A Truly Beautiful Soul in The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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The Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky stands at the very summit of Russian literature. No 19th-century writer had greater psychological insight or philosophical depth. None speaks more immediately and passionately to the mood and tone of the present century. This essay will discuss how Dostoyevsky's intent to portray a 'truly beautiful soul' manifests itself in the novel The Idiot, and access Dostoyevsky's success or failure in achieving his intention.

Dostoyevsky confesses in his letter to Maikov dated January 12, 1868 that his 'desperate situation' compelled him to resort to the fascinating and tempting, but nonetheless difficult and premature thought of portraying 'a wholly beautiful individual.' As a result, into Part One of the novel, which he started writing on December 18 and submitted in its full form on January 11 to the January issue of 'Russian Messenger', the 'beautiful individual', Prince Myshkin, was plunged premature and 'extraordinarily weak'. Dostoyevsky believed that 'beauty will save the world'1 and hoped to create a figure who could lead the many into the experience of the same inner peace and beauty that this character has achieved through grace.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot portrays a morally blameless man, Prince Myshkin, whose innocent simple nature and epileptic seizures cause him to be taken for a cretin. He is a man who is ineffectual because of his positive goodness. His Christ-like qualities, far from influencing those about him, are shown to be utterly incongruous in a sinful world. Nastasya Filippovna, who has been cruelly treated by a former lover, is attracted both to Myshkin and to the evil Rogozhin, and is unable to commit herself to either. W...

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...ween beauty and society indicates the novel as a unit containing beauty, as an ideal, in itself.

Bibliography

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, Middlesex, Penguin Books Ltd., 1955.

Roger B. Anderson, Dostoyevsky - Myths of Duality, Florida: University of Florida Press, 1986.

Michael Holquist, Dostoyevsky and the Novel, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoyevsky's Quest for Form - A Study of his Philosophy of Art, New Haven: Yale University, 1966.

Gary Soul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre - Dostoyevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia.

Joseph Frank, Dostoyevsky - The Miraculous Years 1865 - 1871, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Robert Louis Jackson, Dostoyevsky's Quest for Form - A Study of his Philosophy of Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, p. 40.

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