The anecdote of the man reprieved from execution is an illustration, drawn from the author’s own experience, of the extraordinary value of life as revealed in the moment of imminent death. The most terrible realization for the condemned man, according to Myshkin, is that of a wasted life, and he is consumed by the desperate desire for another chance. After his reprieve, the man vows to live every moment of life conscious of its infinite value (although he confesses to failing to fulfil the vow).
Through his own emergence from a prolonged period on the brink of derangement, unconsciousness and death, the Prince himself has awoken to the joyous wonder of life, and all his words, moral choices and relations with others are guided by this fundamental insight. Joseph Frank, drawing on the theology of Albert Schweitzer, places the Prince’s insight in the context of «the eschatological tension that is the soul of the primitive Christian ethic, whose doctrine of Agape was conceived in the same perspective of the imminent end of time.» Myshkin asserts that in the ecstatic moment of the pre-epileptic aura he is able to comprehend the extraordinary phrase (from the Book of Revelation, 10:6): «there shall be time no longer».
Like Myshkin, Ippolit is haunted by death and has a similar reverence for the beauty and mystery of life, but his self-absorbed atheist-nihilist worldview pushes him toward opposite conclusions. While the Prince’s worldview reflects the birth of his faith in a higher world-harmony, Ippolit’s concern with death develops into a metaphysical resentment of nature’s omnipotence, her utter indifference to human suffering in general and to his own suffering in particular.
In the character of Ippolit, Dostoevsky again considers the terrible dilemma of the condemned man. Ippolit speaks of his illness as a «death sentence» and of himself as «a man condemned to death». In his ‘Essential Explanation’ he argues passionately that meaningful action is impossible when one knows one is going to die. The living soul absolutely requires that its future be open, not pre-determined, and it rebels irrepressibly against the imposition of a definite end. Ippolit conceives the idea of suicide as the only way left to him of asserting his will in the face of nature’s death sentence.
Style
Temporality
Dostoevsky’s notebooks for The Idiot during the time of its serial publication clearly indicate that he never knew what successive installments would contain. The method of testing the central idea in a series of extreme situations, allowing each character to freely respond, meant that there could be no pre-determined development of either plot or character: the author himself was just as surprised as the characters at what happened or didn’t happen. This uncontrived approach to writing becomes, in the novel, a depiction of what Morson calls «the openness of time».
In the usual novel, the apparently free acts of the characters are an illusion as they only serve to bring about a future that has been contrived by the author. But in real life, even with a belief in determinism or preordination, the subject always assumes its freedom and acts as though the future were unwritten. Dostoevsky’s extemporaneous approach helped facilitate the representation of the actual position of human subjectivity, as an open field of possibility where the will is free at all times, despite the apparent necessity of cause and effect. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, «Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable—and unpredeterminable—turning point for their soul.»
Carnivalization
Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky always wrote in opposition to modern tendencies toward the «reification of man»—the turning of human beings into objects (scientific, economic, social, etc.), enclosing them in an alien web of definition and causation, robbing them of freedom and responsibility. ‘Carnivalization’ is a term used by Bakhtin to describe the techniques Dostoevsky uses to disarm this increasingly ubiquitous enemy and make true intersubjective dialogue possible. The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the «joyful relativity» of free participation in the festival.
In The Idiot, everything revolves around the two central carnival figures of the «idiot» and the «madwoman», and consequently «all of life is carnivalized, turned into a ‘world inside out’: traditional plot situations radically change their meaning, there develops a dynamic, carnivalistic play of sharp contrasts, unexpected shifts and changes».
Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna are characters that inherently elude conventional social definition, or—as Bakhtin puts it—anything that might limit their «pure humanness». The carnival atmosphere that develops around them in each situation and dialogue («bright and joyous» in Myshkin’s case, «dark and infernal» in Nastasya Filippovna’s) allows Dostoevsky to «expose a different side of life to himself and to the reader, to spy upon and depict in that life certain new, unknown depths and possibilities.»
Polyphony
Carnivalization helps generate the artistic phenomenon that Bakhtin felt was unique to Dostoevsky in literature: Polyphony. Analogous to musical polyphony, literary polyphony is the simultaneous presence of multiple independent voices, each with its own truth and validity, but always coincident with other voices, affecting them and being affected by them. Bakhtin defines it as «the event of interaction between autonomous and internally unfinalized consciousnesses». In the polyphonic novel each character’s voice speaks for itself: the narrator and even the author are present in the narrative merely as one voice among others. No voice has a privileged authority, and all have a form that inherently expresses engagement with other voices. Thus events unfold dialogically, as a consequence of the interaction between discrete voices, not as a consequence of authorial design:
What unfolds… is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse.
Narrator and author
Despite the appearance of omniscience, the narrator of The Idiot is given a distinct voice like any other character, and often conveys only a partial understanding of the events he is describing. It is the voice of a highly perceptive and meticulous reporter of the facts, who has, despite this objectivity, a particular perspective on what he is reporting, occasionally even lapsing into pontification. At one point in his notes Dostoevsky admonishes himself to «write more concisely: only the facts. Write in the sense of people say…»
The narrator’s resort to ‘the facts’ has the effect of «placing the facts on the side of rumor and mystery rather than on the side of description and explanation.» The narrator is thus not omniscient, but a particular kind of insightful but limited spectator, and in the end he openly admits to the reader that the Prince’s behaviour is inexplicable to him. According to Frank, «this limitation of the narrator is part of Dostoevsky’s effort to present Myshkin’s behaviour as transcending all the categories of worldly moral-social experience.»
For Bakhtin the narrator’s voice is another participant, albeit of a special kind, in the «great dialogue» that constitutes the Dostoevsky novel. All voices, all ideas, once they enter the world of the novel, take on an imaginary form that positions them in dialogical relationship with the other voices and ideas. In this sense, even the author’s own ideological positions, when they are expressed through the narrator, or Myshkin, or Lebedyev, «become thoroughly dialogized and enter the great dialogue of the novel on completely equal terms with the other idea-images». Since the most important thing for Dostoevsky in the construction of his novels is the dialogic interaction of a multiplicity of voices, the author’s discourse «cannot encompass the hero and his word on all sides, cannot lock in and finalize him from without. It can only address itself to him.»
Reception
Critical reception of The Idiot at the time of its publication in Russia was almost uniformly negative. This was partly because a majority of the reviewers considered themselves to be opposed to Dostoevsky’s ‘conservatism’, and wished to discredit the book’s supposed political intentions. However the chief criticism, among both reviewers and general readers, was in the «fantasticality» of the characters. The radical critic D.I. Minaev wrote: «People meet, fall in love, slap each other’s face—and all at the author’s first whim, without any artistic truth.» V.P. Burenin, a liberal, described the novel’s presentation of the younger generation as «the purest fruit of the writer’s subjective fancy» and the novel as a whole as «a belletristic compilation, concocted from a multitude of absurd personages and events, without any concern for any kind of artistic objectivity.»
Leading radical critic Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin approved of Dostoevsky’s attempt to depict the genuinely good man, but castigated him for his scurrilous treatment of «the very people whose efforts are directed at the very objective apparently pursued by him… On the one hand there appear characters full of life and truth, but on the other, some kind of mysterious puppets hopping about as though in a dream…» Dostoevsky responded to Maykov’s reports of the prevailing ‘fantastical’ criticisms with an unashamed characterization of his literary philosophy as «fantastic realism», and claimed that it was far more real, taking contemporary developments in Russia in to consideration, than the so-called realism of his detractors, and could even be used to predict future events.
French and English translations were published in 1887, and a German translation in 1889. European critical response was also largely negative,
