The Idiot - by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Reviewed August 14, 2005

When I told people I was reading The Idiot, I usually got denigrating responses, such as "Is it an autobiographical book?" or other such responses. When I was interviewing internally for a new job, after I was given a 30 day working notice of termination (I hope to write about the full details in a few months), my potential boss told me he wanted his employees to be well rounded, and he said he wanted his employees to read outside of work. He then asked me if I liked to read. I told him I was currently reading The Idiot. My potential boss gave me a stupefied look. So I said the novel was written by Dostoevsky, same guy who wrote Crime and Punishment. Then my potential boss started looking at me in a peculiar fashion. I stuttered, then muttered something about The DaVinci Code, and fortunately we had something to talk about. Needless to say, I did not get that job.

The Idiot took me about 11 weeks to read. Mind you within those 11 weeks I also read War of the Worlds (stay tuned in this space for a review of the novel and the movie.) The Idiot is 615 pages long. The Idiot is about a "saintly beautiful person", a 25 year old man named Prince Myshkin, recovering from an epileptic illness in Switzerland, but travelling back to his home in St. Petersburg. Outwardly, Prince Myshkin resembles a fool, but inwardly, he is intelligent, inspiring and has keen observations. Prince Myshkin falls in love with a portrait of a beautiful woman, Nastasya Filippovna, and soon meets her when he invites himself to her birthday party. Indeed he falls madly in love with her, but complicating matters is earlier that the Prince met Aglaya, a beautiful twenty year old General's daughter. Is 19th century Russia ready for a man like Prince Myshkin? Or is Prince Myshkin ready for Russia? Sadly, he is not quite ready. Caught in a society that emphasizes wealth and beauty, the novel is a tragic reminder that moral idealism sometimes does not prevail (see the synopsis at the bottom of this review for more on the plot).

Dostoevsky wanted to create a saintly beautiful person in Prince Myshkin, much like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. Dostoevsky was worried (in a letter to his niece) he could not pull off the character of a saintly beautiful person - after all, the role model is Jesus C. I think Dostoevsky failed with the saintly beatiful person. The Prince was portrayed inconsistently, but perhaps that was deliberate. It was hard for me to believe someone who outwardly looked like a fool, but kept coming up with keen and inspiring observations.

It is not as good as Crime and Punishment, but perhaps trying to compare this one to the former novel is not fair to this one. I'm of the opinion that the 615 pages could have been distilled into around 300 pages. There are some incredible insights in this novel. The Prince talks about a person who is condemmed to death by firing squad, and only has 5 minutes to live (this actually happened to Dostoevsky). This person allocates two minutes to talking with his comrades, two minutes to think about his life, and the last minute thinking how he will be part of the chruch spires soon, part of the environment. Time is not important anymore. Suddenly, the man is given a reprieve and is not going to be executed. The man, ironically is disappointed. Now the man has an inifinte amount of time to do whatever he wants. There are a few of these ancedotes which are quite gripping. Another is a Russian general, who as a small boy, worshipped Napoleon when Napoleon rolled into Moscow and served as Napoleon's page. Unfortunately, uncovering all these ancedotes takes a long time.

There are many religious overtones. There is talk about nihilism, characters talk verses from the Bible. Lebedev talks about the Apocolypse, though I'm not sure of the meaning of that part of the story. There is supposedly huge reference to a painting by Hans Holbein, which portrays Jesus C after he has been taken down from the cross, and Jesus looks so lifeless, so broken that all hope is lost. That reference in relation to the novel was lost on me. I guess that picture was somehow indicative of how Prince Myshkin was going to end up? I'm guessing here.

There are good philisophical ancedotes, which marked Crime and Punishment. There is an eighteen your old named Ippolit who is dying of consumption. Ippolit confesses what it would be like to kill as many people as possible before dying. People are shocked by Ippolit's confessions, but I found out reading the analysis notes that Ippolit serves as an anti Prince Myshkin, or is an embodiment of evil. I personally thought this Ippolit had a funny name (what else rhymes with idiot?), and was a bit of a despicable character. Aglaya means "light" in Greek, and there are a few other names that could have symbolic meaning.

It's my understanding that this is Dostoevsky's most tragic ending. He hints at it throughout the novel, so the ending is not a surprise. Nastasya is always fearing for her life, thinking that someone is going to kill her with a knife or a razor. Throughout the novel, spectacular murders of the era, that Dostoevsky read in the papers would be referenced in his novel.

It's an okay novel, but I was slightly disappointed. There were a few slow parts in the novel, some confusing parts, and some parts that really weren't consistent. The women in The Idiot are potrayed as beautiful but a bit mentally unstable, and cruel with their suitors. Is that why they get their fate? I'm not sure. The Prince's behaviour is not consistent throughout either; at the beginning, he is "saintly", but near the end, he is coarse when talking about atheism and Catholicism.

Crime and Punishment was dripping with descriptions about St. Petersburg, so much so that I was almost motivated to write something myself about St. Petersburg in that era, that's how powerful the scenes were. This novel could have taken place anywhere else, there are no lasting places. Indeed, Dostoevsky wrote this novel when he was living in Florence, so that may explain the lack of town details. Or perhaps he had written all he could in Crime and Punishment. After I read this novel, I got the sense that Flowers For Algernon was almost patterned after this novel. (Flowers For Algernon is a powerful but sad story about a mentally retarded man who is given some experimental drugs, slowly gains in intelligence, almost to a genius level, gets some action with his special education teacher, a vivacious brunette, but then the man slowly reverts back to his original mental state and stays that way forever, leaving behind his sad teacher.)

Rating: 7 out of 10.

Synopsis.Written in 1868, two years after Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, this novel is about Prince Myshkin, the title character of the novel. He is 25 yrs old, a Russian, but spent a few years in Switzerland recovering from an "illness". In the novel, it is not clear what the exact illness is, but Prince Myshkin is prone to epileptic seizures, and is quite nervous. While on the way back from Switzerland on the train, Myshkin meets two people, a clerk named Lebedev and a rich man named Rogozhin. Myshkin is on the way to meet General Epanchin and his family under the guise that he is related to Mrs. Epanchin. While on the train, he hears about the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna, and at General Epanchin's house, he see her portrait, and falls in love. Myshkin meets the General's three daughters - Adelia, Alexandra and Aglaya. All three are exceedingly beautiful, and the youngest, Aglaya, at 20 years of age, is the most beautiful. In conversations with the Prince, everyone is taken aback with his simpleness, his intelligence, his inspiring viewpoints and his keen observations. Unfortunately, the prince, in appearance, looks like a fool.

Prince Myshkin invites himself to Nastasya Filippovna's birthday party, where she has just thrown $100,000 rubles from a suitor, Gavrila Ardalionovich, into the fireplace and dared him to pick it up. It appears that Nastasya can be "bought", and Rogozhin has the most money, so he appears to be the most promising suitor. However, the Prince declares his love for her, she accepts it, but eventually runs away to Rogozhin.

Aglaya stays in correspondence with the Prince, and she feels sorry for the Prince for his "lost love". Aglaya and the Prince develop a complex relationship where they fall in love. But the Epanchins cannot quite accept the Prince as Aglaya's husband until he passes the approval of society at a party at the Epanchins. Unfortunately, the Prince breaks a vase, spouts some nonsense about atheism and Catholicism, and this "scandal" pratically ruins his prospect with Aglaya.

Meanwhile Nastasya has been running from the Prince to Rogozhin. She is not the marrying kind, and whenever a marriage date gets set, she runs from one to the other. Aglaya and the Prince show up at the house of Nastasya, where the wedding with Rogozhin has been planned. Aglaya and Nastasya are both jealous of each other, but Nastasya dismisses Rogozhin, faints, the Prince runs to comfort her, and Aglaya runs away crying. Now, it looks indeed sure that the Prince will marry Nastasya. A wedding within 2 weeks has been set, but on the marriage day, Nastasya spots Rogozhin, leaps into his arms and commands him to run away with her. The Prince sets out to find the new couple, and ends up at Rogozhin's house. There he finds the body of Nastasya, all wrapped up in white silk; Rogozhin has killed her with a knife. The police find the Prince and Rogozhin in an embrace; Rogozhin is sentenced to Siberia, and the Prince has gone mad again, uncommunicative in a sanitorium in Switzerland.