Idiot Dostoevsky analysis of the work. Problems and ideological meaning of the novel by F.M.

When creating the images of “The Idiot,” Dostoevsky was influenced by the works of Cervantes, Hugo, and Dickens. The trace of Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”, which became the cultural and spiritual model of the novel, is especially noticeable; Pushkin’s poem “Once upon a time there lived a poor knight...” was also quoted in it. Some motifs of the work go back to Russian fairy tales and epics. The Idiot reinterprets the apocrypha, primarily the legend of Christ's brother. Drawing closer to the New Testament is also essential.

Struck by the image of Holbein the Younger, who questioned the Transfiguration and, consequently, the Sonship of Christ, who affirmed death as the essence of earthly existence, Dostoevsky was inspired by the thought of art, which should serve the great purpose of confirming the Good and the redemptive gift of light to man, insight and salvation. The creative discovery of the writer is the person to whom all the meanings of the work are drawn, Prince Myshkin. The idea of ​​the sacrifice of the God-man, born to Dostoevsky on the eve of Easter, becomes the super-theme of the novel. The redemptive suffering of the Son of God, experienced as a modern event, is the rationale for the prototype of the “Idiot.” The drafts read: “Compassion is the whole of Christianity.” The Prince's recollection of Lyon and the scaffold is of crucial importance. The stories told by Myshkin about those sentenced to death are the apotheosis of a life pierced by a miracle. The hero brings to the St. Petersburg world and announces to Epanchin a covenant about the price of cosmic and personal existence, the value of which becomes so obvious at the precipice of death. The prince, remembering the political criminal, also names the vector of human transformation: to see with one’s own eyes the light of truth on earth, to touch heavenly beauty, to merge with the energy of God in the unity of church burning. Current time combines two views: from the scaffold down and from the scaffold up. One is associated only with death and fall, with the other - new life.

The novel “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky is a work about death and the power to overcome it; about death, through which the chastity of existence is learned, about life, which is this chastity. “Idiot” is a project of general and individual salvation. Life appears when torment has become sacramental torment, when a prayerful gesture has been transformed into a real following of the Redeemer. Myshkin, through his own destiny, repeats the mission of Sonship of God. And if at the psychological, plot level he can be considered as a “fool”, “righteous man”, then the mystical level of the image of Prince Myshkin neutralizes such comparisons, highlighting his attitude towards Christ. Myshkin has the ability to know the purity and innocence of the human soul, to see the primordial behind the layers of sin. For the novel as a whole, a spiritual visionary spirit is important, when the problem of the struggle for human destiny is visible through the artistic plot. The prince leaves on the very first day the covenant of the act: to find the beauty of the Redeemer and the Mother of God and follow it. One of the Epanchin sisters voices the ailment of the world: the inability to “look.”

The dogmatics of God's condescension towards people and the ascension of creation (“deification”) receives artistic embodiment in the images and ideas of the novel. Understanding the relationship between time and eternity, Dostoevsky strives to clarify the artistic calendar. The central day in the first part of “The Idiot” is Wednesday November 27, correlated with the celebration of the “Sign” icon of the Mother of God. It is in the appearance of the strange prince that Lizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina senses the extraordinary significance of the day. The image of the “Sign” suggests the further history of the world’s acceptance and rejection of the Child Christ. The apotheosis of the identification of Myshkin and the “baby”, “lamb” - in the episode of Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday. Then the prototype of the heroine is revealed: she is given the opportunity to become the Mother of God. The expected marriage of the prince and Nastasya Filippovna is the betrothal of Christ and the Church. But the heroine does not dare to choose between two radically different symbols: the holiness of Mary and the hellish convulsion of Cleopatra. She has not retained faith in the eternal source of life, she is characterized by spiritual homelessness, the world turns to hell for her.

The tragic beginning intensifies in the novel, since there is no approval of the Church. Dostoevsky creates plot situations so that the faces of the heroes appear in them, a new life is revealed. The New City - “Novgorod”, “Naples” - is a symbol of the author’s concept. However, the addition of earthly and heavenly Jerusalem does not occur. The writer does not seem to know the formidable Christ, the apocalyptic Judge. His God-man is always crucified, on the cross, always the Redeemer. In this regard, the interpretation of the image of Prince Myshkin turns out to be the most controversial. Along with the ideas expressed about his divine-human prototype, there is an idea about the “Christ-likeness” of the character and even his fundamental dissimilarity with Christ.

The idea of ​​mixing good and evil, the morbidity of the soul lies at the heart of Rogozhin’s image. And if Nastasya Filippovna is a spiritual symbol of confusion, then Parfen Rogozhin is a symbol of darkness, irrational captivity in darkness. The discrepancy between the reality of behavior and the given scale of existence is emphasized by the lack of fulfillment of personal names: Parfen - “virgin”, Anastasia - “resurrection”. At the same time, the name of the prince “Lev” is an indication of the image of the Child Christ. The mystery of transformation is also connected with the light that illuminates Myshkin during an epileptic seizure. It clearly correlates with the iconographic assist declaring the divinity of the Messiah. The symbolism of the protagonist’s “transmundaneity” is also supported by analogies highlighted in the flashbacks of the second part of the novel: the correspondence of Myshkin’s storyline to Christmas, Epiphany (the hero’s stay in Moscow) and Resurrection (the note “on Passion” to Aglaya).

The last three parts of the novel are the outcome of the greatest Christian events, demonstrating their apocalyptic sharpness. The apocalyptic Entry of the Lord, the apocalyptic Holy Thursday and Friday, and finally, the Resurrection from the dead, expected by the writer, is a break in time that exceeds earthly history and grants eternity. This is the mystical foundation of the novel. This unique interpretation by Dostoevsky of the coming of Christ allows the writer to hope for the rebirth of man and humanity, for the achievement of a spiritual paradise by a purifying soul. Numerous parallels with the Gospel of John reveal the meta-meaning of the image of the protagonist. For example, Myshkin’s words about faith are close to the twelfth chapter of the Gospel - the prayers of Christ, as well as the inscriptions on the icon “Help of Sinners” and the image “It is Worthy to Eat.” The leitmotif repeats the idea of ​​the need to restore personality, to renew the union with the Creator on the basis of boundless love, thanks to Christ’s beauty, by which the world will be saved. This is heaven; its complete acquisition is possible when there is no more time.

In a moment of the highest languor, similar to the prayer of the Redeemer on the Mount of Olives, Myshkin is faced with the madness of Nastasya Filippovna, who constantly appears in the form of a pagan goddess, and with the demonic possession of Rogozhin, who rejects the brotherhood of the cross. Three parts of the novel pass under the sign of disaster for the world, deprived of salvation. The essence of the ascension of the cross is revealed at Myshkin’s birthday, built around the framework of Holy Thursday. The symbolism of the Last Supper contrasts with Lebedev’s dejection and the gestures of Rogozhin and Ippolit Terentyev. It is characteristic that it is in this part of “The Idiot” that the appearance of the God-Man is comprehended. The theological intensity of the question stems from the perception of the painting by Hans Holbein. In contrast to the image from which “another may lose faith,” Myshkin soulfully speaks about the undyingness of faith, even in the most criminal heart. The essence of Christianity is heard in the words of the “simple pullet” - about the spiritual joy of repentance, about the joy of being sons of God. The copy in Rogozhin’s house clearly replaces the cross, built on the site of the crucifixion. In the heights, instead of the light shown to Myshkin, there is the darkness of destruction, instead of the paradise offered by the prince, there is a grave. The silhouette of the Basel horror blesses the certainty that God is dead forever. His status in the St. Petersburg space is clearly iconoclastic. From the sight of this picture, both Rogozhin himself and Nastasya Filippovna, shaky in it, lose faith. Hippolytus, whose “Explanation” is a philosophical justification of personal unbelief, counts himself among the eyewitnesses of the undoubted defeat of the Anointed One, witnesses of the Divine failure. The Gnostic Hippolytus calls the earthly a corpse collection, an accumulation of decayed things. It seems to him that the brute and evil force of materiality is destroying the Savior. This actually leads the teenager dying of consumption to rational warfare against God, but at the same time his heart preserves the memory of the Messiah.

The idea of ​​Hippolytus was formed on the day of the Ascension of the Lord, being the antithesis of the meaning of the Christian holiday. By attempting suicide, he poses a daring challenge to the universe and the Creator. A failed shot is a sign of God’s providential participation in human destiny, the inscrutability of Providence, a guarantee of a different life. This refutes the hopelessness of the picture, giving the scope of being beyond time. The world has fallen into the trap of casuistry (including Catholic and socialist) and miraculousness, from which it is possible to get out after the final defeat of evil only in an apocalyptic transformation.

Myshkin sets an example of life; to be worthy of it is the task of humanity. The chance, common to everyone, is to acquire the “idiocy” inherent in the prince, i.e. wisdom of vision. The author's sophiological hope complements the ideological structure of the novel; it opposes positivist knowledge. Myshkin’s seizures reveal the ugliness of the earthly, living in the circumstances of the fall of nature, but in the spiritual focus there is no pain, no horror, there is no ugliness and beauty rests. So in the “Dead Christ” the Son of God is still alive. The idea of ​​a new world, of the formation of society as a Church, is also connected with the image of Aglaya Epanchina. But she is also unable to accept the feat of the myrrh-bearing wife, which Myshkin calls for. Reading Pushkin’s ballad, Aglaya outlines her own ideal, which appears in the form of an idol, an idol, and she demands the same from the prince. The value of the "paladin's" life's succession is interpreted by her as a blind offering, the fury of pagan blindness, similar to the act of Cleopatra's slave. The one whose name is “brilliant” speaks of a dark passion. The episode of the meeting between Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna reveals the impossibility of Christian love being realized in them, which dooms the prince to the loneliness of Golgotha. The final chapters of the novel are marked by the coincidence of the numerical symbolism of the resurrection and the eighth (apocalyptic) day. The arrival of Prince Myshkin at Rogozhin’s house, when Nastasya Filippovna had already been killed, restores the reproduction of the “Descent into Hell” icon, the Easter icon. The Second Coming and the Ascension saved lives. In response, humanity gathered around the sufferer: Kolya Ivolgin, Evgeny Pavlovich Radomsky, Vera Lebedeva, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, who knew the covenant of the Russian Christ. The epilogue narrows the scope of the work, serving the purpose of warning, revealing the novel's presentation into reality itself. Man must become an icon and a temple, this is what humanity must become. By presenting the prince as a “sphinx,” Dostoevsky frees the voices of the characters and the assessments of readers as much as possible from the dictates of his own position.

The end of the 1860s - the beginning of the 1870s - the manifestation and design of Dostoevsky's new aesthetic system, which is based on the idea of ​​​​the correlation of the aesthetic ideal with the Incarnation, Transfiguration and Resurrection. Dostoevsky consistently followed the path of mystical realism, the symbolic abilities of which made it possible to bring the super-essential to the level of being, thereby eliminating as much as possible the moment of disintegration between literary creativity and Christian creation.

The first dramatization of the novel was carried out in 1899 at the Maly and Alexandrinsky theaters. The most significant was the production of G. A. Tovstonogov in 1958 on the stage of the Bolshoi Drama Theater. M. Gorky. In the BDT performance, the role of Myshkin was played by I.M. Smoktunovsky, and Rogozhina - E.A. Lebedev. Another interpretation of the novel is in the triptych play of the Moscow Drama Theater on Malaya Bronnaya, staged by S. Zhenovach.

F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot” is today one of the most popular and sought-after works of Russian literature. For many years now, various interpretations of this great creation have been created and continue to be created: film adaptations, opera and ballet readings, theatrical productions. The novel is popular all over the world.

Work on the novel began in April 1867 and lasted almost a year and a half. The creative impulse for the author was the case of the Umetsky family, where the parents were accused of child abuse.

1867 was a difficult time for the writer and his family. Dostoevsky was hiding from creditors, which forced him to go abroad. Another sad event was the death of a three-month-old daughter. Fyodor Mikhailovich and his wife experienced this tragedy very hard, but the agreement with the magazine “Russian Messenger” did not allow the creator to be overwhelmed by grief. Work on the novel completely absorbed the author. While in Florence, in January 1869, Dostoevsky completed his work, dedicating it to his niece S. A. Ivanova.

Genre, direction

In the second half of the 19th century, writers paid special attention to the novel genre. Various subgenres emerged related to direction, style, structure. Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" is one of the best examples of a philosophical novel. This type of prose arose during the Enlightenment in Western European literature. It is distinguished by its emphasis on the thoughts of the characters, the development of their ideas and concepts.

Dostoevsky was also much interested in exploring the inner world of the characters, which gives grounds to classify “The Idiot” as a psychological novel.

The essence

Prince Myshkin arrives from Switzerland to St. Petersburg. With a small bundle of things in his hands, dressed inappropriately for the weather, he goes to the Epanchins’ house, where he meets the general’s daughters and secretary Ganya. From him, Myshkin sees a portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, and later learns some details of her life.

The young prince stops at the Ivolgins, where he soon meets Nastasya herself. The girl’s patron woos her to Ganya and gives her a dowry of 70 thousand, which attracts a potential groom. But under Prince Myshkin, a bargaining scene takes place, where Rogozhin, another contender for the hand and heart of the beauty, takes part. The final price is one hundred thousand.

Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is deeply touched by the beauty of Nastasya Filippovna, he comes to her that same evening. He meets many guests there: General Epanchin, Ferdyshchenko, Totsky, Ganya, and closer to night Rogozhin himself appears with a newspaper bundle containing the promised hundred thousand. The heroine throws money into the fire and leaves with her chosen one.

Six months later, the prince decides to visit Rogozhin at his house on Gorokhovaya Street. Parfyon and Lev Nikolaevich exchange crosses - now, with the blessing of Mother Rogozhin, they are brothers.

Three days after this meeting, the prince goes to Pavlovsk to Lebedev’s dacha. There, after one evening, Myshkin and Aglaya Epanchina agree to meet. After the date, the prince understands that he will fall in love with this girl, and a few days later Lev Nikolaevich is proclaimed her groom. Nastasya Filippovna writes a letter to Aglaya, where she convinces her to marry Myshkin. Soon after this, a meeting of the rivals takes place, after which the engagement of the prince and Aglaya is dissolved. Now society is looking forward to another wedding: Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna.

On the day of the celebration, the bride runs away with Rogozhin. The next day, the prince goes in search of Nastasya Filippovna, but none of his acquaintances know anything. Finally, Myshkin meets Rogozhin, who takes him to his house. Here, under a white sheet, lies the corpse of Nastasya Filippovna.

As a result, the main character goes crazy from all the shocks he receives.

The main characters and their characteristics

1. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin. In the drafts, the writer calls the protagonist Prince Christ. He is the central character and is opposed to all other heroes of the work. Myshkin interacts with almost all participants in the action. One of its main functions in the novel is to reveal the inner world of the characters. It is not difficult for him to call his interlocutor for a frank conversation, to find out his innermost thoughts. For many, communication with him is like confession.
2. The antipodes of Myshkin are Ganya Ivolgin and Parfen Rogozhin. The first of them is a weak-willed, feminine young man, seduced by money, who wants to get out into the world at any cost, but will still feel shame for it. He dreams of status and respect, but is forced to endure only humiliation and failure. The rich merchant Rogozhin is obsessed with one passion - to own Nastasya Filippovna. He is stubborn and ready to do anything to achieve his goal. He will not be satisfied with any other outcome, but life in fear and doubt, whether she loves him or whether she will run away, is not for Rogozhin. That's why their relationship ends in tragedy.
3. Nastasya Filippovna. The fatal beauty, whose true nature was guessed only by Prince Myshkin. She can be considered a victim, she can be a demon, but what is most attractive about her is what makes her similar to Cleopatra herself. And this is not only captivating beauty. There is a known case when an Egyptian ruler dissolved a huge pearl. A reminiscence of this act in the novel is the episode where Nastasya Filippovna throws one hundred thousand rubles into the fireplace. The prototype of the heroine is considered to be Apollinaria Suslova, Dostoevsky's beloved. She has contempt for money, because it bought her shame. The poor girl was seduced by a rich gentleman, but he became burdened by his sin, so he tried to make a decent woman out of his kept woman by buying her a groom - Ganin.
4. The image of Nastasya Barashkova sets off Aglaya Epanchina, antipode and rival. This girl is different from her sisters and mother. She sees in Myshkin much more than an eccentric fool, and not all of her relatives can share her views. Aglaya was waiting for a person who could lead her out of her ossified, decaying environment. At first she imagined the prince as such a savior, then a certain Pole revolutionary.

There are more interesting characters in the book, but we don’t want to drag out the article too much, so if you need character characteristics that are not here, write about it in the comments. And she will appear.

Topics and issues

1. The problems of the novel are very diverse. One of the main problems identified in the text is selfishness. The thirst for prestige, status, and wealth makes people commit vile acts, slander each other, and betray themselves. In the society described by Dostoevsky, it is impossible to achieve success without patrons, a noble name and money. In tandem with self-interest comes vanity, especially inherent in General Epanchin, Gan, and Totsky.
2. Since The Idiot is a philosophical novel, it develops a huge wealth of themes, an important one of which is religion. The author repeatedly addresses the topic of Christianity; the main character involved in this topic is Prince Myshkin. His biography includes some biblical allusions to the life of Christ, and he is given the function of "savior" in the novel. Mercy, compassion for one's neighbor, the ability to forgive - other heroes also learn this from Myshkin: Varya, Aglaya, Elizaveta Prokofievna.
3. Love presented in the text in all its possible manifestations. Christian love, helping one's neighbor, family, friendly, romantic, passionate. In Dostoevsky's later diary entries, the main idea is revealed - to show three varieties of this feeling: Ganya is vain love, Rogozhin is passion, and the prince is Christian love.

Here, as with the characters, one can spend a long time analyzing the themes and issues. If you are still missing something specific, please write about it in the comments.

the main idea

The main idea of ​​Dostoevsky is to show the decomposition of Russian society in the layers of the intelligentsia. In these circles there is spiritual decline, philistinism, adultery, and double life - practically the norm. Dostoevsky sought to create a “beautiful man” who could show that kindness, justice and sincere love are still alive in this world. Prince Myshkin is endowed with such a mission. The tragedy of the novel lies in the fact that a person who strives to see only love and kindness in the modern world dies in it, being unadapted to life.

The meaning laid down by Dostoevsky is that people still need such righteous people who help them face themselves. In a conversation with Myshkin, the heroes get to know their souls and learn to open it to others. In a world of falsehood and hypocrisy, this is very necessary. Of course, it is very difficult for the righteous themselves to settle into society, but their sacrifice is not in vain. They understand and feel that at least one corrected fate, at least one caring heart awakened from indifference is already a great victory.

What does it teach?

The novel “The Idiot” teaches you to believe in people and never judge them. The text provides examples of how one can instruct society without placing oneself above it and without resorting to direct moralizing.

Dostoevsky's novel teaches to love, first of all, for salvation, to always help people. The author warns that about low and rude actions committed in the heat of the moment, after which you will have to regret, but repentance may come too late, when nothing can be corrected.

Criticism

Some contemporaries called the novel “The Idiot” fantastic, which caused the writer’s indignation, since he considered it the most realistic work. Among researchers over the years, from the creation of the book to the present day, various definitions of this work have arisen and continue to arise. Thus, V.I. Ivanov and K. Mochulsky call “The Idiot” a tragedy novel, Yu. Ivask uses the term evangelical realism, and L. Grossman considers this work a novel-poem. Another Russian thinker and critic M. Bakhtin explored the phenomenon of polyphonism in Dostoevsky’s work; he also considered “The Idiot” to be a polyphonic novel, where several ideas are developed in parallel and several voices of the characters are heard.

It is noteworthy that Dostoevsky’s novel arouses interest not only among Russian researchers, but also among foreign ones. The writer’s work is especially popular in Japan. For example, critic T. Kinoshita notes the great influence of Dostoevsky’s prose on Japanese literature. The writer drew attention to the inner world of man, and Japanese authors willingly followed his example. For example, the legendary writer Kobo Abe called Fyodor Mikhailovich his favorite writer.

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PHENOMENOLOGICAL READING OF THE NOVEL “IDIOT” by F.M. DOSTOEVSKY
Trukhtin S.A.

1) Many researchers of F.M. Dostoevsky agree that the novel “The Idiot” is the most mysterious of all his works. Moreover, this mystery is usually associated, ultimately, with our inability to understand the artist’s intention. However, the writer left, although not in a very large number, but still in a fairly clear form, instructions about his ideas; even various preliminary plans for the novel were preserved. Thus, it has already become commonplace to mention that the work was conceived as a description of a “positively beautiful person.” In addition, numerous insertions in the text of the novel from the Gospel left almost no one in doubt that the main character, Prince Myshkin, is indeed a bright, extremely wonderful image, that he is almost a “Russian Christ” and so on. And so, despite all this seemingly transparency, the novel, by general agreement, still remains unclear.
Such hiddenness of the design allows us to speak of a mystery that beckons us and makes us want to take a closer look at the shell of the form, stretched over a semantic frame. We feel that there is something hidden behind the shell, that it is not the main thing, but the main thing is its basis, and it is on the basis of this feeling that the novel is perceived as one that has something hidden behind it. At the same time, since Dostoevsky, despite a sufficient number of explanations, could not fully reveal the meaning of his creation, then from this we can conclude that he himself was not fully aware of its essence and gave out, as often happens in creativity, the desired for what actually happened, i.e. for real. But if this is so, then there is no point in trusting documentary sources too much and hoping that they will somehow help, but we should once again take a closer look at the final product, which is the object of this research.
Therefore, without questioning the fact that Myshkin is indeed a good person, in general, nevertheless, I would like to object to this, which has already become common, approach, in which the failed project of Christ is explored.
2) “Idiot” is Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin. The fact that this name contains some kind of contradiction, I would say ironic, has been noticed for a long time (see, for example,). Obviously, the juxtaposition of the names of Lev and Myshkin somehow does not even harmonize with each other, they get in the way and get confused in our heads: either our hero is like a lion, or a mouse. And it seems that the main thing here is not in the associations that arise with these animals, but in the presence of the contradiction itself, which their proximity indicates. Likewise, the internal, immanent inconsistency is also indicated by the fact that the hero is a figure with the high title of prince, who suddenly receives the low filling of “idiot.” Thus, our prince, even at the first superficial acquaintance, is a highly contradictory figure and far from that perfect form that, it would seem (in view of Dostoevsky’s preliminary notes) can be associated or identified with him. After all, perfection by its nature stands on some edge that separates the earthly, erroneous and absurd from the infallible ideal, endowed with only positive properties - positive in the sense of the absence of any shortcomings or unfinished projects. No, our hero is not without flaws, with some peculiarities of irregularity that, in fact, make him human and do not give us the right to identify him with a certain speculative Absolute, which in everyday life is sometimes called God. And it’s not without reason that the theme of Myshkin’s humanity is repeated several times in the novel: in Chapter 14. Part I. Nastasya Filippovna (hereinafter referred to as N.F.) says: “I believed in him... as a person,” and further in chapter 16. Part I: “I saw a person for the first time!” In other words, A. Manovtsev was right when he asserted that “...we see in him (in Myshkin - S.T.)... a very ordinary person.” Dostoevsky, perhaps, in his rational consciousness, imagined some semblance of Myshkin and Christ, and maybe even the “Russian Christ”, as G.G. writes about. Ermilov, but the hand brought out something different, different, much more humane and close. And if we understand the novel “The Idiot” as an attempt by its author to express the inexpressible (ideal), then one should seem to admit that he did not fulfill his idea. On the other hand, Prince Myshkin also found himself in a situation where it was impossible to carry out his mission, which suggests the true result of the novel: it turns out to be inseparable from the failure of a certain idea by our hero, a man named Prince Myshkin. This result emerges objectively, structurally, regardless of whether Fyodor Mikhailovich strived for it or not.
The last circumstance, i.e. then, whether Dostoevsky was striving to achieve the collapse of Myshkin’s project, or there was no such initially formalized desire, but it appeared as if “by itself”, at the end of the work, this is all a rather intriguing topic. In a way, this is again a return to the question of whether the author of the masterpiece explicitly understood what he was creating. Again, I am inclined to give a negative answer here. But on the other hand, I will argue that the writer had a certain hidden thought, hidden primarily for himself, which beat inside his consciousness and did not give him peace. Apparently, it was precisely the internal requirement to explain to oneself the essence of this thought that served as the motivating motive for the creation of this truly great and integral work. This thought sometimes escaped from the subconscious, as a result of which a network of peculiar islands arose, relying on which one can try to pull out the meaning for which the novel was written.
3) It is best to start research from the beginning, and since we are trying to comprehend the essence, this beginning should be essential, not formal. And if in form the whole story begins to be told from the meeting of Myshkin and Rogozhin in the community with Lebedev on the train, then in essence it all begins much earlier, with Lev Nikolaevich’s stay in distant and comfortable Switzerland and his communication with the local residents. Of course, the novel presents a brief history of the hero before his Swiss period, but it is presented rather fadedly and concisely compared to the description of the main events that are associated with the relationship between the prince and the Swiss girl Marie. These relationships are very remarkable and, in essence, are the key to understanding the entire novel, therefore, it is in them that the semantic principle lies. The correctness of this position will become obvious over time, as we present our entire point of view, and now the reader may recall that a similar position is held, for example, by T.A. Kasatkina, who drew attention to the story with the donkey: in Switzerland, Myshkin heard his cry (after all, as she subtly noted, the donkey screams so that it looks like the cry of “I”) and realized his selfhood, his I. True, it is difficult to agree with by the fact that precisely from the moment the prince heard “I”, i.e. heard, therefore, realized his Self, his whole project began to unfold, since Dostoevsky is not talking about awareness. But it still seems absolutely true that being abroad, in splendid Switzerland with its wonderful nature and the “white thread of a waterfall” is precisely the state from which the semantic shell of the novel begins to unfold.
The cry of the donkey “I” is the hero’s discovery of his subjectivity, and the story with Marie is his creation of a project that will later be destroyed. Therefore, it would be more correct to say that the story with the donkey is, rather, not a semantic beginning, but a prelude to this beginning, which could have been omitted without losing the content, but which was inserted by the writer as that crack in the formal narrative outline, through which our mind squeezes through in search of meaning. The cry of a donkey is an indication of the methodology with which one should move, or, in other words, it is an indication (label) of the language of the narrative. What kind of language is this? This is the language of “I”.
To be more clearly understood, I will speak more radically, perhaps at risk, but at the same time saving time due to secondary explanations: the donkey shouts that Myshkin has reflection, and he, indeed, suddenly sees this ability in himself and, therefore, acquires clarity of inner gaze. From this moment on, he is able to use reflection as a tool with a special language and philosophy inherent in this tool. Myshkin becomes a philosopher-phenomenologist and all his activities should be assessed taking into account this most important circumstance.
Thus, abroad, the prince’s focus on the phenomenological attitude of consciousness is revealed. At the same time, at the end of the novel, through the lips of Lizaveta Prokofyevna, Dostoevsky tells us that “all this...Europe, it’s all one fantasy.” Everything is correct! In these words of Lizaveta Prokofyevna, a hint leaked out to the secret of the novel, which itself is not yet a secret, but an important condition for its comprehension. Of course, abroad is Myshkin’s fantasy, in which he discovers his selfhood. What kind of fantasy? It doesn’t matter which one – any one. Abroad is not the physical location of the prince, no. Abroad is his immersion into himself, the fantasizing of an ordinary person, which he really is, about certain circumstances.
Note that this interpretation differs from the one according to which Switzerland is presented as paradise and, accordingly, Myshkin is seen as the “Russian Christ” who descended from heaven (from the Swiss paradise) to the sinful (i.e., Russian) earth. At the same time, one cannot fail to note some similarities with the proposed approach. Indeed, paradise is substantially immaterial, like the result of fantasy; the exit from paradise presupposes materialization, just as the exit from the state of fantasy presupposes the turning of consciousness from itself to the outside world, i.e. involves the implementation of transcendence and re-formation of oneself by consciousness.
Thus, the dissimilarity between the “evangelical” (let’s call it that) approach and what is proposed in this work can hardly have strong ontological foundations, but rather is a consequence of our desire to get rid of excessive mysticism, which is evoked whenever we talk about divine. By the way, Fyodor Mikhailovich himself, although he inserted quotations from the Gospel into the novel, but urged not to start a conversation about God in an explicit form, since “all conversations about God are not about that” (chapter 4, part II). Therefore, following this call, we will use not the evangelical language, but the language in which competent philosophers think, and with the help of which we can bring out what is hidden in the man Myshkin. This other language is certainly not reducible to the evangelical one and its use can give new non-trivial results. If you like, the phenomenological approach to Prince Myshkin (and this is what is proposed to be done in this work) is a different perspective that does not change the object, but gives a new layer of understanding. Moreover, only with this approach can one understand the structure of the novel, which, in the fair opinion of S. Young, is closely connected with the consciousness of the hero.
4) Now, with the understanding that everything begins with some fantasy of Lev Nikolaevich, we should understand the subject of the fantasy. And here we come to the story of Marie and Myshkin’s attitude towards her.
It can be briefly summarized as follows. Once upon a time there was a girl, Marie, who was seduced by a certain rogue, and then thrown away like a dead lemon. Society (pastor, etc.) condemned her and excommunicated her, while even innocent children threw stones at her. Marie herself agreed that she had acted badly and took the abuse of herself for granted. Myshkin took pity on the girl, began to look after her, and convinced the children that she was not guilty of anything, and even moreover, she was worthy of pity. Gradually, not without resistance, the entire village community switched to the prince’s point of view, and when Marie died, the attitude towards her was completely different than before. The prince was happy.
From the point of view of the phenomenological approach, this whole story can be interpreted as something that in his mind Myshkin was able to connect using logic (he acted with the help of persuasion, used logical arguments) the public morality of the village and pity for those who deserve it. In other words, our hero simply created a speculative scheme in which public morality does not contradict pity, and even corresponds to it, and this correspondence is achieved in a logical way: logically, pity is aligned with morality. And so, having received such a speculative construction, the prince felt happiness in himself.
5) Next, he returns to Russia. Obviously, as has often been noted, Russia in the novel acts as a kind of opposite to the West, and if we agreed that the West (more precisely, Switzerland, but this clarification is not important) represents a designation of the phenomenological attitude of consciousness, reflection, then, in contrast to it It is logical to identify Russia with the external setting in which people find themselves most of the time and in which the World appears to be an objective reality independent of them.
It turns out that after creating a speculative scheme for arranging the World, Myshkin emerges from the world of his dreams and turns his gaze to the real world. Why does he do this, if not for some purpose? It is clear that he has a goal, which he tells us (Adelaide) at the beginning of the novel: “... I really, perhaps, am a philosopher, and who knows, maybe I really have the idea of ​​teaching” (chapter 5, part I) , and further adds that he thinks he will live smarter than everyone else.
After this, everything becomes clear: the prince constructed a speculative scheme of life and decided, in accordance with this scheme, to build (change) life itself. According to him, life should obey certain logical rules, i.e. be logically conditioned. This philosopher imagined a lot about himself, and everyone knows how it ended: life turned out to be more complicated than far-fetched schemes.
Here it can be noted that, in principle, the same thing happens to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who placed his logical manipulations (about Napoleon, about louse and law, etc.) above his own emotions, opposed to conceptual ones arguments. He stepped over them, and as a result, his emotions punished him through the pangs of fear, and then - his conscience.
It turns out that in the novel “The Idiot” Fyodor Mikhailovich remains true to his general idea about the existentiality of the human soul, within the framework of which a person is guided primarily by the flow of sensations, existence, but its essential side is secondary and not so important in order to live a worthy and happy life.
6) What is the peculiarity of the novel “The Idiot” in comparison with other works of Dostoevsky? Actually, this is what we have to find out. At the same time, having received at our disposal an understanding of the general idea that goes beyond the scope of a single novel and covers the entire life attitude of the writer in his mature creative years, and also having received the right to use the language of phenomenology as the most accurate tool in this situation, we will slightly change the structure of our presentation and begin follow the narrative outline of the work, trying to grasp the thoughts of its creator. After all, the structure of the presentation depends not only on the level of understanding, but also on the tools that the researcher has. And since our understanding, as well as our tools, have been enriched, it is logical to change our approach with new opportunities.
7) The novel begins with Myshkin traveling on a train across Russia, returning from Switzerland, and meeting Rogozhin. In essence, this action represents the transition of the hero’s consciousness from a state of fantasy (abroad) to external consciousness (Russia). And since from the very beginning Rogozhin demonstrates his wildness, the element of life, and later throughout the entire novel this property of his does not weaken at all, then the release of the prince’s consciousness into reality occurs in parallel, or simultaneously with his immersion in the stream of uncontrollable life sensations that Rogozhin personifies . Moreover, later (chapter 3, part II) we learn that, according to Rogozhin himself, he has not studied anything and does not think about anything (“Do I really think!”), so he is far from what -or comprehension of reality and there is nothing in it except bare sensations. Consequently, this hero represents a simple, meaningless existence, a being with which Prince Myshkin brings into reality in order to streamline it.
It is important that in this entry into reality another remarkable meeting of Myshkin takes place - with Nastasya Filippovna (hereinafter - N.F.). He doesn’t see her yet, but he already knows about her. Who is she, the magical beauty? Everything will be revealed soon. In any case, it turns out to be what Rogozhin’s violence is directed towards, what existence is moving towards.
At the Epanchins, to whom Myshkin comes immediately upon his arrival in St. Petersburg, he already encounters the very face (photograph) of N.F., which amazes him and reminds him of something. From the story about the fate of N.F. a certain similarity between this heroine and Marie is quite clearly evident: both suffered, both are worthy of pity, and both are rejected by society in the person of the village flock - in the case of Marie, and in the person of people associated with the nobility, in particular, the Epanchins - in the case of N.F. . At the same time, N.F. – something different from Marie, not quite similar to her. Indeed, she was able to “build” her offender Totsky in such a way that any woman would envy. She lives in complete prosperity, is beautiful (unlike Marie) and has a lot of suitors. Yes, and they call her by her first name and patronymic, respectfully and proudly - Nastasya Filippovna, although she is only 25 years old, while the main character - Prince Myshkin - is sometimes called less respectfully, by her last name, and the Epanchin daughters, despite their membership in secular circles, and are often called by simple names, although they are approximately the same age as the “humiliated and insulted” heroine. In general, N.F. turns out to be not identical to Marie, although he resembles her. First of all, it reminds Myshkin himself, since from the very first glance at her he felt that he had seen her somewhere, felt a vague connection between her and himself: “... this is exactly how I imagined you... as if I had seen you somewhere... I have your eyes I definitely saw it somewhere...maybe in a dream..." (chapter 9, part I). Likewise, N.F. on the very first day of their acquaintance, after the prince’s intercession for Varya Ivolgina, she confesses the same thing: “I saw his face somewhere” (chapter 10, part I). Apparently, here we have a meeting of heroes who were familiar in another world. Rejecting Gnosticism and all mysticism, and adhering to the accepted phenomenological approach, it is best to accept that N.F. - this is what was remembered in Myshkin’s mind as Marie, i.e. - an object of compassion. Only in real life this object looks completely different than in fantasy and therefore complete recognition does not occur either on the part of the prince or on the part of the object of pity (Marie-N.F.): the subject and the object met again, albeit in a different form.
Thus, N.F. is an object that requires compassion. According to the prince’s project, the World should be harmonized by bringing morality and pity into logical conformity, and if this can be done, then happiness will come, apparently, universal, universal happiness. And since the object of pity is N.F., and the society, which condemns her for unknown reasons and rejects her from itself, is represented primarily by the Epanchin family, the idea of ​​​​the prince is concretized by the requirement for himself to convince the Epanchins, and others, to edit their attitude towards N .F. towards pity. But this is precisely what in the very first minutes encounters resistance (quite expected and reminiscent of the situation in Switzerland) from society: it is not ready for such compassion.
Myshkin, in accordance with his project, must overcome this resistance, but will he succeed in his plans? After all, he finds himself in a difficult situation. On the one hand, existence strives towards the object of pity (Rogozhin). On the other hand, a society that gives a moral assessment, and therefore evaluates in general, does not strive for it, i.e. does not evaluate it adequately.
The point here is as follows: if a being strives for something, then this something must be something opposite to it. What is the opposite of reality? Opposite to being is its being, the being of being. Then N.F. turns out to be the personification of the existence of all things, and a being that is worthy of pity, in the sense that it is worthy that all the nuances of one’s soul should be directed towards it in order to achieve an adequate state of consciousness. To put it simply, it is pity as a process (or act) that is through which the object of pity is able to be perceived adequately, i.e. through which being can be known. And here is society, i.e. that subjectivity that gives an assessment is not ready to evaluate, in fact, to cognize being; the subject refuses to know. This is a logical contradiction (after all, the subject is the one who knows) and Myshkin must overcome it.
8) Rogozhin-being constantly strives for NF-being, which constantly eludes him, but does not let him go, but, on the contrary, beckons. The society-subject does not want to evaluate what is meant to be evaluated - being.
Here we can recall Heidegger, who said that being reveals itself only in the situation of our preoccupation with it. In Dostoevsky, the analogue of Heidegger’s existential care is pity, pity, so Myshkin, turning into reality, reveals the reluctance of some subjectivity (society) to move towards revealing its essence, its meaning, its ontological center. A society without a foundation - this is how the prince perceives the reality approaching him. This does not at all fit with his speculative ideas about the world order, within the framework of which society is epistemologically conditioned through pity and compassion. And then he decides to take a leap: in N.F.’s house. (chapter 16, part I) he offers her his respect: “I will respect you all my life.” The prince decided to repeat what was performed in Switzerland (constructed in the mind) and take the place of that subjectivity that will carry out the act of mercy - cognition. Thus, the World, apparently, must find its existential center, be filled with its foundation and harmonize. Moreover, according to his plan, the entire Ecumene of the universe should be harmonized, since this was precisely his original idea.
Thus, Myshkin’s idea was embodied in his decision to replace himself, his Self, with something objective (society), independent of him. He decided to replace the natural and objective things that happen in the World as they develop naturally (or, perhaps, make them dependent, which does not fundamentally change the matter) with his subjective Self.
Myshkin in reality repeated his scheme: he personally, by his example, began to show all people the need for pity - firstly, and secondly, he decided to use logical argumentation to convince society to show compassion. Only in his mind (in Switzerland) the object of his attention was Marie, but in reality (in St. Petersburg) - N.F. He succeeded with Marie, but will he succeed with N.F.? And in general, should one act in reality as it appears in the imagination?
9) To answer this question, the topic of execution is very active in the first part (chapters 2, 5).
At the beginning (chapter 2) it is heartfeltly told about the experience of a person condemned to execution, and it is told from the point of view of Myshkin as if Dostoevsky himself was expressing all this (and we know that there are historical reasons for this, his personal experience), as if this is not Myshkin before us , and Fyodor Mikhailovich himself directly shares his experiences and thoughts. There is a feeling that the author is trying to convey his idea to the readers in a pure, undistorted form and wants the reader to accept it without doubt. What idea is he preaching here? It is absolutely clear what kind - a person before certain death is completely clearly aware of the horror of the situation that has arisen, which lies in the vision of his end, his finitude. A person’s consciousness, in the second before inevitable death, is faced with the obviousness of the fact of its limitations. In the fifth chapter, this topic is developed: it is said that a few minutes before execution one can change one’s mind and redo this, that this limited period of time allows consciousness to accomplish something, but not everything. Consciousness turns out to be limited, in contrast to life itself, which next to death turns out to be infinity.
Apparently, Dostoevsky in plots with capital punishment wants to say: human consciousness exists inside this huge, endless World and it is secondary to it. After all, limited consciousness is limited because it is not capable of everything, in particular, it is not capable of absorbing the reality and infinity of this World. In other words, possibility in consciousness is not like what is possible in living reality. It is precisely this dissimilarity between consciousness and the external world that is emphasized most acutely and prominently “in a quarter of a second” before death.
And if so, then Dostoevsky needs stories about people’s experiences before execution in order to show the impossibility of transferring the results of thinking into reality directly, without their coordination with life itself. The author prepares the reader for rejection of Myshkin’s seemingly magnanimous act towards N.F., when he invites her to be with him, when he invites her to “respect her all her life.” This action of the prince, normal and natural from an everyday point of view, turns out to be false and erroneous from the point of view of the philosophical analysis of the novel.
The feeling of this fallacy intensifies against the background of the fact that he invites Adelaide to draw the scene before the moment of execution: Adelaide, as a part of society, is not able to see the meaning (this is also expressed in the fact that she, along with everyone else, does not appreciate and does not feel sorry for N.F. .) and does not know for himself a real, full-fledged pictorial theme (goal). A prince who is able to understand people, easily characterizes them and sees the meaning of current events, so that it is even strange for the reader to listen to his self-characterization as a “sick” or even an “idiot”, this prince advises Adelaide to write, apparently, the main and most relevant for him on that moment meaning - a picture with an image that essentially denotes a person’s awareness of his limitations and imperfections. In fact, Myshkin suggested that Adelaide affirm the fact of totality, the primacy of this World in relation to the consciousness of the individual. And so he, who thinks so, suddenly decides to crush the reality of life with his idealistic idea and thereby affirm the opposite of what he himself insisted on a little earlier. This is an obvious mistake, which later cost him dearly.
10) But why then did Myshkin make this mistake, what led him to it? At first, he had a scheme for the world order, but did not put it into practice; something kept him from doing so. But at a certain point this restriction was lifted. This is what we should now look into in more detail.
First of all, let us recall the important fact that Myshkin appears on the pages of the novel as a very insightful analyst, an expert on human souls, capable of seeing both the meaning of what is happening and the essence of human nature. For example, when Ganya first appeared before him with a false smile, the prince immediately saw someone else in him, and he felt about him that “When he is alone, he must look completely wrong and perhaps never laughs” (chap. 2, part I). Further, in the Epanchins’ house, at their first meeting, he suggests to Adelaide a plot for a painting, the meaning of which is to depict the act of the prisoner realizing his death, his limitations, i.e. it teaches you to see the meaning of what is happening (chapter 5, part I). Finally, he gives a classic in simplicity and correctness, i.e. a very harmonious description of the Epanchin ladies: Adelaide (the artist) is happy, Alexandra (the eldest daughter) has a secret sadness, and Lizaveta Prokofyevna (maman) is a perfect child in everything good and in everything bad. The only person he could not characterize was Aglaya, the youngest daughter of the family.
Aglaya is a special character. The prince tells her: “You are so good that you are afraid to look at you,” “Beauty is difficult to judge... beauty is a mystery,” and later it is reported that he perceives her as “light” (chapter 10, part III). According to the philosophical tradition coming from Plato, light (the sun) is usually considered as a condition for vision, knowledge of being. It is unclear whether Dostoevsky was familiar with this tradition and therefore it is better to pay attention (from the point of view of obtaining reliable results) not to this characteristic of Aglaya, but to another, completely obvious and not raising any objections, i.e. at her beauty, which you are “afraid to look at,” and which is a mystery. This is the riddle that Prince Myshkin refuses to solve, and not only refuses, but is afraid to do so.
In other words, Aglaya is an intriguing exception of as yet unclear properties. Everything else lends itself to Myshkin’s vision, and this is the main thing: our hero is generally able to move from reality to thoughts about it, and, by almost universal recognition, he does this very skillfully and believably. Here Myshkin moves from reality to thoughts filled with real content, emanating from reality, having roots in reality, so that they can be called real thoughts. Thus, for him and for all of us, the existence of a connection between reality and thoughts in general turns out to be obvious and, therefore, the question is raised about the possibility of the reverse transformation: thoughts - reality. Is this possible, is it possible to realize your ideas in reality? Are there any prohibitions here? Again we have come to the question that has already been asked, but now we already understand its inevitable nature.
11) In this regard, we will continue our search for the reason for Myshkin’s lifting of the ban on the use of purely logical constructions in life. We found out that he began to carry out the activities of his external consciousness (i.e., being in the setting of natural perception of the world) through the implementation of a completely legal transformation in the Epanchins’ house: reality - real thought. But then he goes to move into Gana’s apartment, into a room. There he meets with the entire Ghani family, including a very remarkable person - the head of the family, retired general Ivolgin. The exclusivity of this general lies entirely in his constant imagination. He comes up with stories and fables, pulling them out of thin air, out of nothing. Here too, when meeting Myshkin, he comes up with a story about the fact that Lev Nikolaevich’s father, who was actually convicted (perhaps unfairly) in the case of the death of one of his subordinate soldiers, is not guilty due to the fact that this very soldier, whom, By the way, they buried him in a coffin and found him in another military unit some time after the funeral. Indeed, since a person is alive, then he is not dead, and if so, then purely logically it follows that Father Myshkin is innocent due to the absence of corpus delicti, although in reality this whole story is nothing more than fiction: a dead person cannot be resurrected. But in General Ivolgin he is resurrected, so that his ideas turn out to be divorced from life. At the same time, the general insists on their authenticity. It turns out that this dreamer is trying to pass off his thoughts, which do not have solid foundations in reality, as thoughts with precisely such foundations. The trick is that the prince, apparently, believes him. He buys into a pattern whereby unreal thoughts are identified with real ones. He, who sees the meaning, i.e. as if he sees thoughts, he does not see the difference between real and unreal thoughts. The beauty of the logical construction, within the framework of which his father turns out to be innocent, suppresses the laws of life, and Myshkin loses control over himself, becomes bewitched and falls under the influence of the syllogism. For him, what is correct (truthful) is not what comes from life, but what is harmonious and beautiful. Subsequently, through Ippolit, Myshkin’s words will be conveyed to us that “beauty will save the world.” This famous phrase is usually savored by all researchers, but in my humble opinion there is nothing but showiness here, and within the framework of our interpretation, it would be more correct to portray this maxim as Dostoevsky’s emphasizing exactly the opposite of what is usually perceived, i.e. not the positive nature of this phrase, but the negative one. After all, Myshkin’s statement that “beauty will save the world” most likely means “everything beautiful will save the world,” and since a harmonious syllogism is certainly beautiful, it also falls here, and then it turns out: “a syllogism (logic) will save the world.” This is the opposite of what the writer is actually trying to show in all his work.
Thus, we can say that it was beauty that turned out to be the reason Myshkin made his most important mistake: he identified (no longer distinguished) a thought based on reality with a thought that was divorced from it.
12) Our position can be criticized on the grounds that for us beauty acts as a kind of pointer to the negative, although it can also contain positive features. For example, sisters Epanchina and N.F. beautiful or even beauties, but they are not at all something negative, bad, etc. To this it should be answered that beauty has many faces and, as Fyodor Mikhailovich put it, “mysterious,” i.e. contains hidden sides. And if the open side of beauty amazes, hypnotizes, delights, etc., then the hidden side must be different from all this and be something that is separated from all these positive emotions. In fact, Alexandra, despite her father’s high position, beauty and gentle disposition, is still not married, and this saddens her. Adelaide can't see sense. Aglaya is cold, and later we learn that she is very contradictory. N.F. Throughout the novel she is called “sick”, “crazy”, etc. In other words, all these beauties have one or another flaw, a wormhole, which is stronger, the more obvious the beauty of each of them. Consequently, beauty in Dostoevsky is not at all synonymous with complete positivity, virtue, or anything else like that. Actually, it’s not for nothing that he exclaims through Myshkin about N.F.’s photograph: “...I don’t know if she’s good? Oh, if only it were good! Everything would be saved!” Dostoevsky seems to be saying here that “if only there were no flaws in beauty and the idea of ​​beauty corresponded to life! Then everything would be brought into harmony, and the logical scheme would be saved, would be accepted by life! After all, if beauty really were a kind of ideality, then it would turn out that the ideal logical scheme as extremely beautiful does not differ from the feeling that we get from beautiful reality, therefore, any harmonious syllogism (and there are no other syllogisms) turns out to be identical with some (beautiful) reality, and the prohibition in the form of limited consciousness on Myshkin’s fulfillment of his speculative idea would be fundamentally lifted. Myshkin strives through beauty, in particular, through the beauty of logic, to obtain justification for his project.
13) An example that confirms our idea about the negative load of beauty in Dostoevsky in his novel is the scene in N.F.’s house, in which the guests talk about their bad deeds (chapter 14, part I). Indeed, here Ferdyshchenko tells a true story about his latest infamy, which causes general indignation. But here are the clearly fictitious statements of the “venerable” gene. Epanchin and Totsky turn out to be quite handsome, from which they only benefited. It turns out that the truth of Ferdyshchenko appears in a negative light, and the fiction of Epanchin and Totsky - in a positive light. A beautiful fairy tale is more pleasant than the brutal truth. This pleasantness relaxes people and allows them to perceive a beautiful lie as the truth. They just want it to be this way, so, in fact, it is their desire for good that they often confuse with good itself. Myshkin made a similar mistake: beauty for him turned out to be a criterion of truth; in his desire for it as the ultimate value, everything beautiful began to acquire the features of attractiveness.
14) Why, may I ask, did beauty become a criterion of truth for Myshkin?
Truth is a thought that corresponds to reality, and if beauty, or, in another transcription, harmony, turns out to be decisive here, then this is possible only in a situation where the harmony of the World is initially assumed, its arrangement according to some super-idea of ​​divine or some other supreme origin. In essence, this is nothing more than the teaching of St. Augustine, and ultimately Platonism, when the Platonic matrix of being predetermines the consciousness’s grasp of existence.
Being deeply convinced of the falsity of the predestination of human existence, Dostoevsky builds the entire novel on this. He plunges Myshkin into believing in the existence of a certain single pre-established harmony of the universe, within the framework of which everything beautiful and harmonious is declared true, having unconditional roots in reality, connected to it in such a way that they cannot be separated without damage and, therefore, cannot be separated. Therefore, for him, beauty turns into a kind of principle (mechanism) for identifying any idea, including an obviously false (but beautiful) one, with the truth. A lie, being beautifully presented, becomes similar to the truth and even ceases to differ from it.
Thus, the fundamental, most initial mistake of Myshkin, as presented by Dostoevsky, is his attitude towards the teachings of Plato. Let us note that A.B. came close to the vision of the novel’s protagonist’s commitment to platonism. Krinitsyn, when he rightly asserted “... in the aura the prince sees something that is for him a truer reality than what is visible in reality,” but, unfortunately, he did not formulate this matter explicitly.
15) A follower of Plato, Myshkin, accepted beauty (pre-established harmony) as a criterion of truth and, as a result, confused the beautifully concocted gene. Ivolgin a false idea with a real thought. But this was not yet the final reason for him to begin to implement his speculative project, i.e. so that he would take the place of society and offer N.F. your high praise. For this to be possible, i.e. in order to finally remove the restriction on the right to use his scheme, he needed something additional, namely, he needed to obtain proof that the mental forecast based on reality was justified and embodied in what was expected. In this case, the following chain of circuits is built:
1) real thought = unreal thought (fantasy);
2) real thought turns into reality,
from which we get the unconditional conclusion:
3) fantasy turns into reality.
To obtain this chain, i.e. To obtain the right to implement clause 3, Myshkin needed clause 2, and he received it.
Indeed, the prince came from Switzerland with a letter about the inheritance. And although at first his chances were clearly not enough, the matter was not obvious, but still, on the basis of the letter he received, he assumed the reality of the opportunity that had arisen and tried to put the real idea into practice. At first, as we know, he somehow didn’t succeed: and the gene. Epanchin and everyone else who could help him simply brushed him off as soon as he started talking about his business. The situation seemed completely deplorable, because it was after receiving this letter that the prince got out to Russia, and here it turns out that no one wants to hear about him. It seems that Mir is resisting Myshkin’s desire to find out the question that worries him, as if he is saying: “What are you doing, dear prince, quit, forget and live a normal life, like everyone else.” But Myshkin doesn’t forget everything, and doesn’t want to be like everyone else.
And so, when the reader had practically forgotten about the existence of the letter, at the very peak of the events of the first part of the novel, in N.F.’s apartment, Myshkin suddenly remembers it, remembers it as a very important matter, which he never lost sight of and kept in mind. mind, because I remembered about it when, it would seem, I could forget about everything. He takes out the letter and announces the possibility of receiving an inheritance. And, lo and behold, the assumption comes true, the inheritance is practically in his pocket, the beggar turns into a rich man. It's like a fairy tale, like a miracle come true. However, it is important that this fairy tale had a real background, so here there is the fact that Myshkin carried out his plans and received proof of the legitimacy of the transformation: real thoughts turn into reality.
All! A logical chain has been built, and from it one can draw an unconditional (from the point of view of this constructed semantic structure) conclusion about justice and even the need for transformation: fantasy - reality. Therefore, Myshkin, without hesitation at all, rushes to implement his project - he takes the place of the evaluating society and offers high praise to N.F. (“I will respect you all my life”). Thus, the prince’s erroneous platonism (erroneous from Dostoevsky’s point of view) turns into a gross mistake in life - the realization of his abstract fantasy.
16) Dostoevsky plunges the prince into the implementation of his project, into pity for N.F., i.e. into the knowledge of existence. But it turns out to be completely different from what he expected to see, remembering the story with Marie. After all, Marie as an object of pity (being) is completely motionless and only perceives those movements towards her that are carried out by Myshkin. In contrast, N.F. suddenly, completely unexpectedly for Myshkin, she shows activity, and she herself feels sorry for him, since she rejects all his proposals, citing the fact that she considers herself a fallen woman, and does not want to drag him to the bottom with her.
It must be said that the activity of N.F. catches your eye from the very beginning: could she have trained Totsky and the rest of society without this activity? Of course not. Then perhaps it has no relation to being; maybe it does not mean being, but something else?
No, all these doubts are in vain and N.F., of course, denotes what they strive to know (in the context of Dostoevsky’s poetics - to pity), i.e. being. In fact, in the novel she appears to us (and Myshkin) gradually: first we hear about her, then we see her face, and only then she herself appears, hypnotizing the prince and making him her servant. This is how mystery only appears. Isn’t existence mysterious? Further, in ch. 4, part I we read: her “look looked - as if asking a riddle,” etc. Here N.F. it is quite obviously an object that requires solving, i.e. cognition. N.F. - this is being, beckoning to itself, but slipping away as soon as you notice it. At the same time, it does not seem as it really is. For example, in the Ivolgins (chapter 10, part I), Myshkin, who knows how to recognize an essence, says to N.F.: “Are you really what you thought you were now? Could it be!”, and she agrees with this: “I’m really not like that...”. In other words, N.F. in the philosophical construction of the novel, it denotes being not only according to the formal characteristics discussed above (its opposite being, Rogozhin, strives for being-N.F.), but also due to the numerous coincidences of the characteristics that are immanent in being with the characteristics of its person.
Thus, in contrast to the being that Myshkin imagined in his Swiss fantasies, in reality being turned out to be different, not motionless and passive, but with a certain amount of activity, which itself rushed towards him and turned him into its object of pity. What do we have here? The first is that being turns out to be active, the second is the discovery by the subject that he himself also turns out to be an object. Myshkin found himself on the threshold of immersion in himself, in reflection.
17) Entering into reflection is not an easy task, and before this happens, the events described in the second part of the novel will take place. However, before starting to comprehend them, it is useful to think about why Dostoevsky needed to plunge Myshkin into the recesses of his own self?
Apparently, he is simply trying to follow the course of the functioning of consciousness: Myshkin’s desire to harmonize the World results in an attempt to cognize existence and he becomes a subject, revealing the activity of the object to which he has rushed. The existential (essential) meaning of this object quite naturally (Dostoevsky prepared us for this nature in advance) turns out to be not what our hero expected to see. In this case, a closer look at the subject of knowledge is required, which is expressed in the fact that since being does not seem to us as it really is, and it is given only in a distorted form in the form of phenomena, then it is necessary to study these phenomena, or reflections of the root cause object in consciousness. This creates the need for a reflective look at things.
18) The second part of the novel begins with Myshkin tuning his consciousness to a phenomenological vision of the World. For this, he has a good basis in the form of the inheritance he received, which, in addition to giving the prince the right to become a subject of knowledge and pushing him to carry out his mission, showed him and everyone else the existence of his ego. After all, property in its essence is a deeply selfish thing and, no matter how one treats it, it is a consequence of the owner’s selfishness. Therefore, at the moment when Myshkin became rich, he acquired an ego center in himself. If not for this, then perhaps he would not have needed to become a phenomenologist; but Dostoevsky endowed him with property, directing (obviously deliberately) the conveyor of events in a certain direction.
19) At the beginning of the second part, Myshkin leaves for Moscow to formalize his inheritance, in other words, to constitute his ego. There, after him, Rogozhin and N.F. follow, and this is understandable: existence (Rogozhin) and the being of existence (N.F.) coexist only in the presence of a subject (Myshkin), and their coexistence is like a certain pulsation, when They either connect (identify) for a moment, or separate (assert their difference). Likewise, the prince for a moment gets along with N.F. and immediately disperses; the same thing with Rogozhin. This trinity Rogozhin - Myshkin - N.F. (Myshkin is in the middle as a mediator between them) cannot live without each other, but they also do not agree with each other forever.
It is important that Dostoevsky describes the stay of this trio in Moscow as if from the outside, from other people’s words, as if he was retelling what he heard. This circumstance is interpreted differently by researchers, but I assume that this means a refusal to describe in detail the process (act) of registration, i.e. constitution of the ego-center. Why this is so is definitely difficult to say, but, most likely, Fyodor Mikhailovich simply does not see the mechanics of this process and puts into a black box what happens during it. He seems to be saying: in a certain state of consciousness (in Moscow) the formation of one’s pure Self (ego - center) somehow takes place; how this happens is unknown; it is only known that this self-constitution takes place against the background of the presence of the external pole of being and existence - presence in a form in which it is otherwise impossible. Another possible explanation for the writer’s fleeting view of the events in Moscow may be his reluctance to unnecessarily drag out the narrative with secondary scenes that are not directly related to the main idea of ​​the work.
20) Nevertheless, the question arises why Dostoevsky needs Myshkin to acquire an ego center, if he already seemed to have it from the moment he heard the cry of a donkey in Switzerland.
The fact is that the ego center in Switzerland did not have the property of substantiality, it was purely fictitious, fantasized: the prince at that time accepted the existence of a certain ego center, but he had no reason for this. Now, after turning his gaze to real life, he received such a foundation (inheritance) and on this basis he set out to grasp a new, substantial ego - center.
It must be said that this act is deeply reflexive, and its implementation should mean the prince’s gradual entry into the phenomenological attitude of consciousness. For its part, this movement, strictly speaking, is impossible without the presence of an ego - a center that provides it. Dostoevsky, apparently, decided to break this vicious circle, suggesting that at first the ego - center is put forward as a hypothesis (as a fantasy). Next, there is an appeal to the reality of this World, where this hypothesis is substantiated and taken as a postulate, so far without piercing the shell of reflection. And only having a postulated ego-center does the subject decide to approach himself, to reflect.
21) Now let’s consider the form in which Myshkin’s approach to the internal state of consciousness is described.
Immediately upon arrival from Moscow to St. Petersburg, when exiting the train car, he allegedly saw “the hot gaze of someone’s two eyes,” but “having looked more closely, he could no longer discern anything else” (Chapter 2, Part II). Here we see that Myshkin experiences a kind of hallucination when he begins to imagine certain phenomena that either exist or not. This is similar to that reflexive state in which you doubt what you saw: either you saw reality itself, or a glimpse of it. Further, after some time, the prince comes to Rogozhin’s house, which he found almost on a whim; He almost guessed this house. At this point, an association immediately arises with actions in a dream, when you suddenly acquire almost supernatural capabilities and begin to do things that would seem impossible in the waking state, without at all suspecting their unnaturalness. Similarly, guessing Rogozhin’s house among the numerous buildings of St. Petersburg appears as something unnatural, as if Myshkin had become a bit of a magician or, more precisely, as if he found himself in some kind of dream in which the observed reality loses its materiality and turns into a phenomenal stream of consciousness. This flow began to dominate already at the station, when the prince saw a pair of eyes looking at him, but it began to be fully expressed as our hero approached Rogozhin’s house. Presence in real consciousness with fluctuational jumps into reflection is gradually replaced by a situation where these fluctuations intensify, increase in time and, finally, when the prince found himself inside the house, the jump suddenly grew to such an extent that it became stable, and, along with reality, was designated as an independent fact of Myshkin's being. This does not mean that the prince was completely immersed in reflection; he is still aware that reality does not depend on him, is independent as a substantial force, but he already knows about the existence of the World from the point of view of “phenomenological brackets” and is forced to accept this along with reality itself.
22) What was the stability of the emergence of a reflexive vision of the World in Myshkin? This was expressed primarily in the fact that the previous unclear, fleeting hallucinations now, in Rogozhin’s house, acquired quite clear outlines, and he saw the same eyes that had appeared to him at the station - Rogozhin’s eyes. Of course, Rogozhin himself did not admit that he really was spying on the prince, and therefore the reader is left with some feeling that he was really hallucinating at the station, but now the phantom eyes have materialized and ceased to be mystical and otherworldly. What was previously semi-delusional has now acquired the quality of “strange”, but no longer mystical at all. Rogozhin’s “strange” look indicates either that he himself has changed, or to the changes that have occurred in Myshkin, to whom in his new state everything begins to seem different. But throughout the entire novel (except for the very end), Rogozhin practically does not change, and Myshkin, on the contrary, undergoes significant metamorphoses, therefore, in this case, the acceptance that Rogozhin suddenly acquired a “strange”, unusual look encounters resistance from the entire structure of the work . It is simpler and more consistent to consider this episode as a result of the fact that it was the prince who changed in his mind and the narrator, who presents the events in the third person, simply gives out the flow of events in a new perspective without comment.
Further, the prince ceases to control what he himself does. This is shown in the example of the theme with the knife (chapter 3, part II): the knife seemed to “jump” into his hands. Here the object (knife) appears in the field of vision of the subject (prince) unexpectedly, without his efforts or intentions. It seems that the subject ceases to control the situation and loses his activity, loses himself. Such a half-asleep state may in some way resemble a state in the phenomenological setting of consciousness, in which the whole World is felt as some kind of viscosity, and even one’s own actions begin to be perceived as someone else’s, so that picking up a knife can easily seem like someone else’s act (action) , but not your own, and, therefore, the appearance of this knife in your hands, as well as the turning to the knife of consciousness, turns out to be a “leap” that seems to be independent of you. The mind here refuses to connect the appearance of a knife in your hands with the activity of consciousness; as a result, you get the feeling that the object either “itself” fell into your hands, or someone else put effort into it.
23) Thus, the prince in Rogozhin’s house acquires a stable reflective vision of the World. And then he receives a warning not to get carried away with this matter, a warning in the form of a picture of the murdered Christ.
Myshkin saw this painting by Holbein while abroad, and here, at Rogozhin’s, he came across a copy of it.
At this point, one could probably speculate that the original of the painting was in Basel, and its copy was in Russia. But it seems that Dostoevsky did not pay much attention to this circumstance; it was more important for him to once again show the hero something significant, directly related to the course of the action.
Many researchers of the novel “The Idiot” (see, for example) believe that through this picture the writer sought to show the impossibility of overcoming the laws of nature, because in it Christ, who died in significant suffering, does not resurrect in fact. Moreover, his entire tormented body inspires great doubt as to whether he will be able to resurrect in three days, as required by Scripture. I will allow myself to use this idea, since it is it that, apparently, is the main one here for Dostoevsky, since, in essence, it is a reminder of the existence of nature, the real World, the laws of which are so strong that they hold within their limits even the one who is called from them to break out. And even more so, all this applies to the mere mortal Myshkin. For him, this picture appears after acquiring a reflexive attitude of consciousness and calls not to delve into one’s abyss, not to break away from reality, not to enter into solipsism. She seems to say: “Prince, watch out!” This line is further strengthened by the fact that the theme of death in the novel, as explained above, should show the limitations of the human being and should keep him from presenting himself as an all-encompassing and omnipotent infinity.
24) The warning to Myshkin did not work. Indeed, leaving Rogozhin’s house with a reflective vision of the World and a warning about the danger lurking in it, the prince wandered around the city almost not like a carnal man, but like a shadow and became like an immaterial phantom, which is a pure phenomenon of someone’s consciousness. Whose? Obviously, he turned into a phenomenon of his own consciousness, into his own reflection. He is no longer he, but someone else, ceasing to give an account of his actions, as if someone invisible is leading him by the hand. At the same time, his idea of ​​the last seconds before epilepsy, the onset of which he suddenly began to expect, is given: in these seconds “the feeling of life, self-awareness almost increased tenfold.” In fact, here we are talking about touching one’s pure Self, so that at the moment of epilepsy (according to the prince), identification occurs with one’s pure being, when “there will be no more time,” since it, pure being, or, in other words, pure Self, the transcendental ego, the ego - the center (all this is one), temporalizes itself and for this reason alone cannot be in the temporal flow (just as something cannot be in itself, i.e., designate the place of its presence relative to itself). Later, Husserl and Heidegger would come to the same conclusion, considering human existence as self-modernization.
Before epilepsy, i.e. in a borderline state, from the position of which the pure Self is already visible, although it does not seem to be in an obvious form, Myshkin comes to the conclusion: “What is the matter that this is a disease?...What does it matter that this tension is abnormal, if the very result, if a minute of sensation, recalled and considered already in a healthy state, turns out to be extremely harmony, beauty, gives an unheard of and hitherto unknown feeling of completeness, proportion, reconciliation and enthusiastic prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life? In other words, here the hero comes to affirm the highest moment of life in self-identification with his pure being; the meaning of life turns out to be turning to oneself, a kind of meditation; such reflection in which an endless reflection of oneself in oneself occurs, when the differentiation between the self-identifying center and what this center is called upon to compare with itself is lost; His transcendental subject and object merge into one point and turn into the Absolute.
It turns out that Myshkin, before epilepsy, is inclined to become the center of the constitution of this entire World; he forgot (or did not understand, or did not accept) the warning of Holbein’s painting.
25) Myshkin accepted the presence of inner being, in which, as if at one point, all his thoughts and sensations merge. But what then to do with N.F., who also represents being, and such a being that is beyond the consciousness of the prince? This external pole, as a certain significance worthy of knowledge, threatens to elude him, and his entire project is in danger of collapse. In other words, he is faced with the task of getting out of the current situation, i.e. the task of substantiating the existential significance of N.F. in new conditions, and here he puts forward his famous formula: “Compassion is the most important and, perhaps, the only law of existence of all humanity.”
Looking at this phrase more closely, it is easy to notice an amazing thing: being (note, not existence!), it turns out, has a certain law. How can it be that being (non-existent), the ultimate semantic generalization, has a law, i.e. the rule to which it obeys. After all, such a rule is nothing more than a kind of meaningfulness, and then it turns out that the ultimate meaning is subordinate to meaningfulness. Even if we assume that this meaningfulness is ultimate, then it still becomes absurd: the ultimate is subordinate to itself, i.e. designates itself as inferior to itself.
All these contradictions are removed if the “law of being” is considered as the “law of the entry of being into consciousness,” in other words, the “law of cognition of being,” which immediately refers to the “way of cognition of being.” The latter is already devoid of any contradictions and absurdities. In this case, everything becomes clear and understandable: compassion, or pity, is immersion in someone else’s soul, accepting its experiences as one’s own. Compassion presupposes the merging of human emotions into one whole, into a single living organism, and it is through it, according to Myshkin the phenomenologist, that the distinction between each individual ego-center for all people is removed, so that internal and external being for each subject (and for the prince too) merge into one whole. Being in a state of reflection ceases to threaten the overall project. It is only necessary to adjust the immediate goals: now one should cognize not the external world, but the internal one, and only then, through the operation of pity, move on to generalization to the human community, i.e. to the entire universe. By and large, all this is an expression of the prince’s Fichteanism, with the only difference that in Fichte the task of transcendence was resolved with the help of free will, and in Myshkin (as presented by Dostoevsky) - with the help of the existential of pity, which in Heidegger in the 20th century. It will turn into the existential concern.
26) What do we have? In general, we have the following: Prince Myshkin came up with (decided) that the World needed to be improved. He began to carry out this improvement through knowledge of it. Naturally, this process gave way to the desire, first of all, to see (know) one’s pure Self, from the position of which (according to the prince’s plan) it is only possible to correctly and consistently carry out one’s mission. And in this state, he moves after a familiar pair of eyes (chapter 5, part II), until they materialize in Rogozhin, who raised a knife over him, apparently the same one that “jumped” into his, Myshkin’s, hands and which we, the readers, associate with disobedience to the will of the subject. This independence, like something inevitable, hung over the prince and was ready to prove its omnipotence over him, but he exclaimed “Parfen, I don’t believe it!” and everything suddenly ended suddenly.
The prince was in deep reflection (we found this out above) and in this state he refused to perceive the danger looming over him as a reality. For him, the whole World began to appear as a phenomenological stream of pure consciousness, devoid of material substance. That’s why he didn’t believe in the reality of Rogozhin’s attempt to kill him: he didn’t believe that Parfen was serious and wasn’t joking, but he didn’t believe that Parfen with the knife was real, not fictitious. His preliminary feelings that Rogozhin wants to kill him intensified to the idea that Rogozhin is the result only of his own sensations and the perception of these sensations by his own consciousness. “Parfen, I don’t believe it!” - this is a painting of solipsism, in which Myshkin is hopelessly stuck, despite the recent warning by Holbein’s painting.
As soon as this happened, as soon as he indicated his hopeless self-absorption, Dostoevsky immediately plunges him into an epileptic fit. Immediately before this, an “extraordinary inner light” appears to Myshkin’s consciousness, and then “his consciousness faded away instantly, and complete darkness fell.” It turns out that although the prince, before the attack, strived for the center of constitution, for the pure Self, and during epilepsy at the first moment he, apparently, reaches it (when he sees the “extraordinary inner light”), but immediately after that everyone leaves thoughts and images, so that the achieved center ceases to be the center. Consequently, in the movement towards oneself there is a moment of loss of everything, including the loss of oneself; Moreover, this moment comes on its own, without the desire of the subject, thereby denoting the loss of any activity by the subject, the denial by the subject of himself, so that the movement towards the ego-center ends in a complete collapse, loss of purpose, and therefore it, this movement, is false, erroneous.
In other words, Dostoevsky shows that the method chosen by Myshkin for harmonizing (improving) the World turns out to be unsuitable, leading to nowhere, to nothing. Understanding your ego center does not give you anything, and to achieve your goal you need a new attempt in a new direction.
27) The prince began to carry out such an attempt in Pavlovsk, where he went after the Epanchins.
Pavlovsk is some kind of new state of consciousness, different from St. Petersburg, but not far from it. And since in the St. Petersburg period we saw Myshkin both in a natural attitude of consciousness (the first part of the novel) and in a state of solipsism (Chapter 5, Part II), then Pavlov’s state should be somewhat different from both, i.e. should be between them. In other words, in Pavlovsk our hero equally accepts the existence of the external and the internal, without taking any one-sided position. Myshkin begins a new attempt to implement his project as a dualist.
28) Before considering all subsequent news, it is useful to examine the question of what Dostoevsky’s painful state means in the novel.
To begin with, let us note that not only Myshkin, who suffers from periodic mental disorder, is called a crazy person, an idiot, but also the seemingly mentally healthy N.F. and Aglaya. Sometimes one or the other character throws something in their direction like “she’s crazy,” etc. In particular, in relation to N.F. Lev Nikolaevich himself expressed himself more than once in this spirit. What could this madness mean?
Lauth is inclined to believe that Dostoevsky has a “cruel formula” throughout his entire work: all thinking is a disease, i.e. a madman is one who thinks. I don’t know what about all the things by Fyodor Mikhailovich, but in “The Idiot” the situation seems somewhat different.
Indeed, it seems no coincidence that the epithet “crazy”, etc. always expressed by someone who never reflects or, at least, at the moment of utterance is in the position of reality: Myshkin in relation to himself (chapters 3, 4, part I), Ganya in relation to Myshkin many times, Elizaveta Prokofyevna - to Aglaya , gene. Epanchin and Myshkin - towards N.F. throughout the novel, etc. And since “crazy”, “abnormal” are automatically positioned in our minds as different from others, this difference must lie in opposition to ordinary reality. Madness in the work does not mean so much thinking, as Lauth believed, but rather the fact that a character with such a property is directly related to the ideal side of the World, that his carnal form is only an appearance that does not reflect his content, and the content itself is not carnal, not material - in the sense that it has no essential relation to it. “Crazy” is some kind of ideal substance.
29) Dualism is usually understood as that point of view when the existence of both the real and ideal worlds is equally accepted (in contrast to monism, within the framework of which the World is one, and the real and ideal are its different sides). So Myshkin’s dualism resulted in his stratification into two opposite in spirit doubles - Evgeniy Pavlovich Radomsky and Ippolit.
Quite a lot has been written about doubles in The Idiot, and everyone agrees that Hippolytus is the prince’s double. There is no doubt that this is indeed the case. After all, he, like the prince, periodically hallucinates, remains in himself and presents this reflection as something significant, so that this tuberculosis patient appears to be the double that characterizes the reflexive side of Myshkin.
At the same time, almost no one noted that Evgeniy Pavlovich was also a double. Only he is no longer the personification of reflection, but, on the contrary, demonstrates his focus on life as it is in its pragmatic truthfulness. Evgeny Pavlovich is the double who was born from the real part of Myshkin’s consciousness.
You can wince at what has been said: somehow all this was given out quickly and simply. And where is the evidence, the dear reader will ask, and why did the prince become a dualist, and why did he “come out” with two doubles (and not three, four... ten)?
The questions are legitimate, but they should be addressed not to the one who decrypts, but to the one who encrypted. I am simply stating the facts, which boil down to the fact that after the hero falls into epilepsy and leaves for Pavlovsk, two heroes with opposite aspirations and characters appear on the stage of the narrative next to Myshkin, reminiscent of Myshkin himself in different periods of time: Evgeniy Pavlovich resembles him in the first part of the novel, when he speaks well and sensibly about completely different, but certainly real things concerning the characters of people, the relationships between them, and the Russian order; Hippolyte, on the other hand, resembles the prince in the first five chapters of the second part of the novel with his shadows and desire to perceive the whole world in phenomenological brackets.
It can be assumed that Dostoevsky plunges the hero first into deep reflection, and then into dualism in order to show his general position from different sides, and to show it so that no one has any doubts about its falsity. In other words, Fyodor Mikhailovich, apparently, sought to formulate the greatest credibility of Myshkin’s mistake, which lies in his desire to logically harmonize the World, i.e. in an effort to improve the World, ultimately, not by doing something worthwhile in this life, but by simple and worthless knowledge. But life, no matter how you know it, will still remain a mystery and there is nothing else left but to live it with dignity, doing your job. But Myshkin did not accept this, went a different route and ended up nowhere.
30) But why, after all, dualism? This can be easily achieved in the following way. We saw two obvious doubles of Myshkin. Physically, they are performed as heroes independent from each other, and it is this independence of theirs that allows us to conclude that the prince now appears to us as one who sees two different worlds, each of which is filled with its own essential content and, in the limit, has at its core his own substance: one – the substance of the not-I, the other – the Self.
Note that sometimes (see for example) the “wrong doubles” of the main character are such characters as the gene. Ivolgin, Lebedev, Ferdyshchenko, Keller. But all this is nothing more than a misunderstanding. Do the vile deeds of Lebedev and Ferdyshchenko have any basis in Myshkin’s spirituality? Of course not. But a double, in terms of its status, must be a continuation of its original source in some, even if only one, property. Otherwise, duality (if I am allowed to put it this way) is nullified, ceases to be ontologically conditioned, and becomes a simple game of the researcher’s imagination. The hero should, as it were, continue in his doubles, and the move with doubles itself makes sense only as a way to more clearly reflect the side that interests him. What essential, relevant qualities pass from Myshkin to the gene. Ivolgin, Lebedev, Ferdyshchenko, Keller? Yes, none. There is nothing so significant in these, in general, secondary characters that would connect them with the main character. They serve only to either fill the narrative with the necessary colors, or to ensure the prince’s connection with the whole World (as is the case with Lebedev). Perhaps the exception in terms of importance here is the gene. Ivolgin, however, he cannot be considered Myshkin’s double, since he did not take on something of Myshkin’s, but, on the contrary, Myshkin took over from him the identification of real and purely fantasy thoughts.
31) Dualism comes in different forms. In one case, while accepting the equivalence of the internal world of phenomena, the process of cognition itself is still carried out from the point of view of the unconditional reality of the external world. In another case, accepting reality on faith in calm serenity, the position of the Self is actualized.
Upon arrival in Pavlovsk, Myshkin could choose any of these options. Moreover, remembering the recent failure, he could have taken the first path. This, of course, would still not mean a direct renunciation of the attempt to organize the World through its cognition, but it would bring it closer to reality, albeit not ontologically, but axiologically, making it possible to create a basis for exiting the situation of a global error. However, everything went wrong, despite another warning he received from the mysterious Aglaya.
Indeed, Aglaya did not see the prince for six months, and now, having met, she immediately reads to him (primarily to him) Pushkin’s poem “About the Poor Knight” (Chapter 7, Part II). What is it about and, most importantly, why is it given?
In order to at least a little dispel the veil of fog, let's try to give a brief interpretation of the poem.
;) Once upon a time there lived a poor knight,
Silent and simple
Looks gloomy and pale,
Brave and direct in spirit.
Interpr.: Someone lived.
;) He had one vision,
Incomprehensible to the mind -
And deeply impressed
It cut into his heart.
Interpr.: He came up with an idea that he liked.
;) From then on, my soul burned
He didn't look at women
He's not with anyone until the grave
I didn’t want to say a word.
Interpr.: He ignored all other ideas.
;) He puts a rosary around his neck
Instead of a scarf I tied it,
And from the face of the steel grate
I didn’t raise it to anyone.
Interpr.: He locked himself into his idea.
;) Full of pure love,
True to the sweet dream,
A.M.D. with your blood
He inscribed it on the shield.
Interpr.: He was sincere in his aspirations.
;) And in the deserts of Palestine,
Meanwhile, on the rocks
The paladins rushed into battle,
I will name loudly,

Lumen coeli, sancta Rosa!
He exclaimed, wild and zealous,
And like thunder his threat
It struck Muslims.
Interpr.: He was strong with his idea.
;) Returning to my distant castle,
He lived, strictly confined,
All silent, all sad,
He died like a madman.
Interpr.: In the end, he completely lost himself in his idea, withdrew into himself, as a result of which everything ended for him.

In other words, the “poor knight” is a symbol of one who, with honest intentions, is “fixated” on his idea, does not pay attention to the violence of life and, despite all his original strength, dies with nothing. Aglaya seems to be shouting with this poem: “Prince, don’t go crazy, break away from your thoughts and schemes, pay attention to the rest of the diversity of the World.” At the same time, she says, quite seriously and sincerely, that she respects the “knight” for his focus on an ideal, an idea, i.e. it supports cognition as such and does not seek to distract Myshkin from his project. Such inconsistency can only mean that Aglaya is not against knowledge (especially since in the poem she changed the initials A.M.D. to N.F.B. and thereby designated N.F. as the object of Myshkin’s aspiration), but she is against deep ( subjective) idealism. In fact, she is trying to push the hero into that dualism in which reality is accepted not in the mode of calm faith, but as an environment of action.
32) But even more radically than Aglaya, Lizaveta Prokofyevna is agitating Myshkina to abandon her idea. Indeed, as soon as she found out about the prince’s arrival in Pavlovsk and about his seizure, she almost immediately came to visit him, i.e. I came to feel sorry for him. By this, Dostoevsky, through her as a part of society, is trying to tell us that society and the whole World are quite harmonious, that public morality completely absorbs pity and does not contradict it, that the World is learned in an ordinary, natural rhythm. This rhythm, of course, is not what it is in the prince’s imagination, and it is not N.F. who is enveloped in pity, but he himself; those. the prince, who considers himself a subject, himself finds himself in the sphere of cognition (as is the case with the scene at the end of the first part, where he offers Nastastya Filippovna his pity, and she herself begins to feel sorry for him in return), and for him this turns out to be illogical. But the main thing is not the logical completeness of what is happening, but its consistency with human feelings: the prince was ill, they came to pity him, to find out what happened, how he was doing. The world turns out to be quite harmonious if you simply perceive it as it is and do not try to squeeze its existence into an invented framework. Thus, the author of the novel, through Lizaveta Prokofyevna, tries not only to show the uselessness of idealism (solipsism), as is done through Aglaya (reading Pushkin’s poem), but strives to generally show the meaninglessness of the very project to improve the World, since this World is already harmonious due to the implementation of existing norms of behavior.
33) Despite all the efforts of Aglaya and Lizaveta Prokofievna, the prince is stubborn like that donkey who breathed into him the awareness (not yet the vision) of his own selfishness (from the German Ichheit).
Indeed, after Aglaya read “The Poor Knight,” i.e. immediately after her agitation, five guests showed up to Myshkin (chapters 7, 8, part II), among whom was Ippolit, who, by the way, enters the cycle of events in exactly this way: he, together with his friends, began to demand some that's right. Right comes from truth, and the latter comes from correctness (such a chain, in any case, can be built). It turns out that the new guests, together with Hippolyte, began to demand from the prince that he recognize the correctness of their position. What is it? If we discard all the husks, it turns out that they came to bargain for money in a deliberately false case that they concocted. In other words, their position is arrogant, naked selfishness. And it turns out that Myshkin accepts this point of view and agrees with their claims. He accepts not only the existence of ego - that would not be so bad - but he believes that the point of view of these insolent people (the ego's point of view) is more correct and consistent than the opposite, coming from Lizaveta Prokofyevna, who began to shame the aliens for their insolence, and Evgeniy Pavlovich, who supported her. Moreover, Myshkin’s opinion practically did not change even after Ganya, this standard representative of society, quite consistently and clearly proved the inconsistency of the claims against the prince. Nothing worked! The prince turned towards Hippolytus, i.e. towards idealistic dualism, preaching the activity of the Self and the passivity of the non-Self, which immediately affected subsequent events.
34) The main thing that happened after the prince accepted Hippolytus’s point of view was the loss of his activity: if before this it was the prince who served as the center around which all events developed, and from which all the fluids of enchanting those around him emanated, now Hippolytus has become such a center - the inner part Myshkin, who became the new conductor of the event flow, and Myshkin himself found himself on the sidelines. Andersen's shadow has seized power over its former owner.
The prince’s transition to idealistic dualism leads to the fact that his idealistic side, in the person of Hippolytus, declares its claims regarding its absolute correctness: “you only have to talk to the people for a quarter of an hour, and they will immediately... agree on everything” (chapter 10, part .II). So, I went out to the window for a second, stuck my head in, blurted out something, and it was done! However, in order to convince the people, you need to live with them, you need to know them; Convincing people, even if possible, is not a matter of haste, but a matter of a lifetime. But Ippolit, who has no sense of real difficulties, does not understand all this and imagines himself to be some kind of genius. In general, Dostoevsky presents him here as a kind of ambitious man who has torn himself off from the earth, imagining the unimaginable about himself. It is therefore natural that Hippolytus considers himself almost the Absolute, in which object and subject merge together and are identified, so that this narcissistic type constantly cries and feels sorry for himself, i.e. turns his knowledge on himself; he himself is both object and subject in one person.
35) The prince, although leaning towards Hippolytus, still does not abandon dualism, stands on the border between the real and ideal worlds and perceives what is happening in them quite critically.
Indeed, Hippolytus once (chapter 10, part II) declares to society: “You are afraid of our sincerity most of all.” By sincerity we can understand the removal of boundaries between people. Hippolytus professes a phenomenological point of view and believes the whole world to be a creation of his consciousness. For him, people are phantoms, phenomena of consciousness, constituted by his transcendental center, which can only remove the boundaries between phantom people due to the fact that it sees the essential meaning of each such phenomenon initially posited by itself. Standing up for sincerity, Hippolytus affirms this position.
And so the prince catches him in a contradiction, noticing his modesty, and tells everyone this.
Shyness means incorrectly, excessively exposing something of your own, personal, intimate to the public. It turns out, ashamed, Ippolit refutes his own demand to reveal his soul to everyone. The prince saw this contradiction and pointed it out to everyone, including Hippolytus himself. In other words, Hippolytus found himself in a situation of a lie, a mistake that was publicly visible. The last circumstance infuriated him: this egoist cannot tolerate pointing out his wrongness, because, being in solipsism, he thinks of his exclusivity.
36) Myshkin became a dualist-idealist, still seeing the falsity of entering into solipsism (still, the previous experience of the futility of striving for one’s pure Self had an impact). Thus, Dostoevsky prepared him for a new breakthrough in the knowledge of existence.
And here we see the appearance of the enchanting N.F. in a horse-drawn carriage (chapter 10, part II), who informs Evgeny Pavlovich about his financial affairs, and addresses him on a first-name basis. Of course, it is she who turns not to Evgeny Pavlovich himself as such, but to him as Myshkin’s double, and since she is on friendly terms with the latter, Evgeny Pavlovich - a kind of his shadow - also found himself in a “you” situation. All this unexpected message has one purpose: N.F. how the external existential pole of the World calls on Myshkin - precisely him, and no one else - not to forget about the external element; she reminds of herself, of her significance, of the significance of reality.
N.F. confused the prince: he was just about to lean towards idealism, when they pointed out to him (life itself points out) the elemental reality of things. The ground is disappearing from under his feet, and he no longer knows which point of view is correct - the external consciousness or the internal one. As a result, he begins to doubt everything. Even the appearance of N.F. being in a horse-drawn carriage seems like some kind of unreal event to him; reality becomes unreality; everything is confused, and much more so than before: if earlier fantasy seemed to him in the form of reality (“a pair of eyes” by Rogozhin), now reality seems to be fantasy. In general, the prince was completely confused in the coordinate system.
What should he do? Abandon your project? After all, you can’t improve the World without a solid foundation! But no, “it is impossible to escape”, since “he is faced with such tasks that he now has no right not to solve them, or at least not to use all his strength to solve them.”
37) Myshkin was faced with the task of deciding on his position: if he is a dualist, then which dualism should he choose - idealistic (internal) or realistic (external)? The seemingly solved problem again becomes relevant, and even more significant than before, since its solution is no longer an ordinary routine work, but represents the removal of a fundamental limitation on the feasibility of his entire idea.
With this, he enters into a dialogue with Keller on the topic of double thoughts and actually admits not only that it is difficult to fight these double thoughts, but that he still has no way out of the current situation (which arose, we recall, after the appearance of N.F. . in a horse-drawn carriage): thinking about one thing is accompanied by the discovery that the previous thinking, it turns out, concerned something else that was hidden in the wilds of consciousness. Similarly: you think that you have found a justification for one point of view, but in fact this justification conceals a completely opposite position. In formal terms, this means that in any thesis an antithesis is visible. Myshkin came to a vision of this, i.e. he acquired the necessary condition for understanding the immanence of the World of the dialectical functioning of consciousness. His initial monism was replaced by dualism, from which he evolved to look towards dialectics, within the framework of which opposites are interdependent. But ontologically, the latter (if it is consistently implemented) is again monism, so that the prince, having gone through the cycle of the dialectical spiral, approached the approaches to his original point of view, but not in the spontaneous version characteristic of the philistine mood, but in a deeply verified conviction , which was preceded by serious work of his entire being.
38) Dostoevsky put Myshkin on the path of cultivating a dialectician within himself. And if the vision of the existence of differences, i.e. coexistence of thesis and antithesis, represents embarking on this path, then the first step along it is the denial of any unambiguity in anything, including differences, in other words - skepticism (which, by the way, was very fashionable in Germany while Dostoevsky was writing a novel there). And the prince does it: in a conversation with Kolya Ivolgin, he admits himself to be a skeptic, i.e. doubters, demonstrating this by distrusting Kolya’s message that Ganya seems to have some plans for Aglaya (chapter 11, part II). His doubt is the beginning of a clear understanding that he is doing something wrong or wrong.
39) The prince turned his face to dialectics and clearly (consciously), as part of his strategic search, moved towards it. And here the figure of Aglaya begins to declare itself in full force.
Aglaya is probably the most mysterious heroine of the novel. Finally, it's time to talk about her. What is she like?
Here are just some of her properties: beautiful, cold, contradictory. Moreover, her contradiction does not have the character of a total negation, but is only a continuation of the affirmation; her thesis is expressed through the antithesis. For example, at the end of the second part, Lizaveta Prokofyevna realized that Aglaya was “in love” with the prince (it would be more correct to talk about her attraction to him) after it became clear that she did not want to see him: the mother knows her daughter and reveals her hidden sides. Further, it should be remembered that Aglaya is perceived by the prince as “light”. Finally, she is not against Myshkin being related to the ideal (remember, the episode with the “poor knight”), but against his plunging into the empty nothingness of solipsism. So who is she?
Dialectical logic! It is in this interpretation of Aglaya that the inability of the analyst Myshkin, who sees the essence of everything, to recognize it from the very beginning of his acquaintance, becomes completely clear. He was unable then, on his first appearance in the Epanchins’ house, to characterize it because this act is not just an element of thinking, but is thinking about thinking, which was still closed to him at that time. He did not accept the necessity of dialectics, therefore, he did not see it at all.
But when he finally saw the need for dialectical constructions, that’s when the theme of his marriage to Aglaya began to unfold in full force: now he began to need her and he (more precisely, of course, Dostoevsky) considered it completely natural to move to connect them , as a result of which the subject (Myshkin) must receive on legal grounds (read - at the level of natural law) dialectical logic (Aglaya). Similarly, the desire of the beautiful Aglaya for the sexually no Myshkin becomes understandable (if you look at the situation from an everyday point of view): in order for dialectics to realize itself, it needs someone who will carry out the act of dialectical thinking, i.e. a subject is needed. Without a subject - the bearer of activity - any logic turns into the absence of movement, so that dialectical logic, as the very embodiment of the movement of thought, without the bearer of this movement turns into its complete opposite, into peace, into thoughtlessness. Without a subject, dialectics is nullified, because it does not exist “in itself,” like, say, a stone on the bank of a river, which exists without our preoccupation with it. If you like, dialectics is the very “concern” of the subject in its conscious form.
40) Well, Lev Nikolaevich the dialectician is already progress; and although he has not yet become one, but only wants to become one, positive progress regarding the initial premises is still evident. Now that he has become a doubter, his natural step is to carry out a synthesis: doubt is not just a vision of the existence of separate thesis and antithesis, but it is also the assumption of their coherence (after all, doubt concerns
any difference, including differences in the thesis-antithesis pair), so the natural development of doubt is to overcome it through the creation of a single base in which opposites are removed and become part of the whole.
Myshkin tries to carry out such a synthesis through an operation familiar to him, which can be conditionally called “revealing his soul,” when he begins to be completely frank in front of his double, Evgeniy Pavlovich (chapter 2, part III). Briefly, the plot here is as follows: Myshkin admits (publicly) to Evgeniy Pavlovich that he considers him the most noble and best person; he is embarrassed and replies that the prince did not want to say that; Myshkin agrees, but continues in the spirit that he has ideas that he should not talk about; everyone is perplexed.
What do we have here? The prince, on the one hand, believes that it is indecent to be frank (he has ideas that he should not talk about), but expressing this is already a kind of lifting the veil over his secrets, which confuses everyone, and therefore this statement is hidden in self-contradiction. Thus, he understands the existence of boundaries between people and himself - similar to the existence of a boundary between thesis and antithesis. At the same time, he himself does not accept these boundaries and believes it is possible for himself to remove them. At the beginning of the novel, in the Epanchins’ house, the prince also removed these boundaries, demonstrating his ability to see the essence of other people as if he climbed into their soul and saw it from the inside. But then he tactfully stopped at the very border of someone else’s soul and did not delve very deeply into it. This was expressed in the fact that he gave people characteristics of an objective property. Now the prince does not see the opportunity or necessity to be tactful and touches the inner intimate aspects of the people with whom he communicates, as if the souls of these people are fused with his own, or almost fused. At the same time, we called the method that he uses to penetrate other people “revealing his soul,” or, in other words, “turning himself inside out” (all this can be considered as, in some way, an anticipation of Husserl’s future intersubjective world). By revealing his ins and outs, the intimate side of himself that only concerns him, he is trying to destroy the boundaries between himself and others, and to destroy them very thoroughly, thoroughly, and get to their essential core - conscience, the irritation of which is caused by pity for another, i.e. e. in this case - to him himself, Myshkin. Through this he tries to initiate society towards synthetic cognition.
Such an attempt at synthesis, generalization, which at the same time is seen as an attempt to study the possibility of influencing society and directing its pity-cognition in the right direction (in this case, towards oneself) does not work, since people resist deep intervention in their essence. After all, in essence, Myshkin, through positing the possibility of removing boundaries between the souls of people, tries to present them not as really existing with their inherent boundaries, but as phenomena of his consciousness, which are both constituted by him and, therefore, are transparent to him in in the sense of the possibility (more precisely, the competence) to touch their essential features. Among people, such an attempt is met with bewilderment and, ultimately, resistance.
By and large, the prince here demonstrates his total commitment to the same moves that Hippolytus, his internal double, recently carried out, and which he himself recently not only condemned, but pointed out their inconsistency. It turns out, in spite of everything, Myshkin is an inveterate idealist in the sense that he considers his self to be the primary substance. He cannot tear himself away from this, since, apparently, this is his fundamental essence. He may like Evgeny Pavlovich, and he even admires him, but this side of his personality is not the main thing for him. Actually, this is the whole tragedy of Myshkin - he is immersed in himself and there is no way for him to escape from this. His reflection has no way out. It is in this spirit that Prince Shch. Myshkin’s remark should be understood: “...heaven on earth is not easy to come by, but you still count somewhat on heaven.” Paradise here serves as an analogue of some idea, an ideal substance, which, according to Myshkin’s plan, should be realized in reality.
41) Myshkin’s attempt at synthesis failed. Everyone noticed this, including Aglaya. But if society did not accept the very idea of ​​carrying out some kind of action on it, even if it was synthetic, then Aglaya supported the very attempt: “Why are you saying this (the word “this” should be understood as “frankness” - S.T.) here? - Aglaya suddenly cried out, why are you telling them this? Them! Them!" In other words, Aglaya-dialectics did not accept Myshkin’s revelation as a correct dialectical move, but approved the intention to implement it. Along with the best epithets that she bestows on the prince, she does not consider it possible to marry him: he is not yet ready to become her representative. However, she needs a subject and makes an appointment with our hero. But before it happens, we will witness two important scenes.
42) After an unsuccessful attempt at a synthetic unification of opposites (cognition of the World) under the code name “opening up one’s soul,” Myshkin is plunged by Dostoevsky into a situation where he defends N.F. (Chapter 2, Part III). In fact, this is N.F. herself. initiates this noble act of the prince, since he again demonstrates his activity. By and large, she is fighting to ensure that our hero does not go deeper into himself, or more precisely, she continues to fight for this, since all her activity - both previous and current - is aimed only at this goal: to make Myshkin a realist. This time her efforts are justified, the prince stands up for her. This is the second time he stands up for someone: the first time this happened at the beginning of the novel, in the Ivolgin family, and now, in Pavlovsk, he again shows his ability to act. Yes, he - an inveterate idealist - again does not reason, but does something. Moreover, if for the Ivolgins his actions were completely spontaneous and aimed at protecting someone who, being innocent, is still not rejected by society, now he defended the very quintessence of someone who should be pitied (recognized).
What he did not succeed at the logical level (and he did not succeed in plunging the entire society into a situation of accepting frank conversation, i.e., removing all boundaries through the revelation of thinking), succeeded at the level of realizing his natural humanity. Like Lizaveta Prokofyevna, who came to visit him after his illness, he himself, in his spontaneous spontaneity, turns out to be much closer to the knowledge of being than any speculation on this matter. The laws of nature, perceived through the sensory stream, turn out to be not only a simple limiting condition separating man and his consciousness from omnipotence and infinity, but the same laws allow him to overcome himself and move on to other laws (within the framework, of course, of the same naturalness) through an act of action, which negates any manipulation of ideas, but at the same time is impossible without targeting the existential pole, which is, in essence, the idea of ​​ideas. The action turns out to be a true synthetic generalization, which Myshkin sought to obtain, but not a logical generalization, but rather, extra-logical or even illogical.
The situation that arose threatened to result in Myshkin completely leaving the realm of the ideal, and thus getting out of the control of Aglaya, which, by its status as logical dialectics, presupposes speculation and, therefore, immersion in the realm of thought, i.e. - into the ideal. She needs communion with the ideal (however, without plunging into solipsism - we saw this earlier), and she clearly rejects everything purely realistic, without elements of the ideal. An example of this is her rejection of a completely worthy groom (in terms of money, social status, appearance, etc.) Evgeniy Pavlovich, since he is a realistic pragmatist, without the gift of fantasy, i.e. having nothing ideal in it. Here the term “ideal” in our country carries an exclusively ontological load and is not synonymous with “the best” and so on.
All this explains why Aglaya did not accept the prince’s intercession and called it all a “comedy.” She needs a prince - a subject (that is, one who has a “main mind” - the ability to comprehend the existence of things) and she does not intend to just let him go. The next move is hers, she will make it on the appointed date, but for now you can take a break from her.
43) After the prince shows glimpses of realism, it turns out that N.F. invites him to his place. It turns out that almost simultaneously both Aglaya and N.F. make an appointment with him: the struggle for Myshkin’s way of knowing - through thinking (on Aglaya’s side) and through activity, including real actions (on N.F.’s side) - unfolds in full force. This does not mean that each of these beauties wants him as their groom. In particular, N.F. She definitely doesn’t want this for herself; moreover, as follows from Rogozhin’s words, she would even consider the best option for Aglaya and Myshkin to get married. After all, then, according to her plan, Myshkin, armed with the correct way of thinking - dialectics, would be able to correctly realize the knowledge of being. The struggle for Myshkin is not just part of the narrative outline, but it is an essential element of the entire philosophy of the novel.
44) Our hero, by his action, for a moment was able to bring public morality and pity into line, and it seemed to him that he was entering a new period of life, in which everything was harmonious and correctly arranged (formally, this was due to his upcoming birthday). However, he accomplished this harmonization not by logic, but by action. And this despite the fact that the desire for harmony is a desire for some corresponding idea. In this context, the arrangement of harmony is the construction of a speculative construction, perfect from an idealistic point of view and allowing proof of its truth on the conceptual, i.e. at the logical level. In this situation, the question arises: is achieving a goal through action final from the point of view of the requirement of meaningful consciousness?
Dostoevsky builds the answer to this question by contradiction, through clarifying the opposite question: is it possible to substantiate reality with thought, or is the ideal a higher form compared to reality? If the answer is positive, the question you are looking for loses its validity.
For this purpose, the author initiates the prince’s double, Hippolytus, into a lengthy speech, in which an attempt will be made to verify Myshkin’s recent experience through the action of the experience of consciousness.
45) Hippolytus, in his famous reading, asks the question: “Is it true that my nature is now completely defeated?” (Chapter 5, Part III). This questioning can be understood in two ways.
On the one hand, the hopelessly ill Hippolytus thinks about his inevitable death, thinks that his ability to live and resist has almost completely been broken, overcome, defeated “completely.” However, then his natural ability to live is overcome by another natural ability - to die, since death is inherent only to the living. Death, like life, are forms of the same laws of nature. Therefore, if in his question Hippolytus focuses on the disease, then he falls either into a contradiction (his biological nature cannot be defeated by biological laws in principle), or into a misunderstanding of what he is asking (he asks whether his nature has been defeated with with the help of nature, i.e. does nature deny itself with the help of itself in the sense that it transforms itself into its complete opposite - substantial zero, which, again, is logically absurd in its basis).
All this suggests that Dostoevsky, apparently, puts a different meaning into Ippolit’s question and by his nature he understands not a biological hypostasis, not a disease, but something else. Most likely, it means that Ippolit is the internal double of Prince Myshkin.
Of course, this is how it is: the author initiates Myshkin’s inner essence to form an answer to the question that confronts him about the legality of logical proof in the form of real actions. We observe the result of this initiation in the activity and frankness of Hippolytus, who is the inner (ideal) side of the prince. At the same time, his question can be transformed into another, more understandable and adequate form: “Is it true that my ideal nature has now been completely defeated?” Here the question is not whether the laws of nature have been overcome, but, on the contrary, whether his ideal essence has been overcome by the laws of nature. In other words, he wants to find out whether one should finally, after Myshkin’s realism during his intercession for N.F., agree with the primacy of the real (with so-called materialism) and the secondary nature of the ideal, or whether there is still some move that can save (with his point of view) the situation, i.e. save idealism as a worldview. During this search, he, as a true double of Myshkin, as well as his prototype, builds a logical justification scheme, which we will now analyze.
46) a) Hippolytus talks about how he helped the doctor’s family, talks about the old general who helped convicts, and concludes that good deeds are returning. Essentially, here, on the basis of real deeds (his own or others), he deduces an idea regarding such deeds (good ones) that seem to exist without our control and can even return. Things independent of man are real, so Hippolytus talks about the legitimacy of transforming reality into the thought of reality.
B) Further, through Rogozhin’s painting of Holbein, Ippolit comes to the question: “how to overcome the laws of nature?”, i.e. in fact, based on a real picture, he comes to the idea of ​​​​the possibility of overcoming reality. This seems to be a pattern: reality turns into the thought of denying reality.
C) A dream is retold in which Rogozhin at first seemed real, then suddenly revealed himself as a phantom (unreal), but even after the revelation of this phantomism he continued to be perceived as real. Here, as in Myshkin after the fantasies of the gene. Ivolgin, the real and the unreal are completely confused and identified: reality = unreality.
D) After sleep (c), taking into account (b), it turns out that from unreality one can get the thought of denying reality: unreality turns into the thought of denying reality.
D) This prompted Hippolytus to decide to commit suicide. This became necessary for him in order to test the hypothesis: the thought of denying reality = unreality, since in suicide such an identity is realized in direct form. Indeed, you come to suicide yourself, giving rise to the thought of leaving life, of denying reality. At the same time, suicide itself is an act of jumping from life, from reality into unreality, so that in suicide the thought of denying reality and unreality itself meet in identical equality.
E) If hypothesis (e) is correct, then taking into account (c) it turns out: the thought of denying reality = reality.
G) Taking into account (a, b), it turns out that thoughts about the denial of reality and about reality itself transform into each other and become part of one whole, which is that within the framework of which this conclusion was obtained, i.e. real area of ​​speculation. Consequently, reality becomes part of the ideal world.

In this logical construction, which is not the best and not as beautiful as Myshkin’s (see paragraph 16 of our study), the most vulnerable link is hypothesis (d), which assumes suicide. It must be said that the wormhole in this point lies not only in the fact that there is some as yet untested assumption here, but also in the fact that Hippolytus introduced action into the logical scheme as an integral element. Thus, all the fuss of Ippolit, generated, ultimately, by Myshkin’s desire (Ippolit is his internal double) to verify the validity of the proof of a speculative scheme with the help of real cases, goes beyond the category of logically closed operations, since here what should be taken as a premise proven. Such evidence is invalid and empty. And in fact, his suicide attempt unsuccessfully fails and he, disgraced, leaves with nothing.
Myshkin is left with nothing: although he did not receive proof of the need to return to idealism, he also did not receive proof of the legitimacy of replacing the elements of a logical multi-link structure with practical actions. And this is understandable: those who are tuned specifically to cognition, and not to doing, i.e. being in his fundamental error, he cannot (logically) reach action through cognition. This requires a special attitude, which he does not have.
47) Myshkin was left in limbo. Formally, of course, this is due to his location in Pavlovsk, which means equidistance from both solipsism and unconditional realism. But the main reason why he continues his hesitation regarding the real-ideal boundary is his conviction in the correctness of the logical scheme that he built in the first part of the novel (see paragraph 16 of our study), and which no one has yet managed to break. Therefore, even having received the impulse of realism, the prince still cannot completely leave the realm of the ideal, since he is connected by the umbilical cord of the beauty of logic. It turns out that his date with Aglaya could not fail.
Aglaya did not offer the prince love - no, God forbid! – she offered him the role of an assistant, with whom she could leave home and go abroad. So, having presented the prince at the beginning of the novel as a semantic center around which all events develop (even playing the role of a boy on errands, he remained this center), Dostoevsky gradually transfers him to the level of a secondary character, when the initiative almost completely passed to someone else. then to another. At first, these others, to whom the initiative passes, was the prince himself in the guise of his inner essence called “Hippolytus,” but now the activity has completely left him, and he turned out to be just material in the wrong hands. Thus, the writer sews into the very structure of the work the fallacy of Myshkin’s general position.
Aglaia-dialectics decided to rise above the prince-subject and turn into panlogism, apparently of the Hegelian kind, gaining power over everything that is encompassed by thought. Logic threatens to become totality.
48) And this is where Dostoevsky strikes at the invulnerability of Myshkin’s logical construction: gene. Ivolgin, this dreamer and liar, who at one time gave the prince an important basis for his conclusion about the possibility of arranging the World in accordance with fictitious ideas, demonstrates his inconsistency with this life. The theft of money from Lebedev, which happened even before the date with Aglaya, is now revealed in such a way that the thief is the gene. Ivolgin. His inventions about the sublime are shattered on the sinful ground of reality, the smoke of dreams dissipates, and Myshkin no longer believes in the tales of this liar. And when the general was inflated about his former closeness to Napoleon (chapter 4, part IV), our hero only weakly assented, since for him this stream of words turned into nothing, into empty nothingness. The theft turned the general from a pompous and beauty-oriented (i.e., truth) character into a low and primitive old man, exposed his real essence, which turned out to be not the desire for truth, but the desire for worthless deception, and made him a solid symbol of lies. In other words, from the scheme presented in paragraph 16 of this work, the first equality turned out to be missing, so that conclusion (3) ceased to be unconditionally correct and Myshkin’s desire for its implementation, i.e. the desire to arrange the World according to one’s fantasy ideas loses all meaning.
49) Lev Nikolaevich suddenly saw that his logical scheme did not work, and that his project to harmonize life strictly in the form as it was conceived (in Switzerland) could not be implemented.
So, should he give up everything or try again, in a new way, to convince society of his ability to be compassionate, and convince it in such a way as to force it (society) to recognize compassion in itself and, therefore, ensure almost the lost identity of the formally logical and the real? After all, if society recognizes this, then it will have to either express this matter, or form an attitude towards pity that is worthy of utterance, logical formulation. Then it turns out that society-reality recognizes the existence within itself of such an ideal formula, in accordance with which it actually functions.
In other words, Myshkin, instead of a destroyed scheme to justify his project, which he had once created for himself, needed to create a similar scheme for society so that it would accept this scheme and begin to implement it itself, even without his, Myshkin’s, participation. Here again we recall his commitment to the teaching of Parmenides and Plato about the primacy of being (now we can add - about the primacy of existential significance) and the secondary nature of simple existence. The Prince believes that society, like the whole World, exists for a reason, on its own, without an internally expressed goal. On the contrary, according to his ideas, society is driven by some initial goal, which can be reached only by overcoming oneself and coming to oneself as another, when there is a constant, systematic reshaping of one’s essence, which ultimately results in the expansion of one’s borders, that the relationship between subject and object is expressed in the cognitive process, and the relationship between society and the individual is expressed in the acceptance of a morality that would presuppose pity as an obligatory element.
Dostoevsky fully realizes this attitude towards change in Myshkin, forcing him to constantly look for the right moves. Their diversity in the novel honors the persistence of the protagonist, but is intended to emphasize not so much his positive qualities as another obvious thing: failed attempts carried out within a certain paradigm indicate the falsity of this very paradigm, the more strongly the more diverse they were.
The prince’s next attempt was born after the spiritual revelation of the gene. Ivolgina.
50) The novel “The Idiot,” despite its size (not a small novel!), is very laconic: there is nothing superfluous in it. So in this case, as soon as new goals arose before the prince, the writer immediately, without delay, creates the necessary situation for him.
Aglaya the dialectic needs a container for her essence, she needs a subject, but her family doubts whether the prince is a suitable candidate for her. Therefore, it was decided to exhibit it to various titled persons and get their verdict, i.e. obtain the opinion of the “light” of society, personifying society itself, regarding the prince’s ability to fulfill the required role (chapter 7, part IV). As a result, Prince Lev Nikolaevich found himself among the important old men and women who expected from him a sober mind and realistic judgments (this is exactly what Aglaya needs both as the personification of dialectics and as a simple person). They expected him to abandon the idea according to which the world is ruled by a certain pre-established harmony, and the role of people and society is reduced only to the obedient execution of certain supreme orders. Finally, they were waiting for recognition of their importance, i.e. the intrinsic value of society and that reality that harshly reminds itself of itself every time you just think about its secondary nature. At the same time, Aglaya asked Myshkin in advance not to say “school words,” i.e. do not waste useless verbal water, divorced from reality, and in general, be a normal person. In addition, she suggested that if he dispersed and left the state of real consciousness, he might break a large Chinese vase. This assumption here serves as a bell that should warn Myshkin in the event of a threat that he is losing control of the situation and entering too deeply into the ideal.
Myshkin needed this meeting with the “light” to realize his goal. As already mentioned, it was important for him to convince society exactly the opposite of what it wanted to hear from him: he wanted to convince everyone to accept Platonism, while everyone expected him to abandon these views.
As a result, of course, nothing good happened from the meeting between Myshkin and the “light”. The prince began to use the now habitual “opening of his soul” and pronounce a heartfelt speech, in which he reveals almost the deepest pieces of his soul; society pulls him back and constantly calls on him to calm down, but everything is in vain: the prince goes into a rage, breaks a vase, but this warning does not work (no warnings have any effect on him at all! - stubborn as a Swiss donkey). Moreover, he makes a new move and reminds one gentleman of his good deed. He needs this in order to show the ability of all of them to feel sorry and force them to agree with it, to accept it as a voiced and therefore logically conditioned (predicative) fact. The prince, as it were, from opening up his soul, as if it had not lived up to hope, moved on to trying to open up the souls of others, but this trick also fails, and society, even more persistently than before (when it concerned only Myshkin), refuses to accept such experiments. As a result, our hero finds himself in a situation of deep wrongness, a mistake, which is emphasized by an attack of epilepsy.
Thus, the prince wanted society to recognize that it does not exist in itself and has value not in itself, but in something else, to which it should strive. However, nothing worked out for him: according to Dostoevsky, society, and indeed all reality, exists not for something, but for itself.
51) Prince Lev Nikolaevich wanted to squeeze life into logical schemes, but he didn’t succeed; further, he wanted to prove that society should move towards some predetermined goal (idea), which constitutes its own essence, and thereby carry out self-knowledge (self-discovery) - it also did not work. Finally, he faced the question: are there any ways of cognizing existence through logical formulas?
More precisely, of course, Dostoevsky asks these questions and directs Aglaya to N.F. Dialectics itself cannot do anything; for its action it needs a subject, so she went to fetch the prince and together they set off to cognize existence (chapter 8, part IV).
Aglaya was very determined: the letters she received from N.F., in which she admired her, created the impression of the weakness of being and the strength of dialectics. These letters revealed some incredible greatness of Aglaya (not in the social sense, but in the sense that she is likened to some kind of diamond, which everyone bows to and before which everyone tiptoes: “you are perfection for me!”). At the same time, to himself N.F. wrote “I almost no longer exist” (chapter 10, IV). Indeed, since the main character never achieved a reliable cognition of being (there were only some glimpses of this, nothing more), then the threat arose of his complete abandonment of any cognition, and being without cognition, without paying attention to it, ceases to be itself and becomes something that is not.
So, Aglaya decided to rush, so to speak, purely logically, to carry out the act of cognition and came to her object (N.F.) like some kind of princess, began to command and try in every possible way to belittle the one for whose sake she herself exists. But that was not the case: N.F. as a true external center of existence, she manifested herself with all her might, did not allow herself to be crushed, and discovered within herself an immense power, which grew as Aglaya’s pressure on her increased. Being has shown itself: it is defenseless without our attention to it, but the more persistently we try to “get to the bottom of it” and, as it were, subjugate it to ourselves, crush it under the structure of our consciousness, under our desires, etc., the more durable and inaccessible to “get to the bottom of it” it turns out.
As a result, the end is known: Aglaya, who demanded knowledge through logic, lost (fainted) to Nastasya Filippovna, who assumed that knowledge is a direct act of expressing feelings, revealing itself in action. Myshkin, completely instinctively, rushed to N.F. and cried out: “after all...she’s so unhappy!” Thus, he expressed what she needed, but what was impossible for Aglaya. Myshkin voted for direct cognition; he left the ideal world and plunged into reality. How long?
52) The prince, having gone through the difficult path of doubt and hesitation, again came to a direct perception of life as it is. Okay, but what next? After all, it is not enough to reach this level, it is not enough to understand such a need, it is also important to act accordingly, i.e. simply prove your involvement in life with your deeds and actions almost every second. What does our hero demonstrate? He shows his complete weakness.
Indeed, after he unexpectedly chose N.F., preparations for the wedding began. He, according to the logic of events, should have turned into a real bundle of activity, running around, fussing, negotiating with everyone and settling everything. But no, he is strangely naive and entrusts the management of affairs to one, another, another... At the same time, “if he gave orders as quickly as possible, passing on the chores to others, it was only so that he himself would not think about it and even, perhaps, quickly forget about this” (chapter 9, part IV).
Well, please tell me, who needs such a groom? As a result, already in a wedding dress in front of the church, N.F. She prayed to Rogozhin so that he would take her away and not let the impossible happen. After all, she did not need Myshkin’s inactive contemplation, but lively activity. And when she saw her fiancé’s lack of one, she realized that she had been deceived. All his activity, which seemed to manifest itself periodically, starting from the moment he showed the whole society, and at the same time its center of existence - N.F. - that he was able to act when he protected Varya Ivolgina from her brother Ganya, all of his activity, which sometimes broke out later, turned out to be somehow unreal, unstable, like that mirage that appears due to some deceptive coincidence of circumstances, and which completely far from the real subject.
In general, N.F. ran away to Rogozhin, and Myshkin was left alone. At first he abandoned Aglaya when he chose N.F., and then N.F. herself. left him. This “philosopher” squandered his happiness while hovering in the realm of dreams.
53) What happened to Aglaya and N.F. after they were left without their prince-subject?
Aglaya, while she had a connection with the prince, was through him connected with the existential pole of reality - with N.F. After all the breaks, she lost her existential, living filling, but did not disappear, and with the Pole she ran away from home abroad: read, living dialectics, after losing contact with real life, turned into formalism, formal logic.
N.F. came to Rogozhin’s house, and came not to leave, as she did before, but to stay. Being has lost its subject and, next to only the uncontrollable flow of sensations (Rogozhin), has ceased to be the one who is comprehended (after all, Rogozhin, we recall, is neither capable of thinking nor knowing). As a result, being ceased to differ from existence, meaningless sensations were annihilated with meaningfulness. Moreover, in metaphysical terms, this happened completely naturally: Parfen stabbed N.F. almost without blood (which further proves the immaterial nature of N.F. - after all, being is the reality of immateriality), after which he himself calmed down and ceased to exist. Being and the being of beings designate themselves only in opposition to each other. In the absence of one of these sides, the other, having lost its antithesis, disappears from our field of vision. And when Myshkin got into Rogozhin’s house and discovered the dead N.F., who had passed into the category of objectivity (“the tip of a naked leg... seemed as if carved from marble and was terribly motionless”), he finally realized the complete collapse of his project, which had once, just recently, he seemed so wonderful and beautiful. Now this dead beauty of his formula has turned into the beauty of “marble”, devoid of life.
Myshkin without everything: without an existential goal center, without the ability to think clearly and dialectically - who is he? Who is he who “managed”, after mediocrely ignoring a lot of clues (both Holbein’s painting, and Pushkin’s poem, etc.), to reach a dead end in his life? Idiot! An idiot not in the sense of mental inferiority, but in the sense of the desire to replace life itself as it is in itself with ideas about it. Such mistakes are not in vain.
54) Well, we have reached the finale and now, seeing the entire scheme of constructing the narrative, knowing and understanding the philosophical aspects of certain actions, we will try to analyze the entire work of Fyodor Mikhailovich. The previous work carried out allows us to guarantee that the global analysis will not be empty fantasy and snatching out scattered quotes, but will represent a reconstruction of the original idea, which is determined by the entire structure of the novel. In part, we have already carried out such a reconstruction above, but now we need to bring everything into a single whole.
In general, the following picture emerges. Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin decided to improve the World. Noble thought! But the whole point is how he began to implement it. And he began to realize his idea through an absurd thing: through such a movement of the soul, which, being expressed in pity, essentially means the knowledge of this World. A convinced follower of Platonism (or, perhaps, some neoplatonic derivatives), he was convinced that cognition is equivalent to the creation of necessary (and perhaps also sufficient) conditions in order to realize real improvements. In any case, the implementation of real changes, according to Myshkin, should be carried out according to plan. Moreover, this plan is created exclusively in one’s thinking and no connection with reality is required. It is only necessary to grasp a certain ideal matrix of existence, in which absolutely all the strokes of development are contained. A person here is assigned only the role of correct, careful adherence to these supreme instructions. We know Myshkin's project failed. No matter how he tried to approach its implementation from one side, and from the other, and from the third, changing each time the method of discursive cognition, nothing worked for him. And even armed with dialectics, this powerful tool in skillful hands, in isolation from crude reality, he was still unable to cognize what requires cognition - being.
But could the project come true? Yes, of course, he couldn’t, and this constitutes Dostoevsky’s important idea: reality is transformed not through empty cognition (for the sake of cognition), and not through the introduction of beautifully dead schemes, but through living doing.
However, the hero did not succeed in cognition, and not due to the lack of any abilities (he was all right in this regard), but due to the fact that cognition, according to Dostoevsky, is not so much the calculation of mental patterns as parts of the Platonic matrix , how much implantation of oneself into the life flow of events with subsequent awareness of the degree of this implantation. Indeed, as soon as Myshkin had glimpses of action - either in the form of intercession, or in the form of serving someone (Aglaya and Gana as a messenger) - each time he rose in the eyes of the public. But in the same way, every time his philosophizing turned against him, casting him into the void of nothingness (epilepsy attacks). Fyodor Mikhailovich seems to be saying: life is about living it really, absorbing all the juices of the World, giving yourself to it for real, without fantasy embellishment (as, for example, Kolya Ivolgin and Vera Lebedeva do). Life denies empty, worthless cleverness, but, on the contrary, assumes active participation in all ongoing processes. At the same time, doing is not at all opposed to thinking, which is based on real facts. On the contrary, such activity of consciousness is absolutely necessary, because the loss of the ability to think deprives a person of the opportunity to consciously relate to himself and to others. Without full-fledged, dialectical thinking (within the framework of the novel - without Aglaya), strictly speaking, a person becomes like an ordinary natural element (Rogozhin) and ceases to be the one who can carry out transformations. But you should think carefully, not blindly trusting your mind, systematically checking your ideas with practice.
55) Well, what about the social aspect of the novel “The Idiot”? After all, this theme constantly sounds in him, now from one angle of view, now from another. Let's try to focus our attention on what, in our opinion, it all comes down to and what the social pathos of the work lies in.
We found out that Dostoevsky opposed the absolutization of abstract thoughts. This means that he opposed liberal ideas that came from the West (fantasized, untested on our Russian soil) being applied directly in Russia. Let us recall, for example, the speech of Yevgeny Pavlovich Radomsky that liberalism does not reject Russian orders, but rejects Russia itself (Chapter 1, Part III). An idea that has been tested and works successfully in the West (from the point of view of the structure of the novel, works successfully in the mind) requires special verification in Russia (in reality). By the way, Myshkin supported this idea. Apparently, with this Dostoevsky wanted to strengthen the sounding theme and paint it in a variety of colors. In this case, it is important that, again, it is not liberalism itself that is rejected (the idea of ​​liberalism, the idea in general), but the way it is being introduced into Russia: without respect and consideration of its customs, without connection with life itself, as it is. This expresses the liberals' dislike for Russia. After all, the object of love is respected and valued. The lover strives to bring benefit to the one he loves, and any hint of harm is immediately a signal to prevent the possibility of this harm. If there is no love, then there is no worry about possible failures; ultimately, there is no responsibility in making decisions. Society, in the eyes of such figures, turns into an experimental mass on which experiments can and even need to be carried out, any kind of experiments, since the degree of truth of all these experiments lies in the opinion of the experimenters themselves. It turns out that whatever they think, that’s what the “masses” should do (this is exactly how Hippolytus behaved - this complete liberal, suffering from delusions of grandeur and self-righteousness).
To put it bluntly, but clearly, Fyodor Mikhailovich opposed the absolutization of knowledge as such and urged the need to listen to the nature of nature, to the beat of life.
Apparently, this was important to him for the following reason. After the peasant reform of 1861, a layer of people actively began to emerge calling themselves intellectuals, the noticeable beginnings of which we apparently already have in Turgenev’s Bazarov. These intellectuals extolled specific knowledge, were Western-oriented (in the sense that they actively drew their ideas for the social reconstruction of Russia from there) and were ready to introduce even the most misanthropic experiments on society (remember, Ippolit in Chapter 7, Part III “proved ”, which seems to have the right to kill), because they considered themselves “clever”. And it is precisely against such “clever” intellectuals, apparently, that the entire quintessence of Dostoevsky’s aspirations was directed. This was the thought that was beating in his subconscious and which he tried to bring out through the novel “The Idiot.” This explicit idea resulted in his next programmatic work, “Demons,” where he clearly categorically opposes the “socialist” nihilists.
Dostoevsky was a prophet, but they don’t listen to prophets in their own country. Almost half a century before the Bolshevik revolution, he was able to discern the brewing tragedy, because he saw: in Russian society a clan of experimenters, the Hippolytes (and others like them), was maturing, who were striving for power and who would stop at nothing for this. They extol their ideas to the skies, put themselves in the place of the Absolute, place their experiments above human destinies and take upon themselves the right to destroy all those who disagree at their first wish. The Bolsheviks practically proved that the brilliant writer was not mistaken, they even exceeded all possible expectations and carried out such a massacre in the country, in comparison with which all the “great” French revolutions seem like harmless entertainment.
Of course, the communists saw that Dostoevsky was their serious enemy, the seriousness of which was due to the fact that he raised all their ins and outs for everyone to see, betrayed the true secrets of their souls and the real motivations for their actions. But Fyodor Mikhailovich is a genius, and the communists could not do anything about it.
By the way, after the communists completely cooled down and decomposed, they were replaced by the so-called. “democrats” who also called themselves intellectuals and therefore, in their deepest foundations, did not differ from the former communists. What they had in common was giving themselves permission to experiment on society. Only the experiments of some life deniers took place in one direction, and others in another, but all of them were equally far from their people and all their actions were guided only by a passion for power, to realize their ambitions at any cost. As a result, the activities of these new democratic intellectuals brought untold suffering to the Russians.
Dostoevsky was right. What Russia needs is not the implementation of ideas already existing somewhere on the social structure of life. Accordingly, a clan of people who direct their efforts precisely in this direction, in other words, a clan of Russophobes (which, of course, includes the communists who systematically destroyed Russian identity) is extremely dangerous for Russia. And only when it is freed from the ideological power of such people, when the desire to “experiment” on people goes into the irrevocable past, only then can it truly take shape as a global world reality.
56) Finally, as a coda, I would like to say that according to my feelings, the novel “The Idiot” by F.M. Dostoevsky is the most significant achievement in novelism in the entire history of human civilization. Dostoevsky in novelism is I.S. Bach in music: the further time goes, the more significant and weighty their figures become, although during their lifetime they were not very revered. This is how real geniuses differ from pseudo-geniuses, who are exalted during life, but who are forgotten as Chronos devours everything superfluous and superficial.
2004
BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Okeansky V.P. Locus of the Idiot: introduction to the cultural phony of the plain // Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot”: Thoughts, problems. Interuniversity Sat. scientific works Ivanovo, Ivanovo State. univ. 1999 pp. 179 – 200.
2. A. Manovtsev. Light and temptation // Ibid. pp. 250 – 290.
3. Ermilova G.G. Roman F.M. Dostoevsky's "Idiot". Poetics, context // Author's abstract. dis. doc. philologist Sci. Ivanovo, 1999, 49 p.
4. Kasatkina T.A. The cry of a donkey // Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot”: Thoughts, problems. Interuniversity Sat. scientific works Ivanovo, Ivanovo State. univ. 1999 pp. 146 – 157.
5. Young S. Holbein’s painting “Christ in the Grave” in the structure of the novel “The Idiot” // Novel F.M. Dostoevsky “The Idiot”: the current state of study. Sat. works father. and zarub. scientists ed. T.A. Kasatkina – M.: Heritage, 2001. P. 28 – 41.
6. Kaufmann W. Existentialism from Dostojevsky to Sartre. Cleveland - N.Y. 1968.
7. Krinitsyn A.B. On the specifics of Dostoevsky’s visual world and the semantics of “visions” in the novel “The Idiot” // Roman F.M. Dostoevsky “The Idiot”: the current state of study. Sat. works father. and zarub. scientists ed. T.A. Kasatkina – M.: Heritage, 2001. P. 170 – 205.
8. Chernyakov A.G. Ontology of time. Being and time in the philosophy of Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger. – St. Petersburg: Higher Religious and Philosophical School, 2001. – 460 p.
9. Laut R. Philosophy of Dostoevsky in a systematic presentation / Pod. ed. A.V. Gulygi; lane with him. I.S. Andreeva. – M.: Republic, 1996. – 447 p.
10. Volkova E.I. “Kind” cruelty of the Idiot: Dostoevsky and Steinbeck in the spiritual tradition // Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot”: Thoughts, problems. Interuniversity Sat. scientific works Ivanovo, Ivanovo State. univ. 1999 pp. 136 – 145.

All the best to you.

Thank you for answering.
Visit MY page. I decided to publish some of my articles HERE. For now I'm taking the acceleration.
One of them is about Okudzhava. His novel "Rendezvous with Bonaparte". When I wrote it, I did not clearly formulate what was beginning to take shape now - especially after your works on Dostoevsky.
Your article about Bulgakov makes me think. Initially, it’s even SHOCKING: Woland KILLED the Master, brought him out of the state of creativity (I can conceptually “wander” for now, the article is not being read from the corner, I’m still thinking about it...)? But then you will realize the validity of your observations. And you think...
I’ve thought a lot about M. and M. before. The article disappeared at one time.
Mysticism has its place.
Is Bortko really just MONEY? I think he succeeds in the social layer. But the spiritual-mystical one does NOT hear. But it’s taken... It’s a pity.

"Crimes and Punishments"). Using the example of the crime of a person of the new generation, the author shows the crisis of Russian consciousness of the 19th century. Raskolnikov is a completely Russian person, “a type of the St. Petersburg period,” but what happens in his soul is not a personal or national phenomenon: it reflects the state of the whole world. The tragedy of modern humanity is revealed in full force in Russia, a country of the greatest extremes and contradictions. The Russian spirit, unfettered by tradition and infinitely free, experiences the world drama most intensely. That is why Dostoevsky's tragic novels, despite all their national originality, have worldwide significance. But in Crime and Punishment the crisis of consciousness is concentrated in one soul that has fallen out of the old world order. In The Idiot, all the characters are drawn into this crisis, everyone belongs to a dying world. “A positively wonderful man,” Prince Myshkin alone resists the “dark forces” and dies in the fight against them. In Crime and Punishment, only Raskolnikov and his double, Svidrigailov, are stricken with a terrible illness; the rest are apparently still healthy. In “The Idiot,” a pestilent plague has gripped everyone, all souls are ulcerated, all foundations are shaken, all sources of water are poisoned. The world of the novel “The Idiot” is more terrible and tragic than the world of “Crime and Punishment”: people rush about in a fever, speak in delirium, groan and grind their teeth. Two novels are two stages of the same disease: in the first the disease is in its infancy, in the second it is in full development. We know with what excitement Dostoevsky followed everything that was happening in Russia from abroad, how gloomily he looked at reality, how he tried to read the menacing signs of the approaching end in the criminal chronicles. Newspapers complained about the decline in morality, about the increasing frequency of crimes, robberies and murders. But at the same time, he never believed so much in the coming renewal of the dying world, in the salvation of humanity in the image of the Russian Christ. The contradiction between despair and hope, unbelief and faith is embodied in The Idiot. The novel is built on a stunning contrast of darkness and light, death and resurrection.

Dostoevsky. Idiot. 1st episode of the television series

In the sixties, the writer’s pessimism and optimism seemed painfully exaggerated, the novel was misunderstood and almost unnoticed; the old world stood, apparently, firmly and unshakably; the process of destruction that Dostoevsky spoke of took place in the dark depths of consciousness. Only now, in our catastrophic era, are we beginning to understand his prophecies.

The novel “The Idiot” shows the fatal power of money over the human soul. All the heroes are obsessed with the passion of profit, all of them are either moneylenders (like Ptitsyn, Lebedev, captain Terentyeva), or thieves, or adventurers. Ghani's idea varies with his surroundings. Ptitsyn repays his money at interest and knows his limit: to buy two or three apartment buildings; General Ivolgin asks everyone for a loan and ends up stealing; the tenant Ferdyshchenko, having met the prince, unexpectedly asks him: “Do you have money?” And, having received a twenty-five-ruble ticket from him, he examines it from all sides for a long time and finally returns it. “I came to warn you,” he declares, “firstly, “not to lend me money, because I will certainly ask.” This comic episode emphasizes the universal, terrible fascination with money. The theme of money is reinforced by the thoughts of the characters themselves. Ganya says to the prince: “There are terribly few honest people here; there is no one more honest than Ptitsyn.” His thirteen-year-old brother Kolya philosophizes about the same thing: having made friends with the prince, he shares his thoughts with him. His child's soul is already wounded by the indecency of his parents and the immorality of society. “There are terribly few honest people here,” he notes, “so there’s even no one to respect at all... And you noticed, prince, in our age everyone is an adventurer! And it is here in Russia, in our dear fatherland. And I don’t understand how it all worked out this way. It seems that it stood so firmly, but what now... The parents are the first to back down and are themselves ashamed of their former morality. Over there, in Moscow, a parent persuaded his son before anything not to retreat to get money: it is known in print... All usurers, all of them, right down to the last one.” Kolya remembers the murder of Danilov and connects greed for profit with crime. His words already reveal the main idea of ​​the novel.

The first part ends with a reception with Nastasya Filippovna. The motive of money is introduced by Ferdyshchenko’s story about the worst deed: he stole three rubles from friends; The maid was accused of theft and kicked out. He did not feel any particular remorse either then or later. And the narrator concludes: “It still seems to me that there are many more thieves in the world than non-thieves, and that there is not even the most honest person who would not steal something at least once in his life.” This basely clownish confession prepares the effect of a catastrophe. Rogozhin comes to buy Nastasya Filippovna: in his hands is “a large bundle of paper, tightly and tightly wrapped in Birzhevye Vedomosti and tied tightly on all sides and twice crosswise with twine, like those that are used to tie sugar loaves.” He first offers 18 thousand, then increases it to forty and finally reaches a hundred. In a tragic auction, a bundle of one hundred thousand plays a major role.

Nastasya Filippovna returns the floor to Gana and shames him. The motive of greed is associated with the motive of crime. Serving mammon leads to murder. “No, now I believe,” she says, “that this guy will kill for money! After all, now they are all overcome with such a thirst, they are so distracted by money that they seem to have gone crazy. He’s a child himself, and he’s already getting involved with moneylenders. Otherwise he will wrap silk around the razor, fasten it and quietly from behind and slaughter his friend like a ram, as I read recently.” Nastasya Filippovna refers to the case of the merchant Mazurin, who killed the jeweler Kalmykov. The criminal chronicle again intrudes into the novel. The author builds his apocalyptic vision of the world on the facts of the “current moment.” The heroine throws a wad of hundred thousand into the fire and challenges Ghana: pull the money out of the fire, and it’s yours. The effect of this scene is the contrast between the hostess's selflessness and the greed of her guests. She summons not only Ganya, but the entire “damned” world that worships the golden calf. Confusion ensues: Lebedev “screams and crawls into the fireplace,” Ferdyshchenko suggests “snatching just one thousand with his teeth”; Ganya faints. The prince also enters into this orgy of gold: he offers his hand to the heroine, declaring that he has received an inheritance, that he is also a millionaire.

In the second part, a company of blackmailers appears. Burdovsky pretends to be the illegitimate son of Pavlishchev, the benefactor of Prince Myshkin, and starts a case against him in order to hit a decent jackpot. His friend Keller publishes an “accusatory” and vilely slanderous article about the prince in the newspaper. Lebedev says about these young people that they “have gone further than the nihilists.” The apocalyptic theme develops in the indignant monologue of Lizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchina: the kingdom of the golden calf is the threshold of the kingdom of death. “The end times have truly come,” she shouts. – Now everything is explained to me! Isn’t this tongue-tied guy going to kill you (she pointed at Burdovsky), but I bet he’ll kill you! He probably won’t take your ten thousand money, but at night he will come and stab you and take it out of the box. In all honesty, he'll take it out!.. Ugh, everything is topsy-turvy, everyone's gone upside down... Crazy! Vain ones! They don’t believe in God, they don’t believe in Christ! But you have been so consumed by vanity and pride that you will end up eating each other, I predict that. And this is not confusion, and this is not chaos, and this is not disgrace?”

The words of General Epanchina express the writer’s cherished idea: the moral crisis experienced by humanity in the 19th century is religious crisis . Faith in Christ fades, night falls on the world; he will die in the bloody chaos of the war of all against all. Elizaveta Prokofievna’s passionate prophecy is “scientifically” summarized by the reasoner Evgeniy Pavlovich. But his cold-blooded diagnosis of the disease of the century is, perhaps, even more terrible than the passionate indignation of the general’s wife. “Everything that I listened to,” he says, “reduces, in my opinion, to the theory of the triumph of law, first of all and bypassing everything and even to the exclusion of everything else, and even, perhaps, before research into what right consists of.” ? From this, the matter can directly jump to the right of force, that is, to the right of the individual fist and personal desire, as, indeed, it has very often ended in the world. Proudhon settled on the right of force. During the American War, many of the most advanced liberals declared themselves in favor of the planters, in the sense that Negroes are Negroes, lower than the white tribe, and, therefore, the right of might belongs to the whites... I just wanted to note that from the right of force to the right of tigers and crocodiles and even to Danilov and Gorsky not far " This prophecy was fulfilled literally: people of the twentieth century know from experience what the right of might and the right of tigers and crocodiles are...

This is the picture of the world revealed in The Idiot. The idea: disbelief inevitably leads to murder, is embodied in the action of the novel: all the heroes are murderers, either in reality or in possibility. Godless humanity stands under the sign of death.

What is Dostoevsky's Apocalypse based on? Is it not based on a morbid fantasy? He was passionately indignant when critics called his novel fantastic, and argued that he was more of a realist than they were. The menacing signs of the “time of troubles” approaching the world are already inscribed in the “current reality”; you just need to be able to read them. The writer peered into small facts, newspaper news, chronicles of incidents, reports of criminal trials and was proud that he was guessing the most elusive “trends of the moment.” When “Crime and Punishment” was published, newspaper articles appeared about the case of student Danilov. On January 14, 1866, Danilov killed and robbed the moneylender Popov and his maid. The poor student lived off his lessons, was smart and well-educated, and had a strong and calm character; he had “beautiful appearance, large black expressive eyes and long, thick, swept back hair.” During the trial, the prisoner Glazkov suddenly filed a statement that it was not Danilov who killed the moneylender, but he; but soon took it back, “admitting that Danilov had talked him into it.” Dostoevsky was amazed: reality imitated fiction with amazing accuracy. The Danilov case reproduced the plot of Crime and Punishment: even Glazkov’s false confession corresponded to Nikolka’s false self-accusation in the novel. “Realism” triumphed for him. “Ah, my friend,” he wrote to Maikov, “I have completely different concepts about reality and realism than our realists and critics. My idealism is more real than theirs. Their realism cannot explain a hundredth part of real, really happened facts. And we with our idealism even the facts were prophesied . It happened."

In Dostoevsky's art, the greatest flights of fantasy are combined with a painstaking study of facts. He always begins his ascent from the lowlands of everyday reality. His novels are full of chronicles of incidents.

The plot of “The Idiot” is closely related to the criminal trials of the 60s. The very idea of ​​the novel arose under the influence of the Umetsky case. Not a single detail of this family drama survived in the final edition. Mignon’s “embarrassed proud woman” - Umetskaya - is only a distant prototype of Nastasya Filippovna. The Umetskikh process was a ferment that set in motion the author’s creative thought, but dissolved almost without a trace in the process of work. Two other criminal cases - Mazurin and Gorsky - determined the composition of the novel. Dostoevsky admitted to S. Ivanova that “ for decoupling the whole novel was almost written and conceived.” The denouement is the murder of Nastasya Filippovna by Rogozhin: this means that this is the meaning of the novel. The idea of ​​the “murder” of the fallen world is realized in the “killing” of the hero. The figure of the millionaire's killer appears under the impression of the trial of the merchant Mazurin.

“The novel was written in the sixties and occupies a very important place in Dostoevsky’s work. The main and most difficult task that the author faced, by his own admission, was the desire to portray a wonderful person in modern Russian society, torn by passions and contradictions.

"Idiot" brief description and analysis

The main character of the novel, Prince Myshkin, returns home from Switzerland after treatment for epilepsy. On the way, he meets the merchant Semyon Rogozhin, with whom he shares the story of his life, and he tells him about his love. conveyed the atmosphere of the novel through the story of the seemingly “random family” of the Epanchins, who are his only and distant relatives in Moscow, to which the prince comes.

From the first pages of the work, Prince Myshkin makes it clear to Epanchin what a happy person he is, how joyfully he accepts the world. Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin was supposed to be embodied in the novel in the image of the only positive person in the whole world, and at all times, in the image of Jesus Christ. In his manuscripts, Dostoevsky often calls Prince Myshkin - Prince Christ. Treating souls stricken by selfishness is the prince’s main purpose.

Myshkin is an incredibly naive and extremely kind person, he is as spontaneous as a child. Prince Myshkin is a bearer of light, kindness, the main thing is that his conviction is that compassion is the only law that a person should be guided by. Love for everyone around him without exception and the desire for harmony is Myshkin’s true purpose.

No less important in the novel are the images of Aglaya Epanchina and Nastasya Filippovna. Nastasya Filippovna in her letter combines both images of Aglaya and Myshkin. For her, they are both innocent and bright in spirit, “in innocence all your perfection is,” says Nastasya Filippovna. For her, they are both angels who cannot hate.

The idyll is ultimately destroyed, after Aglaya speaks badly and with hatred to the prince about Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin suddenly realizes that Aglaya is not such an innocent lamb: “you can’t feel like that, it’s not true,” but Aglaya refutes this statement. After this incident, the prince moves more and more away from people, from reality, and is more and more immersed in his dreams.

When describing the portraits and actions of other heroes of the novel, Dostoevsky makes it clear what prevents these people from loving. Nastasya Filippovna, Rogozhin, Aglaya, Lizaveta Prokopyevna Epanchina, Ippolit, Ivolgin Ganya and General Ivolgin himself are all very proud people. An unusual sense of pride prevents them from revealing their feelings. The thirst for self-affirmation and the desire to be above others makes them lose their own face. The desire to love is suppressed and all they can do is suffer.

The prince is the complete opposite of the other characters in the novel, he is completely devoid of pride, and only he has the power to see what is hidden under the mask, he is able to recognize the character that is carefully hidden. Myshkin, in fact, is a “big child,” and according to Dostoevsky, if a person has childishness, it means that his soul has not yet been lost, and the “living sources of the heart” are still alive.

During the narrative of the novel, Myshkin has a seizure twice. Epilepsy has always been considered a “sacred” disease; not only Dostoevsky gave this disease an enlightening, special meaning. Just before the attack, the prince felt extraordinary enlightenment, the ability to solve all his problems at once. The worries seemed to disappear on their own. But the consequences of all the attacks were terrible, suffering, pain, mental anguish tormented Myshkin.

Each attack of epilepsy certainly foreshadows trouble, an impending catastrophe. After another seizure, a meeting of the two main heroines of the novel occurs, the author sees Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanchina - Humiliated Beauty and Innocent Beauty. Women compete with each other, turning feelings of love into hatred.

Aglaya sees that the prince cannot look at Nastasya Filippovna’s suffering with indifference and begins to hate him. Nastasya Filippovna realizes that the prince simply pities her, and pity cannot be love, so she leaves the prince and goes to Rogozhin, who loves her madly, realizing that only death can await her.

At the end of the work, Rogozhin and Myshkin meet over the body of the murdered Nastasya Filippovna. Here comes the realization that they are both to blame for her death, they both killed her with their love. Everything enlightened and human in the prince disappears, he turns into a real crazy idiot.

Dostoevsky explains his pessimistic vision of the world, showing that in the novel there is a triumph of egoism, the demonic principle wins, expelling the light that carries the image of Prince Myshkin. The beauty of the world and goodness lose and perish. Despite the gloomy ending of the work, the ending does not give the impression of being gloomy and hopeless. Prince Myshkin was able to leave good, pure things in the hearts of people; with his spiritual death he awakened people to life, gave them faith in the good and encouraged them to strive for the ideal. Otherwise, the world may perish.