The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
19-22 April 2015.
Due to a glitch of the local internet that lasted for three days, I was confined to the books that I already downloaded. So after a small excursion to the early Indian literary space time continuum, I had to contend myself to be warped back into the 19th century of the Russian literature because it was the only book from my list of remaining books to read that was downloaded on my Kindle.
Summary
During the last segment of his travel from Switzerland to St. Petersburg, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a penniless aristocrat, met Parfyon Rogozhin (who just inherited a fortune of one million rubles), and Lebedev. Myshkin passed the last four years in a special clinic in Switzerland to be treated for a severe case of epilepsy. The reason for his return was a letter that he received while abroad and even his doctor found him well enough to undertake the travel to deal with the matter.
In St. Petersburg he wants to get advice concerning the suit he has to give to the letter that summoned him from abroad from Lizaveta Epanchin, a distant relative and the wife of General Epanchin with whom she has three daughters. When he obtained an interview with the General to talk to him about the letter but when the General came to the realization that the Prince was penniless he interrupted him, procured him with a job and loaned him 25 rubles. At several occasions the Prince tried to put forward the real reason for his visit, but was on every occasion interrupted by some mini-crisis that arose.
The general had an old friend, Totsky, who had for many years a young girl for a mistress called Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov but the affair dried out and she started to threaten to ruin his reputation. Therefore the two old men concocted a plan to marry her off to the General’s secretary Gavril Ivolgin (Ganya) by dangling a dowry of 75.000 ruble as bite for the nose of the money hungry Ganya.
He’s also introduced to the General’s wife and meets his three daughters.
Ganya finds out he’s in fact in love with the General’s youngest daughter Aglaya, but is holding back because of the dowry that he hoped to cash in to start his own business when he marries Natasya and fearing that the General wouldn’t find him a worthy candidate for his daughter.
So if he would marry her without her father’s consent he would end up penniless (as in “no dowry”) and jobless. Meanwhile the Prince was taken under the patronage of the General’s wife and his youngest daughter developed a fancy for him.
The Prince, after seeing a picture of Natasya, fell in love with her and he decided to go to her birthday party the next day where she would announce her decision concerning Ganya’s marriage proposal.
The Prince took a room into the boardinghouse managed by Ganya’s mother and his scheming, practical sister Varya. The other members of the household were his alcoholic and confabulating father, General Ivolgin, who was a constant source of embarrassment for Ganya and his younger teenage brother Kolya who was charged to keep an eye on his father.
Into the middle of his introduction of the Prince to his family, Natasya Filippovna showed up and a very embarrassing situation occurred when she pointed out that one of General Ivolgin rants at this occasion was very similar to a story she read into the newspaper a couple of days before. In the middle of all that, the newly baked millionaire Rogozhin, who was by himself feverishly possessed by Natasya, burst in half drunken together with his also drunk friends and declared that at the evening he would bring her at her birthday party hundred thousand ruble to better the proposed dowry of seventy-five thousand of Ganya’s sponsors.
Myshkin invited himself to Natasya’s birthday party and animated everybody with his simpleton remarks, till Rogozhin at his turn crashed the party with his friends and put the promised 100.000 rubles on the table. Now Natasya found the time ripe to ask the love-struck Myshkin if she should marry Ganya or Rogozhin; of course he said none of them and made his own proposal and put the mysterious letter upon the table wherein a Lawyer stated that he came into a heritage of one and a half million rubles.
Natasya refused him by saying he was too good for her, threw Rohozhin’s money into the fireplace and dared Ganya to take it out with his bare hands. He refused and fainted on his way out. Natasha took some poke, fished the money out of the fire and put it next to him.
During six months that followed the party, Natasya Filippovna kept going forth and go between Rogozhin and Myshkin; every time running to the other when one of them came too close of marrying her.
Myshkin was really a soft egg and some scam artists had field day with him. By the time that he made back to St. Petersburg six months later, he was left with only a mere 130.000 rubles of his fortune.
His main reason to return to St. Petersburg was that he pursued Natasja who was there hanging out with his rival Rogozhin, who declared he was nevertheless also his best friend, brought him to his old and senile mother to be blessed and exchanged crosses with him.
That didn’t withhold Rogozhin to try to murder Myshkin the same day. His plot just folded because at the moment he wanted to stab the Prince, the latter got a violent epilepsy seizure and dived head forward from the stairs. After he recovered a little from his injuries, Myshkin decided to rent some rooms at some vacation resort close by St Petersburg and his landlord happened to be Lebedev, the murky civil servant (but a first class opportunist and manipulator) he met on the train.
The prince was barely installed into his new quarters or some scheming nihilists tried to scam him from a part of his heritage by claiming that one of them was the illegitimate son of Pavlichev, Myshkin’s benefactor.
Already a while before their visit, the prince heard of this story and had asked Ganya to look into the matter. As it were to expect, all their claims were at unfounded and most of them just outright lies that could easily be exposed by documentary evidence.
Nevertheless, out of the goodness of his heart, the Prince offered financial assistance of 10.000 ruble to Burdovsky, the one who claimed to be the illegitimate son, but the latter indignantly refused “the charity” (although his friends were pushing him to take it) and offered hospitability to Ippolit, a teenager who was into the terminal phase of tuberculosis.
Myskhin started to pay social visits to the Epanchin family and fell in love with the youngest daughter Aglaya, who most of the time made fun of him but seemed at last to give in.
On his birthday party Ippolit gave a long speech that he called his confession but that was in fact a veiled suicide note. Then he tried to shoot himself through the head, but didn’t load the gun properly. Everybody laughed at his antics and a drooping Ippolit was escorted by his friends to his own quarters.
At the Epanchin household they were getting used to the idea of Myshkin as Alaya’s fiancé and they decided to throw a party to introduce him to their circle. The prince, of course, misread the guests completely. What for them is just common sense decorum and etiquette, he takes for genuine feelings and thoughts.
As a result he started wild, hugely misplaced and very opinioned speeches about religion, nobility and patriotism. He also managed, by gesturing wildly while delivering his sermons, in breaking one of Mrs. Epanchin’s favorite vases to end by getting an epileptic fit.
Aglaya is not turned off by this but before consenting to the marriage, she decided to put Myshkin through a final test. She asked him to escort her to Natasya Filippovna’s house and to make out with her.
Of course the damsel is raged with jealousy (although she wrote three letters to Aglaya, pressing her to marry Myshkin) and when Aglaya summoned Myshkin out of the house she “fainted”. The over-compassionate Myshkin was all over her and a furious Aglaya ran off. All future marriage plans were shelved and the Epanchin’s excluded him from their house and so did all their socialites.
Again preparations for a marriage were made and again Natasya glided into the familiar pattern of despair and emotional outbursts. Just when Myshkin’s best man wanted to fetch her to bring her to the church for the wedding ceremony, she jumped into a chariot with Rogozhin and they escaped to St Petersburg.
Myshkin, the faithful dog went the next day also to St Petersburg on a frantically search and rescue mission to but couldn’t find them. Finally Rogozhin found him and took him to his house where he showed Myshkin her corpse; he had stabbed her to dead the previous night.
The whole night long they held a wake near her body and were next day discovered by Lebedev and a bunch of policemen. The Prince was in a near catatonic state and Rogozhin suffered of a severe case of brain fever.
After Rogozhin recovered, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in Siberia and all his fortune was forfeited in favor of his giddy younger brother.
The prince was returned to the Swiss sanatorium by Kolaya and presumably never recovered. Aglaya married an exiled Polish count who turned out to be an imposter and conman.
Comments;
It seems that the theme of declining dynasties was fascinating a lot of European writers by the end of the 19th century. For sure that period of time was characterized by the downfall of centuries old dynasties of nobility to be replaced at the top of the heap by a new class of emerging industrial capitalists.
Those old traditional nobles who were relying too much on what their estates produced and missed the train to the future, were confronted by falling prices for agricultural products, and those who persisted in their disdain for money management were driven into poverty and anonymity.
All books of that time describe, up to a certain degree, the last siblings of a decaying dynasty as “idiots”.
The Maharajagar 