WE HAVE TO IMAGINE the exceptional case of a being, a full-grown man by virtue of his matured intelligence and highest good sense, but retaining the simple heart of a child – who, in a word, personified the evangelical concept, “Be ye as little children.” Such is Muishkin, “The Idiot.” The aforesaid nervous complaint happily lends itself towards bringing about this desired phenomenon. The disease is made to abolish that portion of the brain which harbours one’s defects, such as irony, arrogance, egoism, concupiscence, and has liberally developed all the other and nobler parts. On leaving the lunatic asylum this extraordinary young man is plunged into the current of ordinary life. It looks as if, not being equipped with the villainous weapons we possess for defending ourselves, he was going to drown there. Far from it. His simple uprightness is stronger than all the wiles used against him; it solves all difficulties and brings him triumphant out of every ambush. His simple words of wisdom end all discussions. They are as the profound words of an ascetic who, when addressing a dying man, says: “Pass on before us, and forgive us our happiness.” In another place he says: “I am afraid I am not accounted worthy of my sufferings.” There are hundreds of other sayings all in the same strain. He lives in a world of usurers, liars, and scoundrels who, whilst they treat him as an idiot, respect and venerate him, and eventually submit to his influence and become better men. The women also begin by laughing at him, but they, too, end by loving him. His response to their adoration is limited to the expressions of tender pity and of that compassionate love which is the only feeling Dostoyevsky allows his heroes.

The writer incessantly returns to his one obstinate idea of the supremacy of the “simple mind,” and of the sufferer. I would nevertheless like to probe this dogma to the bottom. Why this envenomed attack by all Russian idealists against thought and against the fullness of life? The meaning of this hidden and unconscious unreasonableness I think is this: That their instincts tell them to believe as a fundamental truth that to live, to act, to think, is to attempt the inextricable task of separating good and evil.

Glazunov's Myshkin (1956).

All action “creates and destroys” at the same time, and is entirely dependent on somebody or on something. Therefore not to think, not to act, is to escape the fatality of producing evil alongside of the good; and as the bad affects them more than the goods, they take refuge in doing nothing. They admire and sanctify “The Idiot” – the neuter, the inactive. He does no good, it is true, but he does no harm, consequently according to their conception of the world his is the better part.

I go boldly against these giants and monsters, who appeal to me, but how can I pass over in silence such a one as the shopkeeper, Rogokin, a very realistic figure, one of the more powerful the artist has ever drawn? The twenty pages in which he shows us the tortures of love this man’s heart had to endure are by the hand of a great master. The passion is so intense and acquires such a power of fascination that the woman he loves comes to this savage whom she hates, against her will, well knowing that will kill her. This actually happens, and standing by the bedside of the strangled woman he calmly discusses philosophy with a friend, the whole night long. There is not a trace of the melodramatic. The scene is quite simple, at least it appears so to the author, and that is the very reason why it makes one icy cold with horror.

Rare as the occasions are for enlivening these studies, I must also notice the drunken little pawnbroker who “every evening prays for the peaceful repose of the soul of Madame la Comtesse du Barry.” But do not think that Dostoyevsky wishes to enliven us. No, it is in all seriousness that – by the words of the character personifying himself – he is moved to pity by the tortures of Madame du Barry undergone during her long journey on the tumbril and in her struggles with the executioner. Always recalling that fateful half-hour on the 22nd of December 1849!