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From Violence to Silence: Vicissitudes of Reading (in) The Idiot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Alexander Spektor
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Abstract

How the narrative dynamics of The Idiot shape and inform its ethics is the focus of this article by Alexander Spektor. The Idiot is one of the most radical of Fedor Dostoevskii's novelistic experiments inasmuch as it questions the integrity of the self created through the process of narrative representation and interpretation. Dostoevskii achieves this effect by contrasting the idea of the inherent distance between sign and meaning with Myshkin's initial belief in the possibility of the transcendental signifier. The reader is gradually forced to accept that any form of participation in the big dialogue of the novel is bound to cause intense rivalry for the control of its meaning, which ultimately leads to physical violence either against the self (Ippolit and Nastasia Filippovna) or against others (Rogozhin). Dostoevskii undermines the integrity of any narrative formation of the self, including the self of the reader, by framing it within nonverbal acts of violence and compassion. Hence, The Idiot can be read as a Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, traverses the distance between the novel's is—an attempt to secure positive ethical meaning (within an established) narrative—and the novel's ought, the silent and nonsensical acts of compassion that, ultimately, defy signification. To make sense of The Idiot requires the reader to participate in an ethically compromised endeavor. Forced to do justice to the text, the reader also has to bear responsibility for the violence inherent in any narrative construction of the self.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , Fall 2013 , pp. 552 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2013

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References

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11. While I hope that “the reader” in this discussion can stand for a general reader of Dostoevskii's prose, my argument concerns one's personal responsibility for reading. Hence, I think it proper to choose “he” as a generic pronoun for this paper's reader if only to reflect the specific responsibility of this, gendered reader.

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56. One only needs to remember the famous letter to Fonvisina in which Dostoevskii soberly announces himself “a child of this century,” not impervious to the epoch's doubts and religious skepticism. See Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. Frank, Joseph and Goldstein, David I., trans. MacAndrew, Andrew R. (New Brunswick, 1987), 68 Google Scholar.

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60. Since Vinokur uses Tolstoi (and Anna Karenina) as a foil for Dostoevskii, it is perhaps useful to compare Tolstoi's ambivalence toward language as a tool of communication in this novel (but also in War and Peace—especially in the hunt scene) to Dostoevskii's more radical stance in The Idiot (as argued here).

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62. Similarly, what inspires Myshkin to believe Keller's intentions is, in Myshkin's words, Keller's “childlike trustfulness and extraordinary honesty.” Dostoevsky, , The Idiot, 308 Google Scholar. In the novel, Switzerland and childhood are the unreachable regions where a human being can still be whole, while Russia and adulthood are the markers of the fallen state, where the reader resides together with the novel's characters. Not surprisingly, Myshkin prefers to be with children, and those who, like Lizaveta Prokof'evna, are “childlike,” follow Myshkin readily, or at least, more willingly than others. It is also children's souls that Myshkin saves from perdition in Switzerland, the only place where his presence is able to save anyone.

63. In this sense, the novel can be seen as an inside-out twin of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” While in the story the narrator's morally corrupt word is sufficient to destroy a Utopian and sinless society, in The Idiot Prince Myshkin's morally pure word has the same effect: it destroys a corrupt society.

64. Or as Benjamin puts it, “the relationship of human life to the living.” Benjamin,“ Dostoevsky's The Idiot,” 81 Google ScholarPubMed.

65. Robbins, Jill, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago, 1999), 12 Google Scholar.

66. Ibid.

67. Here I have to confess that the futility of language to express the inexpressible is overwhelming. Whether we can speak of “acquiring knowledge” in Myshkin's case remains a question I cannot resolve.

68. It is perhaps in the first part that Myshkin's voice is most unambiguously salutary, and his meek presence, making the ripe conflicts explode, leads to a temporary resolution. Still, it is also in the first part where the intrigue and rivalry that beset the rest of the book begin to germinate. Even here Myshkin's voice manages to seduce both of the female protagonists. In this sense, while the story of Marie is irresistable, its asexual dynamics prove to be unsustainable in the world of the novel.

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70. Ibid. 234. See Bethea, David, “The Idiot: Historicism Arrives at the Station,” in Knapp, ed. Dostoevsky's The Idiot: A Critical Companion, 130–90Google Scholar; and Emerson, Caryl, “Problems with Baxtin's Poetics,” Slavic and East European Journal 32, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 503–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71. Or so he writes in the letter to his niece, Sofia Ivanova. See Dostoevsky, , Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 28. 2:318.Google Scholar

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73. See, for example, Wachtel, Andrew, “Dostoevsky's The Idiot: The Novel as Photograph,” History of Photography 26, no. 3 (2002): 205–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; or Skakov, Nariman, “Dostoevsky's Christ and Silence at the Margins of The Idiot,” Dostoevsky Studies, n.s. 13 (2009): 121–40Google Scholar.

74. For a discussion of the anachronistic, Enlightenment nature of this interpretation, see Gatrall, Jeff, “Between Iconoclasm and Silence: Representing the Divine in Holbein and Dostoevskii,” Comparative Literature 53, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 215n3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75. Ibid., 218. For Ippolit this painting represents the triumph of nature and progress over spirituality: “Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or to put it more correctly,… in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone“! Ibid., 408.

76. See Coetzee, “Confession and Double Thoughts,” for a more thorough discussion of the nature of confessions in Dostoevskii in general and in The Idiot in particular. For a somewhat different reading of this scene, see Skakov, “Dostoevsky's Christ and Silence at the Margins of The Idiot.”

77. Skakov, , “Dostoevsky's Christ and Silence at the Margins of The Idiot,” 132Google Scholar.