The process for deciding what is good is an ongoing struggle. Our preferences are shaped and changed by our experiences, the people we meet, and even our beliefs. But how do we come to a common understanding with so many differing opinions? Sometimes it's easier to just surround yourself with people who think the same or believe the same way.
But this isn't representative of our daily lives and who we interact with. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a book with a large cast of characters and it takes the most wholesome and innocent individual perhaps ever to be born and throws him into the middle of a society enraptured with its own desires and materialistic needs. What would happen to this person? If they were giving, when would it be too much? If they were always helping, when would they be too naive for this situation?
And if they're too nice? when would they just be taken advantage of? Hot off the tails of the publishing success known as crime and punishment, Dostoevsky released The Idiot in 1869, a book that didn't achieve the same level of critical acclaim, but still found a core group of readers who loved it.
Unlike his other books, there is no central or iconic scene like the Napoleonic Man or the Grand Inquisitor. And maybe that's what makes this novel more approachable, because it takes the everyday struggle of the everyday man and makes it visible. Acclaimed biographer Joseph Frank even wrote about how personal this story was to Dostoevsky.
That is to say, to understand this book is to understand Dostoevsky. There's a belief that the moment before your death, your entire life flashes before your eyes. In that moment, you'll gain the clarity of the most important things in your life. Dostoevsky took this into his main character, Prince Mishkin, to represent the highest ideals of kindness and love. His Christian ideal man, who only had the best of intentions for others, but stuck him in a society mired in the sloth of the material and quotidian.
What would happen? Would he push others to see his way? Or would they push him to compromise?
Who will break first in The Idiot? This is part of our Before You Read series where we take life-changing books and talk about what they could mean in our modern lives. Whether you're someone looking to tackle your first large novel or working your way through all of Dostoevsky's works, we're putting together this brief list of things that you need to know before you start The Idiot. We're going to go through some of the context, why it's important, and some themes to help you get the most out of your reading of this book. At the end of putting all of this together and editing for clear plot spoilers, it's worth pointing out that the term spoilers is very subjective.
So the plan for today, we started off with a little bit of a skit of what you're getting with this novel to get you excited. Up next, we're going to talk about expectations versus reality, author and the publication info, Dostoevsky's challenge with this novel, a tumultuous time of the culture, and the road ahead. But first up, Expectations versus reality.
Expectation number one. The cast of characters is too large. I can't keep all these characters straight.
Dostoevsky is the best at writing characters, and he's probably the one author you want to have spend a little bit more time working out what each of these characters means. Luckily, there's kind of like a core group, and he's going to need a large array of supporting characters to move these characters around and explore his main ideas and themes. It's also a Russian novel. That means... Lots of pages and lots of details.
But details matter. It's these small acts of kindness and compassion of where the book excels. And that may be challenging for some. But my advice? Slow down.
This is a meditation of society, life, and kindness. And by the end, you're just hanging out with your small group of four or five friends that have four or five names. It's fine. Expectation number two. The psychology is too intense and I won't understand everything in the novel.
Well, you might be in the same boat as Dostoevsky, as having just recently kind of been coined in the mid-1800s, Dostoevsky himself would have very limited experience with psychology. Even today, modern psychologists look to Dostoevsky's characters for a sense of realism, and famed philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described Dostoevsky as the only person who ever taught me anything about psychology. End quote. He had perhaps some of the greatest insights into our own humanity.
Where it doesn't matter. whether he was writing psychology, he was writing real people that we see and recognize in our normal lives in this novel. Expectation number three, the pacing is so slow. All these old novels just got paid by the word count.
Sometimes exploring human nature takes time. And instead of just offering a bunch of platitudes that sound nice, Dostoevsky challenges his own beliefs and own expectations of humanity to get us to a closer form of truth. But to understand this book, is to understand Dostoevsky, the writer.
Dostoevsky took a long time to get this novel into our hands. Quote, We know from the notebooks that Dostoevsky had great difficulty in projecting the plot of The Idiot, and because of his commitment to his editor and his terrible financial plate, each section had to be submitted for publication before the next had been written or even sketched out. And perhaps it's most telling that this episodic nature of the way that the book was written reflects clearly the epileptic mode of the book.
I quote, The novel also shows this epileptic pattern in its larger structure. The action seems to progress unevenly in waves of tension that gather and burst in climactic scenes of spectacular emotional violence, leaving the narrative energy of this novel depleted and for a time directionless until a new wave of tension begins to accumulate. So maybe in the same way that epilepsy helped Dostoevsky as a person find his moral center, So too does the episodic nature allow us to challenge our own morality expectations.
And for this novel, Prince Michigan very much is the moral compass. In a society that's a little bit crazy, it's the start and restart that allows us as the reader to challenge what we think is the right thing to do. And another highly biographical element to Dostoevsky's life is the reprieve from the firing squad. In 1849, he was sentenced to death and moments before the firing squad...
took their aim to shoot at him, he was reprieved and sentenced to hard labor. They say that one can see one's true value and purpose in life moments before their death, and this couldn't have been more true for Dostoevsky, who then took these elements and ingrained them into the writing, ingrained them into his characters, for us to ask for our own selves, how do we live our own lives in a better way? Which leads us to Dostoevsky's challenge and his view on Christianity and why so many people find him captivating to read. I think he challenges himself. He doesn't just say, if Christ were to come back to earth, snap, it would be so easy and everybody would see what was going on.
Yeah, I think it's the concept of if pure goodness were put before you, would you accept it? There's the age old thing that we all know that when someone says that they hate you or that you're ugly, you instantly believe them like, oh. But when someone is good or says you look good, you're like, well, why is that?
You always question good intentions, but believe bad intentions. And it's reminiscent of Jesus in the Bible and his call to action to behave like children. Be quick to forgive.
And in the opening chapters, Dostoevsky imbues this into his main character, asking the readers, how do you look at this character? As he goes through this adventure, how would we react if you came across someone so naive, so pure of thought? This is Dostoevsky's. biggest challenge. And while we are but one part of society, it's all these decisions together that begin to influence each other.
And you have to remember, Russia was one of heavy Christian orthodoxy. Entwined so close together with the state, it's hard to tell where one began and the other ended. So what does that mean when your moral fiber of your society is built into the laws and the culture?
This brings us to the opposing westernization problem of Russia, the ideas of nihilism, egoism. socialism. Russia's political landscape is exploding with all of these new ideas, and it's impossible to completely grasp all of them.
So let's start with nihilism. And why did Dostoevsky have such a problem with this concept? Well, Christianity believes in a lot of higher purpose in terms of design of life, purpose in life, kindness, compassion.
Well, nihilism is a belief in nothing, that there is no point to life, that it's all meaningless, not just my life, not just Dostoevsky's life. or the nihilist to everyone's life, a belief in nothing. And we're trying to describe what nihilism is considered today.
Nihilism was much more polemic in 1860s Russia. A good way that I like to think about it is the creature in the bathroom thought experiment, which wasn't even really particularly intended for this. It's the idea that let's say you go to the bathroom and there's a creature in the sink trying to crawl out and you go in day in, day out, and the creature just can't escape from the slippery sides of the sink.
You help the creature by picking it up, putting it on the ground so it can leave its free life to however it wants. You come back a week later, it's keeled over, dead in the middle of the bathroom. Did you do good? Did you help the creature? Was there a point to that?
Well, a nihilist may say, eh, all life is meaningless. It doesn't matter whether it died in the sink or died on the bathroom floor. It doesn't matter that you did anything. And you could even say that Russian nihilism is somewhat of a fad at the time because of the recently released Turgenev novel.
Published in... In 1862, fathers and sons was the first to actually coin the term nihilism, where Russian culture began to almost mimic Barasov, kind of imitating him, destroying value or questioning what is valuable and even dressing like him as they walk around the streets of Russia. You could even consider this a movement away from Russian orthodoxy and into the idea of socialism.
And we'll do our best to kind of prod you to think about it, but we're obviously not experts in this area. But I guess one last thing to think about is ants in an anthill. Do you separate the good ants from the bad ants?
No. They're just ants. There is nothing else beyond them.
It's probably the biggest takeaway of how we're changing the structure of how we view society. And with this so heavily ingrained, into Russian society. Russian orthodoxy is the definition for good and bad for many of these people. So a move from way that into nothingness was probably quite intimidating for someone like Dostoevsky, who saw a rise in things such as egoism with the idea of just what's best for me. And we still maybe struggle with a lot of these themes today.
So we just wanted to point these out as things to consider when checking out this novel. Next steps, we are going to have a four-part discussion series. with a playlist down below where you can click on it and follow along and maybe kind of share some of your thoughts and give us feedback as we start to kind of explore what this novel means to our lives. And a special shout out to all of our patrons. This would not be possible without you.
And also thank you for the read-along with Leslie, Christy, and Pei. We appreciate your help and support in this read-along. So whether you continue to read with us or read it on your own, we wish you the best of luck as you explore The Idiot by Fyodor Lysenko. Dostoevsky.
My name is Una. Thank you for spending time with us today. Peace out.
War and Peace read-along coming up soon. Peace.