The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Fyodor Dostoevsky · a novel in four parts · serialised in The Russian Messenger, 1868 to 1869 · book edition 1874 · scored on Dostoevsky’s Russian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Russian quoted only where its words are certain, each quotation with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Novel of scandal and inheritance turned on a saint; society novel, tragedy and novel of ideas in one action
Mythos
A Christ who comes into the world and is undone by it, set against Holbein’s dead Christ in the tomb; the poor knight, Don Quixote; the fallen woman whom the Christ figure would raise; two brothers by an exchange of crosses
Phase
From a train arriving from Warsaw to a birthday party the same night; six months passed over; a summer at Pavlovsk, a wedding that does not take place, and a vigil
Presentation
Fiction; four parts, written abroad to monthly serial deadlines, told by a narrator who in the last part says he cannot fully explain what happened
Register
From General Ivolgin’s lies and Lebedev’s apocalyptic commentary to Ippolit’s fevered confession; voices that interrupt themselves, and confessions that turn into attacks
Scale
One prince, two women and a merchant’s son; two Petersburg families, a circle of hangers-on, Russia against Europe
Governing Proposition
A young prince, Myshkin, comes back to Petersburg from a Swiss valley where he was treated for epilepsy and lived among children, with a bundle and no money, and is drawn at once between two women: Nastasya Filippovna, kept from childhood by her guardian and now to be married off at a price, and Aglaya, a general’s daughter. His pity for the first and his love for the second cannot choose, and the merchant’s son Rogozhin, with whom he has exchanged crosses, murders Nastasya Filippovna; the prince keeps watch with him over her body and returns to idiocy. The wager of the novel is that a wholly good man can be set at the centre of a realist novel of money, pride and desire without allegory or sentiment, and that the logic of his goodness can be followed to its end.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A train comes into Petersburg from Warsaw, and in a third-class carriage two young men sit facing each other. One is dark, restless and feverish: Parfyon Rogozhin, a merchant’s son, whose father has just died and left him rich, and who talks of a woman called Nastasya Filippovna. The other is fair, thin, poorly dressed for the cold, with a bundle: Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, coming home from a Swiss valley where a doctor treated him for epilepsy, which in his childhood made him an idiot. He answers every question put to him, without guile and without offence, and by the end of the journey Rogozhin has taken to him.
He calls on General Epanchin, whose wife is a distant relation, and the general’s wife and three daughters are amused by him until he begins to talk. He tells them of an execution and of the last minutes of a condemned man, who knows to the minute when he will die and finds each minute endless. He tells them of Marie, a poor girl in the Swiss village, shamed and dying, whom he and the village children comforted. The account of the condemned man draws on Dostoevsky’s own: on 22 December 1849, on Semyonovsky Square, he stood with other prisoners before a firing squad and was reprieved at the last moment.
The novel was written abroad, in Geneva, Vevey, Milan and Florence, to the monthly deadlines of The Russian Messenger, which serialised it in 1868 and 1869; it came out as a book in 1874. Dostoevsky’s first child, Sofya, was born in Geneva in February 1868 and died there in May, while the second part was being written. In a letter of January 1868 he stated his aim, to portray “положительно прекрасного человека”
(a positively beautiful man). His notebooks show several plans abandoned on the way, in which the hero was quite another man.
Movement II
Nastasya Filippovna is first seen as a portrait, which the general’s secretary, Ganya Ivolgin, has been given, and the prince looks at it for a long time. As a child she was taken up by her guardian, Totsky, and kept by him; now he wishes to marry, and to be rid of her he has offered seventy-five thousand roubles to the man who will take her. Ganya means to be that man, and despises himself for it. That evening is her birthday, and the whole company gathers at her house: Totsky, the general, Ganya, hangers-on, and the prince, who comes uninvited.
To pass the time the guests play a game in which each confesses the worst thing he has done, and every confession turns into a performance. Nastasya Filippovna asks the prince whether she should marry Ganya, and he tells her not to; he offers to marry her himself, and it emerges that he has come into an inheritance. Then Rogozhin bursts in with his drunken crowd and a packet of a hundred thousand roubles, the price he has promised for her.
She takes the packet and throws it into the fire, and tells Ganya that it is his if he will pull it out with his hands. He does not move; he stands, and faints. She has the packet pulled out, gives it to him as he lies there, and goes out with Rogozhin and his crowd into the night. She will not take the prince, she says, because she would ruin him. A woman bought as a child has had her price paid in front of everyone, and has burned it; the prince runs out after the troikas.
Movement III
Six months pass, and the novel says little of them. The prince comes back to Petersburg and goes to Rogozhin’s house, a dark and gloomy house where his father lived and where everything stands as it did. Over a door hangs a copy of Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, the long narrow picture of a corpse already touched by decay. Dostoevsky had seen the original in Basel in 1867. Rogozhin asks the prince whether he believes in God, and the prince says of the picture that such a painting could make a man lose his faith: “вера может пропасть”
(faith may be lost).
The two men exchange crosses, Rogozhin’s gold for the prince’s tin, and become brothers, and Rogozhin takes him to his old mother to be blessed. All that day the prince feels eyes on him. At evening, on the dark stair of his hotel, Rogozhin is waiting with a knife. In that moment the aura of the prince’s illness comes on him, the moment of highest harmony in which, as he has said, “времени больше не будет”
(there shall be time no longer), and he falls in a fit down the stairs, and the knife does not fall.
The summer moves to Pavlovsk, where the Epanchins and half the novel take villas. There the young nihilists press the claim of Burdovsky, “Pavlishchev’s son”, on the prince’s inheritance; General Ivolgin tells his lies, among them that he served Napoleon as a boy in Moscow; the clerk Lebedev comments on the Apocalypse; and Aglaya, before the prince and the whole company, recites Pushkin’s poem of the poor knight, a Don Quixote who has seen one vision and lives for it, and alters its initials to those of Nastasya Filippovna.
Movement IV
On the prince’s birthday at Pavlovsk the consumptive boy Ippolit, who has been told he has weeks to live, reads aloud a long confession he calls his “Necessary Explanation”. In it he sets the dead Christ against the law of nature that devours everything, and himself against the feast of life, where he alone is not invited. He puts to the prince, mockingly, a saying he has heard attributed to him: “мир спасет красота”
(beauty will save the world). At dawn he announces that he will shoot himself, puts the pistol to his head, and it does not fire.
Aglaya loves the prince, mocks him, and makes him come to her; the Epanchins let it be understood that he is to be her husband. Nastasya Filippovna, who has run from Rogozhin to the prince and back, writes to Aglaya, urging the match and tormenting herself with it. The prince loves Aglaya and pities Nastasya Filippovna, and he cannot tell the two apart in himself; the narrator, as the fourth part goes on, begins to admit that he cannot explain his hero.
The Epanchins hold a reception to show him to society. Warned not to break their mother’s Chinese vase, he breaks it; then he talks too much, against Catholicism and for Russia’s Christ, and falls in a fit. Then the two women meet, with the prince and Rogozhin present, and Nastasya Filippovna tells the prince to choose. He hesitates. He looks at the face of the woman he pities, and turns to her, and Aglaya runs out, and he has lost her.
Movement V
A wedding is arranged between the prince and Nastasya Filippovna. On the day, at the church door, dressed as a bride, she sees Rogozhin in the crowd, cries out to him to save her, and goes off with him. The prince does not follow at once. He goes back to Petersburg the next day and looks for them, and at last Rogozhin finds him in the street and takes him to the dark house.
She is in the bedroom, behind a curtain, under a sheet, with an oilcloth beneath her and bottles of disinfectant set round her against the smell. A fly wakes and buzzes over the bed. Rogozhin has killed her with a knife in the night. The two men lie down side by side on cushions on the floor, near her, and talk in whispers through the night of what they will do and how she was. Rogozhin falls into delirium, and the prince, trembling, strokes his hair and his cheeks. In the morning, when the door is broken in, they are found so: the murderer raving, and the prince no longer understanding anything, an idiot again.
The close is told at second hand. Rogozhin is sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia. The prince is taken back to the Swiss doctor, and does not know those who visit him. Aglaya’s fate is reported in a few lines, and it is bad. Her mother, at the end of a visit to the prince in Switzerland, delivers her verdict on the whole foreign life she has seen, Europe with it: “одна фантазия”
(all a fantasy). The positively beautiful man has come into the world, and the world has gone on, and he has gone back to the valley he came from.
Act III · The Twelve
This is the novel’s weakest axis and the case is plain. The spine is required: Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin, with Aglaya as the fourth term, and every scene in which they meet. But the novel was written month by month without a settled end, and it shows. The six months between the first part and the second are skipped and then explained by report. The Burdovsky affair, the claim of “Pavlishchev’s son” pressed by the young nihilists, runs long for what it yields. General Ivolgin’s lies and Lebedev’s apocalyptic commentary are rich in themselves and could be halved without the loss of a fact the book needs. Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” is necessary in substance and extended past need. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that many parts are present because a serial had room for them.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure is that absolute compassion, entering a world of money, pride and desire, does not save it and may hasten its catastrophe. Myshkin pities Nastasya Filippovna, loves Aglaya, and cannot choose, and both women are destroyed by the pity that will not choose. The disclosure about Nastasya Filippovna is as exact: a woman made a commodity in childhood takes her revenge on herself, and the hundred thousand roubles thrown into the fire at the end of the first part are her price returned. The execution passages disclose what it is to know the hour of one’s death. The Holbein carries the question of whether nature’s law has the last word over Christ. These hold as stated truths. Held below the top because the book’s own meaning wavers between them, by design and by haste.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The novel rises often and very high. The end of the first part: the packet of money in the fire, Ganya fainting rather than reach for it, Rogozhin’s crowd carrying her off. The execution, told by Myshkin to the Epanchin women. The aura on the stair, the moment of highest harmony in which, he recalls, “времени больше не будет”
(there shall be time no longer), broken by Rogozhin’s knife. Ippolit at Pavlovsk, condemned by illness, seeing himself the one outcast at the feast of nature. The vase falling. The meeting of the two women, and Myshkin’s hesitation. Above all the vigil: Rogozhin and Myshkin lying beside the body behind the curtain, the oilcloth, the fly, the morning. Held a step below the summit because between these heights the novel runs flat for long stretches.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The myth is built and it bears weight. Myshkin is a Christ who comes into the world from a Swiss valley where he was healed among children, and is returned to idiocy by it. The novel tests that figure against the dead Christ of Holbein, hung in the house of the man who will murder. Rogozhin and Myshkin exchange crosses and become brothers, and within the hour Rogozhin raises the knife. Myshkin is also Don Quixote, and the book says so through Aglaya, who recites Pushkin’s “Рыцарь бедный”
(the poor knight) in his presence and alters its initials. Nastasya Filippovna is the fallen woman of the Gospels, whom the Christ figure would raise. Every archetype stays particular: a prince with a bundle, a merchant’s son in a dark house, a woman known first by her portrait.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance is the society novel of scandal and inheritance, and the precedent Dostoevsky named was Don Quixote. The departure is to put at the centre of a realist novel of Petersburg money a man without guile, and to follow the logic to its end. The wager is that goodness could be made the subject without allegory or sentiment, and the cost was steep: Dostoevsky wrote in his letters of his fear that the idea was beyond him, his notebooks show him abandoning plan after plan, and the ending refuses every consolation the form had, with no conversion, no rescue, the hero returned to idiocy and the heroine dead. The scandal scene, in which a whole company gathers in one room and every pride breaks at once, is made a structural principle here more than in any earlier novel.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Where the form works, it is the knowledge. Myshkin’s presence makes people speak the truth about themselves, and the scandal scene, everyone assembled and everything said, is the form of that power: Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday, the evenings at Pavlovsk, the Epanchins’ reception. The narrator who loses confidence in the last part is itself a form of knowledge, since no one can explain Myshkin, including the voice that tells his story. But the form is also loose where the knowledge does not require it: the six months’ gap, subplots carried and dropped, a close that reports Aglaya’s fate at second hand. Change the structure of the scandal scenes and the book loses what it knows; change the serial looseness and it loses nothing. Hence a figure below the great formal novels.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The evidence is a century and a half of readings that have not settled who Myshkin is: a Christ, a failed Christ, or a figure whose goodness is itself a harm. Hermann Hesse’s essay on the novel (1919) read him as the man who has passed beyond good and evil; Mikhail Bakhtin made Dostoevsky’s polyphony a theory of the novel; Julia Kristeva read the Holbein and the book’s melancholy; Joseph Frank set it in its biography. The book holds each and refutes none. Ippolit’s confession alone has been read as Dostoevsky’s strongest case against his own faith. The formal yield is real too: the narrator’s late uncertainty, the paired women, the doubled crosses. Held below the top for the stretches that return less on rereading than they gave at first reading.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is Russian literature of the 1860s, the decade of Fathers and Sons, Crime and Punishment and War and Peace. The force: the holy fool made the hero of a modern novel, and the scandal scene made into structure. In its decade and language it is not the book that moved the field most: War and Peace redirected the novel itself, and within Dostoevsky’s own work the greater redirection belongs to Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The force is very high and the reach narrower than the force. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the novel of the saintly innocent in a corrupt world runs on after it; Hesse took it as a key to his age; Kurosawa moved it to postwar Hokkaido (Hakuchi, 1951); and Myshkin became, for the twentieth century, the type of the good man’s failure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
About one hundred and fifty-seven years. The text survives whole, in the serial and in the book edition. Presence has been continuous and wide: in print in Russia since 1874, through the Soviet years when Dostoevsky was officially suspect; translated into most written languages and retranslated into English several times; taught widely; filmed in Russia, Japan and elsewhere. Its surfaces most fixed to their moment, the nihilists of the Burdovsky affair, the talk of railways, Myshkin’s tirade against Catholicism, have dated and are read as period; the core has outlived them. Its presence is a step narrower than that of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, the Dostoevsky novels most read.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Russian as far as it can be judged without hearing it; Dostoevsky’s sentence is hasty, repetitive and abrupt, and that is charged only where it costs the work. The dialogue is a command of the first order: voices that interrupt themselves, confessions that turn into attacks, Lebedev’s buffoonery and Ippolit’s fevered argument each wholly distinct. The great scenes are built with complete control of crowd and timing: the end of the first part, the vase, the meeting of the two women, the vigil. Charged: the construction between those scenes, written to the month; the narrator’s explanatory summaries; the repetition of stock gestures, laughter, pallor, trembling lips; the haste of the close. A making with heights of genius and visible seams.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: General Ivolgin’s tale of serving Napoleon in Moscow as a boy, a comedy of lying, and the vigil over Nastasya Filippovna’s body. Do they obey one law? In large part, yes: both are humiliation, the lie told to preserve a self and the murder committed to possess one, and Myshkin meets both with the same unjudging pity. Lebedev’s farce and Ippolit’s despair share the novel’s physics of confession. But the law shifts as the book goes. The Myshkin of the first part, wise and sure, becomes in the last a figure the narrator cannot account for, and the narrator himself changes footing. Subplots open under one law and close by report. The range is very wide, and the law holds it with visible strain.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held are many and integrated. Consciousness at its extremes: the aura, the condemned man’s last minutes, Ippolit’s dying mind. The family: the Epanchins and their three daughters, the decayed Ivolgins. Money and class: the inheritance, the hundred thousand, Totsky’s purchase of a child’s future, the moneylender Ptitsyn. The generation: the nihilists, the boy Kolya. The state in its law and its scaffold. The sacred at its most extreme: the Holbein, faith and its loss, Russia’s Christ against Rome. Europe and Russia, from Switzerland to Pavlovsk. Illness and death. All of them pass through one man and the four people around him. Held below the great panoramic novels because history is a ground and labour all but absent.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 9.2, then The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable at 9.1. Heights reached in every part, from the money in the fire to the vigil behind the curtain; a century and a half of readings that have not settled who Myshkin is; a disclosure that pity which will not choose cannot save and may destroy; a Christ figure built into the action and tested against Holbein’s dead Christ; and a text continuously read, its dated surfaces read as period and its core intact.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.8, held by a serial written month by month without a settled end: the six months skipped and explained by report, the Burdovsky affair, General Ivolgin’s lies and Lebedev’s commentary longer than the book needs, Ippolit’s confession extended past need. Next above it, The Inner Law at 8.5, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.6: a law that shifts as the hero and the narrator change footing, a form loose where the knowledge does not require it, and seams between scenes of genius.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, the nearest by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, which The Inevitable, The Inner Law, The Living Form and The Made hold down.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Идиот (Idiot), scored as one novel in four parts. It was serialised in The Russian Messenger (Русский вестник) in 1868 and 1869 and published as a book in 1874; the novel as the author completed it is the unit. Every score is judged on the novel in Dostoevsky’s Russian, which is not in hand. Russian is quoted on this page only where its words are certain, and beneath each quotation stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation. Translation · Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s (2001) is the version best known to this reading and was used for sense, with Constance Garnett’s (1913) for comparison. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged to the novel. The spine and the great scenes are judged closely; the middle of the second and third parts, the Burdovsky affair, General Ivolgin and Lebedev’s circle, is known by episode rather than by chapter, and the figure that rests most on it is argued with that limit in view. The sound of Dostoevsky’s sentence is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged, save where its haste costs the construction. Names follow the usual English forms. Citations are by part. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of chapters, the length of the novel, the differences between the serial and the book, the reception on first publication, the names the notebooks give the hero and the author’s later judgments on the construction, are not given.