It’s Saturday night and I can hear a cold wind howling over the tree tops through the jazz I have on in the living room. Last night I at last finished The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky which was a long and complicated novel about Prince Myshkin and the two loves of his life, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya Yepanchin.
These three are a triumvirate of characters that I’m not likely to forget: a Christian of such innocence and selflessness that everyone mistakes him for being mentally handicapped, a woman who is so divided between self-hatred and love that she burns down her own life to lose the man that she loves, and a spiteful girl of twenty who is cruel to everyone and especially the Prince, though she is the only character to actually see the Prince for who he is.
Part One was breathtaking for its speed and building fury and Part Four was notable for its devastating tragedy. I still have a sinking feeling when I think of the end . . . and there was a lot of philosophy and 19th century Russian social criticism that I didn’t follow sandwiched in between.
Both the first and last sections had me wondering what it is that people love in art. This art was terrifying: Part One in its whirlwind and Part Four in the disaster that wrought upon the characters. After the first section I was left wondering if this would make a workable movie, what pace! At the end I was left wondering whether or not anyone want to see a movie in which the major characters meet such ruin.
All this has me wondering what the point of the book was in the end. I wonder if there is some larger social point that Dostoyevsky was trying to make about a Russian society and the noble class of the time. So much to wonder about . . . so little time.
