Beauty in Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”
“Oh, what are my grief and my trouble, if I am able to be happy? You know, I don’t understand how it’s possible to pass by a tree and not be happy to see it. To talk with a man and not be happy that you love him! Oh, I don’t know how to say it…but there are so many things at every step that are so beautiful, that even the most confused person finds beautiful. Look at a child, look at God’s sunrise, look at the grass growing, look into the eyes that are looking at you and love you” (Dostoevsky, The Idiot p. 553)
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is perhaps the most beautiful and tragic work of art I have ever encountered. His devastating portrayal of Prince Myshkin, a man Christ-like in his goodness and faith in humankind, is as horrifyingly beautiful as Hans Holbein’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb,” a recurring image in the novel. Yet, within the tragedy, there arises a glorious celebration of life, a celebration that mirrors Joseph Pieper’s idea of affirmation of goodness in his work In Tune with the World: “But a festival becomes true festivity only when man affirms the goodness of his existence by offering the response of joy” (29). The passage above, spoken by Myshkin, embodies this “response of joy.” Along with the message of the words themselves, Dostoevsky’s writing and the story in itself is an affirmation of this goodness. To have the desire to share one’s view of the world, to contemplate our place in nature and in society, and to recognize that goodness exists, even if it appears as fleetingly as the forgiving gaze of Myshkin, is to see the glory of God’s creation and a way of praising life itself and its creator.
The Idiot manifests the three characteristics of beauty––playful, symbolic, and festive––described by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Play is most fundamentally seen in this work of literature through the merging of the characters in the novel and the observer (Gadamer 24). Part of the beauty of this novel is that the reader feels every moment fully. In the passage above, one is in the room as Myshkin expounds on his philosophy, is fully present, desperately attempting to find the beauty all around. Movement is key to play, and Dostoevsky writes in a way that the reader becomes a part of the movement of the story, the characters, and the words themselves (Gadamer 23).
As in many novels, Dostoevsky capitalizes on the symbol, the most apparent being the character of Myshkin as Christ. Gadamer describes the symbol as a “fragment of being that promises to complete and make whole whatever corresponds to it” (32). In the novel, the reader is able to use the very real symbol of Christ through Myshkin as a way to understand the beautiful and forgiving manner of looking at the world described in the given passage. Neither Dostoevsky nor Gadamer ends there, though. As mentioned in the lecture, Gadamer writes about how the symbol has two parts — unveiling and veiling. Through Myshkin, Dostoevsky unveils, allowing the reader to think more deeply and to listen as proposed by Gadamer, but he also veils, for we cannot fully understand (36). In fact, we ought not to fully understand, and Dostoevsky acknowledges this in Myshkin’s cry of “Oh, I don’t know how to say it.” Gadamer himself writes, “Perhaps the greatest achievements of the greatest writers are themselves marked by tragic speechlessness in the face of the unsayable” (9). We are always between knowledge and ignorance, between “the ideal and the real,” both as readers and simply humans. Briefly, beauty has the capacity to be the “bridge” between those ideas, but it is not its role for that to be permanent or the full truth (Gadamer 15).
The final characteristic of beauty, festivity, is revealed most fully in the timelessness and the community one experiences while reading Dostoevksy’s novel. The novel is shared across cultures, in different languages, through personal thought and discussion. Gadamer speaks of “the intention that unites us” all in choosing to read and allow ourselves to fully experience the work of art before us (40). This is similar in many ways to Pieper, who thinks of festivity as contemplative and timeless in its relation to the community. While Gadamer’s writing applies to the novel as a whole, Pieper’s outlook is most applicable to the given passage, for he specifically writes of how art’s goal is the “praise of creation” (54). There must be an intention behind the art that looks towards God, not simply a means of entertainment. Dostoevsky’s novel has intentionality beyond entertainment. One can certainly find joy in the style and the story, but the heart of the novel is simultaneously a struggle with the idea that we are capable of destroying something as inherently beautiful as Christ and a glorious reveling in the goodness of creation if we only are able to “Look!” as Myshkin begs us to.
Pieper writes that we have the “gift” to find the “still point of the turning world” and “react with awe to the mystery of the being revealed,” and that these are the “postludes of festivity” but that they could become the “preludes” (85). The Idiot demonstrates how those very postludes become preludes in the view Myshkin offers us. Dostoevsky captures Pieper’s final remarks in the passage, for Pieper says, “But what is hidden is nonetheless real. And those who are certain that the ever-bountiful source of all festive celebration remains unalterably present in the world, even though veiled, will regard the empirically patent unfestivity of this same world as not altogether hopeless” (87). In other words, Dostoevsky, through Myshkin, reveals that the potential for “one single everlasting festival” is present in the beauty that we find around us and through making those moments become the source of festivity (Pieper 86).
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Vintage, 2003.
