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Title: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Michael Sheen, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 9-6263405-9-2 Publisher: Naxos Audio Books Pub. Date: August, 1995 Format: Audio CD Volumes: 3 List Price(USD): $19.98 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 (61 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Dostoevsky, the great Russian social commentator
Comment: Having read "Crime and Punishment" fifteen years ago, I was prepared for Dostoevsky's commentary on the social and materialistic qualities of the Russian middle class of the 19th Century. "The Idiot" has a slower pace but a surprise ending which makes reading it well worth the effort.
The novel begins with three strangers in a train en route to Petersburg. A young man named Prince Myshkin is returning from a Swiss sanatorium where he has been treated for the past few years for some malady similar to epilepsy. He meets a roguish young man named Rogozhin, who has an unhealthy obsession with a beautiful young woman named Nastasya Filippovna, and a nosy government official named Lebedyev, who figures prominently throughout the novel.
Upon arriving in Petersburg, Myshkin acquaints himself with many of the citizens and eventually meets, and is infatuated by, Nastasya. She is pushy, fickle, and impetuous, and bounces from fiance to fiance like a fortune hunter. Her irresistibility and psychological stronghold on the men in her life leads to her downfall.
The basis of the novel is that Myshkin is not bright, has not had much education, and traverses society with a mentality of simplistic innocence. When speaking his opinion, he struggles to articulate himself with Charlie Brown-like stammering and wishy-washiness. For this reason, people consider him an idiot, but he is a good, honest, sympathetic, and gracious person. When he comes into a large inheritance, he is blackmailed by a man who claims to be the illegitimate son of Myshkin's benefactor; but when the man's story is debunked, Myshkin befriends rather than chastises the culprit and his accomplices. Myshkin also falls in love with and becomes betrothed to a giddy girl named Aglaia, who uses his ingenuousness as a foil for her jokes and sarcasm, despite his undying devotion to her.
The novel seems to say that a saintly man, making his way in a society that is concerned with materialism and cutthroat avarice, will be considered a childish idiot for valuing honesty, kindness, and the simple things in life. Like I said, the ending is a shocker and sends a plaintive message, that in a crazy world, a sanatorium is the only place for a saint.
Rating: 5
Summary: A dark, tumultuous, complex work--one of D's greatest.
Comment: Dostoevsky, that great tortured and feverish soul, wrote this novel after the onslaught of the Nihilists in Russian arts and letters. He felt he was waging a war against the crude and unfeeling Western materialism of the day; he was battling what he saw as a holy war. While authors like Turgenev and Tolstoy regarded the expanding West with (fairly) open arms, Dostoevsky feared it would cause a religious crisis, where faith in Christ was extinguished and ignorance, vanity, and greed would overcome.
This is a towering, exciting novel--perhaps not as great as "Crime & Punishment" or "Brothers Karamazov"--it contains some of his most penetrating insights into religious faith, human compassion, despair, and insanity. Prince Myshkin is of course one of literature's great characters, a Christ-like young man caught up in the treachery of the aristocratic lives of the Yepanchins. The other two main characters, Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna, along with Myshkin, form a powerful triangle that, despite their being "off-stage" for much of the novel, drive this novel to its tragic, unavoidable climax.
I do not, however, recommend this book to first time Dostoevsky readers; that should be "Notes from Underground" or "Crime and Punishment." The ideas Dostoevsky explores here need some context and understanding; they may leave the inexperienced reader a bit confused. At least that was my experience! After understanding him and his concerns, this novel cracked wide open. It is a darkly spiritual work, as are all of his; it is also quite disturbing. When young Ippolit describes the Hans Holbein painting "Christ in the Tomb" that adorns the cover of the Oxford edition, we see into the darkest reaches of despair and hopelessness. Indeed, the painting is a Christ that is unresurrected, one that is rotting flesh and cannot, in Dostoevsky's scenario, save humankind. This thought terrifies Rogozhin, Myshkin... and Dostoevsky himself.
What a stunning achievement this work is. I am in awe of it. Simply: Read it.
Rating: 4
Summary: 4.75 Stars
Comment: There certainly will never be another book like The Idiot. As every high school student knows, the central maxim of creative writing is, "Show; don't tell." Henry James, who criticized the novels of Dostoyevsky as big, lumbering dinosaurs, epitomized this method of literary exegesis. In The Idiot, Dostoyevsky wrote nearly 700 pages of "telling" and almost no "showing" to speak of. The book doesn't really have a plot: though linear, there is little cohesion; in addition, Dostoyevsky takes frequent times outs from telling his story to expound on such philosophical issues as capital punishment, morality, humility, materialism, and the order of chaos. Indeed, the previous subject, or the lack there of, is really the theme and the focus of the book. In reading The Idiot, it becomes quite clear why Christ was crucified. Dostoyevsky portrays the Russia of his time as a mad, chaotic world characterized by an obsession with decadent materialism. In such a swirling mass of "isms", one struggles to find a rational and coherent foothold; morality and virtue have no place. The Christian ideal -- which now seems to have disappeared from the world, if, indeed, it ever actually existed -- of humility, submission, deference, tolerance, and turning the other cheek, as personified in Prince Myshkin, the novel's title character and protagonist, also has no place. Dostoyevsky saw the Christ-like figure of Myshkin as the only hope that Russian culture and society had: he was Dostoyevsky's redemptive figure. Unfortunately, as Dostoyevsky clearly and vividly portrays in this dark and bleak novel, such a person would most likely never be able to integrate him or herself into a culture as far gone into decadence and negative modes of thinking -- atheism, nihilism, etc. -- as his Russia was. Does this sound familiar, or does it not? The book and it multiple messages are clearly still very relevant today. One literary scholar quite accurately called this Dostoyevsky's most contemporary novel. One senses that it is even more applicable to today's (post-Communist and once again being invaded by capitalism and Western materialism) Russia than to the Russia of Dostoyevsky's own time. The book is not an especially exciting read: there is a multitude of dialogue and very few things (with the exceptions of Nastashya's two big incidents) which can be called "exciting" take place. The novel, as mentioned before, is also very fragmented: it is seemingly not structured at all, and events happen apparently at random and with no connection to each other. This, of course, relates back to the chaos of order -- or, in relation to the novel itself, the order of chaos. The discontinuity of the novel reflects and comments upon the discontinuity of society and the world itself. This is precisely why we still read Dostoyevsky today, and why we should always read him: the anomie of Dostoyevsky is the eternal anomie of mankind.
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Title: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0553211757 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Konstanfin Mochulski ISBN: 0553212168 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 April, 1984 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 067973452X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Rosemary Edmonds ISBN: 0140444173 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: October, 1982 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Devils : The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, David Magarshack, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0140440356 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1954 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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