostoevsky explores the moral implications of false accusation (albeit a passively enacted accusation) relentlessly; the gentler modes of parody and ridicule have been abandoned. Rousseau's maltreatment of Marion spurred him on to write his C onfessions and to seek the good. Stavrogin's encounter with Matryosha also "inspired" his confession, but his relations with her end only after he precipitated and witnessed her suicide. The degree to which Dostoevsky polemicized with and parodied the Rousseau of T he C on fession s in "At Tikhon's" cannot be overestimated; Miller, "Rousseau and Dostoevsky," pp. 96-98. 20. The implied author uses this anecdote to introduce the title of the novel La d am e aux cam élias by Dumas f i b into the text. Nastasia Filippovna somewhat resembles its heroine. 21. For another discussion of the role of Rousseau in Dostoevsky's works, see Dolinin's notes, in P, II, 510-511. 22. Grossman, "Stilistika Stavrogina," p. 142. 23. A . G. Dostoevskaia, V ospom in an iia (Moscow, 1971), p. 396. This letter of 26 November 1883 was not published until 1913. 24. Rousseau, The C on fessions, p. 17. 25. Lionel Trilling described Rousseau's claim to "pre-eminence in sincer­ ity." He further quotes Rousseau: "I who believe and always have believed, that I am on the whole the best of men, felt that there is no human breast, however pure, that does not conceal some vice"; see Sincerity an d A u then tic­ ity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 58-59. 26. Michael Holquist aptly described the importance of the idea of the moment for The Id io t: "The structure of a single moment's promise broken under the onslaught of a series of other such moments following upon it, con­ stitutes the novel's central pattem." See his D o sto ev sk y an d the N o v el (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 122. 27. But Myshkin himself cannot fully escape the habit of rational discourse and of thinking in terms of inexorable laws. He thinks later, "Com­ passion is the chief and perhaps the only law of human existence" (VIII, 192; 250). He uses the language of rational discourse to express a religious doctrine. 28. Robert L. Belknap, "Dostoevsky's Nationalist Ideology," R ev iew o f N ational Literatures, 3 (Spring 1972), passim. 29. A. S. Pushkin, Sochin en iia, III, ed. P. V. Annenkov (St. Petersburg, 1855), 17. As the 1974 editors noted, this set was in Dostoevsky's library (IX, 402). 30. D. D. Blagoi, "Dostoevskii i Pushkin," in D ostoev skii, k h u d o z h n ik i m yslitel, ed. K. N. Lomunov (Moscow, 1972), p. 402. 31. For the text of Dostoevsky's letter to Sonya Ivanova, see chapter 2. Dostoevsky's idea of a Don Quixote who was serious and not comic continued to develop. As late as 1877 he gave his image of Don Quixote a political cast: he placed Don Quixote in opposition to Metternich, to the spirit of capitalism,

Notes to Pages 189-191

279

and to the doctrine that the morality of the state need not coincide with the morality of one man (a doctrine rationalized under the phrase: "the interests of civilization.") According to Dostoevsky, these Don Quixotes had arisen in Russia and had begun to frighten Europe. Don Quixote figures as the cham­ pion of eternal morality, a morality which applies equally to states and to men. See D n evn ik p isatelia in S obran ie, XI, 50-51, or T he D iary o f a W riter, trans. Boris Brasol, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), II, 608. Myshkin too has the interests of all Russia at heart; he believes that his knowledge of good and evil will ultimately help him to fortify goodness and to redeem beauty; he too clutches at his sincerity as his most valuable weapon. The image Dostoevsky used in T he Id iot to convey a model for personal ac­ tion becomes, in T he D iary, a model for political action. In T he Id iot Myshkin's ideological opponent, Ippolit, appropriates for himself the motto, "Après moi le déluge." Curiously, in the same passage from The D iary about the political image of Don Quixote Dostoevsky asserts that if the truths advo­ cated by his Don Quixote are not preserved, then the banner bearing the in­ scription "Après nous le déluge" will be hoisted. 32. The stanza appeared in an anonymous article in S ov rem en n ik, ac­ tually written by M. L. Mikhailov, entitled "Respect for Women." Mikhailov was writing about the effect that the cult of Mary in the Middle Ages had had upon the ideal of service to women (IX, 403). The article appeared in S ovrem en n ik, 1, no. 1, 275-319, and 3, no. 1, 92-129 (1866). 33. The editors observe that the existence of this isolated strophe encour­ aged Dostoevsky to believe that this was not the only unpublished part of the poem. Structurally, the version recited in T he Id iot is incomplete, because the final verse in which the poor knight dies alone and insane in his castle con­ tradicts the traditional Christian representation of the eternal "responsiveness" of the Mother of God to prayers addressed to her (IX, 404). And indeed, the complete unpublished version of the poem does end with the Virgin Mary's in­ tercession on behalf of her poor knight; she takes him from hell up to heaven. 34. In another stanza, the seventh, which also did not appear in the shorter, published version of Pushkin's poem, the poet describes the knight's utter devotion to the Virgin Mary. He spent whole nights before her icon, star­ ing at her with his "sorrowful eyes." The earliest draft for the stanza contains the phrase "passionate eyes" (strastny ochi) which Pushkin later changed to "sorrowful eyes" (sk o rb n y och i); A. S. Pushkin, P oln o e so bra n ie sochin enii, III (Moscow, 1963), p. 463. This earliest draft underlines the voluptuous, even sinful zeal with which the poor knight worshipped the Virgin Mary. Such a motif of excessive, sensuous devotion was common to the Gothic novel; for example, in T he M o n k the virtuous Ambrosio falls passionately in love with a painting of the Virgin; this unholy passion precipitates his downfall. 35. As D. D. Blagoi points out in his article on Pushkin and Dostoevsky, much later (17 August 1880) Dostoevsky inserted this third unpublished verse into his notebook, but he transformed it in a characteristic way; “P od ezh aia p o d Z henevu / U p od n o z h iia kresta / Vstretil on Sviatuiu D evu / Mater' G o sp o d a Khrista." ("While approaching Geneva, he m et the Holy Virgin, the Mother of the Lord Christ, at the foot of a cross.") Blagoi notes that Dostoev­

280

Notes to Pages 191-207

sky probably intended to have Ivan Karamazov's devil recite this verse in its altered form. See "Dostoevskii i Pushkin," p. 403; see also L iteratu m oe N asledstv o: N eizdannyi D o sto ev sk ii (Moscow), 83 (1971), 770. ^ 36. Dostoevsky here alludes, the editors point out, to Iskra, published in Petersburg from 1859-1873 (IX, 445). 37. Myshkin's account is also heavily influenced by Victor Hugo's novel Le dern ier jo u r d'un con dam n é, 1829. 38. For Keller, questions of form and style in a narrative always take pre­ cedence over content. At the prince's birthday party in Part III, he reveals his passion for reading about the English Parliament in the newspapers. "I love terribly to read in the papers about the English Parliaments, that is, not in the sense of what they are discussing . . . but how they talk among themselves and carry on, so to speak, like politicians, 'the noble viscount, seated op­ posite,' 'the noble count who shares my idea,' 'my noble opponent, who has as­ tounded Europe with his proposal,' that is, all those fine little phrases, all this parliamentary procedure of a free people —that's what is alluring to me; . . . I've always been an artist in the depths of my soul" (VIII, 309-310; 393).

6. The Search for a Binding Idea 1. Compare the relevant passage from R evelation s, which does not actu­ ally appear in the text of T he Idiot. "And he said unto me, It is done. I am Al­ pha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life [of istoch n ika v o d y z h iv o i} freely," R ev ela­ tions, 21.6; see also 22.1, 22.5. 2. Earlier, when the prince arrived at his own party Lebedev announced that they had been discussing H am let and the question 'T o be or not to be." (Lebedev's metaphor of rottenness also recalls H am let.) In the notebooks Dos­ toevsky has Ippolit rephrase Hamlet's question; it becomes "To die or not to die? . . . To live or not to live?" (IX, 277). Moreover, H am let is concerned with the power of art; Hamlet plots, "the play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King" (II. ii). Characters in T he Idiot (like Myshkin, Kel­ ler) share a similar consciousness of the tremendous power of rhetoric. Hamlet's T o be or not to be" soliloquy provides a link between the narra­ tives of Lebedev and Ippolit. Lebedev's medieval cannibal confessed because his conscience drove him to it, because he was subject to the influence of a binding idea. Hamlet, in describing his fear of suicide touches upon the power of "the dread of something after death . . . Thus conscience does make cow­ ards of us all" (III, i). For Lebedev that dread and that force of conscience reflect man's involuntary participation in the binding idea. Ippolit draws in­ spiration from the first half of Hamlet's soliloquy, though he ultimately, in choosing suicide, makes the opposite choice. 3. See also R evelation s 1 0 :1 -7 , especially 10:6, "that there shall be time no longer." 4. This dictum has been attributed to Louis XV (1710-1744), although it is not known whether he really said it. Dostoevsky had already used it in 1863, in Sum m er N otes on W inter Im pression s (IX, 449).

Notes to Pages 207-233

281

5. The editors cite the influence of Hugo's Le dern ier jou r d'un con d am n é upon Ippolit's confession, especially chapter 24 in which the condemned man describes the malice and fury that raged within him in the face of death (IX, 449). 6. This formulation of seeds of goodness being sown and taking root throughout the world comes to fruition in T he B rothers K aram azov ; Robert Belknap, T he Structure o f T he B rothers K a ram az ov , Slavistic Printings and Reprintings, vol. 72 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), pp. 48-50, 74-76. 7. This hypothesis about absolute ideas being veiled behind successive layers of narrative belongs to Robert L. Belknap, T he Structure o f The B roth ­ ers K aram azov , p. 105. 8. One could continue to draw parallels between aspects of T he Id iot and Rousseau's C onfession s. Ippolit's reading of his statement echoes Rousseau's reading aloud from his C on fession s to a select audience. 9. René Girard, D eceit, D esire, an d th e N o v el: S elf an d O th er in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p. 12. 10. The triangles among these three characters alone overlap each other in so many ways that the situation becomes impossibly complex. If one were to add the triangles engendered by the conflicting desires and mediators of Rogozhin, Ganya, and Ippolit, the enumeration of all the possible triangles would become grotesque. In these relations the added ingredient of ressenti­ m ent comes into play; Rogozhin, Ganya and Ippolit hate Myshkin for the de­ sires he has filled them with; they hate, in short their mediator or model.

Conclusion 1. P, III, 16/28 July 1876, 227-228. 2. Wayne Booth, T he R h etoric o f Fiction (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1961), p. 386. 3. Ibid., p. 396.

Appendix A. The Novel and the Critics 1. M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, S ob ran ie sochin en ii v d v ad tsati to m a k h , IX (Moscow, 1970), 411-413, quoted in P oln o e sobran ie, IX, 416. For a more complete survey of Russian reactions to the novel than it would be useful to present here, see IX, 410-420. 2. Nicholas Berdyaev, D o sto iev sk y , trans. Donald Attwater (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 227. 3. Ibid., p. 120. 4. A. P. Skaftymov, "Tematicheskaia kompozitsiia romana Idiot'," in T v orch eskii put' D o sto ev sk o g o , ed. Nikolai I. Brodsky (Leningrad, 1924), 131-136. In this respect Skaftymov's ideas bear a striking resemblance to those expressed by such modem students of the phenomenology of reading as Georges Poulet. 5. Skaftymov, 'Tematicheskaia Kompozitsiia," pp. 174, 176.

282

Notes to Pages 233-237

6. Vyacheslav Ivanov, F reed om an d the Tragic L ife: A Study in D o sto ev ­ sk y , ed. S. Konovalov, trans. Norman Cameron (New York: Noonday Press, 1968), p. 72. Ivanov goes on to explicate his own complicated, symbolicmythic overview of Dostoevsky. André Gide has also remarked upon the or­ ganic connection between the last pages of C rim e an d Punishm ent and T he Id­ io t; see Gide, D o sto ev sk y (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions Books, 1961), p. 113. But, he adds, "The transition from The Id iot to T he Eternal H u sban d is more interesting still" (ibid., p. 114). 7. Ivanov, F reed om an d the Tragic L ife, p. 90. 8. Ibid., p. 101. Ivanov muses about the reasons for Dostoevsky's failure, and, carried away, he speculates about what would have happened had the novel succeeded: "But so otherworldly was his conception that he could not extract its entire content, or completely express it within the limits of artistic awareness. Had he been able to do so, all men would have cried out, in the words of that Barbarian King who had enquired of his guest concerning the destiny of the human soul: H as not the seer taught our hearts again to know whence the swallow flew which appeared in the firelight of this bright-lit com­ pany, and what it was that drove her back into her native darkness?' Because Dostoevsky had not been able to do this, T he I d i o t . . . must be regarded . . . as incomplete" (ibid., pp. 101-102). 9. Leonid Grossman, D o sto ev sk y : A B iography, trans. Mary Mackler (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), p. 438. 10. Konstantin Mochulsky, D o sto ev sk y : His L ife an d W ork, trans. Michael A . Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 346. Like Ivanov and Gide, Mochulsky remarks on the connection between Crim e an d Punishm ent and T he Id iot (pp. 351-352). 11. Ibid., p. 380. 12. R. P. Blackmur, "The Id io t: A Rage of Goodness," in his Eleven Es­ says in the E uropean N o v el (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964), p. 142. 13. Mochulsky, D o sto ev sk y , pp. 375-376. 14. Blackmur, "A Rage of Goodness," p. 156. 15. Ibid., p. 141. 16. Murray Krieger, "Dostoevsky's 'Idiot': The Curse of Saintliness," in D o sto ev sk y : A C ollection o f Critical Essays, ed. René Wellek (Englewood Cliffs, N .J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 48. 17. Blackmur, "A Rage of Goodness," p. 156. 18. Krieger, 'The Curse of Saintliness," pp. 49-50. 19. Edward Wasiolek, D o sto ev sk y : The M a jo r Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: M .I.T. Press, 1964), p. 103. 20. Ibid., p. 109. 21. V. I. Etov, D o sto ev sk ii: O ch erk tv orch estv a (Moscow, 1968), pp. 295-296. 22. Ibid., p. 307. 23. M. Gus, Id ei i o b ra z y F. M. D o sto ev sk o g o (Moscow, 1971), p. 367. 24. Ibid., p. 386.

Notes to Pages 238-240

283

Appendix B. The Phenomenology of Reading 1. V. N. Voloshinov (about whom there is speculation that he is really Bakhtin) articulated his idea as early as 1930 when he wrote, "there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding." V. N. Voloshinov, M arxism and the P hilosop h y o f Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 102. It is, of course, a small step from speaker and listener to author and reader, and in fact, Voloshinov chooses to il­ lustrate this very point with a quotation from Dostoevsky's Diary o f a W riter. 2. H. W . Fowler, A D iction ary o f M o d em English Usage, 2nd ed. rev. Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 400. 3. Wallace Martin, 'The Hermeneutic Circle and the Art of Interpreta­ tion," C om p arativ e Literature, 24 (Spring 1972), 99. 4. Walter J. Slatoff, W ith R esp ect to R eaders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 3. 5. Stanley E. Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," N ew Literary H istory, 2 (Autumn 1970), 123. The late Roland Barthes took a simi­ lar polemical stance when he wrote that "the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tryannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions." Roland Barthes, T h e Death of the Author," in Sallie Sears and Georgianna W . Lord, eds., T he D iscontinuous Universe: S elected W ritings in C o n tem p o rary C onsciou sn ess (New York: Basic Books, 1972), pp. 7 -8 . 6. Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 123: Fish quotes W . K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe Beardsley, T he V erbal Icon (Lexington, Ky: University of Ken­ tucky Press, 1954), p. 21. 7. Wolfgang Iser, T he Im p lied R ead er: Patterns o f C om m u nication in P rose Fiction fro m Bunyan to B eck ett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univer­ sity Press, 1974), p. 30. He has quoted Northrop Frye, Fearful S ym m etry (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 427. This quotation, however, does not describe Frye's own conception of the reader. Frye, like Iser, Fish, and Slatoff, has felt the need to set himself against a critical tradition. But he emphasizes the separation between the processes of criticism and of reading, "However disciplined by taste and skill, the experience of literature is, like literature it­ self, unable to speak . . . The reading of literature should, like prayer in the Gospels, step out of the talking world of criticism into the private and secret presence of literature." Northrop Frye, A n a to m y o f Criticism : F our Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 27. 8. Jorge Luis Borges, "For Bernard Shaw," in his O ther Inquisitions, 1937-1952 (New York, 1968); quoted by Donald Fänger in "Gogol and His Reader," in Literature an d S ociety in Im perial Russia, 1800-1914, ed. William Mills Todd III (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978) p. 63. 9. Walter J. Ong. S.J., T h e Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," PM LA, 90 (January 1975), 9.

284

Notes to Pages 241-245

10. Roger Fowler, "Language and the Reader,' in Style an d Structure in Literature: Essays in th e N ew Stylistics , ed. Roger Fowler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 89. 11. Jonathan Culler, "Defining Narrative Units," in Fowler, S tyle an d Structure, p. 140. 12. Ibid. 13. Robert Scholes, while often critical of the structuralist critics, seeks to absolve structuralism in particular from the charge that it isolates the work from the world outside it, although he recognizes that the structuralists do of­ ten ignore larger questions of meaning: "Another danger for structuralism has been . . . the 'formalistic fallacy' . . . a reproach usually leveled against for­ malism and which the Russian formalists, especially in their earliest enthusi­ asm, sometimes deserved. The formalistic fallacy is a lack of concern for the 'meaning' or 'content' of literary works, and it is a charge frequently brought against that criticism which refuses to acknowledge the presence of a cultural world beyond the literary work and a cultural system beyond the literary sys­ tem . . Structuralism, properly understood, far from being cut off from the world in a formal prison, approaches it directly at several different levels of in­ vestigation." Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 11. 14. John Preston, The C reated S elf (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1970), passim. 15. Ong, "The Writer's Audience," p. 12. 16. Iser, T he Im p lied R ead er, p. xiii. 17. Ibid., p. 102. 18. Frye, A n a to m y o f Criticism, p. 86. 19. Iser, The Im plied R eader, pp. 288-290. 20. Booth, T he R h etoric o f Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 388. 21. This evaluation of Todorov has been provided by Scholes, Structur­ alism in Literature, pp. 144-145. 22. Wallace Martin, 'The Hermeneutic Circle and the Art of Interpreta­ tion," p. 110. Martin has quoted Roland Barthes, "Language as Criticism, TLS, September 27, 1963. 23. Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, 148-149. 24. Roland Barthes, T he Pleasure o f th e Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1975), p. 24. 25. Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, p. 37. Scholes also calls this superreader a "monster." 26. Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," N ew Literary H istory, 1 (October 1969), 55. 27. Ibid., pp. 57-58. 28. Booth, R h etoric o f Fiction, 138. 29. Slatoff, W ith R espect to R eaders, p. 39. 30. Ibid., pp. 60-69. 31. Ibid., p. 35. 32. Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 145.

Notes to Pages 245-248

285

34. Preston, T he C reated Self, p. 5. Sterne has drawn a compelling por­ trait of the reader as actor. C. S. Lewis has made use of a theatre motif as well, but for him the reader plays a more traditional role as spectator: "It is not a question of knowing . . . It is conn aître not sa v o ir; it is erleben ; we become those other selves . . . in order to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre." C. S. Lewis, A n Experim ent in Criticism (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 138-139; quoted by Preston, p. 208. 35. Preston, ibid., pp. 5 -6 . 36. Iser, T he Im p lied R ead er, p. 46. 37. Ibid., p. 56. (See T om Jon es, VIII, i.) 38. Ibid., p. 102. 39. Ibid., p. 120. 40. Ibid., p. 290. Preston and Iser have both compared the activity of reading to the acquisition of experience. Norman Holland, on the other hand, discovers a metaphor for experience in the act of reading. "The individual (considered as the continuing creator of variations on an identity theme) re­ lates to the world as he does to a poem or a story: he uses its physical reality as grist with which to re-create himself, that is, to make yet another variation in his single, enduring identity. In short . . . experience." Norman N. Holland, Five R eaders R eadin g (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 128-129. 41. Wolf Schmid, D er T extau fbau in den Erzählungen D ostoev skijs (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1973), pp. 18-19. 42. Ibid., p. 21. 43. Ibid., p. 23. 44. Ibid., p. 34. 45. Ibid., p. 28. Here Schmid asserts that we are dealing with a fictive reader if the narrator addresses the reader in the second person, or with such phrases as "gentle reader," "dear friend," or if the narrator, in seeking to influ­ ence the reader, allows himself to be recognized in a personal, particular way. The fictive reader cannot exist independently of the narrator; instead, he is created as a projection of the narrator and functions as another fictive form of the world represented in the work. Thus, the fictive reader possesses no char­ acteristics that are not assigned to him, directly or indirectly, by the narrator. 46. Ibid., p. 26. 47. Ibid., p. 27. Schmid here cites his source for this idea as existing in Robert L. Belknap's T he Structure o f the B rothers K aram azov , Slavistic Print­ ings and Reprintings, vol. 72 (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), p. 77. 48. Schmid, D er T extau fbau , p. 38. In fact, Schmid asserts that Dostoev­ sky was the first Russian writer to have depicted his represented world to the reader as a riddle or solveable problem. Schmid's assertion, it seems to me, could apply equally well to other Russian writers, especially Gogol. 49. Ong, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," p. 11. 50. Ibid. As an example, he cites the student's typical problem in writing the inevitable "How I spent my summer vacation" essay. He points out that the difficulty of writing the essay lies not in its subject but in the matter of the au­ dience. For whom is the student writing? Who wants to know? His grand­ mother? His classmates? His teacher? Ong is really asking a question about

286

Notes to Pages 248-251

narrative method here: questions of readers and narrators cannot be separated from each other. 51. Ibid., p. 12. ^ 52. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics an d Literary H istory: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. 19. 53. Martin, "The Hermeneutic Circle and the Art of Interpretation," pp. 102-103. He has quoted Emil Staiger, G ru n dbergriffe d e P o etik (Zurich, 1951). 54. Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 162. 55. Ibid., p. 125. 56. Ibid., p. 140. 57. Riffaterre, Poulet, and Todorov also give importance to the temporal quality of reading. Scholes describes Riffaterre's concentration on the message/receiver relationship in poetry. (Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, p. 35.) Poulet emphasizes what happens to him in the course of his reading; he is "persuaded," "freed," "modified," and "astonished." Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," pp. 55-60. Todorov, Scholes points out, has separated reading from two other critical stances, description and interpretation. Reading is unlike de­ scription, which "tends to reduce poetic structures to spatial form." Scholes, Structuralism in Literature, p. 145. 58. Iser, The Im plied R eader, p. 279. 59. Fänger, "Gogol and His Reader," p. 86. Although Fänger is writing about Gogol and his reader, his article presents an overview of the Russian reading public in the first half of the nineteenth century and suggests how to proceed to an interpretative study of the reader in Russia through existing his­ tories, memoirs, and pronouncements of the "ubiquitous censor." He observes that this approach had been called for in Russia as early as 1922 by Aleksandr Beletsky, in an article "On One of the Immediate Tasks of Historical-Literary Scholarship: The Study of the History of the Reader" (ibid., p. 64). For a more historical approach to this problem, and one spanning a slightly later period, see also Jeffrey Brooks, "Readers and Reading at the End of the Tsarist Era," in Literature an d S ociety in Im perial Russia, 1800-1914, pp. 97-150. 60. Iser, T he Im p lied R eader, p. 282. 61. Ibid., p. 288.

Index

"About Kartuzov," 50 Adventure novel, related to Gothic, 120, 272n52 Aglaya, see Epanchin, Aglaya Aksakov, Ivan, 36; letters to, 38 Allen, W alter, 266n l0 Alyosha (Brothers Karamazov): con­ trasted with Myshkin, 50; material from notebooks, 72 Amadis of Gaul, 219 Ambrosio, Abbot ( The Monk), 114, 117; and the Virgin M ary, 279n34 Anna Karenina, 19, 37 Annenkov, P. V ., 189, 191 Apocalypse: Lebedev as interpreter of, 200, 202-205, visions of, in Part III, 201; Ippolit on, 202, 206-207 Aristotle, 241 Arkady ( The Raw Youth), material from notebooks on, 72 A rt, "dangerous," as in the dead Christ, 212-213 Artist: vs. poet and entertainer, 25-28, 49, 224; and the writing of The Idiot, 46 Atheism, 18, 34, 41, 225 Atheists, Myshkin on, 184-185 Audience: effect of on narration, 6-7; Dostoevsky on, 12, 14-15; reader vs. public, 16-17; Ippolit's, 215-217 Austen, Jane, 98, 266n9 and nlO, 269n25 Author: real-life vs. implied, 3; absence of voice of, 14-15, 131; divisions of, 224; see abo Artist; Entertainer; N arrator; Narrator-Chronicler; Poet Autobiography, seen through fictional characters, 24 Bakhmutov (The Idiot), 211 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 237, 276n5; on nar­ rator-chronicler, 3; on polyphonic

novel, 8-9; on interest vs.‘ artistry, 28; on Dostoevsky's characters, 62-63; on narrative voices, 67, 133; on in­ serted narratives, 166-167 Balzac, Honoré de, 108, 121 Barashkov, Nastasia Filippovna (The Idiot), 42, 76, 83, 252, 267n l2; oscillations of, 51; as Heroine, 52, 53, 85-86; enigma of, 79; ward of Totsky, 101, 102, 227-228; indirect description of, 106; as corrupted beauty, 112, 114-115; and Myshkin, 138; letter to Aglaya, 138, 219-220; vigil beside corpse of, 157; failed abduction of, 218-219 Barthes, Roland, 241, 243-244, 246 Baudelaire, Charles, 268n21 Beardsley, Monroe, 240 Beauty: and the sublime, 109; and horror in the Gothic novel, 109-112 Beautiful Muslim Girl, The, 30 Beginnings of novels, 40-41 Bel'chikov, N. F., on family structure, 52 Belinsky, Vissarion, 14, 18; Dostoev­ sky's relations with, 18-19, 2 7 7 n ll; on Rousseau, 181-182; on feuilletonist, 266n4 Belknap, Robert, 237, 281n6 and n7, 278n28, 285n47 Berdyaev, Nicholas, 232 Bezukhov, Pierre ( War and Peace), 59 Billington, James, 65 Binding idea: possibility of, questioned, 200; force of, 203; source of life, 209, 210-211; in Ippolit's statement, 211 Blackmur, R. P ., 234-235 Blagoi, D. D ., 279n35 Bleak House (Dickens), 265nl "Bobok," 112, 277n l0 Booth, Wayne C ., 243; on real and

288

Index

implied authors, 3-4, 91; on liter­ ary interest, 31; on mystery and irony, 118, 159; on the implied reader, 128, 242, 244-245; on roles of writer and reader, 225, 247 Borges, Jorge Luis, 240 Bovary, Madame, see Madame Bovary Brothers Karamazov, The, 21, 33, 34, 280n35, 208; narrative method in, 2, 89, 228; as expression of idea, 35, 38; inner narratives in, 39-40; ending of, 41; multiplicity of voices in, 44; notion of the chain in, 59; material from notebooks in, 71; use of super­ natural in, 112; confession in, 181; beauty and horror in, 268n21, n22, n23; attitude of narrator in, 273n9 Burdovsky, Antip (The Idiot), 124, 132, 192, 253; claim on Myshkin, 195-197 Burke, Edmund, on terror and the sub­ lime, 109, 119, 267n l6, 268n l7 and n l8

70-71 Confessions, 176; Dostoevsky on, 176177, 277n l6; at the name-day party, 177-181; Rousseau's, 178-182, 2 7 7 n ll Confessions, The (Rousseau), Dostoev­ sky on, 178-179, 181

Cannibalism, in Lebedev's story, 202-204

Dalton, Elizabeth, 60, 72, 262n9, 264n35 Davidovich, M. G ., 275n l6 Dead Souls (Gogol), 259n4 Death: preoccupation with, 168, 169, 183; Ippolit's.attraction to, 205-207 Defoe, Daniel, 121 De Quincey, Thomas, 120, 277n l6

Castle of Otranto, 120 Cervantes, Miguel de, 82, 189, 241; use of inserted narration by, 166, 276nl and n3 Characterization: determination of, 46; of Myshkin, 51, 60-69 Charles (Madame Bovary), 157-158 Charterhouse of Parma, The (Stendhal),

121 Chateaubriand, 259n4 Chemyshevsky, Nikolai, 185 Chinese vase, breaking of, 145-146, 150,

221 Christ, 114, 234; Myshkin's attitude toward, 67; portrayal of through ac­ tion, 84; Holbein's painting of, 212-213, 217; as mediator, 220; enigma in, 226; see also "Prince Christ"

Christmas Tree and A Wedding, A (Dostoevsky), 277nl6 Chulkov, Georgy, 26, 28 Cleopatra, as fatal woman, 270n35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4, 122, 245, 270n32 Comedy: in presentation of the good man, 81; adopted by Dostoevsky for the Idiot, 82-83; and tragedy in Gothic novel, 112-113 Comic voice in narration, 8, 82 Communication: problems of, 2, 224; emphasis on indirect, 13; as ul­ timate goal, 224-225; novel as, 238 Conciseness, a goal in The Idiot,

Confessions of an English Opium Eater (de Quincey), 120 Conrad, Joseph, 270n 32 Created Self, The (John Preston), 242 Correspondence, supportive of Dostoev. sky, 20-21 Crime and Punishment, 33, 50, 178; narrative method in, 2, 273n3; ef­ fectiveness of, 18; interest of, 24; as expression of idea, 35; ending of, 41; internal dialogues in, 62-63; overtones of incest in, 112; rela­ tion to The Idiot, 233, 282n6 Critics, ambivalence toward, 21 Culler, Jonathan, 241 Cumberland, Richard, 166

Dernier jour d'un condamné, Le (Hugo), 280n37 Desdemona, 89, 158 Devils, The. See The Possessed Devushkin, Makar (Poor Folk), 6, 14-15 Dialogue, strategies of, 9 Diary of a Writer, The (Dostoevsky): letter to Solov'ev on, 12-13; accept­ ance by readers of, 20-21; time pres­ sures vs. expression of ideas in, 36-37; on political Don Quixote image, 279n31 Dickens, Charles, 74, 82, 108, 165, 270n32; mixture of comedy and real­ ism in, 113; comic relief in, 136; inserted narratives of, 276nl Digressions: as revealing narrator, 9293, 123-125; on railroads, 128-130; effect on reader, 131-132, 136; on the ordinary man, 141-142 Doktorenko, Vladimir (The Idiot), 128, 192, 195, 197, 203, 253 Dolinin, A. D ., 25, 27, 237; on Dos­ toevsky's plans, 38 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 9-10, 190; inserted narratives in, 166

Index

Don Quixote, 157, 233; prototype of "good man," 17, 74, 81; mad­ ness as cloak for, 152; and "the poor knight," 189; mediator of, 219; and Madame Bovary, 258n l2; "comic en­ velope" of, 259n6 Dostoevsky, Anna Grigor'evna 20, 24; letters to, 37, 41; on Dostoevsky's planning The Idiot, 48; Diary of, 274nl3 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 241; use of in­ serted narratives by, 166; as polemi­ cist, 187; on Don Quixote types, 278279n31; attitude toward his readers, 223-224; device of multiple authors and multiple readers, 224, 230-231; see abo Author; N arrator Dostoevsky, Mikhail, 14; letters to, 33-34 Double, The (Dostoevsky), 14, 49; criticisms of, 18 Dowden, E., 257n2 "Dream of a Ridiculous Man, The" (Dostoevsky), 2, 112 Dreams: narrator on Myshkin's, 138; Myshkin's, 140 du Barry, Countess, 183 Dumas, Alexandre, 108, 270n35 Eliot, Goerge, 223, 257n2 Endings of novels, 41-42; importance of, in The Idiot, 41-42; as expansions, 42-43 Engelgardt, B. M ., 97 Enigmas: balanced against explanation, 78-79, 81; as intentional, 87; Dos­ toevsky's emphasis on, 226 Entertainer, vs. artist and poet, 25, 49, 224 Entertainment, see Interest Epanchin, Adelaida, 169, 170, 173, 253, 267n l2 Epanchin, Aglaya {The Idiot), 80, 83, 89, 252, 253, 267n2; and Nastasia, 85, 102; as implied reader, 133, 148; on marriage with Myshkin, 134-135, 145, 218-219; Myshkin's proposal to, 147; on Myshkin's parables, 169, 171, 173; on Myshkin as "the poor knight," 188-191, 192; role in the novel, 190; and Lebedev's story, 204-205; on Ippolit's confession, 218; Nastasia's letters to, 219-220 Epanchin, Alexandra, 100-101, 173, 218, 253, 267n l2 Epanchin family, 54, 56, 69, 253; irony in presentation of, 95-96, 98-100, 115, 227, 266n9; described in Part III, 130

289

Epanchin, General Ivan Fyodorovich, 77, 128; first description of, 94; family of, 98-100; attitude toward Nastasia, 101-102; Gothic overtones in description of, 113; confession of, 179-181 Epanchin, Lizaveta Prokof'evna, 132, 145, 158, 173, 253; on reading of. Pushkin poem, 190-191; and article on Myshkin, 193 Epileptic seizures, 275n22; in Part II, 116, 117, 119, 124; in Part IV, 150,

221 Eternal Husband, The (Dostoevsky), 50 282n6 Etov, Vladimir, 236-237 Evnin, F. I., 24-2:5 Exempla, 182-183, 204 Faces, reading of, 105 , 267n l2 Failed acts, expressiveness of, 218-219 Faith, religious feeling: Myshkin on, 185-186; Ippolit on, 208-209; threatened by laws of nature, 209 Family structure in The Idiot, 52; development of, 53-55, 61, 62; rela­ tion of illegitimacy to, 60; and the novel of manners, 98; the Epanchins, 98-101 Fänger, Donald, 259n4; on the reader, 7-8, 258n8; on reading, 250-251 Fathers and Children (Dostoevsky), 35 Faulkner, William, 270n32 Fedotov, Goerge, on the yurodivyi, 65-66 Ferdyshchenko {The Idiot), 10, 83, 85, 107, 201, 253; as jester, 175-176 Feuilletonist, 266n4 Fielding, Henry, 121, 165, 166, 241, 246, 266n l0; on the Gothic novel, 269n29; inserted narratives of, 276nl and n3 Fish, Stanley, 240, 241, 244, 245, 249, 250 Flaubert, Gustave, 157 Florence, 51 Form (style, technique): determined-by idea, 48-49; Gothic mode in service of, 122; Frank on, 159; and the order of narration, 187 Forster, E. M ., 42-43, 136, 261n30, 265nl Fowler, H. W , 239 Fowler, Roger, 241 Frank, Joseph, 155, 237; reading of The Idiot, 159-161; on being a reader, 265n2; on shift of narrator, 273n8

290

Index

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), 118 Frankenstein, 114 Friedman, Norman, 257n6 Frye, Northrop, 240; on intentional ''"fallacy, 243

Heroes, fatal, of romanticism, 114-115 Heroine: changing conceptions of, for The Idiot, 53-54; fatal, 114-115 Herzen, Aleksandr, 273n4 Historical novel, related to Gothic, 120

History of Tom Jones: A Foundling Gambler, The (Dostoevsky), 24, 277n l6 Gautier, Théophile, 270n35 Geneva, 50 "Gentle Creature, A" (Dostoevsky), 2 Gide, André, 282ri6 Girard, René, 219-220 Gogol, Nikolai, 6, 215, 234, 241, 250; method contrasted with Dostoevsky's, 14; Dostoevsky compared to, 18, 131, 237, 259n4; irony of, 95; mixture of comedy and realism in, 113; refer­ ences to in The Idiot, 141, 143 Golyadkin {The Double), 14, 62, 63 Goncharov, I. A ., 36 Good deeds: obstacles to enactment of, 209-210; by Myshkin and Ippolit, 211212; defeated by laws of nature, 212-213; effectiveness of, 214 Good man, the : Dostoevsky's portrayal of, 17; prototypes of, 17;. Myshkin as, 170 Gothic novels: influence on Dostoev­ sky, 108-112; sublime and beautiful in, 109; mixture of comedy and trag­ edy in, 112-113; vampire in, 114-115; basic lack of explanation in, 120; excessive religious devotion in, 279n34; in Part II, 228; revival of in­ terest in, 270n32; fatal women in 270n35 and n37; emphasis on weather in, 271n39; popularity of, 271n49 Gothic voice in narration, 8, 108, 113, 115; in Part III, 134-135 "Grand Inquisitor, The" (Dostoevsky), 39 Grigorovich, Dmitri, 18 Grossman, Leonid, 8, 233-234, 237; on interest vs. artisitc execution, 28; on influence of Gothic novel, 120-122; on inserted narratives, 166; on the confession, 277n l6 Grushenka ( The Brothers Karamazov), corrupted beauty, 112 Guilt and responsibility, final under­ standing of, 230 Gus, Mikhail, 237

Hamlet, 280n2 Hardy, Thomas, 46, 270n32 Hero-villains: of Gothic novels, 112, 114; of Dostoevsky, 112; Miltonic, 114

(Fielding), 276n3 Hoffman, E. T . A ., 108 Holbein, Hans: painting of dead Christ, 184, 212, 267n l2; reactions of Myshkin and Ippolit to, 212-213 Holland, Norman N ., 270n32 Hollander, Robert, 272nl House of the Dead, The (Dostoevsky), quoted, 46 Hugo, Victor, 37, 44, 108, 280n37 Hume, Robert L., 270n32 Hyde, Virginia, 270n32 Iago, Plan for (Dostoevsky), 68; relation of the Idiot to, 68-69, 88; related to "Prince Christ," 84; enigma in, 226 Ideas: expression of, in writing, 32-33; threatened by deadlines, 34-35; strug­ gles to express, 35-37; embodied in plan, 38-40; narrative manner deter­ mined by, 45, 90, 224; distortion of, 137, 141; Myshkin's attempt to state, 150-152, 155, 2 6 7 n ll; inability of language to express, 184, 197, 205, 214, 216, 230; and the inserted nar­ ratives, 230 Idiocy: significance of, 63-64, 263n l9; indefinability of, 195 Idiot, the: notebooks on role of, 52, 53, 225-226; changing family relation­ ships of, 53-56; a yurodivyi, 54, 61, 65, 69; problem of legitimacy, 57-60; development of basic concept of, 60; and children, 61-62, 76; reason for idiocy, 63-64; lack of early biography for, 64-65; as Holy Fool, 65-67; as catalyst (Iago), 68-69; in­ nocence of, 81-82; as perpetual Sphinx, 82; narrative voices in, 90-91; see also "Prince Christ" Idiot, The, 33; Dostoevsky's opinion of, 1; notebooks for, 7, 46-89; effective­ ness of, 18; Maikov on, 26-27; as expression of idea, 33; importance of ending, 41, 42; multiplicity of voices in, 44, 163-164; changes in con­ ception of Myshkin, 51; Parts I and III compared, 127; Frank and Lord on, 158-161; Zundelovich on, 161-163; effects intentional, not accidental, 227 Illegitimacy, 57-60, 71 Ilyusha {The Brothers Karamazov), 50

Index

Implication, as strategy for maintaining interest, 6 Implied author, the: fantastic world of, 125; and narrator, 127-130; in dra­ matic scenes, 132; occasional direct speaking of, 139, 142; attitude toward Myshkin, 152; demands on reader's judgment, 155; distrust of narrator exploited by, 156; responsible for nar­ ratives related by characters, 165; on confessions, 177, 179; on religious feeling vs. words, 185; on Aglaya's reading of Pushkin, 191; pictorial expressions of, 213; use of inserted n rratives by, 230 Implied reader, the, 3, 5, 15, 139; basis for, 21-22; gap between nar­ rator and, 131, 153-154, 224; Aglaya's resemblance to, 133; on quickened tempo of modes, 133-134; occasional closeness to narrator, 139; and changes in chronology, 146, 152; on Myshkin at the Epanchins' party, 150; suspicion of ability of nar­ rator, 154-155; demands of implied author on, 156, 229; reaction to article on Myshkin, 196; reaction to Ippolit's confession, 216, 217-218 Incest, overtones of in Dostoevsky's novels, 112 Inserted texts, narratives, etc., 165, 276n l and n3; purpose of, 9-10; uses of, 166-168; in Part I, 168-183; par­ ables, 168-176; confessions, 176-182; exempla, 182-183; in Part II, 183-198; accomplishments of, 198-199, 230; in Part III, 201-220; Lebedev's tale of cannibalism, 202-205; Ippolit's con­ fession, 205-219; Nastasia's letters, 219-220; in Part IV, 220-221 Insulted and Injured, The (Dostoevsky): narrative method in, 2; confessions in, 179 "Intentional fallacy," 243 Interest: strategies for maintaining, 5, 32; Dostoevsky's stress on, 23-24, 28-29, 32; vs. artistic execution, 2425, 28; as narrative strategy, 31, 81, 167; types of, 31; Gothic de­ vices for, 122 Irony, 92; in sketch of Epanchin family (Part I), 95-96, 98-101, 102; in balance with mystery, 118; more bitter in Part III, 131; in inserted material, 165; in use of language, 185 Iser, Wolfgang, 240, 242, 243, 246-247, 249, 257n2; on the Gothic novel, 269n29

291

Iskra, 280n36 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 233 Ivanova, Sonya: letters to, 17, 18, 25, 26, 35-36, 72, 189; letters on The Idiot, 74, 89 Ivolgin, General Ardalion Ivanovich (The Idiot), 10, 77, 85, 253; on Myshkin's biography, 174; anecdotes by, 175, 183, 220 Ivolgin, Nina Alexandrovna, 253 Ivolgin family, 68, 69; conception of, 53, portrayal of, 103 Ivolgin, Gavril Ardalionovich (Ganya), 2 6 3 n ll; relation to the Idiot, 55-56, 68; development of, 76-77, 83; re­ lation to Nastasia, 101; as an "or­ dinary person," 143; Myshkin's lies to, 173-174; on confessions, 177; on selfpreservation, 202 Ivolgin, Kolya, 77, 158, 2 6 3 n ll; biog­ raphy of Myshkin read by, 192-193 Ivolgin, Varya, 253 Jackson, Robert, 49, 258-9nl, 262n4 James, Henry, 90, 223; on interest, 31; on Dostoevsky, 167-168; on omnis­ cience of narratory, 266n5 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 246, 276n3 Journalistic writing: Dostoevsky's de­ fense of public in, 22-23; interest as narrative strategy in, 29-31 "K ***" (Pushkin poem), 188 Kafka, Franz, 270n32 Kant, Immanuel, 268n l7 Katkov, Mikhail, 24; letters to, 33 Keech, James, 270n32 Keller (The Idiot), 253; article on Myshkin by, 192-197; on form and style, 197, 280n38 Kenotic saints, 66-67 Kira, Julius, 237 Korvin-Krukovskaia, Anna, 43 Kovacs, Arpad, 237 Krieger, M urray, 235 "Landlady, The" (Dostoevsky), 117 Lebedev family (The Idiot), 69 Lebedev, Lukian Timofeevich, 83, 128, 193, 253; first glimpse of, 93, 94; preoccupation with death, 183, 200; story on cannibalism, 202-205; com­ pared to Ippolit, 205-206, 280n2 Lebedev, Vera, 158, 253 Lebyadkin, Captain (The Possessed), 50 Legros, a prisoner, 168 Lermontov, Mikhail, 6, 259n4 LeSage, Alain René, 276n3

292

Index

Letters from a Dead House (Dostoev­ sky), 15; see also Notes from the House of the Dead ,Levin, Harry, 258n l2 Levy, Maurice, 271n49 Lewis, Matthew, 108; The Monk, 113, 118; novel of horror, 119 Lies: kinds of, 220-221; narration and lies, 154, 168, 172-173, 174-181, 207; mixture of truth and, 196, 198-199, 200 Life of a Great Sinner, The (Dostoev­ sky), 34-35, 37, 225

L'Indépendance Beige, 175 Lord, Robert: on expression in The Idiot, 159-161; on being a reader, 265n2; on epilepsy, 275n22 Lotman, Yury, 2 7 7 n ll Lovejoy, Arthur O ., 263nl5 Lubbock, Percy, 265n l

Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 9-10, 157-158, 219, 258n l2, 274n l3 Magic, 149, 273n5 Maikov, Apollon, 19; letters to, 15, 16, 18, 23, 41-42, 49, 60, 189; as ideal reader, 16; on interest, 26-27; letters on writing The Idiot, 72-74, 88 Malthus, Thomas R ., 202, 273n4 Manners, novel of, 98-99, 102; change in Part III, 131 Marie ( The Idiot): resurrection of, 50; Myshkin's story of, 170, 171, 173; Myshkin's pretended love for, 172 Martin, Wallace, 239 M ary Magdalene, 170 Matthewson, Rufus W ., Jr., 259n6 Maturin, Charles, 108, 126; Melmoth, 113; novel of horror, 119; popularity in Russia, 120; influence on Dostoev­ sky, 121, 267n l5 Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 113, 114, 118, 120, 269n26 Melville, Herman, 270n32 Menippean satire, 276n5; Dostoevsky's use of, 167 Michael of Klopsko, 66 Milan, 51 Milton, John, Gothic mixture of sublime and evil in, 113-114, 119 Mochulsky, Konstantin, 233-234 Molière, 141 Monk, The (Lewis), 113, 120, 279n34 Monologues, as dialogues between doubles, 62-63 Montaigne, Michel de, 1, 90 Morality: and the reader, 1, 4-6, 102103, 242-243; seduction of reader,

106-107; reader forced to moral judg­ ment, 155; guilt and responsibility of reader, 230-231 Musset, Alfred de, 277n l6 "My Necessary Explanation" (Ippolit), 205-218 Myshkin (Prince Lev Nikolaevich) (The Idiot), 42; attitude of implied author toward, 4; attitude of narrator toward, 4; development of in Note­ books, 47, 51, 54, 63, 66-67, 81-84, 86-89; contrasted with Alyosha, 50; meeting with Rogozhin in train, 54, 91, 128; relation to Holy Fool, 66; growing isolation of 85-86, 149-150, 153, 155, 157, 160; mystery of, pre­ served, 103-106, 117; transition to suitor, 107; Gothic overtones in narration on, 115-117; on distortion of ideas, 132-133; and narrator, 133-136, 139-140, 145, 146, 149, 150-157; and Aglaya, 134-135, 136137, 145; attitude of author toward, 142, 148, 152; varying interpretations of, 158-163, 232-237; inability to ex­ press ideas effectively, 150-152, 155, 2 6 7 n ll; parables, 168-172; inserted narratives about faith, 184-188; nar­ ratives descriptive of, 188-198; lack of self-confidence, 201; growing silence of, 205; ideas of on time, 209; on good deeds, 210-211; reaction to Hol­ bein's "Christ," 212-213; on Ippolit's confession, 217-218; as mediator, 220; biography of, 221; final descriptions of, 274nL2; see also Idiot, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Raddiffe), 117, 120, 269n24 and n25, 271n49 Mystery: balanced with irony, 118; device in Gothic novel, 120 Narration: modes of, 8-10; Dostoevsky on strategies of, 12; method of, in The Idiot, 69-75, 77, 84-85; as balance of enigma and explanation, 89; difficulties of, 154, 227; role of inserted material in, 168; Ippolit's skill in, 214-215 Narrative: first- and third-person, 2; strategies of, 5; relation to persua­ sion, 6 Narrative modes: appropriate to idea, 90; narrator-observer, 91-92; ironic, 92-101; novel of manners, 98-99; dramatic, 103, 107; Gothic, 108, 113, 115; quickened pace of, 133-136; multiplicity of, 265n l Narrator-chronicler, or narrator-

Index

observer, 1; and implied author, 4, 91, 127; reader of, 5; voice of as mode of narration, 8, 15; apology to reader by, 87, 143, 153; as first voice in The Idiot, 91-92; in ironic mode, 92-101, 115, 149; digressions of, 93, 123-125; in dramatic mode, 103, 107; information withheld by, 105, 108, 123; reader implicated by, 108; in Gothic mode, 108, 113, 115, 228; as a character himself, 123125, 228; as “novelist," 125; changing relations with reader, 126, 227-228, 273n8; vs. implied reader, 131, 133134, 136, 138-140; role in dramatic scenes, 132; effect of changing voices of, 136; changes in treatment of Myshkin, 138; concern with role of reader, 142-143, 152, 155; contra­ dictory behavior of in Part IV, 144146, 153, 226; withdrawal from Myshkin, 146-150; abdication of, 152155, 157, 272n3, 273n ; distrust ex­ ploited by author, 156; limitations of, 165; on Aglaya, 190; shared reactions with Ippolit, 214-215; failures of, 219; Myshkin's failure as, 221-222; multiple voices as ultimate expres­ sion of idea, 230 Narrator's reader, 5; and implied reader, 127, 130-131, 224; effect of digressions on, 131-132; at end of Part III, 140, 229; on Myshkin at the party, ISO151; bafflement of, 155, 226 Nature: in Gothic novels, 117; power of, vs. beauty and faith, 212-213 Nekrasov, Nikolai Alekseevich, 18-19, 35 Netochka Nezvanova (Dostoevsky), 112, 277n l6 Nevsky Prospect (Gogol), 143 Nihilists, Dostoevsky on, 183 Nilus of Sorsk, 67 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 269n25 Notebooks for The Idiot, 7, 35, 46-89; clues in, 7; differences among, 46-47; 1st and 2nd, 46-47, 50, 51-75; 3rd, 46-47, 50-51, 75-89; dates of, 50-51; plot elements in, 52-53; family rela­ tionships in, 53-55, 60; illegitimacy in, 57-60; emergence of identity of Idiot in, 60-69; on narrative manner, 69-75, 84-85; on narrative strategy, 75, 78, 79; on enigma vs. explanation, 78-81, 86- 87, 89; on Sphinx and "Prince Christ," 84; notes on denouement, 87- 89; value of, 225-226

Notes from the House of the Dead

293

(Dostoevsky): reader's interest in, 23, 32; relation to The Gambler, 24 Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky), 2, 268n l7; internal dialogues in, 63 "Notes of the Life of the Deceased Priest and Monk, The Elder Zosima" (The Brothers Karamazov), 39 Ong, Walter }., 240, 242, 245, 248-249 Opiskin, Foma Fomich (The Friend of the Family), 16 Originality, Dostoevsky's stress on, 23-24

Otechestvennye Zapiski (The Fatherland Notes), 19, 35 Othello, role of Iago in, 68, 84, 88 Othello: relation of the Idiot to, 88; as narrator, 171 "Overcoat, The" (Gogol), 250 Parables: character revealed through, 85; of Myshkin, 168-174; mixture of truth and fiction in, 172-176; Keller's misuse of, 198 Paradise Lost (Milton), 114 Paradoxes, popular demand for, 13 Part I (The Idiot), 91-108; opening scene, 91-94; Chapt. 2, the Epanchins, 94-103; novel of manners, 98-100; use of irony, 100-101; entrance of Nastasia, 101-103; entrance of Myshkin, 103-105; Myshkin and Nastasia, 106-107; summary of, 107-108; inserted narratives in, 168-183; author's strategy in, 227-228 Part II (The Idiot), 108-122; echoes of Gothic novel in, 108-115; return of Myshkin, 115; Chapt. 5, and the novel of terror, 116-122; summary of Parts I and II, 122-125; distinction between voices of narrator and im­ plied author in, 122-123; use of digres­ sions in, 124; .real vs. fantastic world in, 125; inserted narratives in, 183199; author's strategy in, 227-228 Part III (The Idiot), 127-140; compared to Part I, 127; use of digression in, 127-130; Epanchin family, 130-132; dramatic conversation with Evgeny Pavlovich, 132-133; Myshkin and Aglaya, 134-138; relation of narrator and reader, 138-140; transition to "fantastic reality," 140; narrative strategy in, 228-229 Part IV (The Idiot), 140-158; digression on the ordinary man, 140-141; contra­ dictory assertion of narrator, 144-146;

294

Index

changes in chronology, 146, 152; nar­ rator's withdrawal from Myshkin, 146-149; party at Epanchins', 148-152; - further change of narrator toward hero, 153-155; demands on reader for judgment, 155; roles of three readers, 155-156; vigil of Rogozhin and Myshkin, 157-158, final details, 158; narrative strategy in, 228, 229-230 Pavlishchev, Nikolai Andreevich (The Idiot), 83, 195, 196 Pavlovna, Anna ( War and Peace), 59 "Pedantry and Literacy" (Dostoevsky), 29 Père Goriot (Balzac), 273n3 Personality, suppression of own, 23-24 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A (Burke), 109 Pickwick, Mr. (Pickwick Papers), 74; prototype of the good man, 17, 81 Pirogov (Nevsky Prospect), 143 Pisemsky, Alexei, 15 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 16; as ideal reader, 20, 21 Plan, for The Idiot: Dostoevsky's work on, 33-38, embodiment of idea, 38-40; difficult preliminary stage of novel, 48; circularity of, 51; see also Notebooks Platzner, Robert L., 270n32 Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes), 244 Poe, Edgar Allan, 108, 268n21 Poet: vs. artist and entertainer, 25, 49, 224; and the writing of The Idiot, 48 Poor Folk (Poor People) (Dostoevsky), 6, 14, 49, 277n l6; absence of author's voice in, 14-15; reaction to, 18; incest in, 112 "Poor Knight, The" (Pushkin), 86; as mysterious, 105; Myshkin as, 188, 205, 237 Portrait, The (Gogol), 269n26 Possessed, The (Dostoevsky), 33, 34, 227n l6; narrative method in, 2, 89, 228; notebooks for, 7, 50; interest of, 25, 32; attempted omission of artist from, 26; as expression of idea, 33, 35-36; writing of, 40; ending of, 41-42; multiplicity of voices in, 44; material for, 71; vampire legend in, 270n37; deflation of mood of terror, 271n43 Poulet, Georges, 281n4, 244, 249 Praz, Mario, 114-115, 268n l8 and n21, 269n25 Preston, John, 242, 245-246, 249 "Prince Christ," 84, 168, 227, 264n40

Ptitsyn, Ivan Petrovich {The Idiot), 202, 221, 253, 263M 1 Public: hostility of, 16; vs. reader, 16-17; acceptance by, 20; defense of, 22-23; necessity to entertain, 23; see also Audience Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich, 6, 44, 86; narrator in work of, 3; on the poor knight, 10, 188-189, 191, 237, 279n33, 34, 35; and the common peo­ ple, 22; on the fatal woman, 270n35 Radcliffe, Ann, 108-109, 113, 117, 118, 269n24; on terror and horror, 119; popularity in Russia, 120-121; in­ fluence on Dostoevsky, 121 Radomsky, Pavlovich Evgeny, 76, 86, 128, 132, 203, 235; Myshkin's dis­ cussions with, 137, 155; effect of re­ sponses of, 155-156; at end of novel, 158; on self-destruction, 202; on Ippolit's confession, 218 Railroads, use of as device in novel, 128-130, 272nl Raskolnikov {Crime and Punishment), 41, 62; and The Idiot, 233 Raw Youth, A (Dostoevsky), 33, 34, 277n l6; narrative method in, 2; notebooks for, 7; Nekrasov on, 19; Strakhov on, 19; as expression of idea, 35; plan for, 37-38; similarities to material from notes for The Idiot, 71-72 Reader: impact of narrative on, 2; reallife vs. implied, 3-4; kinds of, 5; Dos­ toevsky on, 16-21; expectations of, 106-108, 122-125, 146; relation with narrator, 126-127, 145, 149-150, 152; addressed by narrator, 128, 139, 143, 153; effect of changes in narrative tone on, 131-132, 136; three simul­ taneous, 155-156, 158, 163-164, 224; Ippolit, as 217; Dostoevsky's demands on, 223-224, 228-230; new critical emphasis on, 238-251; final meaning achieved through, 231; historical roles of, 242; defining the role of, 243-249 Readers, for beginners, 29-30 Reading: a phenomenology of, 25, 224; temporal and spatial views of, 249250 Real author, 3, 5; see also Author; Im­ plied author Real reader, 3; independence of, 9; relation to narrator, 125, 126, 140, 152-153, 227; confusion of, 129, 138, 142-143, 149, 155; effect of digres-

Index

sion on, 131-132; misled by narrator, 145; as both narrator's reader and im­ plied reader, 156; Dostoevsky's use of, 224; Parts I and II contrasted in ma­ nipulation of, 228-229 Revelations, 280n l; see also Apocalypse Revision, necessity for, 43-44 Rhetoric of Fiction, The (Booth), 3, 257n2 and n4, 266n5 Richardson, Samuel, 11, 121, 241 Riffaterre, Michael, 241, 244 Rogozhin, Parfyon Semyonovich ( The Idiot), 42, 68, 209, 252; meeting with Myshkin on train, 54, 91, 128; de­ velopment of, 77, 78-79; element of enigma in, 79; murder of Nastasia by, 85, 88; as hero-villain, 112; as fatal hero, 114; portrayed in Gothic mode, 115-117, 135, 272n2; final meeting of Myshkin with, 157; and copy of Hol­ bein's Christ, 212, 217; foiled murder by, 218-219 Roman feuilleton, 120 Romantic realism, novel of, related to Gothic, 120 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 178-182, 2 7 7 n ll

Russki Vestnik (The Russian Messanger ), 19, 25; The Idiot sent to, 72, 75 Sade, Marquis de, 118, 121, 269n24 St. Augustine, 277n l6 Sakulin, P. N .: on dating of notebooks, 50; on family structure, 52; see also Bel'chikov Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 193; on The Idiot, 232 Sand, George, 108, 277n l6 Satan, Gothic overtones of, 114 "Scenes from the Times of Chivalry" (Pushkin), 188 Schiller, Friedrich, 268n l7 Schmid, Wolf, 245, 247 Scholes, Robert, 244 Scott, Sir W alter, 108, 122, 259n4, 270n32, 271n49; on inserted stories, 276n3 "Second Coming, The" (Yeats), 201 Self-preservation, Lebedev on, 202, 206 "Self-Sufficient Fedya" (SaltykovShchedrin), 193-194 Sergius, St., 66-67 Setchkarev, Vsevolod, 269n26 Shakespeare, William, 263n l0; and the Gothic novel, 112-113, 119 Shch-------, Prince, 128, 191, 253 Sherman, Leona F., 270n32 Shklovsky, Viktor, 237, 241 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 271n43

295

Skaftymov, A . P ., 233 Slatoff, Walter, 239-240, 245, 249-250 Smollett, Tobias, 121, 165 Sociological vignettes: of "all-knowing gentlemen," 92; of second-rank char­ acters, 94; see also Digressions Socratic dialogue, 167 Solov'ev, Vsevolod, 12-13; as ideal reader, 20 Soulié, Frédéric, 108, 277n l6 Sovremennik, 193 Sphinx, the Prince as, 82-83 Spitzer, Leo, 249, 250, 265n3 Staiger, Emil, 249 Stavrogin (The Possessed), 71; material from notebooks on, 72; as hero-vil­ lain, 112; as fatal hero, 114; and the vampire legend, 270n37 Steiner, George, 120-122 Stendhal, 121 Sterne, Laurence, 121, 241, 246, 259n4; use of inserted material by, 276n l Strakhov, Nikolai, 16; advice from, 1920; letters to, 26, 34, 40, 89; on interest, 27; on Dostoevsky's complex­ ity, 27-28, 37, 43-44, 167; on Dos­ toevsky and Rousseau, 182 Structuralists, on reader's role, 243-245, 246 Sublime, the: in reaction to Gothic novel, 108-109; Burke on beauty and, 109; of Milton, 114 Sue, Eugène, 108, 271n43 Supernatural: Dostoevsky's use of, 112; in Gothic novels, 113 Surikov (The Idiot), 212 Svidrigaylov hero-villain, 112 Swift, Jonathan, 241 Switzerland, 171-173 Synthesis, importance of in narration, 15 Tate, Allen, 274n l4 Terentiev, Ippolit (The Idiot), 10, 68, 76, 85, 143, 192, 253; horror of death, 168, 169, 170; on reason, 184; and article on Myshkin, 196-197, 198; statement of, 200; confession of, 205218; bungled suicide, 218-219 Terror, novel of, 119 Theodore Studite, St., 66 Theodosius, St., 66 Tikhon, St., 66, 67 Tillotson, Kathleen, 257n2 Time: Myshkin's obsession with, 168169, 186, 188; Ippolit on, 206-208; Myshkin and Ippolit compared, 209 Time, 29, 293

296

Index

Todorov, Tzeveton, 243, 246, 249 Tolstoy, Leo, 11, 35, 241, 261n39; Dotoevsky compared with, 19, 37; Strakhov on, 27; influence on The Idiot, 59-60; James on, 167 Tom Jones (Fielding), 166 Totsky, Afanasy Ivanovich ( The Idiot), 100-101, 177, 227; description of re­ lated to Gothic, 113; confession of, 181 Triangles of desire, mediators of, 219-220, 281n l0 Trilling, Lionel, 258n l2, 266n8 Trofimovich, Stepan, 42 Trollope, Anthony, 126, 165 Truth: indirect expression of, 13; coex­ istence of with falsehood, 196-198, 205; and lies in Nastasia's letters, 219; function of inserted narratives for, 230 Tunimanov, V. A ., 273n8 Turgenev, Ivan, 36, 259n6 Tyutchev, Fyodor Ivanovich, 224, 259n2

Vampire, 114-115, 270n37 Varma, Devendra P ., 271n49 Veinburg, P. L , 88-89 Verbal Icon, The (Wimsatt and Beardsley), 240 Vevey, 51 Voltaire, 12 Vrangel, A . E., letters to, 35

Umetsky, Olga, 53, 55 Umetsky case, 262n8 and n9 Uncle, in the Notebooks: family rela­ tionships of, 53-55; the Idiot's relation to, 56; lessening importance of 56-57; as Versilov, 58 "Uncle's Dream" (Dostoevsky), 2

Yanovsky, Stepan, 20-21 Yeats, W . B., 201 Yurodivyi: the Idiot as, 54, 61, 63, 65, 69; common conception of, 65; as Holy Fool, 66-67

Valjean, Jean (Les Misérables), proto­ type of good man, 17, 74 Valkovsky {The Insulted and Injured): hero-villain, 112; fatal hero, 114

Walpole, Horace, 108, 113 War and Peace (Tolstoy): Strakhov on, 27; illegitimacy in, 59; influence on Dostoevsky, 59-60 Wasiolek, Edward, 49-50, 236, 2 6 3 n ll; on family structure, 52 W att, Ian, 258n l2, 269n25 "White Nights" (Dostoevsky), 2 Wimsatt, W . K ., 240 Words- expressiveness of, 10; inability to express ideas, 137, 151, 184, 197, 200; inappropriateness of, 148; used for lies, 198

Zhemarin trial, 203, 209, 221 Zhinkin, N ., 272-273n3 Zosima (The Brothers Karamazov), 44 Zundelovich, la. O ., 161-163, 237, 275n37