The return to nature: Tolstoyan echoes in The Idiot

Russian Review

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 87-102

  Orwin, Donna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

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EID: 36148997911     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.591999059     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. F. M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 30 vols. (Leningrad, 1972-88), 9:364-65, 452-53, 465
2. All references in the text and notes to Dostoevsky are by volume and page number to this Academy edition. All translations are my own. See also Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge, MA, 1981), 59-60
3. Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot, 38
4. Robert Louis Jackson discusses the positive and structuring role of nature and the seasons in Notes from the House of the Dead. See his The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, 1981), 40-41. The resultant circular structure of the work, also remarked on by Jackson, is a feature that it shares with War and Peace. Even in this most Tolstoyan of his works, however, Dostoevsky is more Christian than the early Tolstoy in his emphasis
5. In this general interpretation of Notes from the Underground I follow Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky
6. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865 (Princeton, 1986), 310-45
7. and Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, 1996), 21-29
8. The editors of the Academy edition, citing Sorokina, "Zamysel i ego osushchestvlenie," Uchenye zapiski Tomskogo universiteta, no. 50, 1965, connect Myshkin with Tolstoy's teaching methods at the Iasnaia Poliana school (9:364). The editors also point out that, while extensive plans in the drafts for a children's school and club are not realized in the novel, there are sympathetic children through the book, and many adult heroes (Nastasia Filippovna, Aglaia, Madame Epanchina, Keller, Ippolit, Gania) have, as Myshkin understands them, a childlike purity of heart (9:365). Myshkin himself, of course, is childlike, so much so that early on, when General Epanchin learns that Myshkin is twenty-six, he exclaims that he would have thought him much younger (8:24). Various contemporary critics commented on Myshkin's resemblance to a child (9:413-41)
9. Vremia, the journal founded and edited by Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail, followed Tolstoy's pedagogical essays in Iasnaia Poliana and commented on them sympathetically. See Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 102
10. L. N. Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS), 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928-58), 8:321-22. All references to Tolstoy in the text and notes are to volume and page of this Jubilee edition of Tolstoy's works. All translations of Tolstoy are my own
11. In 1855, still in exile in Siberia, Dostoevsky read Adolescence in the journal Sovremennik and was sufficiently struck by it to ask a correspondent the name of its pseudonymous author (28.1:184). Half a year later he praises "L. T." (Tolstoy) in a letter to his literary correspondent A. N. Maikov (28.1:210). In The Injured and the Insulted [Unizhennye i oskorblennye; 1861]
12. According to Kennoske Nakamura, Chuvstvo zhizni i smerti u Dostoevskogo (St. Petersburg, 1997), the other, dark side of Dostoevsky's response to nature arises from fear of death, which bars the dying Ippolit from the joy he seeks. Ippolit's reaction to the same scenes, and perhaps even to the same "sensation," might have been hatred that he was excluded from the "feast of life." It is crucial, of course, that Ippolit is dying while Myshkin was recovering from a serious illness when he met the Swiss children. Nakamura distinguishes two different reactions to nature that Dostoevsky felt himself and that he expressed and explored in his fiction: the first is ecstatic joy of life; the second, visceral fear of death. Compare also Andrei's reaction in War and Peace to the children stealing apples in the orchard before the battle of Smolensk
13. Arpad Kovacs, "The Poetics of The Idiot: On the Problem of Dostoevsky's Thinking about Genre," in Critical Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Robin Feuer Miller (Boston, 1986), 119-22
14. Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot, 59
15. Joseph Frank points to the idealism inherent in the prince's "transcendent yearning" to go beyond the division between sky and earth (Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 [Princeton, 1995], 320). This idealism, I shall argue, is something unnatural in the prince, something that takes him out of nature
16. A. Gertsen, Pis'ma ob izuchenii prirody (Moscow, 1946), 19. Herzen agrees with Rousseau about the artificiality of contemporary civilization, but takes exception to his return to nature. He argues that to go backwards is itself unnatural (neestestvennyi), and he sees a parallel between historical development and the natural development of organisms
17. See the two-part assessment of Tolstoy, "Graf Tolstoi i ego Sochineniia," published in nos. 1 and 2 of the Dostoevsky brothers' journal Vremia in 1862
18. See Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky, 9, 82, 240
19. A. L. Volynskii remarks on Rogozhin's exceptional intelligence. See his Dostoevskii (St. Petersburg, 1906), 67
20. George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York, 1959), 151-52
21. Quoted in N. N. Gusev, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k biografii s 1855 po 1869 god (Moscow, 1957), 224
22. Whether he knew it or not, Dostoevsky's own vision of the expansive self, like the Tolstoyan concern with unity of self, may be traced back to Rousseauian metaphysics and psychology. See Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago, 1990), 44-45
23. For her excellent discussion of Tolstoy and Herder see "The Expressive Self in War and Peace," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12 (Winter 1978): 526-28
24. See also book 5, chapter 1, for Herder's explanation of the organization of nature according to the great Chain of Being. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA, 1942), has traced this idea back through Western culture and the Neo-Platonists to Plato himself, and hence to those very Platonic ideas that are present in other forms in War and Peace
25. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov feels a brief respite from his obsessive plans to commit murder when he crosses a bridge of the Neva at sunset and looks down into the water (6:50). On the sun and particularly on sunsets in Dostoevsky see Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia, 131-32, 160, 164, 180
26. The seed metaphor is highly developed in The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoevsky preserves the notion of a chain as well. As Miller observes, "the chain as a symbol of the immortality of good deeds" is "crucial" in The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky and The Idiot, 59). Note again, however, that the chain in that novel refers to human deeds rather than a structure in nature
27. A. P. Skaftymov, "Tematicheskaia kompozitsiia romana Idiota," in Tvorcheskii put' Dostoevskogo: Sbornik statei, ed. N. L. Brodskii (Leningrad, 1924), 131-85. Myshkin's last name, derived from mysh' ("mouse") contrasts with his first name, Lev ("lion"). The name Myshkin could be a joke, meant to distinguish Dostoevsky's moral man from Tolstoy's proud moral hero, Prince Dmitrii Nekhliudov, Nikolenka's friend in Adolescence and Youth, the hero of Morning of a Landowner, and the narrator of Lucerne. But the mouse roars in Myshkin's strident speech at the Epanchins' party