1. Dostoevskii, Fedor M., Idiot. Polnoe sobrame sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), vol. 8 Google Scholar. Citations are from this edition. Translations are my own. I wish to thank the editors of Slavic Review for honoring my request to cite from the novel in English, as well as Russian. My reading depends, in part, on retrieving the etymological wisdom of key Russian words such as prilichie and razlichať. It may be that a discourse on difference in relation to the human face could only be discerned in Dostoevskii by a reader who is not a native speaker of Russian and who has had to work the boundary between these two languages to speak her mind.

2. Although Jackson, Robert L. does not confront this question directly, he discusses the face in relation to the “moral-aesthetic spectrum” in Dostoevskii. See Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar, esp. 58ff.

3. For a discussion of painting in the novel, see Goerner, Tatiana, “The Theme of Art and Aesthetics in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot ,” Ulbandus Review 59 (1972): 79–82 Google Scholar, and Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 66-68 and 78-79.

4. For an extended meditation on this painting which takes its point of departure from Ippoliťs description see Kristeva, Julia, “Holbein’s Dead Christ,” trans. Roudiez, Leon S., in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Feher, Michel with Naddaff, Ramona and Tazi, Nadia (New York: Zone, 1989), 238–269 Google Scholar.

5. Danow, David K., “Semiotics of Gesture in Dostoevskian Dialogue,” Russian Literature 8 (1980): 41–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, convincingly argues that nonverbal forms of communication, such as gesture or silence, are full-fledged dialogic elements.

6. In the view of Miller, Robin Feuer, the narrative strategy of limited omniscience is a Gothic device to excite the reader’s sense of mystery for as long as possible. See Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 103 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This manipulation of the reader, however, is not an end in itself. Limited omniscience has positive significance in relation to the face, that sign of otherness behind which, in an absolute sense, one cannot go.

7. If one shows one’s face before one says one’s word—that is, if the face is not on the order of a sign in a system of signifiers, but is instead the unique sign or signal of the one who signifies his or her own self— then Bakhtin’s view that dialogue is the ultimate principle of Dostoevskii’s work may be misleading, at least in relation to this novel.

8. Izobraziť polozhitel’noprekrasnogo cheloveka”; see letter to S. A. Ivanova, 13 January 1868, in Dostoevskii, , Pis’ma v 4-kh tomakh, ed. Dolinin, A. S. (Moscow: Academiia, 1928-1959) 2:71 Google Scholar.

9. Joseph Leo Koerner deals with this and related questions in “Rembrandt and the Epiphany of the Face,” Res 12 (Autumn 1986): 5-32. Koerner’s work suggests one reason for Dostoevskii’s appreciation of Rembrandt.

10. See Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Lingis, Alphonso (Pittsburgh, Perm.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 78 Google Scholar. Throughout this study, my approach to the face has been inspired by the thinking and language of Levinas, for whom Dostoevskii, in turn, has been an acknowledged inspiration.

11. Jackson, Dostoevsky’s Quest for Form, 78-79, comments on the face of the condemned man as a subject for a painting. Because he situates his discussion in terms of Dostoevskii’s aesthetic speculations, rather than the prince’s teaching, he mistakes the subject as one for “ordinary vision,” “entirely appropriate to [Adelaida’s] surface realism.”

12. Levinas, Emmanuel, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Cohen, Richard A. (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 86 Google Scholar.

13. Ibid., 92.

14. Ibid., 87.

15. The prince’s way of regarding the other is analogous to the enabling receptivity of the psychotherapist. Each creates an intersubjective space for the revelation of the other, but, unlike the prince, the therapist makes a distinction between being responsible to, and being responsible for, the client. This limits intervention to the realm of the symbolic.

16. Jankélévitch, Vladimir, Le pardon (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967), 6.Google Scholar

17. I deliberately employ the language of the icon. The relation between the psychology of icon veneration and the ethics of facing is the subject of a forthcoming study.

18. Compare this action of the prince’s face with that of the high society guests who condescend at the Epanchin soiree. Identified variously as “stupendous,” “important,” or “higher” personages or faces (pp. 443-447), these characters inspire a kind of Mesopotamien awe that obliterates the face of the other, rather than eliciting it.

19. See, for example, Eigen, Michael, “On the Significance of the Face,” Psychoanalytic Review 71 (1984): 427–441 Google Scholar.

20. See Heschel, Abraham Joshua, The Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 124–127 Google Scholar, for a discussion of the Tselem, or image of God, in Hebrew thought. Especially relevant to the prince’s conduct is a quotation from Rabbi Joshua ben Levi: “A procession of angels pass before [a] man when he is traveling, and the heralds proclaim before him, saying: Make room for the image (eikonion) of God” (125, author’s emphasis).

21. Neuhäuser, Rudolf, “Semantisierang formaler Elemente im Idiot ,” Dostoevsky Studies [Klagenfurt] 1 (1980): 47–63 Google Scholar.

22. After the rozha comes the rylo, that encephalized surface of the body by which a beast invades and appropriates its environment with no awareness of the other. This degraded face, however, is more pertinent to the universe of Nikolai Gogol’ than to that of Dostoevskii.

23. Note the language—a virtual repudiation of otherness—of Rogozhin’s surly reply when the prince inquires, “Have you completely moved in here?”: “Yes, I’m at home here [literally, I am at home with myself, or, I am at myself]. Where else should I be?” (172).

24. Levinas, Emmanuel, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978)Google Scholar.

25. The painting mentioned by the prince at breakfast with the Epanchins (55) is assumed to be the Holbein original that he (and Dostoevskii) saw in Basel. While in Basel, however, Dostoevskii also viewed a painting by Hans Fries, “The Beheading of St. John the Baptist” (1514), in which the sainťs head is depicted with open eyes (Goerner, “Theme of Art and Aesthetics,” 82). Because the Holbein painting is not explicitly named in this scene, which graphically deals with faces and decapitated heads, Dostoevskii may have conflated these two paintings in the designation “Basel painting” (55).

26. Dostoevskii generally makes a semantic distinction between the looking that objectifies or observes [nabliudať] and the looking that engages the intersubjective dimension (words built on the root gliad-, such as vzgliad, gliadeť, or vzglianuť). Somewhere in between are verbs for watching or scrutinizing (smotreť, vsmatrivať sia). The prince is rarely associated with verbs of observation, which presume ethical noninvolvement.

27. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Rostel, R. W. (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973), 142 Google Scholar. On the theme of liminality, see Monas, Sidney, “Across the Threshold: The Idiot as a Petersburg Tale” in New Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Jones, Malcolm and Terry, Garth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. See also, Morson, Gary Saul, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of A Writer and the Tradition of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

28. Aglaia in the pique of her jealousy and Evgenii Pavlovich in the presumptuousness of his wit have the wrong subtext for the prince’s response to Nastas’ia. The prince would serve Aglaia “with his visor down,” as in Aleksandr Pushkin’s lyric “Zhil na svete rytsar’ bednyi,” whereas he openly offers Nastas’ia his face and his regard to forestall the nightmare of her madness. If Pushkin does haunt his relation to Nastas’ia, more probably it is the disturbing lyric, “Ne dai mne Bog soiti s uma.” This poem seems to mediate the prince’s horrified response when Nastas’ia appears at the pavilion. Convinced that she is mad, he sees her as a caged animal, “on a chain, behind iron bars, beneath the stick of a keeper” (p. 289). Pushkin evokes the horror of madness with similar images of beast, chain, iron bars, abusive keepers, and a cruel public come to taunt the crazed poet even as the music goers now madden Nastas’ia and call her an “animal” (p. 290). See Pushkin, A. S., Polnoe sobrante sochinenii v 10-i tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959), 2:384–386 Google Scholar. The prince inflects the self-reference of Pushkin’s utterance into the morally enlivened awareness of another: not “God forbid that / go mad . . . ,” but “God forbid that she go mad.”

29. Pomerants, G., “Kniaz’ Myshkin,” Sintaksis 9 (1981): 112–167 Google Scholar, has felt through the beauty (and goodness) of this character.