The Idiot

These facts, most of them registered in this volume’s Chronology, blend in the popular imagination with material from Dostoyevsky’s fiction (the murder of Fyodor Karamazov, numerous scenes of violated innocence, Prince Myshkin’s seizures in The Idiot, Makar Devyushkin’s hand-to-mouth existence in Poor Folk, hellish scenes from The House of the Dead and from The Gambler). Dostoyevsky’s Russian critics processed his fiction in these terms, and ‘scientific criticism’ of foreign scholars was quick to build upon this shaky foundation. The most reckless diagnosis no doubt belongs to Emile Hennequin:

All of these sensational details of his life and work are, however, subject to qualification. James Rice, in a thorough and insightful study of Dostoyevsky’s illness, notes that unlike the hero of The Idiot, Dostoyevsky could generally anticipate his seizures and rarely suffered them in public.⁴ He was able, ultimately, to control and terminate his obsession with gambling, and to write his way out of debt. The madness, violence and irrationality of his characters – denigrated by his contemporary Russian critics and celebrated by his first foreign ones – were more often than not creative transformations of his childhood reading of early nineteenth-century European literature. In ways unrecognized by his first European readers, he was returning them the themes, plots and characters of their own Romantic fiction, drama and poetry.

By studying Dostoyevsky’s letters, notebooks and revisions – most fully collected in the thirty-volume Soviet collection of his works (1972–90) – later twentieth-century scholars began to show the extent to which his choices were the products of a deep understanding of literary art. Unlike Henry James, who famously undervalued Russian craftsmanship (except Turgenev’s), Dostoyevsky did not publish prefaces to his works, nor did he author an essay on the art of the novel. But the notebooks show that he had a nuanced understanding of the rhetorical and aesthetic consequences of his choices of narrative viewpoint, archetype, plot sequence and mode (comic, tragic, satiric, ironic). Robin Miller’s magisterial reading of the notebooks for The Idiot, in particular, opened new perspectives on Dostoyevsky’s art.

By countering the initial response to Dostoyevsky as an untutored savage, such detailed studies of his texts and writing process enable us to understand him as a gambler in a new and different sense. While he is famous for his compulsive gambling sprees at a game of chance, roulette, his greatest gamble was one that he indulged not for six years, but for nearly four decades: that he could support himself exclusively by his writing, by becoming one of Russia’s first truly professional writers.

To appreciate this risk one must understand the circumstances in which Dostoyevsky worked. Secular Russian literature was scarcely a century older than Dostoyevsky himself. And the first tentative steps toward a viable, prestigious literature that was not a matter of salon play or court patronage had been taken by writers but a generation or two older than Dostoyevsky: Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818), Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837), Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) and Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) among them. These writers contended with conditions far from conducive to the development of a literary marketplace. For a start, the autocracy was inconsistent in dealing with what the Emperor Alexander II would call ‘the ungovernability and excesses of the printed word’.⁵ During the period 1750–1854 private presses were permitted, banned and re-established; ambiguous passages in a text were held against the author, then discarded, and – de facto – held against him; the importation of foreign books was banned, permitted, then severely curtailed. And agencies with censorship powers proliferated, often contradicting one another. The imperial government had so little respect for the laws it promulgated that one of the censors would justly complain that ‘there is no legality in Russia’.⁶ With Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War and the accession of a new emperor in 1855, the situation became better, but still far from ideal. Dostoyevsky would feel the lash on his own back in 1863, when Vremya (Time), the very successful journal that he and his brother Mikhail had founded, was shut down over an innocuous article on the Polish Uprising of that year. That Dostoyevsky, an ardent Russian nationalist who sprinkled unsympathetic Polish characters across his novels, should have suffered this disaster indicates the continuing capriciousness of the government, which, even as it was banning Vremya, was allowing the publication of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s Utopian novel, What Is to Be Done?, which would become gospel for radical youth, including, later, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

So high were the barriers to successful professional authorship that few of Dostoyevsky’s fellow writers risked hurdling them; a contemporary survey by S. S. Shashkov argued that few writers earned the 2,000 roubles a year necessary to support a family and that the situation in the 1870s was little better than it had been four decades earlier.⁷ Even prominent writers relied on independent means or hedged their bets with official positions. Leo Tolstoy inherited a large estate (approximately 800 taxable serfs), Ivan Turgenev divided an estate of 4,000 with his brother. These grand holdings considerably dwarfed the small debtridden property of Dostoyevsky’s father. Both Ivan Goncharov and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin came from families that enjoyed noble status and merchant wealth, and both made significant careers in state service, from which Dostoyevsky had quickly resigned upon graduating from the Academy of Military Engineers. Dostoyevsky’s family background was decidedly modest – his mother came from the merchant estate and his father had worked his way into the lower nobility from the even less prosperous parish clergy. Once Dostoyevsky had surrendered his ensign’s pay and exchanged his share of his father’s insignificant estate for 1,000 roubles, he had no other sources of support than small loans from friends and relations and income from his writing.

To count on finding a readership was no less a gamble than was braving the Russian legal system. Five years before beginning The Idiot Dostoyevsky estimated that only one Russian in 500 was sufficiently educated to read the literature that he and his fellow writers were publishing in a handful of journals, in an increasing number of newspapers and in small editions of individual volumes.⁸ Eight years of penal servitude and Siberian exile, most of them spent in the company of non-intellectuals, had made him acutely conscious of the cultural schism between the empire’s minuscule Westernized elite and the illiterate masses which preserved Russia’s traditional Orthodox culture. He had come to deplore this schism; he sought enduring value in the people’s way of life, and he dedicated his post-exile career to reconciling intellectuals who looked to the modern West (‘Westernizers’) and to the Russian past (‘Slavophiles’) through a policy of pochvennichestvo (a term derived from the Russian word for soil) in his short-lived journal Vremya. But Dostoyevsky attempted to do this as a professional author, not as a gentleman-pamphleteer or salon debater, and, as a professional, he knew that he not only had to argue with the cultured elite, but also entertain it and seize its imagination.

Dostoyevsky may not have had financial resources, but the cultural capital he could stake was not insignificant by the standards of his time. He had acquired a love of literature in his family surroundings and at school. At the Imperial Academy of Military Engineers he received instruction in Russian and French literature, German and history. In these early years at home, at school and in St Petersburg he pored over and passionately discussed the books of the Bible; Job, Revelation and the Gospels, especially John, shaped his view of the world. The Dostoyevsky family, far socially from the Francophone elite, taught him to revere the best of Russian literature, and his texts – including The Idiot – reverberate with quotations from the works of Pushkin, Gogol and Karamzin. Gogol’s impact is particularly noticeable throughout Dostoyevsky’s career in the uncanny relationships between his characters, in his often fantastic treatment of St Petersburg, and in his use of multiple narrative positions within a single fiction. Pushkin and Gogol had helped foster a vision of St Petersburg as a city of extremes, of inhumane destructiveness, of sudden transformations. Dostoyevsky’s very notion of reality, ‘fantastic’ as he called it shortly after completing The Idiot,⁹ derived in large part from the experience of these two predecessors in thematizing the capital of the Russian bureaucracy, ‘the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe’, as one of his characters, the Underground Man, would put it. But Dostoyevsky would tether his predecessors’ balloon of fantasy to social, economic and cultural situations they had not envisioned, as is immediately apparent from the opening chapters of The Idiot, set in a railway car and in the home of a newly enriched capitalist.

Nabokov, mocking Dostoyevsky’s Russian nationalism, could not resist the temptation to call him ‘the most European of the Russian writers’,¹⁰ and Dostoyevsky’s early letters and late journalistic essays, to say nothing of his fiction, show an intense, enduring fascination with several interrelated genres imported into Russia by translators and literary journals. The German writer Friedrich Schiller gave him a sense of life as festival, an ecstatic sense that humanity could be perfected and that people could become brothers through achieving a harmonious balance between mental, emotional and sensual activities. Such visions extend from Dostoyevsky’s early teens through Prince Myshkin’s visions in The Idiot to Dmitri Karamazov’s confessions in verse and Alyosha Karamazov’s final speech. Gothic fiction, another youthful fascination, transects all of Dostoyevsky’s fiction with mysterious settings, characters beset by mental dysfunction and plots set in motion by violations of the divine order. If we could use the term ‘Gothic’ in its historical sense and not in its present, pejorative one, we would find much of it in Dostoyevsky, whose mature fiction centres around daring challenges to moral and divine authority. French social Romanticism (Georges Sand, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, the Utopian Socialists) figures no less prominently in his early reading, and it gave him lessons in criticizing contemporary society and dreaming of a potentially harmonious social order. Dostoyevsky would begin his literary career with a translation of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833). Canonical works sanctified by Romanticism, such as Shakespeare’s, would lend Dostoyevsky citations and plot structures for the rest of his career. So, from the other end of the literary hierarchy, would his immersion in the columns and serialized novels of the popular newspapers. A glance at the annotations to the present volume will show how well all of this youthful reading stayed with Dostoyevsky, to be supplemented with references to later writing, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux camélias (1848), to the heroines of which he will sharply contrast The Idiot’s tormented Nastasya Filippovna.

This varied material staked Dostoyevsky well, and his gamble on professional authorship paid off, at least initially. His first novel, Poor Folk (1846), earned him critical attention and steady honoraria for his ensuing pre-exile fictions. The happy few who comprised the reading public welcomed him back from political imprisonment and exile in 1859. He published a two-volume collection of his pre-exile fiction in 1860, a relatively rare event at a time when most successful literary commerce was conducted through a handful of so-called ‘thick journals’ – the reading public and distribution networks were not sufficiently capacious to make individual volumes profitable. His work for Vremya and the pseudo-memoir of his prison experience, The House of the Dead, earned him a handsome income of 8,000–10,000 roubles a year.

The closing of Vremya, however, became but the first in a series of catastrophes that preceded the writing of The Idiot. The deaths of Dostoyevsky’s niece (February 1864), wife (April 1864) and brother Mikhail (July 1864) were profound personal misfortunes, and they had a major impact on Dostoyevsky’s ability to conduct his professional life. A new journal which his brother had received permission to publish, Epokha (Epoch), got off to a slow start, each issue appearing two months late throughout the first year. It produced little income because subscribers to Vremya had to be compensated for the issues they had not received when the journal was banned. To make matters worse, the new journal’s fiction did not meet the standards that Vremya had set. The one exception was Dostoyevsky’s own Notes from Underground, which would become one of his best-known and most respected fictions only in the twentieth century. But in 1864 the circumstances of serialization worked against this challenging novella: over two months elapsed between the appearance of the first and second parts, giving the journal’s readers little chance to see the intricate connections between the two parts. The critics dismissed it with silence.

Meanwhile, Mikhail’s family, a widow and young children, had inherited an immense debt of 33,000 roubles, and Dostoyevsky took responsibility for their well-being. In an effort to support himself, his stepson and his brother’s family, Dostoyevsky made two exceedingly risky business decisions. The first was to continue Epokha instead of abandoning it to his brother’s creditors as a liquefiable asset. It soon folded from want of subscribers. This drove Dostoyevsky to take a second major risk, agreeing to finish two novels in 1866, a Trollope-like rate of production which he never before or afterwards met. For the first novel, the future Crime and Punishment, he secured a place in Mikhail Katkov’s ‘thick journal’ The Russian Herald, at a rate – 150 roubles a signature (a printed sheet equivalent to twelve pages) – that he would continue to receive for his next two major novels, The Idiot and The Devils. This journal was one of a handful that supported major Russian novelists during the 1860s-1880s, and Katkov would regularly send Dostoyevsky advances during the late 1860s, thereby providing a sort of salary, but at a cost. The rate Katkov paid took Dostoyevsky out of the very first rank of Russian writers. Rates were well known in the literary world, and this drop in income would have brought with it a concomitant drop in prestige, a handicap in negotiating future honoraria.

Publishing with The Russian Herald entailed artistic and ideological hazards. Dostoyevsky suspected that Katkov was knocking down his rate to compel him to produce a longer work. ‘A novel is a poetic matter,’ he wrote to A. E. Vrangel, ‘it demands spiritual calm and imagination’ (28:ii.150–51). In the years to come Dostoyevsky would discover that Katkov’s journal impinged not only on the ‘poetry’ of his novels, but on their concrete realization, their ‘art’, as he called it. Katkov, a political and cultural conservative, would insist that Dostoyevsky change the scene of the prostitute Sonia reading the Gospels in Crime and Punishment and that he drop Stavrogin’s confession to Tikhon from The Devils. The publishing pressures on The Idiot were less a matter of censorship than ones of pace and deadline, but they would constantly challenge Dostoyevsky to solve problems of plot and characterization on the fly, giving him no chance to return and revise previous parts as he moved forward with the process of serialization.

The contract for Dostoyevsky’s other novel of 1866, The Gambler, was even more threatening to his art and livelihood than the contract with Katkov. Tempted by the possibility of publishing another collected edition of his works, Dostoyevsky agreed to a contract with F. T. Stellovsky that is legendary for its penalty clause: if he did not deliver a novel of twelve or more signatures by 1 November 1866, Stellovsky would acquire the right to publish Dostoyevsky’s works for nine years – with no compensation for the author. This proved as melodramatic a predicament as any Victorian novelist, including Dostoyevsky, ever invented. Fortunately for Dostoyevsky, the melodrama’s opening acts of tragedy were followed by the obligatory comic ending, a rescue-in-the-nick-of-time. The hero of the piece turned out to be one of Russia’s first stenographers, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. He would work late into the night over his notebooks, jotting down ideas. Then, by day, he would dictate passages to her, and she would transcribe them and promptly return them neatly copied for editing. With her help he not only met Stellovsky’s deadline, he also found a work rhythm that he would continue for the remaining fifteen years of his career. Jacques Catteau argues that the insistent peculiarities of Dostoyevsky’s mature style owe much to this mode of creativity:

Born the year Dostoyevsky published his first novel, Anna Grigoryevna was half his age. Broadly educated and fluent in German, she was, like other literate young Russians of her time, devoted to literature. She became Dostoyevsky’s wife in early 1867, shortly before the newly weds were forced abroad by debts. No account of Dostoyevsky’s work can neglect the extraordinary contributions she made to his career and reputation. Not only did he dictate all his remaining fiction to her, she managed his publishing affairs and a book-setting business after they returned from four years of wandering in Europe. Disseminating his works is only a part of what she did to secure his legacy. She kept a stenographic diary of their time abroad, she wrote valuable memoirs, and she prepared Dostoyevsky’s letters to her for publication. The diary – more than the worshipful memoirs – chronicles his gambling sprees, his bursts of temper, friction with relatives and other daily trials that he would make, much reworked, the stuff of his fiction. The letters show the agony Dostoyevsky experienced in dealing with journals, editors and publishers.

It is to Anna Grigoryevna that we owe our best record of the process of writing The Idiot, the notes that Dostoyevsky jotted down in three notebooks as he planned and drafted the novel. Fearing a lengthy customs inspection, he had planned to destroy them, as he destroyed the novel’s drafts, before crossing the border back into Russia, but she managed to save them, and their crying child distracted the officials, who did not detain the family.

In the best of times writing for serial publication without a completed novel was a nerve-racking process, a gamble by the author that he would be able to pull the work together within the course of the journal’s subscription year. But for the Dostoyevsky family these were not the best of times. As he worked fitfully on the novel between September 1867 and January 1869, Dostoyevsky and Anna Grigoryevna moved between four different cities (Geneva, Vevey, Milan, Florence), enduring a number of seizures, gambling episodes, grinding poverty and, most disheartening of all, the death of their baby daughter Sofia (May 1868). The writing in the notebooks reflects this desperate situation. Earlier editions neatly lay them out into eight plans for the novel, followed by notes for Parts Two–Four, but the most recent edition reproduces them precisely, not as discrete plans, but as a chaotic set of brief comments on plot and character, a few long paragraphs and many feverish ‘Nota bene’ asides. A sequence of headings that Dostoyevsky gave some of his notes captures his attempts to give himself confidence in the novel’s direction and, then, his failure to do so: ‘new and final plan’, ‘new plan’, ‘new plan’, ‘final plan’, ‘final plan’, ‘plan based on lago’, ‘again a new plan’. None of these ‘plans’ is more than two printed pages in length; most of the material they contain is not to be found in the final version of the novel. The notes are at times remarkable, as I have noted, for their awareness of problems of characterization, plotting and rhetoric. They make subtle distinctions which help our understanding of the novel, as when the author differentiates three different kinds of love that his principal male characters exhibit – ‘I) passionately direct love, Rogozhin; 2) love from vanity, Ganya; 3) Christian love, the prince’ (9:220) – or when he differentiates his approach to depicting a virtuous character (‘innocent’) from those of Cervantes and Dickens (Don Quixote and Pickwick are ‘comical’, 9:239).

More remarkable still, however, is the extent to which the notes and plans show novelistic dead ends, character traits and events rejected from the final version, as Dostoyevsky discards possibilities both extremely sensational and novelistically conventional. The future Prince Myshkin in early versions rapes his adopted sister (the future Nastasya Filippovna), sets fire to their house, is a figure of proud self-mastery, a figure based on Shakespeare’s lago and a wife-murderer. Nastasya Filippovna herself and her rival for the affections of Prince Myshkin, Aglaya Yepanchin, show similar instability, the former – as rape victim (in one version by the Idiot, in another by his handsome brother, cut from the final text) who marries the prince and runs off to a brothel, the latter in vacillating relationships with the prince, with Nastasya Filippovna and with Ganya Ivolgin.

Dostoyevsky struggled with these possibilities throughout the autumn of 1867, eventually rejecting the biographical development of his future hero’s oppressive past, the most brutal events and a number of the hero’s family entanglements. The novel became, thereby, much less a Gothic thriller or a work of social Romanticism, in which the characters are crushed by the circumstances of their milieu. He discarded one false start to the novel before starting anew in early December. By 18 December a new novel had taken shape from these confused beginnings, and by 5 January 1868 be Part Onewas able to send off the first five chapters of to The Russian Herald; two more chapters followed on 11 January, and the first journal instalment was complete; he had written nearly a hundred pages in less than a month.¹² The remainder of Part One constituted the second, February, instalment. As was often the case in his years as a serial novelist, Dostoyevsky met his deadline, but allowed himself no time to correct the proofs of the instalment. Living abroad further limited his opportunity to make last-minute changes.

Discarding the bric-à-brac of conventionally sensational fiction opened the way for Dostoyevsky to undertake the radical novelistic gamble that lies at the centre of the finished novel. In a letter to his friend Apollon Maikov, Dostoyevsky spelled out the direction that his writing had taken him: