Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence. Edith Cavell was a nurse who worked in Belgium during the First World War. She is famous for declaring that we must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone. To that end, she would treat soldiers from both sides during the war, helping all she could. Yet this kindness eventually led her to helping wounded Allied soldiers escape the German-occupied Belgium.
Despite the fact that she was British, this was not done out of patriotism, but instead her firm belief that everyone in need was worthy of help. But when this indiscriminate act of kindness was discovered, she was tried and executed by the German authorities. It was her very selflessness that sealed her fate.
This ties into what many consider an unbearable fact about the world. The people we consider good are often taken advantage of, sometimes precisely because of their admirable qualities. This has been pointed out at least as far back as ancient Athens, where Plato asked, why be virtuous if virtue grants no personal advantage?
It is found today in the modern idea that nice guys finish last, or that it is a dog-eat-dog world, one that you must be cruel to survive in. The traditional approach to this problem has been to reassure people that it is, despite appearances, in our own interests to be good and kind rather than bad and manipulative. But this is certainly not true in all cases.
and many of us live in fear of being a mug, or someone whose own goodness and kindness is used by others for their own gain. Arguably, this becomes increasingly true as you ascend social structures, as those with more power, be it political or monetary, have to be increasingly on guard for those who would manipulate them or take them for a ride, since other people have more to gain by doing this. Meaning that the very people who could achieve the most good are disincentivised from doing so. However, there was one thinker who was brave enough to suggest that we should be kind even when the world is crashing down around us, and we are rejected and neglected by all sides.
That is Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in his book The Idiot, he aimed to show a perfectly beautiful man and what happens to him when he encounters the messy cutthroat business of socialite Russian society. Gets ready to learn how kindness can persevere through the most difficult of circumstances, how inner shame can lead to self-destruction. and if there's any value in being an idealist in a deeply unideal world.
As always, bear in mind that I won't be able to discuss every idea or facet of The Idiot in this video. I highly encourage you to read it for yourself as it's one of my favorite books, and if we have disagreements about interpretations, that is absolutely fine. But speaking of being taken for a ride, there is one way to avoid having your newsfeed manipulated, and that is today's very kind sponsor, Ground News.
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Back to Dostoevsky. 1. The Idiot. An incomplete synopsis.
Before we get stuck in, it's good to look at the broad outline of the plot, just so we are all on the same page. I will warn you, this is quite a windy tale with lots of twists and turns, so do bear that in mind as we move forward. And in case it wasn't obvious, spoilers ahead.
The Idiot follows the young Prince Mishkin, who suffers from epilepsy and has just spent four years recovering in Switzerland. He enters the story a kind and innocent soul. the sort of person Dostoevsky would want us all to be, and yet he leaves it completely broken. Our tale opens on a train pulling into St. Petersburg with three men on it talking.
One of these men is Prince Mishkin, who has just met the merchant's son Rogozhin and the civil servant Lebedev. For any Russian speakers in my audience, please bear with my terrible pronunciation. Rogozhin is a passionate and virile man who is set to collect a large inheritance as soon as he returns home. While Lebedev is a good-natured but self-interested person who becomes sycophantic as soon as he smells wealth on the horizon.
During the journey, Rogozhin says he intends to marry Nastasya Filippovna, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and our female protagonist. Nastasia is considered a fallen woman by the rest of Russian society. She was groomed and abused by her guardian, Totski, at a mere 16 years old, and she wavers between outright rebellion and a deep sense of shame at what was done to her.
Totski, eager to avoid a scandal, has arranged for her to marry a rather vain man named Garnier, who does not love her, but has been promised a fortune by Totski if he goes through with it. Upon arriving in St. Petersburg, Mishkin immediately strikes up a friendship with one General Yapanchen and his family. I'm going to recap all of the names in a sec, don't worry. He is a proud man and has a wife, Lizaveta, and three daughters, the most important of which is Aglaya, the youngest. Mushkin delights Lizaveta and her daughters with his stories and is told to stay with the aforementioned Ganya, who is a friend of the Apanchans.
Here, Mushkin also sees a portrait of Nastasya Filippovna for the first time. He is immediately struck by her intense beauty, but also the unbearable depth of sorrow in her eyes. Later, at Ganya's, Mishkin is being introduced to his family, when Nastasia and Rogozhin both arrive in quick succession.
Nastasia reveals that she knows Ganya is merely marrying her for money, and in response Rogozhin offers to up the price, saying that he will buy her hand for 100,000 rubles. Nastasia laughs at this, and Rogozhin runs off to collect the money. She then invites the assembled company to her birthday soiree that evening.
Mishkin later appears at Nastasia's apartment when the party is already in full swing. She asks Mushkin whether she should marry Ganya, and Mushkin replies that she should not. And in response, she immediately breaks off their engagement.
Rogozhin storms in with the promised 100,000 rubles, and Nastasya goes to leave with him, throwing the money in the fire and telling Ganya that if he wants it so much, he can go and get it. At the last moment, Mushkin shocks everyone by offering to marry Nastasya. But she still leaves with Rogozhin, and that is curtains on act one.
So, to recap the cast, we have Prince Mushkin, our protagonist. Rogozhin, an anti-heroic loose cannon, Nastasya, our tortured heroine, Lebedev, our scheming civil servant, Ganya, our vain money-obsessed gentleman, General Yapanchen, Lizaveta Yapanchen, and Aglaya Yapanchen, their daughter. Part two begins six months later, and Nastasya continually flits between seeing Mushkin and Rogozhin, a situation which slowly stokes Rogozhin's jealousy.
He becomes increasingly violent and erratic around both Nastasya and Mushkin, though at the same time he and Mushkin become honorary brothers by trading their crosses. swearing loyalty to one another forevermore. Despite this, Rogozhin tries to murder Mushkin not long after, but Mushkin falls into an epileptic episode which scares Rogozhin off.
Rather charmingly, everyone then goes off to the country for the summer, with Mushkin renting a dacha off Lebedev. One evening, when a whole cast is gathered, a group of young men storm in claiming to be entitled to a portion of Mushkin's inheritance. It turns out they are not, but Mushkin still offers financial support to them out of goodwill. This enrages Lizaveta Yapanchen, who does not see this as the proper way to do things, and disappoints Aglaya, who was hoping that Mushkin would defend himself.
The only member of this band of rogues we need to concern ourselves with is Ippolit, a young nihilist who is dying of tuberculosis, and who oscillates between crying out for friendship and treating those around him with a cynical disdain. At the opening of part three, it becomes increasingly clear that Prince Mushkin is slowly falling for Aglaya, the youngest daughter of the Yapanchens. The Ypanchans, for their part, are growing increasingly frustrated with Mushkin's generosity and indiscriminate kindness, and are sceptical that this sort of person would be at all appropriate for their daughter. Mushkin and the Ypanchans step out for a walk, and who should they encounter but Nastasya Filipovna? She gets into an altercation with a military officer, and Mushkin steps in to defend her, much to the ire of the Ypanchans.
Though Aglaya also gives him a note, saying she wants to meet him in private later. That evening, Mushkin bumps into Rogozhin. and they have a heart-to-heart about many topics, including Nastasya Filippovna's strange relationship towards Mishkin.
Mishkin also forgives Rogozhin for his ill-fated murder attempts, and Mishkin suddenly remembers that it's his birthday tomorrow, so they go back to the dacha for a drink. When they arrive, there is a whole party there already, and they are pontificating on a variety of subjects. Here, Ippolit reads out an essay which contains his vulnerable reflections upon his approaching death, and, in his despair, attempts to shoot himself.
However, the gun does not go off. and everyone mocks him, saying he was only posturing and never intended to do anything. Eventually, the party begins to disperse.
Later, Mushkin meets with Aglaya, where she questions him about his connection with Nastasia, and says that Nastasia obviously loves him. For her part, Nastasia has been writing to Aglaya, declaring her admiration for Aglaya and supporting her potential marriage to Mushkin. Aglaya wants Mushkin to deal with this and also break off any connection with Nastasia.
It is clear he must do this if he wants any hope of marrying her. And that is the end of part three. Part 4 has a number of subplots which we will skip over, but the first big event is that Prince Mishkin is invited to a large society dinner at the Appanchins, where he will aim to demonstrate that he is undeniably a suitable match for Aglaya. Aglaya at this point still occasionally insists that she doesn't love the prince, but almost definitely does. At this event, Mishkin embarks on two passionate rants and makes a bit of a fool of himself in the eyes of the assembled company, both breaking a glass and then having an epileptic episode.
Worst of all, he seems to have no knowledge of how to act in the presence of his betters, always speaking honestly and from the heart. To try and put all of this conflict to rest, Mushkin agrees to a meeting between Aglaya and Nastasia in order to, hopefully, allay Aglaya's jealousy. However, when they get there, Aglaya spends the whole time berating and humiliating Nastasia, which Mushkin cannot stand.
He tells her to stop, and she leaves in a rage, while Mushkin feels he cannot abandon the suffering Nastasia's side. As a result, Nastasya suddenly expels Rogozhin and a wedding is arranged between Mushkin and Nastasya. In a lot of other stories, this would lead to a happy ending, but it simply is not to be.
Nastasya leaves Mushkin at the altar for Rogozhin, who then carries her away to St. Petersburg where he promptly murders her. Mushkin finds them there, Nastasya already dead, and completely collapses, going mad. He is found by the police, crying with Rogozhin, incoherent and...
inconsolable. Mushkin is packed off to Switzerland, Rogozhin is condemned to penal servitude in Siberia, and no one is happy. Unlike a lot of Dostoevsky's other great novels, there is not even the hint of a happy ending here. It is explicitly said that Mushkin will likely be mad for the rest of his life. Rogozhin is not given some hopeful glimmer of redemption.
Ippolit dies of tuberculosis, consumed by his own misery, and Aglaya ends up estranged from her family. It is remarkable because of the despair that flows right to the heart of the novel. And the entire story rests on the remarkability of its protagonist.
So that is an excellent place to start. If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing to my Patreon to both support me and gain access to exclusive content. The link is in the description.
2. Prince Mishkin, the Modern Saviour In his private writings concerning the idiot, Dostoevsky said he wanted to create a character who was beautiful. Here he is not talking about outer attractiveness, but rather the kind of person that radiates beauty and beatitude. This was to be someone who was kind, generous, innocent, and above all, like Jesus Christ, who Dostoevsky admired above all else. I am an atheist, but it's very easy to see the appeal in such a character, and The Idiot is by no means a book only for believers. Dostoevsky wanted to put this beautiful man to the test against the vices of what, for him, was modern society, and see if the two could be reconciled.
One of my favourite interpretations of Mushkin comes from Anna Berman, and I'll be drawing upon her heavily for this section, although I'll also be melding many of her thoughts with my own. Something that marks Mushkin out as special is his innocence. He is not simply good in the way that ordinary people are, but begins the novel with a totally uncomplicated view of the world and of others as fundamentally benevolent.
On the train ride to St. Petersburg, he surprises Rogozhin and Lebedev with how open he is, and at any moment he's willing to bare his soul to a stranger. This innocence also shines a light on some of the unkinder parts of high society, such as Mushkin's insistence on treating everyone from the humblest of servants to the greatest of nobles in the same kind, respectful, yet slightly casual way. Berman calls this the prince's initial naive state, drawing on the German author Schiller's concept of the naive. For Schiller, naivety is not necessarily a bad thing and can signify a certain unity of character and direct contact with reality.
Muschkin begins the novel blissfully unaware of the distorting lenses of social mores. In this way, he resembles both the Christ of the Gospels, who famously saw people's souls rather than their appearances or social status, but also arguably the ancient cynics who similarly held social standing and money in contempt. But Muschkin is not critical like the cynics.
He simply cannot make sense of what, for him, is irrelevant information, and so he treats everyone with the same naive kindness. However, this is not to last. Throughout part two, it becomes apparent that no matter how straightforwardly kind the prince attempts to be, he always seems to be upsetting people or causing some kind of unwanted pain.
For instance, when he offers financial support to the people who have come to try and poach his inheritance, he manages to offend both them and the assembled noble company. He has wounded the pride of the band of robbers, who see this as a show of contempt, and he has offended the nobility around him, who see this kindness as an unacceptable sign of weakness. It is a disturbance in the fabric of their social world, where such things are simply not done.
Mishkin should be offended or outraged or challenge these people to a duel, but he should certainly not be kind to them. This particularly upsets Aglaya, who wants to see Mishkin be a man, so to speak. Both sides view him either as an idiot or a dangerous unknown element in society.
He becomes suspicious precisely because of his principle to always treat people with the same selfless kindness. If he is so committed to that, then he will be a disloyal ally to any one faction or group in high society. And indeed, this idea is incompatible with the very notion of high society.
I want to point out here that it is not that Mishkin is kind and, incidentally, something goes wrong. It is rather that something goes wrong because of his kindness. A trait that is ordinarily seen as uncomplicatedly good is corrupted by circumstance and starts to sow discord. Some, like Janet Tucker, have argued that this is because, for all of his virtues, Mishkin displays hubris in his willingness to go against the grain of social norms. But...
I respectfully disagree. I think that Dostoevsky is shining a light on how certain values and social standards can twist even qualities like kindness or selflessness into destructive forces. The trouble is that Mushkin and the people around him are mutually incomprehensible. They cannot understand Mushkin, and Mushkin cannot really understand them either. One of the most common thoughts that other characters have upon meeting him is the assumption that the gentle, kind exterior is just an act.
and that underneath Mishkin must have some other egoistic game he is playing. This is especially prominent with more selfish or vain characters like Ganya. He is initially incredibly suspicious of the prince's motives because he cannot make heads or tails of them.
The idea that Mishkin's persistent kindness to Nastasia is because he genuinely wants what's best for her seems insane to Ganya, who almost always acts out of what is best for his own skin. Not because he's a monster, but just because he's pretty self-concerned. And when they are not viewing Mishkin as potentially threatening, most people see him as basically stupid. This comes across most in part two, where Aglaya talks about Mishkin as like the poor knight featured in Pushkin's poetry. Aglaya often mocks Mishkin for his persistent devotion to restoring Nastasia's spirits and helping to save her from her own self-destructive spirals.
Aglaya certainly views this as somewhat noble, but ultimately also a hopeless task. And this is how the rest of the world views Mishkin's whole outlook. It is as if they are patting him on the shoulder and saying, it's all well and good, all of this kindness stuff, boy, but do enter the real world. It is, of course, taken for granted that the real world must, by necessity, both be cruel and require cruelty. Even Aglaya's irreverent reading of Pushkin's poem still paints Mishkin as a knight when, to quote Joseph Frank, nothing could be less characteristic of the prince than deeds of military valour.
As C.S. Lewis would point out nearly a hundred years later, There are few more effective ways to get someone to abandon their principles than to declare them childish or otherwise unrealistic. In other words, to convince them that they are idiotic. And the prince eventually does come round a little to this way of thinking.
He continues to act in a kind and selfless way, but he is now much less hopeful that any real good will come of it, or even that it is the right thing to do. He begins to scold himself for his outlook, saying that he knows he is stupid and that his thinking lacks a sense of proportion. He becomes suspicious of other people in a way he simply was not before.
And what is worse, his suspicions are proven correct. He chides himself for thinking that Rogozhin is out to kill him, but then Rogozhin appears and does just that. He refers to his own ideas as humiliating and begins to see them as fundamentally childish, but he does not know any other way to be. Strangely, this is also often the case for the classic 19th century Byronic hero. Characters like Manfred in Byron's Manfred or Heathcliff in Bronte's Wuthering Heights both rebel against society and traditional morals, but tend to do so from a place of anger or self-assertion.
The proposition they assert is that their individual freedom and the intensity of their feelings just matter more than simple social norms or even the power of God himself. They stand alone against the world. Though it seems strange to say it, Mushkin spends much of his novel in a similar position.
He, too, is implicitly rebelling against his own society, but rather than it being a revolt of self-interest or of feeling, it is one of kindness, of loving your enemy. Throughout parts 2, 3, and 4, Mishkin often becomes deeply sceptical that his goodness will ever be reconciled to Russian high society, and yet he sticks to his guns anyway. His is a rebellion that comes not from anger, but from a recognition that even if this way ends in disaster, any other way would be agreeing that kindness and selflessness truly are foolish. And Mishkin is simply not willing to do this. To quote Simon Lesser, he,"...suffers from the noblest and most endearing of all possible weaknesses, an excess of goodness."When Mishkin ends the novel, mad, alone, and broken, the implicit question hanging in the air is, was it all worth it?
Was this a noble rebel, making a last stand against an unjust world? Or was this simply an idiot? Someone too stubborn to recognize the hopelessness of his one-man crusade, or even to know he is enacting it. Put a pin in this, as we will definitely be returning to it later. However, I want to turn from Prince Mishkin's unique approach to some of the forces which twist it into destruction, starting with Dostoevsky's sharp critique of many societal norms.
3. Society, Money, and Worth Because of his pro-religious and anti-socialist views, Dostoevsky is often considered a conservative thinker, and they don't wholly disagree with this. He was a traditionalist Christian, a proud political nationalist, and a supporter of Sarazin. But we must be careful about painting him as uncritical of the society he lived in. After all, he spent a lot of the first half of his life campaigning for the abolition of serfdom. And until the 1860s, he would quite often align himself far more with social reformers.
Nowhere is Dostoevsky's contempt for the values of his day more evident than in The Idiot. And we may recognize some of the flaws in our own society here as well. A contrast that is immediately drawn between Prince Mishkin and the other characters in The Idiot is that he is uninterested in appearances.
This is almost always to his detriment and is yet another reason people think of him as foolish. Yet, at the same time, Dostoevsky shows how the obsession with social appearances held by the rest of the characters in the novel also lead them to despair and how their assumption that everyone is acting egoistically comes back to bite them. This theme is put in significant motion with the character of Garnier.
At the start of the novel, he has been betrothed to Nastasya, but he really loves Aglaya and will continue to pursue her for the rest of the novel. However, it is his obsession with money and status which means he does not end up with either one of them. One of the crucial reasons Nastasya decides to reject his proposal on the recommendation of Prince Mishkin is because Ganya sees her largely as a means to an end. Totski has promised 75,000 rubles to him if he takes his victim away, and so Ganya agrees.
Of course, this culminates in Nastasya throwing 100,000 rubles into a fire right in front of Ganya, taunting him to rescue them from the flames if he loves money so much. Lebedev exhibits similar behaviour. His only real principle in life is to follow where the money leads, but as a result, by the end of the novel, he has not particularly made any true friends.
He is mostly treated with a mixture of disgust and disdain. This is not the same sort of sharp disaster faced by Ganya, but they ultimately end up in the same place. relatively alone and relatively unloved, led in circles by their fascination with money. Sometimes this image obsession manifests in a preoccupation for societal honour.
This is particularly pronounced in the case of Lisaveta Ipancha. We are told at the beginning of the novel that she has a tendency to feel insecure in her social standing. Her husband's wealth and success have placed her in the company of those she sees as far higher up the social ladder than her, and this has made her hyper-conscious of her family's position in society. Much of her anger at the prince makes sense when viewed through this lens.
Mushkin's behaviour threatens to bring everything she holds dear crashing down. This is both in a literal sense, since if he marries a glier and then behaves scandalously, it will bring shame to the family, but also in a philosophical one. Mushkin is a living challenge to her entire way of life.
He poses the inevitable question, what if everything you stand for is pointless, next to the simple values of kindness and generosity? That is the question. in itself is a threatening thought. In his confessions, Leo Tolstoy said that the mere idea that everything we have lived for might be meaningless is enough to plunge us into despair.
That is what Mushkin exemplifies to Lisaveta, and it's no wonder that she reacts with such extremity. Interestingly, we see this obsession with appearance even in Hippolyte, the young nihilist who will die in a matter of weeks. Immediately after he unsuccessfully attempts to end his own life, he is mortified, but this is not out of regret or out of a sudden wish to live, but instead because he is worried that others will think this whole attempt has been staged and now consider him a coward. That thought, that his reputation in the eyes of others has diminished, is even more painful to him than his consumption.
Some of his final days are spent tormented over the judgments of other people. In a lot of philosophical novels, the days before dying are when characters discover what really matters to them. It is when Father Panlu from The Plague reaffirms his faith in God, or when Ivan Ilyich from The Death of Ivan Ilyich realises that his whole life was for nothing.
But in Ippolit, Dostoevsky paints this obsession with reputation as so powerful that it can even obscure the terrifying clarity death brings in its wake. For him, it is perfectly possible for us to be lying on our deathbed about to slip from this world and to still be worried about whether we will make a pretty enough corpse. Ippolit's nihilism also causes him to become increasingly egoistic as his death approaches, meaning that he is totally alone by the time he does pass away.
He is too self-concerned to find the true connection with others that he seeks. Whereas Mushkin reaches out, Ippolit reaches in and finds nothing satisfactory there. Perhaps the character that embodies this appearance-based approach to life at its most extreme is General Evolgius. This is a minor character in the book who comes from a long and noble heritage, but is now poor and ignored. He tries to recoup some of that prestige by continually lying.
And this culminates in a long-winded diatribe about how he served as a pageboy during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and formed an unusually close bond with the French emperor. This story is almost certainly not true, and everyone knows it. But it is one of the many things that Evolgin does to debase himself, clinging on to reputation even in his final drunken days.
Like Ippolit, he is primarily concerned with himself, not out of an inflated ego, but simply out of a vulnerable one. And this brings him no consolation in his final hours. All of this mirrors a critique Byung-Chul Han has made of our own society. According to him, we have begun to prioritize exhibition value above everything else.
In other words, we often value things not for what they can do or because of their intrinsic properties, but rather simply as a tool for drawing attention to ourselves. People, experiences, and memories are not... treasured for their own sake, but rather because we can brag about them to others. We spend an awful lot of time looking at ourselves through the eyes of other people, and viewing us as objects to be admired or condemned, rather than experiencing agents. People capable of love or kindness or virtue or vice.
This reaches its apotheosis in the way some of us broadcast ourselves out to thousands of people every day, though the irony of me saying that is not lost on me. In the idiot Dostoevsky recognises a nascent form of this exhibition value in the mid-19th century. Throughout the work, most of the characters are not asking what would make them happy, or what would fulfil them, or even what they think is right.
They instead just ask, how will this make me look? And they follow that path wherever it takes them. To borrow a thought from Gagne near the beginning of the novel, the worst thing anyone can be is unnoticed, ordinary, beneath remark.
This is completely at odds with the way Mushkin sees the world. For him, social standing and money are irrelevant to what ultimately matters, which is how someone's suffering can be alleviated, and, at certain points, the properties of their character. His kindness often rubs people up the wrong way precisely because it is indiscriminate. He spends just as much time reassuring the disgraced General Evolgin as he does the well-reputed Lizaveta Ipancha.
And he throws his own shot at love and happiness away just to have a chance of saving Nastasia from her self-destructive spiral. We might look upon this as noble, but it also inevitably brings him into conflict with the other characters. His attempts to be kind are always well-intentioned, but they are also unworldly in this context, and this is part of why they mostly end in disaster.
This is arguably Dostoevsky's ultimate critique of his society, that it has become impossible to be unselfishly kind. But, on the other hand, it also serves as a critique of Mushkin himself. Should he not have bent his principles in order to actually achieve more good.
Again, we'll be exploring this theme in more detail later in the video. But next, I want to move away from the themes of society and worldliness and towards ones of love. Because Dostoevsky thinks that some ways of loving are antithetical to kindness, and yet sometimes we accept them.
Because, sadly, many of us will not let ourselves be loved unless it hurts. 4. Love's labours martyred At its core, the primary conflict in The Idiot is about one of the oldest and most troublesome human tendencies, love. In traditional analyses of the novel, the character of Ganya is supposed to represent a sort of vain, selfish love, Rogozhin stands in for a passionate, violent love, and Mushkin for a selfless, spiritual love. I do think there is something in this, but I also want to focus on the significant figure of Nastasya Filippovna and how she reacts to each of these types of love. After all, love is an interaction between more than one person.
and Nastasia's own character helps explain why the ideal type of love exemplified by Mushkin backfires so horribly. We have already talked about what Ganya wants out of his arrangement with Nastasia. He is being paid off. His love, if you can call it that, is solely aimed at what he stands to benefit from being with her.
In his analysis of genres of love, Stendhal talks about these loves of vanity which spring up not out of a true desire for the other person as an agent who loves you, but rather because of what having that person will bring to you. This might be money and its accompanying social status, as in the case of Garnier, but it might also be a certain type of self-image. This is also hinted at with Garnier when he desires Aglaya.
He will not abandon his engagement with Nastasia until he has full reassurance from Aglaya that she will be waiting for him when he does. In other words, whatever happens, he does not want to end up alone. He is pretty miserable at the end of the book, when he's relying on the generosity of his sister and her husband to survive. This, just like not having a betrothed, clashes with his self-image.
Dostoevsky paints him as too wrapped up in himself to ever really love or find love. On the one hand, this approach is woefully unsuccessful as he faces rejection after rejection. But on the other hand, no particular rejection hits him too hard because he was never that fond of who these people were in their own right.
It was always mostly about his vanity. We also see this excess of self-concern and love in Ippolit, who never quite learns to reach out to others in a selfless way before his tragic death, despite his repeated pleas that he requires the love and company of others. At the same time, Dostoevsky does not paint Gagne or Ippolit as sociopathic narcissists.
In Gagne's case, his vanity is somewhat understandable. His family's position, as well as his own, is faltering, and a marriage would be a great change for the better in his life. Nonetheless, he is still unable to love anyone for their own sake, and so he represents a kind of love Dostoevsky would hold in contempt. The same goes for Hippolyte, who, in Dostoevsky's view, has been led astray by nihilistic ideas that cut him off from taking the leap of faith of truly caring for others and accepting that whether they return this is out of your hands. Secondly, we have Rogozhin, who has a far more interesting but also destructive approach to love.
His method of loving is probably best summed up in the word avaricious. He feels incredibly passionately for Nastasia and this is emphasised time and time again in almost every encounter we have with him. However, this passion is not always a good thing.
Rogozhin does not just want to love Nastasia or for her to love him, he almost wants to own her. He grows uncomfortably jealous about Nastasia and Mishkin. He is convinced that she loves the prince and we are not particularly told either way whether this is true but the thought occupies Rogozhin to the point of obsession. It torments him inside to the extent that he tries to murder Prince Mishkin and eventually does murder Nastasya. It is not clear that he does this out of hatred or spite, but more because his passion has become totally uncontrolled, morphing into a hot rage that he releases on the two people he associates with his jealousy, Mishkin and Nastasya.
For Dostoevsky, this type of love is a frequent target of his novels. He makes a similar criticism of Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, where his own passion drives him to commit irrational and destructive actions. Here we see Dostoevsky's scepticism about a love which is devoid of spirituality and driven by emotion alone. Passion may bring excitement, thrill and lust, but it can also bring anger, pain and death. It is, ultimately, still selfish and animalistic.
Mishkin's love, on most interpretations, is pretty much purely selfless. In fact, at many points, he denies being properly in love with Nastasia in the way most people understand. He more often says that he is filled with an infinite compassion for her.
When Mushkin looks upon Nastasia, he largely sees her as someone in need of kindness. This is how his love manifests. It is in contrast to his love for Aglaya, which is still simple but less selfless. But with Nastasia, he desperately wants her to see that she is worthy of respect, affection, and love. He makes endless sacrifices for her.
giving up the chance to be with Aglaya, agreeing to marry her, and drawing the scorn of all of his friends to make this happen. Nastasia also does seem to hold a great affection for the prince in her heart. She defers to his opinion, Mishkin can affect her in ways no one else can, and she admits he sees her as the person she is deep down, underneath layers of self-protective scorn and aggression.
Yet, she chooses not to go with him. She chooses Rogozhin. Why?
Well, this is sometimes interpreted as her going for the bad boy, but I think it's a bit more complicated than that. We must remember that Nastasia has an incredibly twisted view of herself. She is a disgraced and fallen woman, but not through fault of her own, but rather because Totski took advantage of her when she was only a child. She is so used to social shame that she takes it upon herself.
In an act of rebellion, she says, fine, if you want me to be scandalous, I shall be, and becomes an anti-heroic socialite, a Cleopatra of disrepute. But at the same time, she nurses a deep self-hatred. At some level, she truly does see herself as a morally fallen woman, yet at another, she knows she was just the victim of a horrible crime. She has an inner contradiction, which mirrors the one between Mishkin's character and wider society.
She is caught between two thoughts, but ultimately, it is the destructive one that wins in the end. I would argue that she chooses Rogozhin primarily as an act of self-punishment, to atone for the sins she never even committed. you After all, she knows Rogozhin will likely kill her. She tells Mishkin as much. She has been beaten by him, threatened by him, and knows he will be the death of her, and yet she keeps going back to him.
She rejects Mishkin despite acknowledging that he would make her happy. And I think this is largely because she does not think she deserves happiness. One of Freud's theories that has surprisingly stuck around was the idea that we might search out not necessarily social dynamics that are good for us, but ones that feel right because they are either familiar or because we feel we are not deserving of anything better. The brilliant trauma researcher Judith Herman has built on this point by saying that a feeling of safety is often the first step to recovering from an experience like Nastassia's. But at the same time, this sort of abuse can make the victim feel unworthy of anything more safe or fulfilling than their unpleasant situation.
This changes Nastasya's perception of violence like Rogozhin's from a clearly unjust imposition to merely how things ought to be. By contrast, Mushkin's genuine concern for Nastasya's well-being strikes her as thoroughly undeserved and as a result unsettling. Though I hope not many of you have gone through what Nastasya did.
I do think that we can recreate this same sort of behavior on a smaller scale in our own lives. And it is, ultimately, something to watch out for. Here, again, we see a way that Mushkin's kindness backfires. Although initially Nastasia finds his affection affirming, over time it increasingly distresses her.
While she begins the novel suffering but still in control of herself, before her death she is chaotic and frightened. Mushkin's love is part of what pushes her into Rogozhin's arms, and thus her eventual death. Again, the figure of kindness has done all he has done out of selfless generosity, and again it has caused far more harm than good. And again we return to a central question.
If the sort of kindness Mushkin promotes clashes with the world so much that it ends in disaster, how should we react to that? And to explore this in more detail, I want to examine the alternative to kindness, and look at some of the most unsettling parts of the novel, where Dostoevsky explores the limits of human cruelty, in polite society. Five, the boundless cruelty of man. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously dubs humanity as the most cruel sort of animal because we are not just cruel out of simple self-interest, but we turn it into a sort of sport for our own enjoyment.
He says, the thing that sets us apart from the rest is that we make cruelty artistic. We creatively devise new means of tormenting one another. and this is far more insidious than the simple brutality employed by the animal kingdom, even if theirs is often more bloody. And one of Dostoevsky's main themes in The Idiot is to show just how cruel people can truly become without ever really noticing.
Perhaps the starkest example of this in the novel is the general treatment of Nastasya Filipovna. She is looked down upon as a fallen woman by pretty much everyone she comes across. She is demeaned, outcast, and bad-mouthed by almost everyone else in the novel. This very much extends to the nominally kind Japanshans.
At various points, either Lisaveta or Aglaya express some condemnation of Nastasia, calling her honour into question and accepting her characterisation as a disgraced woman. This is despite Mushkin having told them all a story about his time in Switzerland where a young woman, Marie, underwent a very similar unpleasant treatment at the hands of her village. Until, eventually, the prince managed to convince all the children of the village to love and cherish her.
The Apanchans are big fans of the tale and clearly recognize that the treatment of Marie was wrong, yet this moral evidently strikes them as totally irrelevant to their own situation with Nastasia. They will state that they value the sort of kind approach taken by the prince, with Lizaveta even calling them kindred spirits, but this is only ever in theory. Their love and kindness is largely stated and very rarely put into practice, especially regarding people they view as socially condemnable. This human tendency was also noticed by C.S. Lewis.
who saw people professing noble sentiments in the abstracts just for them to only ever remain sentiments, and by Kierkegaard, who talked about the double-mindedness of only half-heartedly committing to our principles, abandoning them at the slightest pressure. We find it in the Brothers Karamazov, where a doctor humorously remarks that the more he loves humanity, the less he loves people. The members of high society here are engaged in a sort of double-think, where they are, in theory, enormous fans of Mushkin's humble, kind, Christian approach. That is, until they notice sometimes it works against them socially. Then all their values evaporate in a moment.
Again, the best example of this is Lizaveta Yapanchen. Initially, she is among the loudest of Mushkin's supporters, and she specifically praises his meekness, humility, and kindness. And yet, at the same time, she becomes enraged when he displays those very qualities to people she deems undesirable or unworthy. As we said, in book two, Mushkin shocks everyone by not prosecuting or reacting to the band of extorters trying to get him to cough up his inheritance, but rather sincerely offering them financial help and forgiving them all their trespasses against him.
But no one is enraged by this more than Lizaveta, partly because it is going far beyond the sort of courtesy that society would deem proper. Dostoevsky is often seen as a great critic of atheist, materialist, and nihilist philosophies, and this is definitely true, you can check out my video on crime and punishment if you want to learn more about that. But just as much of the time, he takes aim at those Christians he sees as not properly living their faith.
For him, as for Tolstoy, Christianity was not something to be believed as just a metaphysical doctrine, but rather a way of life. This is embodied in the Elder Zosima from the Brothers Karamazov, who proclaims a kind of earthy faith, which does not just believe in the perfect world to come, but actively tries to make things on earth as they are in heaven. Dostoevsky is just as critical of the sort of Christianity that is only ever lived in theory as he is of atheism and its associated doctrines.
And he is even more critical of those Christians who use their faith as an opportunity to seize worldly power. The Apanchans are not atheists, far from it, but their faith and morality is so often forgotten that they may as well be. In fact, they show a far more bitter hostility towards Mushkin's approach by the end of the novel than the more explicitly nihilistic characters. The message is clear. Even the nominally kind elements of society are unsuited to Mishkin's unique approach.
Their values are still held as luxury goods. Nice to talk about and nice to have, but when belts are being tightened, they are the first casualty of budgeting. And this is when the characters in the novel are not just being outright cruel.
In one of the idiot's most powerful scenes, the dying Ippolit reads out an essay detailing his philosophy and saying that he will soon end his life. I would argue the compassionate thing to do here is clear. This is a person in need of love and care, as he himself has said before. However, Mushkin is one of the only people who is at all open to this idea. Most of the assembled company either ignore Ippolit or mock him or otherwise dismiss his feelings and his thoughts out of hand.
When Ippolit actually puts a gun to his own head and the gun misfires, people accuse him of only faking, doing it all for attention and paying him very little mind. He turns to the prince and reveals that he expected just this sort of... of reaction. Here is someone bearing their soul in their most vulnerable moments and meeting only brutality in response. Because of the emphasis on faith and religion in Dostoevsky's personal philosophy, it is tempting to interpret him as thinking that this is the cure to all ills, but this doesn't do justice to his approach.
Here, it is not a matter of the villainous atheist bearing down upon the meek, innocent Christian, as in Raskolnikov and Sonia's first scenes together in Crime and Punishment. It is instead that faith has become so corrupted and perverted that it no longer promotes a brotherly love between all people. For Dostoevsky, Mushkin is likely the only true Christian there. The rest have a desiccated idea of Christianity, a merely aesthetic engagement with its ideas. Some modern psychologists have called this sort of thing the self-licensing effect.
Sometimes, when we have a particularly strong or positive self-conception, we can become less sensitive to when we are committing an unkind act or one that is against our stated values. So we may give some money to charity and pat ourselves on the back, and then the next day we feel that bit more able to snap at our colleague because we have bought ourselves a scrap of moral credit. It can't be that bad, we think.
After all, I'm a good person. On the other hand, we tend to attribute personal blame to other people for their failings while excusing our own. And this combination can become truly horrific because it blinds us to when we are being cruel. It is what allows Lizaveta and the Apanchins to look down upon Nastasia for the crime of being abused, while at the same time remaining assured of their own goodness. It is what allows them to decry things as improper without stopping to consider whether they are kind or whether the proper rules might require some changing.
We might call the sort of cruelty we've just discussed as a cruelty from sophistication or a sort of super ego cruelty, to borrow a term from psychoanalysis. This is cruelty that comes from the sophisticated structures that make up society and the human intellect's ability to rationalize its own brutality. But at the other end of the scale, Rogozhin represents the baser instincts of man, which can be reflexively cruel in an almost animalistic manner. When he ends Nastasya's life, this is a very different kind of horror. We might call this id-based cruelty.
Rogozhin is not perverting a value system but simply giving free reign to his jealousy and his passions. It's the same when he tries to kill Mushkin. In each case, it seems very much a spur-of-the-moment decision, and Rogozhin calms down almost immediately afterwards, neither regretting what he's done nor particularly reveling in it either. This is probably the closest thing Dostoevsky has in the novel to representing mankind in a Hobbesian state-of-nature mindset, without any kind of value system to place limits on their passions. In many ways, Rogozhin is far more nihilistic than the explicitly nihilistic Hippolyte.
Wherever Mushkin turns, he encounters people exhibiting either kinds of cruelty or both kinds of cruelty. Even Nastasya Filippovna suffers from super-egoistic self-cruelty. She abuses her own person because she recognizes that by the values of her society she is a fallen woman.
At the same time, she reflexively rebels against this, and her character is trapped between self-condemnation and self-defense. This is partly what causes the suffering that Mushkin always finds in her eyes. For Dostoevsky. Muschkin is a little speck of kindness and selflessness in the same way that Christ was.
But whereas Christ had the advantage of divine authority, Muschkin has none, and so his small acts of saintliness are outweighed by the overwhelming cruelty of others. His existence is an impossible task. Or, to paraphrase another classic author, What can he do against such reckless hate?
But hang on a second. This Mushkin character cannot be all good. We shouldn't be totally uncritical of his approach. So, let's play devil's advocate here and ask whether Mushkin is actually good or whether he is simply ineffectual.
6. Machiavelli and Mushkin The Italian statesman and thinker Niccolo Machiavelli is famous partly for his view that, in politics, the ends often justified the means. In both The Prince and his discourses, he often sanctions that the leader of a city-state could commit true acts of brutality, because sometimes being meek and mild led to even worse outcomes. And the negative effects of this would not just be felt by the ruler, but by the populace at large.
So, at the risk of sounding inappropriate, let's do a bit of roleplay. Let's pretend we are a Machiavellian character, concerned only with ends. What would we think of Mushkin's actions? Well, arguably, we would condemn them in the strongest terms.
From a certain perspective, Mushkin's behaviour in the novel is almost completely disastrous. Well-intentioned, yes, but disastrous all the same. First, he ruins Nastasia's initial marriage to Ganya. Sure, Ganya did not love her, but the marriage would have likely improved her social station, and it was hardly unusual for couples to learn to love one another over the years in this time period.
Whatever his aim was, they set in motion the events that would lead to Nastasia's death. Secondly, when Nastasia went with Rogozhin, the prince insisted on staying around. and letting her know he would always be open to her.
This again had ever so noble intentions, but it also inflamed Rogozhin's jealousy. It later drove him to try and kill Mishkin. Rogozhin had been passionate before, sure, but he had never turned to such extreme violence.
It is Mishkin's supposedly kind actions that are rubbing on Rogozhin's character and turning him more and more brutal. It is, of course, Nastasia who has to bear the brunt of the consequences for Mishkin's reckless innocence. Despite this, Mishkin persists.
he will not let Nastasia just be with Rogozhin. He must help her see her own worth. He thinks that if he is just unrelentingly kind, understanding, and generous, then it will all be for the best. But this is the very thing that keeps Nastasia obsessed with him. It is what makes her prize his opinion above all others and tears her between him and Rogozhin.
It is what eventually sends her running back into Mishkin's arms, spurning Rogozhin for the last time and sealing her macabre fate. If Mushkin had just not got involved, then things might have turned out for the better. Rogozhin may still have turned violent, but perhaps Nastasia's life would have been spared. The pursuit of noble means has given way to terrible ends, and Mushkin has hurried along a murder with his well-intentioned obliviousness. To take another example, let's look at Mushkin's relationship with the Apanchans, a pretty united family when he came along.
A mother, a father, and three daughters, living in near-perfect harmony. And yet, before long... Mushkin starts stirring up trouble.
It is his stubborn insistence on being actively kind and selfless that begins to sow divisions between Aglaya and her parents. She is drawn to these qualities in him and is caught between her desire to be with him and her commitment to her family, who seem to disapprove of the match, and the values her family has taught her. She fights with them, torments them and Mushkin, and all because of him.
Later, Mushkin refuses to abandon Nastasia in her hour of need, and Aglaya loses him as well. She eventually runs off with someone else, becomes Catholic, and estranges herself from her family. If Mushkin had never got involved in her life, she would have likely remained close to them, and they would have eventually found her a nice, suitable husband.
She could have had a happy marriage, and all of the trappings of Russian nobility, and now she is isolated from most of the people she professed to love. Was this truly kind of Mushkin? Or in his innocence, has he created a much larger problem than existed in the first place? Or take Ippolit, the young, committed nihilist. As much as he may try to hide it, it is clear that his philosophy has been shaken by Mishkin's outlook.
He has only a few weeks to live and he spends most of the time torn between two different philosophies, the one of the nihilist and the one held by Mishkin. Despite his misery, he begins the novel as someone confident in himself, though crying out for a touch of love and companionship from others, while he ends it a bitter and resentful figure, someone who is so rude to those around them that it even drives Mishkin away. We have no way of knowing what would have been had he never met the prince.
But it is not clear that any real positive impacts have been made, and there seems to even be potential negative consequences as well. Was Ippolit better off with Mishkin in his life? It seems very difficult to say.
And let's not forget the final victim in all of this, Mishkin himself. His behaviour eventually causes him to go completely mad. Some may see this as the result of the cruelty of everyone else, but with our Machiavellian hats on, we might say that it is the consequence of his own actions.
On this reading, Mishkin is held responsible for not recognising that his particular genre of kindness is incompatible with the situation he is in. He displays a total lack of wisdom. While many others in the novel might attract our condemnation because they are willing to trade in principle for expedience, Mishkin has the exact opposite problem.
He is unwilling to concede even a tiny point of principle in order to further his aims of spreading kindness and brotherly love. And let's measure all of this against the definite good he does. Well, arguably he does provide Ippolit with some sympathy, at least at first, and he has a positive effect on Gagne's younger brother. He also occasionally reassures some of the minor characters like General Evolge.
But... that's about it. It's not like he rescues Nastasia from her self-destructive spiral, nor provides a life of bliss for Aglaya.
Rather than being a cool balm to Rogozhin's patterns, or setting a good example for him, he instead helps inflame them. And his dogged commitment to his precious principles infuriates almost everyone around him. And what does he have to show for it? Nothing.
Even less than nothing, a trail of destruction. If we read the idiot in this slightly cynical fashion, Mushkin is the tragicomic figure that emerges when you live in an ideal world and totally forget about the real one. It is Candide, but in the Russian countryside.
To again draw from Lesser's article about the idiot, he says that Mushkin's lack of worldliness is not something to be admired, but is instead a sort of deficiency of character. His passivity, his willingness to forgive, his uncompromising generosity. In the novel, this is all stuff that only works on children, not in the more complex domain of adults.
and certainly not in the high society of Petersburg. On this reading, Mishkin is presented as kind, but also incompetent to the point of destruction. For Lesser, The Idiot is not just a story about the world being unable to cope with uncomplicated kindness. It is the tale of a fool who cannot adapt his kindness to the circumstances in front of him. It is arguably the same sort of destructive commitment to an ideal that Dostoevsky saw in some political revolutionaries.
It's now just Dostoevsky's own ideal in the dock. This is one of the most controversial interpretations of the idiot you could take. And yet, I don't think we should totally dismiss it either. It is easy to see Mishkin as an uncomplicated ideal, but I do think in some ways this is probably a little bit simplistic.
He is kind and innocent and gentle and generous, but he is also unable to employ these qualities in an effective way. He is someone Aristotle would say is lacking in phronesis, or practical wisdom. And this has real consequences.
Being completely principled in an unprincipled world may win you some sort of moral high ground, but if it brings destruction not just for you but for all of those around you, is it really worth it? Not just from a selfish perspective, but from a selfless one too. In the Gospel of Mark, it has the famous line, What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul? But is it truly kind or godly or loving or good to insist on keeping your soul spotless?
even when a little more practicality would benefit your fellow man? Obviously, I don't straightforwardly know the answer to this question, but I want to continue in this vein of thinking, because I think perhaps the most interesting theme in the entire book is about faith, action, consequences, and commitment. 7. A leap of faith For each of us, our first properly philosophical question probably came when we asked, what should I do?
We are all immersed in a world where we must continually make choices, and without a way of choosing between options, we're a bit stuffed. Without any sort of criteria, it would become almost impossible to act in any organized fashion. Thus, St. Augustine, Epictetus, and Boethius condemned those who did not have values as being in some way pitiable, or even unfree.
With this in mind, the original question becomes slightly clearer. On what principles should I base my decisions? The entire field of ethics is geared towards answering this question.
We have utilitarians, Kantians, virtue ethicists, divine command theorists, and more all telling us how we should live. But ultimately, the question of ethics is not just answered in the seminar room with a whiteboard, but gradually, day by day, as we interact with the world. Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that we are condemned to be free, but he might as well have said we are condemned to act. Each time we make a decision, we are affecting the world, bringing about consequences that we will have to square with our conscience.
When Raskolnikov commits a murder in Crime and Punishment, he has all the backing of his abstract philosophical reasoning, and yet that does not stop his guilt from turning him inside out over time. Mushkin tries his best to be good, and yet this goes really rather poorly, both for himself and for those around him. This is part of the existential agony of crafting a life.
We do not know in advance what the consequences of our decisions are, or if we'll be able to live with them afterwards. It is all well and good declaring that Mushkin truly is an idiot, and he would have been far better playing the unscrupulous game of Russian high society, rather than sticking to the same old principles that time after time have failed him. But is this true?
Would things have been better if he was just a bit crueler, or more Machiavellian, or just more savvy? We can theorise all we want. but ultimately we just do not know.
We do not know what would happen in Dostoevsky's world, just as we do not know what will happen in ours with any ethical question of any real complexity. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard has a fascinating view on decisions. He tends to view them as a collapse of possibilities.
When we make a choice, we are reducing all of the possibilities of what we could do to a single thing that we, in fact, do. And crossing this divide, as with much else in Kierkegaard's philosophy, requires a slightly irrational leap of faith. When we decide that we want to commit to a relationship or a job or a set of values, we are also denying all the possibilities that are incompatible with that.
If we were all immortal, then many of us might never make any of these commitments. But the jaws of time close shut behind us, collapsing possibilities into actualities either way. And so we can either choose a path or die of indecision, like Aesop's donkey, who was equally thirsty and equally hungry. and so neither drank nor ate.
This dovetails rather nicely with the thoughts expressed by Dostoevsky about the limits of rationality. Repeatedly in his novels, we come across characters who have used their reason to turn themselves hopeless. From Ippolit's nihilism in this very book to the passivity of the depressive Kirolov in Demons.
For Dostoevsky, if we simply approach life from the standpoint of certain reason, we will get nowhere and may end up destroying ourselves in the process. It is terrifying to act knowing that it may blow up in our faces and that we may fail, but it is only with a touch of faith that we get over this and learn to do anything at all. Or, as Sartre would later put it, it is in acting that we craft our values, not just thinking.
The Russian philosopher Lev Shestov would later criticize rationality from his own unique and esoteric perspective. The idea expressed here is fascinating, that action requires some form of faith or semi-irrational maneuver, but that the alternative is certain. despair.
The thing I admire about Dostoevsky in The Idiot is that it would have been so easy to turn Mishkin into a straightforward hero. Just like Fyodor, Mishkin believes in selfless love and the brotherhood of all people. He sees wisdom in the most humble peasant and the highest born of nobles.
He is a man of faith, of true enacted Christianity. He imitates Christ with his selfless kindness. If Dostoevsky intended his novel to simply be a mouthpiece for his own value system, he could have had Mishkin fix all the problems of those around him with his touch. Just like Jesus healing the leper, he could have had Mishkin heal Nastasia's trauma, Rogozhin's chaotic passion, and the workless faith of the Yapanchins. But Dostoevsky pointedly does not do this.
He does not pretend that all it takes is for one good man to stroll into town and clean everything up. He rather lets people know that even if they are truly kind and selfless, things may still not go their way. It is just that, in his humble opinion, these are the best values on offer. The ones that have the most chance of bringing joy and compassion to those around us and to ourselves.
What works for Mishkin in Switzerland does not work for him in Petersburg, and yet nothing about the approach has changed. For Dostoevsky, kindness and humility and selflessness are not flawless answers to life's problems. They are simply the best we've got in a world that is so woefully outside of our immediate control.
Perhaps this is partly what he meant when he said, if pressed, he would have to choose Christ over truth or reason. He is professing faith in this particular approach to life. Dostoevsky does not treat human existence as a problem to be solved by an axiomatic ethical theorem, but rather a great gamble we take every day.
He recognises the inherent terror of action. that just like a butterfly flapping its wings in the past may lead to a tsunami decades later, we are the butterflies of the present, causing untold good and evil wherever we go, uncertain of whether we are doing the right thing at all, yet desperately doing our best to add a little more good than bad to the world. Mushkin serves as a great example of this.
He is, on the surface, everything we could want out of a person. He is almost an ideal figure, and yet this does not stop him from causing the complete opposite of what he wants. It does not protect him from being taken advantage of or of accidentally sowing the seeds for the destruction of the very people he loves most. He is brilliant, innocent and practically unimpeachable. And yet he fails.
This is the tragedy of someone who personified kindness, someone whose tragic flaw was not hubris but humility, not wrath but warmth, not lust but brotherly love. It is the tale of how he was broken by the people around him and how he broke them in return. Yet he is unlike almost any other tragic hero. Because when we ask that final question, should he have done anything differently, we hesitate to say yes.
Some of us want to say absolutely not, he should have done everything the same. His kindness was the best path, it is just that even the best paths sometimes lead to unhappy destinations. Was the prince's leap of faith admirable, regardless of its real-world effects?
Was it worth it simply to show the shortcomings of an increasingly materialistic society? Or is it better to give in to the world as it exists and ignore the ideal? Where is the balance between the ideal and the real? Are we brave enough or foolish enough to be as kind as he was? I cannot say.
but maybe you can. But finally, I want to make a plea with you on behalf of the idiot. The work Dostoevsky thought expressed his mental state in its most peculiar form. Eight, dignifying an idiot.
What is literature for? People have suggested many fantastic answers to this question. Some have prioritized entertainment, others its ability to communicate ideas.
Some have suggested it can help develop our characters and encourage us to be more empathetic. I don't have a problem with any of these answers, but I would like to throw another into the mix. Great literature can dignify some of life's worst and most depressing moments, helping us feel that bit less ashamed of them. Aristotle used to say that a great tragedy would purge an audience of their pent-up fear and pity by providing an outlet for it in the theatre.
And I want to suggest a sort of analogous function for characters like Mishkin. It is not that he helps us release our kind urges. but rather helps liquidate our frustrations when acting in accordance with our own values does not go our way.
Most of us will encounter situations where we have stuck to being kind or generous or compassionate and it has come back to bite us. Perhaps we have stood by a friend in need only for them to abandon us when we needed them most. Maybe we were almost unfailingly kind to a romantic partner only for them to leave us for someone else.
Perhaps we gave everything to a job or a community just to be ostracized. Maybe we get the sense that the innocent sides of our natures are being taken advantage of. In such a situation, it is so easy to feel like, well, an idiot. The tempting alternative presents itself. Why not just care about us?
Why bother trying to be good at all if it just leaves us vulnerable to the machinations of others? Would it not be easier to have no values and just act out of moment-to-moment expedience? The jaws of a twisted kind of cynicism open wide. and begin to look rather enticing.
Of course, if everyone took that jump, then we would be lost. We would degenerate into a war of all against all, never thinking about anyone but ourselves, caught in a trap of egos clashing against other egos. A world full of Rogozhin at his worst. For Dostoevsky, and most of us, this would be a disaster. However, this is where the figure of Mishkin begins to step in.
Whether we think he should wise up a bit or is perfect the way he is, Mishkin is undeniably extraordinary. Even in his disasters, there is something to honour and respect, and at the end of the novel, we feel for him. We don't regard him as just a pitiable, useless idiot, but rather a visionary, someone whose tragic kindness was not ultimately rewarded, but who persisted in that kindness nonetheless.
There is a sense that, if we must suffer, we would much rather suffer in the manner of Mishkin than of someone like Rogozhin, who truly does not seem to hold many morals. and primarily lives for himself. This is a very different sort of encouragement than the kind we get when someone tells us that evildoers will get what's coming to them or what goes around comes around, because that is just not always the case. It is the genius of Dostoevsky to craft a character who does not reassure us that our kindness will be rewarded, but rather allows us to lend meaning to any suffering we do endure in the pursuit of selfless love and helps us to persist in our kindness even when it is not serving us. It is not the naive optimism of it will be all right, but the more mature thought that things may not be all right, they may be difficult, and things will not always go your way, but it is possible to be kind nonetheless.
Mishkin gave up everything, his chance at love, his happiness, even his mind, in his pursuit of kindness and selflessness. We may not have to do this, but it is characteristic of Dostoevsky to try to convince us not that being kind is in our best interests, but rather that it is worth being kind in our best interests. even in spite of them.
For me, that is what the idiot is at its core. A treatise on kindness and selflessness, which carries the thought that to be either of these things may not be good for us in some situations. It may even cause us to go mad.
But even if all we achieve is to be like Mishkin, to serve as a small light that briefly flickers before being snuffed out, having accomplished little and gained even less, this would still be worthwhile. Perhaps this is just another way of Dostoevsky saying kindness is a leap of faith. Maybe it's a totally irrational idea to be dismissed out of hand, but it certainly speaks to me and helps me to try to emulate the gentle, innocent Mushkin and persevere in attempted kindness even against self-interest. I do not succeed in this most of the time, I am a flawed person in more ways than I could possibly count and I likely have a whole host of further defects that I'm not even aware of. But I can say one thing, reading the idiot made me kinder.
And I don't know how I could recommend it in higher terms than that. But if you want to explore some of these themes of love and selflessness further, then click here to watch my video on Dostoevsky's radical philosophy of love. I hope you enjoyed the video and have a wonderful day.