Russian Liferaiure XI 11982) 377.388 North-Holland Pub fishing Company

NIHILISM, AESTHETICS, AND THE IDIOT

CHARLES A.MOSER

It is hazardous to approach any novel of Dostoev- skij’s from one point of view only, and this is cer- tainly true of a work as complex - not to say confus- ing - as The Idiot. And yet critics and literary his- torians may sometimes utilize such an approach to good and quite legitimate effect, provided that they remgm- ber that they are elucidating only a facetof the work, and not the work in its entirety. I shall try to bear that in mind in this discussion of Dostoevskij's great novel The Idiot.

As I approached it within the context of Russia of the 1860's, the decade in which it was written and first read, The Idiot intrigued me because superficial- ly it seemed to have so little in common with the rad- ical intellectual currents swirling through the coun- try in that day. It is, after all, the second of a se- ries of three novels, of which the first and third clearly have much to do with 'nihilism' as an intellec- tual and cultural phenomenon. Indeed, so obsessive was Dostoevskij's concern with the intellectual trends of the 1860's.that evenhis fourth great novel, The Broth- ers xaramazou, which articulates his religious views in a manner unsurpassed in world literature, is still set in the Russia of the 1860's.

Dostoevskij began planning The Idiot in 1867, one of the decade's central years, began writing specifi- cally on it in September of that year, and worked most intensively on the text as we now know it from the fol- lowing December until about January of 1869. A major impetus for the novel flowed from his attendance at a Peace Congress in Geneva from September 9 to 12, 1867, in which he had the chance to observe at first hand that gathering of radicals chaired by Garibaldi. He found the European radicals distinctly repulsive and

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muddle-headed, good embodiments of traits which he found so ridiculous and yet dangerous in the Russian radicals of his day. Despite all this, it seems, he then wrote a novel with rather few overt connections to the assault upon political and philosophical radi- calism which he had undertaken in Crime and Punish- ment and would intensify in The Possessed. This is a circumstance which calls for some investigation and explanation.

To begin with, there are clearly .soms openly anti- nihilist elements in The Idiot; indeed they are quite obvious. For example, the description of Antip Burdov- skij, Pavli&%v's putative son, who arrives with a small group of radicals to confront Prince Mybkin with an article exposing and upbraiding him for living off his father's wealth without providing for PavligEev's natural son, is a locus czassicus of the description of the young radical in the antinihilist literature of the 1860's. Burdovskij's personal cleanliness leaves much to be desired (his hands are dirty, as were supposedly those of all nihilists); his clothing is both filthy and untidy. Although Dostoevskij empha- sizes the young man's 'innocence', he also detects in him an element common to his entire generation, a "strange and consistent need both to be and to feel himself to be eternally offended" (2151.' Somehow re- ality has done the younger generation wrong, and can never be forgiven. Also, Burdovskij shares with most of his nihilist contemporaries a severe inability to express himself verbally: he spoke 'hurriedly', Dosto- evskij writes, and could scarcely get his words out, "just as if he were tongue-tied, or even a foreigner, although as a matter of fact he was of purely Russian extraction" (2151. Dostoevskij was fully capable of delving more deeply than this into the social psychol- ogy of,the nihilist, but he-did not think this neces- sary in describing the meeting between the Pririce and the nihilist group. He simply pointed to Burdovskij's traits of personal uncleanliness, verbal inadequacy, and psychological sensitivity, and passed on.

Dostoevskij also underlined the crude straightfor- wardness of the radical generation in other portions of the novel. During their meeting with th8 Prince, the young radicals "do not request,but rather demand": they advance a claim to what is theirs by right, and which they do not intend to be denied. They have long ago condemned the formalities of civilized discourse, and spare no one's feelings in their dedication to the truth. A young man very much one of them, Ippolit Te- rent'ev, considers this a positive trait. When he

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wishes to discover precisely how much time is left to him, he summons the student Xislorodov (his very sur- name is a satirical thrust at the radicals):

A week or so ago the student Kislorodov was brought to see me; his convictions have made him a materialist, atheist and nihilist, which was why I asked him to come: I needed a man who finally would tell me the unadorned truth, without formalities and ceremony. That is precise- ly what he did, and not only readily and without cere- mony, but even with evident satisfaction (whichIthought was a little excessive). He blurted out tome that I had about a month to live... (322-323)

Thus even Ippolit complains a bit about the relish with which the radicals bear evil tidings to others.

The 'woman question', intellectually quite fashion- able in the 1860's, also emerges in The Idiot, as one might expect from a novel in which beautiful and mod- ern women play such important roles, but it is never examined in great depth. Thus it occurs in the amusing passage early on in which the cynical Ganja Ivolgin declares to Mybkin his willingness to marry Nastas'ja Filippovna for her money (he can be as rudely straight- forward as any radical):

She thinks me a scoundrel because 1% SD openly ready to take her for her money even though she was another man's mistress, without realizing that a lot of other men would deceive her even worse: they would attach themselves to her and start spouting all the liberal and progressive phrases, including all this stuff about feminism. <...Z They'd swear to the self-centered fool <...> that they were taking her because of her "noble heart and her misfortunes", when in fact they'd be marrying her for het money too. (103)

Dostoevskij probably believed, then, that the enthusi- astic adherents of 'women's rights' - among men, at any rate - simply utilized currently popular ideas for the purpose.of deceiving gullible women.

Dostoevskij's treatment of the 'woman question', though it is mentioned here and there in the novel, reaches its apogee in the description of MySkin just before his intended wedding, when the inveterate gos- sipers and misinterpreters of reality who inhabit DOS- toevskij's fictional world decide that he is attempt- ing to prove a radical point by marrying Nastas'ja Fi- lippovna instead of Aglaja:

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And to this was added, by way of characterizing contem- porary morals, that the muddle-headed young man[My&in] had in fact been in love with his fiancee, the general's daughter, but that he had rejected her purely Out of ni- hilism and for the sake of the scandal he vould create when he allowed himself the satisfaction of marrying a fallen woman in front of everyone and thereby to show that as far as he wss concerned there exist neither fall- en nor virtuous women, but only free women, nothing more... (4771

Shortly before this passage Dostoevskij links Myskin - at least as interpreted by the crowd - to the "nihil- ism detected by Mr. Turgenev" (476) and so to the anti- nihilist current in literature generally. Furthermore. recognizing that the phrase "out of nihilism" (is ni- giZizma) may sound a trifle strange to the untutored ear, Dostoevskij offers a gloss on it: "out of nihil- ism, that is, for insult and humiliation's sake" (477). Through this gloss Dostoevskij identifies the nihil- ists as individuals who systematically and deliberate- ly employed scandal as a means of subverting accepted social customs, and thereby society itself: if the general rules of a society come to be seriously ques- tioned, then the society itself is in danger of top- pling. The reader of The Idiot realizes that Prince Mygkin's motivations in marrying Nastas'ja Filippovna are not the same as those attributed to him by the crowd - and yet there is some justification for its interpretation of the facts.

Here we touch upon a deeperproblemof Dostoevskij's fictional approach to reality, one which is for him a constant but which, in the confrontation between My& kin and the young nihilist*, he connects to the nihil- ist intellectual movement: the question of truth. P-re- cisely this feature of Dostoevskij's art - his pro- found sense of the contingency of truth, the refativ- ity of reality - makes him the most modern of nine- teenth century writers despite his overtly conserva- tive beliefs and his conscious desire to preach the eternal verities. It also makes him one of the most intellectually unsettling writers in literature, for in reading him we can rarely be certain that we have achieved a 'true' comprehension of reality. To be sure, we may come to know the 'facts', bare and unadorned, but the human mind cannot content itself with a juml+e Of facts: it must also have an interpretive framework in which to arrange them. The problem is that differ- ent people erect different frameworks, and the inter- pretations of events which emerge from those frame-

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works may diverge sharply from one another and from actual 'reality'. For example, all the 'facts' the rumormongers cite in describing Prince Myskin's court- ship are 'true': he had had a relationship of sorts with Aglaja, he had declared his intention of marrying Nastas'ja Filippovna, he had broken a valuable Chinese vase, and he had appointed a date for the wedding. In fact he had asked his nihilist friend Burdovskij to act as the wedding attendant (riafer) for Nastas'ja Fi- lippovna. Thus the facts given in the popular account of My&kin's marriage are all correct SO far as they go, but they seem to yield false conclusions when ar- ranged in an interpretive framework which ~SSUIIES that Mybkin is motivated by 'nihilism'.

Myskin deals with precisely this same issue when he encounters the young nihilists and their article in chapter 8 of part two. A number of the 'facts' con- tained in the article, if viewed simply as facts, are arguably correct: and yet the author of the article interprets them in a framework which makes the whole piece emerge as, in MySkin's word, 'untruth' hzpravda) (222). To be sure, the Prince shows that certain key 'facts' given in the article are pure distortions. Backed into a corner, Keller admits he wrote most of the article, but still defends its overall effect:

As for certain inaccuracies - hyperboles, SO t0 say - why YOU will surely agree that the most important thing is initiative, the most important thing is aim and pur- pose; the important thing is to provide a beneficent example, and then later on we can worry about particu- lar details, and then finally it's a matter of style (szog) . . . (225)

Thus. Keller argues, the chief thing in a piece of writing is its central theme: does it promote the 'good of society'? The reader should consider 'initia- tive', motivation, the author's good intentions, even 'style', or the generally accepted manner of writing on a particular topic. Under such conditions the ques- tion of factual accuracy recedes to a position of sec- ondary importance.

In this case, however, the 'aim and motivation' of the entire piece depend on one 'fact': is Burdovskij indeed PavliSEev's illegitimate son7 Here Myzkin pro- duces his trump card when Ivolgin demonstrates by the scientific laws of mathematics and human gestation that Burdovskij could not be PavliIEev's son. Burdov- skij has no choice but to accept this proof, and to withdraw any demands made.in the article on his behalf.

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But the problem of factual accuracy reappears at the end of the confrontation, when Burdovskij returns to the Prince a sum of money which the latter had sent him as 'charity'. Doktorenko declares the sum to be 250 rubles, one participant indignantly recalls that the article had reported the sum es only 50 rubles, and actual examination of the money determines that it consists of 100 rubles. One radical, Lebedev's nephew, protests that in essence all such figures are equiva- lent: "Of course 100 rubles is not the same thing as 250 rubles", he says:

and the'whole matter is not one of indifference, but the principle is important; the important thing here is the initiative, and it's merely a detail that the sum is 150 rubles short. The important thing is chat Burdovskij refuser to accept your charity,,Your High- ness, that he throws it back in your face, and in this sense it’s all the same whether it's 100 or 250 rubles. (236)

Here Lebedev's nephew asserts the superiority of moral criteria over bare facts in determining truth, and he defends factual inaccuracy much as Keller has done be- fore him: 'initiative' 'intention' are the vital fac- tors, more important p&haps than the laws of mathe- matics or of reality which are subject to empirical verification. What is important is that Burdovskij re- turns money to MySkin out of a sense of self-respect: the amount of the money in question is a mere detail.

The difficulty of interpreting reality - exempli- fied by the popular rumors about Mygkin's marriage at the end of the novel and the discussion of Keller's article in the middle - is a central one in Dostoev- skij's fictional world: the reader can rarely be cer- tain of what has happened there, for Dostoevskij un- tiringly undercuts what the reader thinks he knows. However, this problem deserves far more extended treat- ment than can be pxovided in a paper of this length.

Still another element in Dostoevskij's thought plays a very important role in The Idiot, and defines a major area of conflict between the radical intellec- tuals of the 1&60's and their opponents: aesthetics, or the science of the beautiful.

The aesthetic conflict had begun to emerge openly in the 1850's, with the formation of what came to be called the Gogolian and Pushkinian schools in Russian criticism. The Gogolian camp, represented by EernyHev- skij and his followers, believed that art should be socially useful, and decried purely aesthetic values

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in art and literature. By the mid-1860's the radicals had reached the point where they rejected aesthetics altogether: in 1865 Dmitrij Pisarev could write in a retrospective article on ?erny&?vskij's master's essay that "aesthetics, to our immense satisfaction, has been absorbed into physiology and hygiene". The Push- kinian school, on the other hand, preached the primacy of art over reality and praised Pugkin for what they interpreted as his dedication to the ideal of pure art. These two camps among Russian ifitellectuals diverged sharply in the 1860's: as a consequence of this dis- agreement the radicals belittled PuHkin as a poet, and Nekrasov was constrained to repress his natural affin- ity for Pugkin for some 15 years, while the controver- sy was at its height.

The radicals' campaign against aesthetics in the 1860's engendered some extreme reactions from their opponents. The poet Afanasij Fet devised a literary theory which asserted the absolute primacy of aesthet- ic considerations in art, finding strong support for his position from such critics as Aleksandr Druzinin and Vasilij Botkin. And the little-known critic Niko- laj Solov'ev, in an article of 1864 published in DOS- toevskij's journal ~pocha, went so far as to argue that aesthetics should serve as the basis for human ethics and morality.' Since this was the first article Solov'ev had published iri Qpocha, Doatoevskij appended a note to it in which he welcomed it, but added that he could not agree with all its conclusions.

In all probability one of the things Dostoevskij rejected in Solov'ev's piece was his central idea of founding ethics upon aesthetic feeling. Both the radi- cals and the extreme aesthetic camp tended to reject supernatural revelation as an ethical foundation. The radicals were atheists almost as a matter of course: they sought to base a new ethic on scientific ratio- nalism or on utilitarianism. In like manner, the ex- treme aesthetic camp felt no need for the hypothesis of God: Fet, for instance, was a well-known and quite open atheist. Dostoevskij, on the other hand, defended the traditional view of ethics and morality as based upon Divine revelation and sanction, and therefore found himself at odds with both the radical and aes- thetic camps. In Crime and Punishment and T'he Pmsess- ed Dostoevskij sought to demonstrate that a moral code based upon the rational and scientific presuppositions of the radicals could only lead to destruction; in The Idiot, in my view, whatever may have been his ini- tial intentions, he ends by demonstrating that a code of morality based upon aesthetics alone (as Solov'ev

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would have it) also results in destruction. Therefore, by a process of elimination, the only sound basis re- maining for a code of morality is a belief in inunor- tality and in God as revealed to mankind through Christ.

If we realize that the destructive power of beauty is a major theme within The Idiot, then certain impor- tant aspects of the novel become much more comprehen- sible than they may be otherwise. For instance PuZkin, the patron of the aesthetic camp, is a central pres- ence in the novel: near its mid-point Aglaja recites his poem "The Poor Knight" in its entirety, and MySkin is closely associated with both the poem and its hero. Aglaja summarizes her view of the poem's meaning in the following very significant words:

In this poem we have the direct depiction of a man who first of all is capable of having an ideal, and who in the second place, once he has found an ideal, can put his faith in it, and having done that, can blindly ded- icate his entire life to it. <...> It is not said there, in the poem, what exactly the "poor knight's" ideal con- sisted of, but it’s obvious that it was some bright im- age, “an image of pure beauty”... (207)

No matter what we may think of Aglaja's interpretation of the poem, her words may be applied rather directly to Mygkin, who indeed is enamored of all: things beau- tiful. Very early in the novel we learn of theprince's attraction to the beauties of calligraphy: he writes a beautiful hand himself, and is happy to expatiate at great length on the achievements of great calli- graphic masters of the past. He ends his discourse on this topic with the revealing peroration:

A flourish (ros&rk) is a highly perilous thing! A flour- ish demands extraordinary taste; but if it should be successful, if the right proportions should be found, why such a script is beyond compare, so much so that one could fall in love with it (30 - italics added).

In view of this, it is scarcely astonishing that when Myskin first set?s Nastas’ja Filippovna’s portrait, he is struck by her extraordinary beauty: the author's description of the impression the portrait makes upon the Prince includes the adjectives 'strange', 'blind- ing', and - most important - 'unbearable'(nevynosimyj) attached to the noun 'beauty' (68). Shortly thereafter, in speaking of Nastas'ja Filippovna, Adelaida remarks that "such beauty is power (... ) with beauty like that

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one could transform (perevernut’) the world!" (69). And Mybkin does in fact succumb to the power of NaS- tas'ja Filippovna's beauty: like PuSkin's poor knight, he dedicates himself to the ideal of pure beauty as embodied in Nastas'ja Filippovna. However, there is one crucial difference between the poor knight and Myzkin: the former acts within a religious context, while the latter remains on a secular plane, no mat- ter how exalted it may be.

Myskin's tragedy lies in the fact that his dedica- tion to an ideal of "unbearable beauty" is simply the prelude to illness - his personal affliction - and ultimately to destruction. The famous passage inwhich the narrator describes the onset of Mybkin's epilep- tic attacks contains elements very like those used in describing his reaction to Nastas'ja Filippovna's por- trait:

His mind and heart were illuminated with an extraordi- nary light; all his unease, all his doubts, all his worries were somehow eliminated at one stroke, were resolved into SCOW sort of higher peace, full of clear and harmonious joy. <...> But these moments, these flashes were only harbingers of that ultimate second <...> which led to the attack itself. This second was, of course, unbearable. <...> ‘What difference does it make if this is an illness?” he finally decided. “why should it matter that this tension is abnormal if its RSUlt, if the moment of sensation, recalled and exam- ined later when I am restored to health, turns out to be harmony and beauty in the highest degree...?”

(188 - italics added)

No matter how the Prince may extol the ecstasy of the instant before the onset of an epileptic seizure, the fact remains that the attack entails the temporary obliteration of his normal faculties; and, if the at- tacks continue without hindrance, they will cause their permanent destruction.

This context makes even more understandable the significance of Nastas'ja Filippovna's efforts to at- tain the apex of her beauty on the eve of her project- ed marriage. To be sure, any woman seeks to be at her most beautiful on her wedding day, and Mygkin is told that Nastas'ja Filippovna is "as busy as only a great beauty can be in dressing for her wedding" (491). When she emerges from the house on her way to church, the narrator describes her beauty, not so much direct- ly as indirectly, through its powerful effect on the clownish bystanders: and a familiar word appears in

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the single brief passage which speaks directly of her beauty: "her large dark eyes flashed out at the crowd like red-hot coals; and'that glance was unbearable for the crowd (493 - italics added). The symbolism of the scene, however, lies in this, that it is precise- ly at the.instant of her supreme beauty that Nastas'ja Filippovna flings herself into RogoZin's arms and sets off to her doom. Nastas'ja Filippovna's beauty leads to her physical destruction, and Prince Mygkin's dedi- cation to that beauty dauses his intellectual and mor- al destruction in the novel's unforgettable concluding scene. It is fatal, Dostoevskij thus demonstrates, to base one'smoral life on a sense of beauty: an ethical and moral system cannot be built upon an aesthetic foundation, for the immoral, the abnormal, even the ugly may sometimes appear beautiful to certain indi- viduals.

If this interpretation is correct, then one must reassess MySkin's otherwise puzzling reactions to Hans Holbein's famous painting of Christ taken from the cross, a copy of which he sees in Rogo%in's house. Holbein depicts the body of the dead Christ with such excruciating realism that MySkin exclaims: "Some peo- ple could lose their faith by looking atthatpicture!" (182). Moreover, MySkin offers this comment after he - nearly alone among Dostoevskij's major characters - has refused to reply by changing the subject when Ro- gosin puts the central question of Dostoevskij's uni- verse to him: does he believe in God? What faith in God My&kin has must be founded upon beauty and harmo- ny: in all probability it cannot survive a sustained challenge from unlovely reality, as exemplified by Holbein's crucified Christ. We have the contemporary witness of Dostoevskij's wife that when she and her husband first viewed the original painting, despite the fact that she reacted to it much as Mygkin did,it overwhelmed Dostoevskij, filling him with 'ecstasy', so that he ended by declaring Holbein a "remarkable artist and poet".3 1~ his book Dostoeuskij's Quest for FOWI, Robert L.Jackson deals with the place of Hol- bein's painting in The Idiot in a manner which leaves an unresolved contradiction. "Holbein's 'Christ in the Tomb' was", he writes,

- from the point of view of Dostoevsky's Christian aesthetic - <...> a caricature of the supreme symbol and embodiment of transfiguration. Jesus Christ; its message was death and disfiguration. Dostoevsky's commitment to the notion of ideal beauty is B commit- ment c...Z to the ideal of ethical beauty. To give

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de jure recognition to Holbein's disfigured Christ, to call it beauty, would not merely destroy the notion of an aesthetic idea: - it would deny the notion of an ethical ideal...

If the analysis proffered here is correct, then Jack- son is wrong in equating the aesthetic and ethical ideals in Dostoevskij's thought. Dostoevskij's own ethical ideal was based upon a commitment to Christ, who lived in this world as a man, who suffered and died as a man; and Dostoevskij knew very well that suffering and death are rarely lovely. That is why Dostoevskij was so taken with Holbein's painting, and why MySkin's response to it does not coincide with his own. For in The Idiot, among many other things, Dastoevskij occupied the aesthetic no-man'*-land lo- cated between the radicals and their opponents: while affirming the importance of art for the elaboration of human ideals, he denied with equal vigor that man could build a moral code for himself on an aesthetic foundation. Ethics could only be founded on true re- ligion : "Morality and faith are one" he wrote in the notebooks to The Possessed.=

In The Idiot, then, Dostoevskij grappled with two of the central intellectual cleavages of the 1860's: the problem of morality and the question of aesthetics. Thus The Idiot is just as firmly rooted in the intel- lectual soil of that remarkable decade as are Crime and Punishment and The Possessed.

The George Washington University

368 Charles A.Moser

1. All citations given in parentheses in the text are to volume 8 of Dostoevskij's PoZnoe sobmnie so&enij v tridcati tomach (Leningrad 1972).

2. N.Solov'ev, "Teorija bezobrazija", &'pocha b7 (18641, l-16.

3. A.G.Dostoevskaja, "Iz dnevnika 1867 goda", in: F.M.Dostosv- skij v vospominanijach sovwmennikov II (Moskva 19641, 121.

4. Robert L.Jackson, Dostoevsky's &uest for Fan (New Haven and London 19661, 69. The entire discussion runs from 66 to 70.

5. F.M.Dostoevskij. op.cit., XI, 188.