The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky - my review

Dostoevsky has a well founded reputation as a giant of western literature for his use of the novel to explore emergent ‘enlightened’ philosophies, Christianity, and enduring socioeconomic truths amidst contemporary socioeconomic change.  For me personally, his novels immerse me into the world my grandfather and great aunts Sybil and Susan reflected, a bygone era with odd idiosynchracies - and drama - that nonetheless reflect enduring human traits.  Its human themes are timeless.

Character development may be Dostoevsky’s greatest genius.  Consider the 19th century descriptions of the two main characters right from the opening pages. First, Lebedev, who ultimately emerges as a Luciferian anti-Christ figure, is described here: 

“His nose was broad and flat, and he had high cheek bones, his thin lips were constantly compressed into an impudent, ironical - it might also be called a malicious - smile; his forehead was high and well formed, and atoned for a good deal of the ugliness of the lower part of his face.  A special feature of his physiognomy was its death-like pallor…”

The protagonist, his opposite, Christ-like Prince Muishkin was described as:

“very fair, with a thin, pointed, and very light colored beard; his eyes were large and blue, and had an intent look about them, yet that heavy expression which some people affirm to be a peculiarity as well as evidence, of an epileptic subject.”

Thus described, these two begin a dance of lies and truths, romantic intrigue, support and sabotage that swirl throughout the story.  Beyond the 19th century proclivity to project personalities from visual tells, (his forehead was high and well formed) deeper character traits emerge right away through spoken words and individual actions.  The prince’s taciturn nature and antecedent medical treatment in Switzerland brand him the “Idiot”, granting variously leeway and dismissal within Russia’s high society shallowness.  Quickly along the plot line, two beautiful women become fatally attracted to his kindness and vulnerability, caught in their respective centrifugal attraction of hatred and jealousy.  So much psychology, so much morality, all infused into a simple romance novel.

While these two characters may reflect timeless juxtapositions, the yin and yang of humanity, individually and collectively, as Christ-like and Luciferian, this work lacks the overt exploration of Russian mysticism vs. Christianity and religious existentialism of later works.   And yet, as in Brothers Karamazov and Demons, Dostoevsky creates characters whom we all know: a little bit of this, a little bit of that, spanning the spectra of good and evil, of power and powerlessness, full of humanity’s best and worst: all in such small slices of place and time. Themes that could be considered undercurrents here became central to these later works. 

Dostoevsky was paid on word count, so some of the descriptions seem excessive, particularly in the first third of the book; but these can be absorbed, not hurried.  If you’re going to tackle this book, take your time; but don’t stay away for long either.  To leave the book for too long will let nuances fade. There’s so much nuance, and so many Russian names, even within the limited cast.  On the names, I found it useful to pencil in every new character’s name, adding diminutives, family connections ("-ovitch" is the reference to the father’s name) or titles.  For example, two ‘generals’ play important roles in the story, and they too are opposites.  Keeping track of characters by their varied names reinforces the philosophical threads and sorts out some of the complexities; it’s worth the trouble.

Mid-nineteenth century Russia was a hotbed of new ideas, many on social structure, coming out of Europe at the time.  Tsar Alexander had freed the serfs in 1861, a brief eight years before the book’s publication, so social order was in flux and intellectuals everywhere weighed in on where to take it.  Insight into the dangers of ideas disconnected from the complexities of humanity would be more deeply explored in Demons a few years hence, but Dostoevsky’s contempt for salon intellectuals is inescapable in this earlier piece.  

“There is nothing so annoying as to be fairly rich, of a fairly good family, pleasing presence, average education, to be ‘not stupid’, kind hearted, and yet to have no talent at all, no originality, not a single idea of one’s own — to be in fact, ‘like everyone else’…  they stand alone in the van of enlightenment and that no one has such humanitarian feelings as they.  Others have but to read an idea of somebody else’s and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain.  The ‘impudence of ignorance’ if I may use the expression, is developed to a wonderful extent in such cases.”

Today, when we with decades of life, and interactions with possibly thousands of people, hear young people explain to us how the world works, I can’t keep the ‘impudence of ignorance’ out of my head.  (“Did I say that out loud” is a work in progress.) Binary worldviews views embraced by the academy handicap kids terribly for a complicated, multi-variant world.  Dostoevsky knew intellectual deception and elitist shallowness personally; he had lived the truth of real suffering as a political prisoner for five years in Siberia a decade and a half earlier.  He knew real suffering. He had lived it.

Through the pathetic Hippolyte character, Dostoevsky explores death, the pressures then acceptance of imminent demise, another insight perhaps from the author's Siberian exile, capturing both regret and reconciliation, simultaneously.  Bad behavior is often called out cleverly and graciously by our prince; but the writer steps aside from the story to add, in his own voice as the author:

“We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.” 

In other words, Grace.  

Other characters show other traits we're familiar with, revealing insights into our own personal head space, as well as the headspace of those we interact with.    

The plot swirls more quickly than other works, and unlike many other Russian works I’ve read, the final chapters were so engaging, I couldn’t put the book down.  To reveal too much plot would detract from anyone thinking about tackling this masterpiece.  It is an engaging story.  I’d recommend this to anyone interested in understanding humans, including ourselves and our changing world, better.