FOR MYSELF I THINK that way of putting it stupid and wrong. Only very simple-minded people can refuse to admit the existence of psychological conditions other than those experienced by themselves. When studying Dostoyevsky and his works we have to remember one of his favourite phrases which frequently flowed from his pen: “Russia is a freak of nature.” We find curious anomalies among the lunatics conceived by this romancer. They are absorbed in self-contemplation and furiously intent on analysing their innermost thoughts. When the author calls on them to take some action, they immediately rush to perform it blindly, obedient to the disordered impulses of their uncontrolled nerves and unreasoning minds, or one might say with wills set at liberty, and actuated by the most elemental forces.
Note the kind of acting in the play reproduced ad nauseam. The attitudes taken up by the body enable us to guess to what extent the mind had been perturbed. A character is hardly ever introduced to us seated at a table and occupied with something. “He was extended on the divan, eyes closed but not asleep…. He walked the street unconscious of where he was going…. He was motionless, his eyes intently fixed on some distant object….” These people never eat, they drink tea, and only at night. Many are drunkards. They seldom sleep, and when they do, they dream. There are more dreams in Dostoyevsky’s books than in all our standard works put together. They nearly always have fever. In every twenty pages we come across the expression “feverish state” at least once. Whenever these creatures come on, or come in contact with any of their kind, their “acting” as shown by every new paragraph, is invariably, “He shivered… he made one bound… his features contracted… he became as pale as wax… his lower lip trembled… his teeth chattered….” Or else there are long pauses in the conversation and the two speakers glare at each other. Of the innumerable people invented by Dostoyevsky I do not know one whom Charcot, the famous alienist, could not have claimed as his own under some guise or another.
Derek Jacobi as Myshkin. National Theatre Company at the Old Vic, 15 July 1970.
The Idiotis the most laboured of the author’s characters; his favourite child who takes up a whole volume all to himself. Dostoyevsky describes himself in this character, as all authors do, certainly not as he really was, but such as he would like to be. To begin with, “The Idiot” is an epileptic. These attacks provide the means for permitting all emotional scenes to find their climax in the most unexpected manner. The author feels an unbounded joy in describing them. He assures us that for a few seconds previous to the attack the soul is flooded with a sense of extreme ecstasy. We can take his word for it. The nickname of “The Idiot” was given to Muishkin, because, as a young man, that special illness so altered his faculties that he had been somewhat queer ever since. Taking the soundness of his pathology for granted, this imagined character is enlarged upon with astonishing verisimilitude.
Dostoyevsky had evidently at first intended to adapt Don Quixote – the ideal type of a “redresser of wrongs” – to contemporary literature. Here and there we find signs of such an attempt. Soon, however, carried away by his own creations, he takes a higher flight and brings into that soul – in which he sees and admires himself – the most sublime Gospel teachings, and makes despairing efforts to enlarge the character by implanting into it the moral qualities of a saint.
