Reading The Idiot: the hero and other problems

The Idiot (Idiot, 1868) is perhaps the strangest and most problematic of Dostoevsky's major fictional works, and over 130 years after the novel was published, it continues to vex and divide critics. It lacks an easily definable plot, and has a messy, ad hoc structure, in which an enormous temporal gap opens up and the central story and relationships are sidelined in favour of sub-plots, with major characters disappearing, while apparently unimportant ones become central. Its hero, who bears no resemblance to Dostoevsky's initial conception, has invited the most contradictory interpretations, and its narrator, who at the beginning of the novel appears omniscient and sympathetic to Myshkin, by the end resembles the embodied chronicler of The Devils (Besy, 1871–72) and spurns the hero. Its confusion on the structural and thematic levels has led to the suggestion that it ought not to work as a novel at all, yet it remains compelling and retains a curious unity. Dostoevsky's question, ‘Who is the Idiot? A terrible rogue or a mysterious ideal?’ (reference to PSS in end note here instead of note 4, with vol/page ref. IX, 195), applies just as much to the novel as a whole as to its hero.

The Idiot also appears to lack several features of the quintessential Dostoevskian novel. For example, doubles in The Idiot are far less well developed than in his other fiction, and of little significance on the thematic or structural levels.