Greetings and salutations! It is my pleasure to announce that I have finished The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky and I must say that it was quite a trudge. I picked this volume because it is considered by some to be one of his three greatest works alongside Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov and although I can see what aspects of his writing have attracted so much attention and admiration, I failed to enjoy this particular work as a whole. I will, of course, explain these sentiments further. I hope everyone will forgive the lack of my customary author introduction and allow me to jump right into the meat of the review. I may add it later as an afterthought, depending on my available time, but right now I am eager to prepare next year's list.
Allow me to break the story into its most basic storyline, though the book is long and complicated with a large cast of characters and several subplots involving money, scams, and lies. The Idiot tells the story of a certain Prince Myshkin, who is not a prince by western understanding but more like the last male in old and dying family line. In fact, he has no wealth whatsoever. He is also recovering from a long period of mental illness, hence the title "The Idiot." He returns to Russia after a long treatment in Switzerland to seek out a distant relative who is in a higher "class" than he and, strangely, he really has no hopes of this encounter other than to introduce himself. However, after a series of introductions he eventually finds himself welcomed into what would be middle class Russian society mostly due to his simple-minded honesty and openness. Even those who would seek to deceive him or treat him ill often find themselves coming back to him because he is open, forgiving, and understanding to such a degree that everyone can't help but love him, or at least respect him. (In fact he is often compared to Christ in critiques.) In the midst of his meanderings through the various homes of middle-class Russian society he (at different times) encounters two wholly different women. One is Nastasya Filippovna who is beautiful, wild, but self-destructive and questionably mad. He encounters her early in the novel and falls in a sort of love/sympathy with her. She, of course, laughs in his face at this point in the novel. Later he encounters the young but timid Aglaia Ivanovna who is strong in her ideals but cryptic with her feelings. She spends most of her time laughing at him as well. It becomes clear, late in the novel, that both of these women love Myshkin deeply no matter how poorly they treat him. Though well spaced and heavily complicated with weaving sub-plots, the majority of the story is dedicated to these two women pulling on Myshkin's heartstrings. Nastasya manages to lead him on then crush him in some humiliating way over and over while Aglaia draws him on very slowly but he isn't able to manage things in his ineptitude and cannot hang onto her. After several poor choices on the part of Myshkin the book ends with several tragedies to our "hero" and those he loves.
Allow me, first, to describe to you what I liked about the novel. It is clear that Dostoevsky draws inspiration from his own life and I have read that this is a common theme throughout his works. Aspects of Myshkin, such as the epilepsy are drawn from Dostoevsky's own battle with epilepsy. Even the story of a death row inmate having his sentence commuted at the last second is a true story from his own experience. The most extraordinary quality of his writing style that I noticed very early in the novel is his amazing ability to capture the nuances of the human psyche in all of his characters. Even through Aglaia's laughing in Myshkin's face we can detect a hint of Aglaia's affection for him; How she is trying to hide it from her family as well as herself! There are multitudes of complicated motives and reactions like this that feel very real and human throughout the story. Dostoevsky has frequently been described as a great writer of human psychology and I would have to agree with that.
What I did not like about the book was the fact that it was immensely long and spent three-fourths of the book re-examining the same aspects of Myshkin's Christ-like qualities. (The length of a book is usually not much of a burden unless it does not seem to move forward story-wise and, of that, this is very guilty!) Someone scams him, he forgives them, some one treats him poorly, he forgives them, someone scams him again, he forgives them. Show him some self-serving bourgeois high society and he can only see their best qualities; show him a dying man who only wants attention and makes a fool of himself and he still sees him for his best qualities. This process is done ad nauseum until the end of the book. Much of the book is obvious filler such as the dying man's "confession" that goes on for about fifteen pages which is really no more than an experiment in free writing or an interpretation of a peyote dream, another example would be the handful of multi-page political/philosophical diatribes. One critic described the reason of the book's length as a result of Dostoevsky's crippling debt that followed him everywhere and his advances were often based on a by-the-page rate. I have no other confirmation of this but I feel the comment hits home. Many of the events in the book truly seem superfluous even at the time of reading but this randomness of action and purpose also seems to endear his work to many. It seems that he has many of both fans and detractors in literary circles. To say I truly hated the book, however, would be incorrect though I did not enjoy it. I merely was not prepared for it in mood or content. I, for instance, had a difficult time assigning faces to characters for the longest time. Many of the names were confusing to me as he would refer to characters by their family name in one paragraph and switch to their given name. Lyov Nikolayevich Myshkin would be referred to as Myshkin for most of the book but would on rare occasions be referred to as Lyov Nikolayevich at which point the name would look unfamiliar. Imagine this practice done with about twenty characters and imagine adding nicknames and include the fact that females sometimes ended their family names with an "-na" while males sometimes ended with a "-vich" (both in the same family, of course!) It took me a while to figure out realtions! There is no doubt that this early confusion has contributed to my overall impression of the book to some degree. I imagine that if I re-read the book today the characters would form more naturally in my mind and the story, such as it is, would at least seem more vivid. The benefit of this is that when I read Crime and Punishment down the road, I will not have to spend much time adapting to style and character. Outside of this, I am eager to move onto another story and am glad to put this book back on the shelf!
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