Temporal punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by some after death, by some both here and hereafter, but all of them before that last and strictest judgment. But not all who suffer temporal punishments after death will come to eternal punishments, which are to follow after that judgment.St. Augustine (City of God)
Sin scars. In this life -- or the next -- the wounds left by sin require satisfaction. The sinner who is saved must do penance in this life or be purified in the next. Tradition and Scripture testify to this purgatorial reality. God’s law written on our hearts also testifies the reality that sin -- even forgiven sin -- has consequences. While purgatory has been attacked by Protestant “reformers” and Eastern schismatics for centuries, this doctrine is an infallible and unchangeable dogma of Holy Mother Church. To the extent those outside return to her, they must realize their error because purgatory is not a marginal doctrine: it informs the central truths to how we should live as Christians.
A restatement of purgatory may seem to be a inapposite introduction to a work by legendary novelist and Slavophile Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But in one of the more interesting literary and religious ironies, one of Dostoyevsky’s great works, The Idiot, is in fact a purgatorial story. Undoubtedly, The Idiot is a biting critique of the Russian aristocracy written fifty years before its destruction in the final Bolshevik conflagration. But Dostoyevsky is always a philosopher before he is a social commentator, and The Idiot is more profoundly a testament to the power of purgatorial justice and mercy, so ingrained in our nature, that even Dostoyevsky, a lifelong anti-Catholic, uses purgation as the primary theme without ever connecting to its dogmatic equivalent.
Set in Saint Petersburg during the 1860s, The Idiot is based upon a guileless “idiot,” Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin. Rather than what we think of as a conventional “idiot,” Prince Myshkin is a sweet and loving soul. Dostoyevsky’s description of him as an idiot is a commentary on those around him rather than the Prince himself. True to another New Testament truth, Dostoyevsky’s naive Myshkin is foil to the worldly and intellectual world around him: “But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the strong.” (1st Epistle Of Saint Paul To The Corinthians 1:27.)
The novel begins on a train – a metaphoric introduction that the characters we meet, and the story we about to read, is one about change and journey. Prince Myshkin is a threadbare traveler returning to Russia after years of treatment in Switzerland for his “idiotic” condition, i.e., epilepsy. Dostoyevsky, himself epileptic, often used epilepsy as an important character theme in his novels and the same is true of The Idiot.
What strikes the reader almost immediately about Prince Myshkin is his child-like innocence. He is returning in his late-twenties to Russia with no family, no funds, or even no semblance of how he will support himself. On the train-ride, he meets Parfyon Rogozhin, who serves throughout the novel as his rival and antagonist. Also in his late-twenties, Rogozhin is the boorish and hotheaded son of a wealthy merchant returning home following his father’s death after a short self-imposed exile against his family. Dostoyevsky creates in the juxtaposition of Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin a rich depiction of the fall of man -- Myshkin representing “Adam” before the Fall graced with preternatural gifts and Rogozhin representing “Adam” after the fall and fleshly to the core. On their trip, Rogozhin recounts his arguments with his family and his infatuation with Nastasya Fillipnova. They part in Saint Petersburg with Rogozhin’s impulsive invitation that Prince Myshkin stay with him at his home – as if to signify that Myshkin’s naivety notwithstanding he will also be protected.
Once in Saint Petersburg, Myshkin makes his way to aristocratic home of General Yepahchin, a retired General and father of three daughters of marriage-able age. His wife’s family, “Myshkin,” is of honorable and ancient lineage in Russia and possibly a distant relation. Prince Myshkin’s decision to visit the Yepahchin’s is based upon this tenuous connection. His modest reason in visiting the Yepahchin family is to inquire whether they, as successful and experienced people, will provide him some guidance on what he should do in returning to Russia.
The Yepahchin family is introduced as a microcosism of the Russia aristocracy: a “respected” family filled with duplicity, social scheming and boredom. Accordingly, in a fit of psychological projection, Prince Myshkin’s visit is viewed with considerable suspicion. After all, he cannot simply want their advice – he must be scheming for something else. While making the acquaintance of the Yepahchins, Myshkin sees a portrait of Nastasya Fillipnova and is immediately overcome by the depth of her great beauty.
Nastasya Fillipnova is connected to the Yepanchins through the General’s friend, Afanasy Ivanovich Totsky: Nastasya's foster father and her seducer. His debauchery in “adopting” Nastasya as a young girl is recounted and Totsky and Yepanchin scheme to marry her off to Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivogin (“Ganya”), Nastasya's prideful and seething suitor. Gayna is the General’s assistant of sorts -- and though he loves the General’s daughter, Aglaya, he has agreed to marry Nastasya in exchange for a payment from Totsky.
We are introduced thus to Nastasya on the eve of her decision to marry Ganya. At a cocktail party for this decision, Nastasya publically asks Myshkin whether she should marry Ganya: he advises her to say no and so she does. At that point, Rogozhin and his rowdy coherts storm the party. He announces insolently that he will give Nastasya 100,000 rubles if she will leave with him. Myshkin then offers his hand to Nastasya and announces that he has just inherited a fortune. Nastasya is touched by his offer, but deems herself too debauched for the unworldly and innocent Myshkin; she leaves with the base Rogozhin.
Over the next several months, Myshkin and Rogozhin literally trade Nastasya back and forth as she cannot make up her mind. Rogozhin’s “love” for Nastasya is all-consuming; a type of burning obsession that destroys rather than edifies. Over the course of the book, it is clear that Rogozhin both loves and hates Myshkin and a strange, foreboding friendship develops between them. He even plans to stab Myshkin but is thwarted by the latter’s sudden epileptic fit.
All the while, the guileless Myshkin is hounded by charlatans masquerading as creditors of his new found estate -- and he chooses to diminish his inheritance by paying on dubious claims rather than dishonor the dishonorable.
In the midst of his pursuit of the fickle Nastasya, Myshkin begins to fall in love with the youngest Yephanchin beautiful daughter, Aglaya, who feels the same but openly mocks him and pretends away her love for him. Her family sees through the spoiled girl’s charade and begins to treat Myshkin as her fiance. Her love for him comes out into the open, paradoxically, after he embarrasses himself at a Yephanchin aristocratic party thrown for him and Aglaya -- at which he clumsily interacts with the haughty guests and breaks an ancient Chinese vase. His night culminates with another epileptic fit.
During the courtship of sorts, Aglaya has been receiving letters from Nastassya in which the latter implores her to marry the Prince. After his disastrous introduction to the aristocracy -- as if to spite them -- Aglaya forces the issue between the Prince and Nastassya. The women seek to Prince’s decision on his choice of love and even though the Prince “loves” Aglaya in the romantic sense of the term, his compassion for the wounded Nastassya prompts him to pause (albeit for a moment). This pause is enough to convince Aglaya to flee the Prince, and, in turn, Nastassya agrees to marry him.
The marriage does not take place as Nastassya leaves him at the altar and runs off again with
Rogozhin. The Prince follows them to Saint Petersburg only to find that Rogozhin has stabbed her to death and the book ends with their vigil over her dead body. The main characters all leave Russia of sorts: Rogozhin to Siberia, Aglaya to Poland with a deceitful nobleman, and Myshkin to Switerland. The ending for the book’s central young people is a metaphor of sorts of Russia’s inability to hold her young.
For any Dostoyevsky fan, there are certain characters that repeat in his works and this one is no exception. There is the spoiled arisoctratic beauty paired with the lower class woman-child of suspect morals. There is the beautiful soul whose goodness radiates throughout the work coupled with the base Russian man of depravity. There are licentious men, superficial middle-aged psuedo-intellectuals, sickly boys, and, of course, bad Poles. Dostoyevsky has certain motifs he uses over and over again: Catholic bashing, epilepsy, murder, and grinding poverty. The gift that separates Dostoyevsky from everyone else is that he takes these same types and motifs and reinvests in characters and situations that are as fresh and compelling as the first time that you read them -- you are literally transported into his world and care deeply for his characters.
But why is this story one of purgation? Because Myshkin cannot have Nastassya: her sins persist in time and, in some measure, disqualify her for a relationship with a purer soul in Myshkin -- and her senseless fleeing from him, over and over again, was not a senseless as it seems. Nastassya knows she cannot have him -- her sins have defiled her. She flees from that which she desires most because nature, as it were, compels her to do so. His love for her was two-fold: a self-sacrificing love that seeks to heal the other and an aesthetic infatuation. But make no mistake, Myshkin’s hesitation at the novel’s inflection point was a reflection that his love for her was profound and consuming. This love is one that cannot be -- the scarring on her soul prevents its.
Another central theme in this work is that of the “attraction.” The compulsion towards it -- towards what is searing beauty is a theme that Dostoyevsky uses over and over again. As I imagine it, Nastassya was one of those rare beauties who mere presence radically changes men. They are rare indeed but they are the type of women that men will throw everything away to pursue as if drunk or hypnotized. I knew one such woman in college: her beauty was so overpowering that she attracted men of all sorts with a primal force of nature as such that I had never seen before. Someone who had gone to high school with this woman recounted how one of her teachers had been fired from pursuing her as a teenager. Knowing her and witnessing her effect had on men, I understood exactly how that could have happened. When she entered a room with friends of mine in a group, virtually all conversation ceased -- or so it seemed -- and all eyes, men and women, focused on her as if entranced. I often wondered what that type of grinding attention does to someone’s mental health. If Dostoyevsky had such a beauty in mind as I imagine Nastassya,, then I think he quite correctly captured the deleterious effect of such objectification has on a young woman.
Another theme captured by The Idiot is that of the aristocracy and service. We catch a glimpse of the death throes of an ossified aristocratic culture that has forgotten that it owes services to the greater good. The Yepahchins and their society is emblematic of the inward rot of the Russian aristocracy. It is another theme that Dostoyevsky and other great Russian writers during Russia’s Golden Age explore in near-prophetic fashion. In some ways, its later demise fifty years after Dostoyevsky finished The Idiot was anti-climatic: it was already long dead.
The Idiot is certainly not one of Dostoyevsky’s finest books, but it still is one of the better novels one will read. It is well worth the time.
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