The Idiot-идиот

Is Prince Lev Myshkin an Idiot?

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot centers around Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, an epileptic who is returning to Russia at the age of 26 to collect an inheritance and be among people after spending the previous four years in a Swiss sanitorium. The prince is naïve, and his pure innocence is beautifully contrasted in this novel with the people of St Petersburg, where everyone is obsessed with money, power, sex, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder in this story rich with dialogue between rambling immoral drunkards and Dostoevksy subtly yet effectively illustrates the effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the general society around him which has been plagued with nihilism, self-hatred, and dishonesty.

On the train entering Russia, he meets Prince Rozoghin, a wealthy merchant, and an official named Lebedyev known for town gossip and stirring the pot. These two, among the more venomous in local society, cannot help but laugh and stare in amazement at every single word that comes from this man’s mouth. Later in the story, Prince Myshkin and Rozoghin both fall in love with Nastasya Filippovna for her immense beauty. This creates a disastrous love triangle and leaves Nastasya with the decision between the good prince with money or the bad prince with money. Ultimately, partially due to her tumultuous upbringing in which she was sexually assaulted by her own caretaker, she chooses the bad prince due to the added excitement that bad men provide and also due to her own feelings of unworthiness for the good natured Prince Myshkin.

Throughout the story, so many scenes take place at dinner parties in which the characters get drunker and drunker and the scenes become more and more chaotic. The one constant in all these scenes is Prince Myshkin’s innocence and his kind and honest nature. All the people in St Petersburg are so used to encountering conniving and malicious characters in their daily lives that they consistently refer to the Prince as an idiot due to his unorthodox and aberrant honest and charismatic behavior. In addition to this, they inherently believe that intelligent people will always conceal their true nature and intentions and therefore be more reserved and deceptive. Unfortunately, the majority of the characters in this novel take on this false interpretation of the Prince. Only a handful of the characters are able to pick up on and appreciate his intelligence and admirable nature, such as the 13 year old Kolya.

In Russian, Lev translates to lion and Myshkin to mouse. The Prince internally is a lion with immense strength of character and intelligence, but due to his epilepsy and innocence from his isolation from society for so many years, he is looked upon as a mouse and an “idiot”. Dostoevsky also had epilepsy, like a lot of famous writers and because of this, he spent a lot of time indoors in serious thought and reflection. When someone enters a fit of epilepsy, they suffer pain that is out of their control. According to Charles Bukowski, “pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire…. Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It’s real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you’ve suddenly become an idiot. There’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel. And knows how to help.” Therefore, epilepsy is largely a public illness and a lot of writers with epilepsy spent a good amount of time indoors to avoid the public embarrassment that accompanies having a fit.

On the contrary, Prince Myshkin spends almost no time throughout the book isolated from others. He’s a lion at heart and truly does not care what others think of him. He is content with himself internally and therefore does not feel the need to prove himself to anyone. A lot of the scenes are large dinner parties with members of high society who are constantly judging and mocking the prince for his naivety and good nature, but this same good nature is what allows him to laugh off these attacks and not take anything to heart.

Myshkin has a sage-like level of wisdom. This is shown in subtle ways throughout the novel. He never truly expresses his opinions or feelings until one of the final dinner scenes where he goes on a passionate rant about Roman Catholicism versus Orthodox Christianity, and how the world has become increasingly more atheistic and nihilistic. He proves his passion and understanding of the world and how it operates in this scene. However, despite his patience, kindness, and honesty, he ends up making one of the most idiotic decisions in the end: choosing to marry Nastasya who is playing both him and Rozoghin over a beautiful woman who admits that she truly does love him, Aglaya.

Due to the constant drunk rambling dialogue that makes up a majority of the scenes throughout this novel, which Dostoevsky is such a genius at conveying, the overall plot takes on the shape of a large steel Russian locomotive inevitably headed for disaster and chaos. The Prince, despite his good nature and kind feelings, is eventually subjugated only to what the general society thinks of him. After his final fit of epilepsy which sends him back to Switzerland, he is ultimately regarded as an idiot.

Nevertheless, I do not think the Prince can be summarized by a single word. I believe his nature is infinitely more complex and fascinating than what the locals ridden with vice and consumed by money and power can describe or even comprehend. To them, he is simply an idiot, but to the reader, he is saintly, and his actions are beautiful regardless of his mistakes.

“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”

One of my favorite Prince Myshkin quotes that hints at some innate level of wisdom and intelligence is when he is discussing his positive feelings towards children. The quote may be even more powerful if one is to compare the numerous similarities between the prince and children in terms of their virtuous, innocent, and overall carefree nature.

“One can tell a child everything, anything. I have often been struck by the fact that parents know their children so little. They should not conceal so much from them. How well even little children understand that their parents conceal things from them, because they consider them too young to understand! Children are capable of giving advice in the most important matters. How can one deceive these dear little birds, when they look at one so sweetly and confidingly? I call them birds because there is nothing in the world better than birds!”