Lizavéta Prokófyevna – Aglaya’s mother and Myshkin’s distant relative. Though child-like in the spontaneity of her emotions, she is strong-willed and imperious, particularly about matters of honour and morality. Myshkin considers her and Aglaya to be very alike.
General Iván Fyódorovich Epanchín – Aglaya’s father.
Alexándra Ivánovna – Aglaya’s sister, eldest daughter of Ivan Fyodorovich and Lizaveta Prokofyevna.
Adelaída Ivánovna – Aglaya’s sister, second daughter of Ivan Fyodorovich and Lizaveta Prokofyevna.
Prince Shch. (or Prince S) – a ‘liberal’ aristocrat who marries Adelaida Ivanovna.
Yevgény Pávlovich Radómsky – a handsome military officer who is a close friend of the Epanchins. His rumoured interest in Aglaya leads Nastasya Filippovna (who wants to bring Aglaya and the Prince together) to publicly expose some unsavoury aspects of his background. Despite this, he and the Prince become friends and have a mutual respect for each other’s intelligence.
Afanásy Ivánovich Tótsky – a wealthy aristocrat and libertine, a friend and business associate of General Epanchin. He is the former guardian of Nastasya Filippovna.
General Ívolgin (Ardalión Alexándrovich) – Ganya’s father, a highly honourable man, but a drunkard and mythomaniac. He is the subject of a subplot in Part 4, involving the theft of 400 rubles from Lebedyev.
Nína Alexándrovna – General Ivolgin’s long-suffering wife, and mother of Ganya, Varya and Kolya.
Kólya (Nikolay Ardaliónovich) – Ganya’s younger brother. He is a friend of Ippolit’s, and also becomes a friend and confidant of the Prince.
Várya (Varvára Ardaliónovna) – Ganya’s sister.
Iván Petróvich Ptítsyn – Ganya’s friend and Varya’s husband.
Ferdýshchenko – a lodger with the Ivolgins, a drunkard whose inappropriate manner and coarse but cutting wit is valued by Nastasya Filippovna.
Antíp Burdóvsky – a young man who mistakenly thinks he is the illegitimate son of Myshkin’s benefactor Pavlishchev. He begins by aggressively demanding money from the Prince, but later becomes an admirer.
Kéller – a retired Lieutenant, initially one of Rogozhin’s crew, he becomes an associate of Ippolit and Burdovsky and writes a slanderous article about the Prince. He later develops a great admiration for the Prince and seeks to defend him.
Doktorenko – Lebedyev’s nephew, a nihilist who, along with Ippolit, leads Burdovsky’s attack on the Prince.
Véra Lukyánovna – Lebedyev’s daughter.
Themes
Atheism and Christianity in Russia
A dialogue between the intimately related themes of atheism and Christian faith (meaning, for Dostoevsky, Russian Orthodoxy) pervades the entire novel. Dostoevsky’s personal image of Christian faith, formed prior to his philosophical engagement with Orthodoxy but never abandoned, was one that emphasized the human need for belief in the immortality of the soul, and identified Christ with ideals of «beauty, truth, brotherhood and Russia».
The character of Prince Myshkin was originally intended to be an embodiment of this «lofty (Russian) Christian idea». With the character’s immersion in the increasingly materialistic and atheistic world of late 19th century Russia, the idea is constantly being elaborated, tested in every scene and against every other character. However, Myshkin’s Christianity is not a doctrine or a set of beliefs but is something that he lives spontaneously in his relations with all others. Whenever he appears «hierarchical barriers between people suddenly become penetrable, an inner contact is formed between them… His personality possesses the peculiar capacity to relativize everything that disunifies people and imparts a false seriousness to life.»
The young nihilist Ippolit Terentyev is the character that provides the most coherent articulation of the atheist challenge to Myshkin’s worldview, most notably in the long essay ‘An Essential Explanation’ which he reads to the gathering at the Prince’s birthday celebration in part 3 of the novel. Here he picks up a motif first touched upon early in part 2, in a dialogue between Myshkin and Rogozhin, when they are contemplating the copy of Holbein’s Dead Christ in Rogozhin’s house, and Rogozhin confesses that the painting is eroding his faith.
Holbein’s painting held a particular significance for Dostoevsky because he saw in it his own impulse «to confront Christian faith with everything that negated it». The character of Ippolit argues that the painting, which depicts with unflinching realism the tortured, already putrefying corpse of Christ within the tomb, represents the triumph of blind nature over the vision of immortality in God that Christ’s existence on Earth signified. He is unable to share Myshkin’s intuition of the harmonious unity of all Being, an intuition evoked most intensely earlier in the novel in a description of the pre-epileptic aura. Consequently, the inexorable laws of nature appear to Ippolit as something monstrous, particularly in the light of his own approaching death from tuberculosis:
«It is as though this painting were the means by which this idea of a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force, to which everything is subordinate, is expressed… I remember someone taking me by the arm, a candle in his hands, and showing me some sort of enormous and repulsive tarantula, assuring me that this was that same dark, blind and all-powerful creature, and laughing at my indignation.»
The Prince does not directly engage with Ippolit’s atheistic arguments, as a religious ideologist might: rather, he recognizes Ippolit as a kindred spirit, and empathetically perceives his youthful struggle with both his own inner negation and the cruelty, irony, and indifference of the world around him.
Catholicism
The Prince’s Christianity, insofar as he is the embodiment of the ‘Russian Christian idea’, explicitly excludes Catholicism. His unexpected tirade at the Epanchins’ dinner party is based in unequivocal assertions that Catholicism is «an unChristian faith», that it preaches the Antichrist, and that its appropriation and distortion of Christ’s teaching into a basis for the attainment of political supremacy has given birth to atheism.
The Catholic Church, he claims, is merely a continuation of the Western Roman Empire: cynically exploiting the person and teaching of Christ it has installed itself on the earthly throne and taken up the sword to entrench and expand its power. This is a betrayal of the true teaching of Christ, a teaching that transcends the lust for earthly power (the Devil’s Third Temptation), and speaks directly to the individual’s and the people’s highest emotions—those that spring from what Myshkin calls «spiritual thirst». Atheism and socialism are a reaction, born of profound disillusionment, to the Church’s defilement of its own moral and spiritual authority.
It is because of this «spiritual thirst» that Myshkin is so uncompromisingly scathing about the influence of Catholicism and atheism in Russia. The Russian, he claims, not only feels this thirst with great urgency, but is, by virtue of it, particularly susceptible to false faiths:
"In our country if a man goes over to Catholicism, he unfailingly becomes a Jesuit, and one of the most clandestine sort, at that; if he becomes an atheist, he will at once begin to demand the eradication of belief in God by coercion, that is, by the sword... It is not from vanity alone, not from mere sordid vain emotions that Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits proceed, but from a spiritual pain, a spiritual thirst, a yearning for something more exalted, for a firm shore, a motherland in which they have ceased to believe…»
The theme of the maleficent influence of Catholicism on the Russian soul is expressed, in a less obvious and polemical way, through the character of Aglaya Epanchin. Passionate and idealistic, like ‘the Russian’ alluded to in the anti-Catholic diatribe, Aglaya struggles with the ennui of middle class mediocrity and hates the moral vacuity of the aristocracy to whom her parents kowtow. Her ‘yearning for the exalted’ has attracted her to militant Catholicism, and in the Prince’s devotion to Nastasya Filippovna she sees the heroism of a Crusader-Knight abandoning everything to go in to battle for his Christian ideal.
She is deeply angry when, instead of «defending himself triumphantly» against his enemies (Ippolit and his nihilist friends), he tries to make peace with them and offers assistance. Aglaya’s tendency to misinterpret Myshkin’s motives leads to fractures in what is otherwise a blossoming of innocent love. When the Epanchins go abroad after the final catastrophe, Aglaya, under the influence of a Catholic priest, abandons her family and elopes with a Polish ‘Count’.
Innocence and guilt
In his notes Dostoevsky distinguishes the Prince from other characters of the virtuous type in fiction (such as Don Quixote and Pickwick) by emphasizing innocence rather than comicality. In one sense Myshkin’s innocence is an instrument of satire since it brings in to sharp relief the corruption and egocentricity of those around him.
But his innocence is serious rather than comical, and he has a deeper insight into the psychology of human beings in general by assuming its presence in everyone else, even as they laugh at him, or try to deceive and exploit him. Examples of this combination of innocence and insight can be found in Myshkin’s interactions with virtually all the other characters.
He explains it himself in an episode with the roguish but ‘honourable’ Keller, who has confessed that he has sought the Prince out for motives that are simultaneously noble (he wants spiritual guidance) and mercenary (he wants to borrow a large sum of money from him). The Prince guesses that he has come to borrow money before he has even mentioned it, and unassumingly engages him in a conversation about the psychological oddity of ‘double thoughts’:
Two thoughts coincided, that very often happens… I think it’s a bad thing and, you know, Keller, I reproach myself most of all for it. What you told me just now could have been about me. I’ve even sometimes thought that all human beings are like that, because it’s terribly difficult to fight those double thoughts…
At any rate, I am not your judge… You used cunning to
