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The Poetics of the Unconscious in The Idiot and Hegel’s Subject of Philosophical History

于The Dostoevsky Journal
著者：
Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover Adjunct Associate Professor (Research), School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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在线出版日期:
12 Apr 2023

Abstract

The present paper reads The Idiot in the context of Hegel’s philosophy of history and subjectivity and finds that Dostoevsky’s avowed interest in Hegel led to a substantial absorption of Hegel’s thought in his own aesthetics.

Dostoevsky’s educated readers of the 1860s saw the novel as a moral history of the age, represented through an eccentric « new subject » (or the « new people »), embodied in marionette-like characters. The present paper explores this view further and finds that these marionette-like characters function as agents of the unconscious (and pre-empt the aesthetics of the theatre of the Absurd), which is the source of all subjectivity. Expressivity is the defining feature of subjectivity and is represented by means of pathological states – lying and self-destructive tendencies of the characters who display a pathological demeanour. Caprice (will power) is the prime mover of this subjectivity, which, in the context of Hegel’s philosophy of history, is the driver of the historical process and a direct expression of « Geist » or spirit of the people. This spirit comes to expression in different types of Russian national discourses, embodied in the myriad of embedded stories narrated by the characters on stage and off stage, and in stories within stories of episodic characters. These embedded episodic narratives, consisting of verbal pictures (or ekphrases), tell the story of Russia’s historical development from Peter Great’s time to Dostoevsky’s present of the 1860s. This is the story of the demise of the old « estate culture » of traditional Russia, with a « new Russia » emerging into history, which is grounded in an indeterminate subject of history, whose « pochva » (« soil ») is the groundless ground of language and an ethics of individual freedom. Both of these elements of subjectivity, which define the « new people », are negativities shaping a new dialectics, which is both form and content of the new self-conscious “world-historical individual” – Hegelian Man - through which spirit (Geist) manifests itself in the “present moment” of Dostoevsky’s Russia.

关键词reception of The Idiot; ekphrasis; the unconscious; expressivity; marionettes; modern pathological subject; world-historical process; Russian national spirit (Geist); concept (Begriff); finitude of language; Hegel’s “philosophical history”; history as genealogy of spirit; “Russian Christ”; “world-historical individual”

Table of Contents

  1. 1Introduction
    1. 1.1Hegel in Russia and in Dostoevsky’s Life and Works
    2. 1.2Dostoevsky’s Contact with Hegel’s Thought
  2. 2Hegel’s History as Genealogy of Spirit: Actualization of Reason and Freedom
  3. 3Hegel’s “World-Historical Individual” and Volksgeist
  4. 4Dostoevsky’s “Eccentric Subject” and Expressivity as Character Structure
  5. 5Temporality of the Unconscious as Spirit
  6. 6Dostoevsky’s New Ontology of Discourse
    1. 6.1Types and “Ordinary” People
    2. 6.2Performance of Narrative as History
    3. 6.3The Hegelian Man, Freedom and the “New People”
  7. 7Myshkin’s Russian Christ as Hegel’s Spirit

1 Introduction

1.1 Hegel in Russia and in Dostoevsky’s Life and Works

For over 150 years, Dostoevsky scholarship has drawn inspiration for the interpretation of Dostoevsky’s literary works form his publicist writings. The pronouncements made in dialogue by Dostoevsky’s fictional characters have been carefully matched to Dostoevsky’s pronouncements in his journal articles, his Diary of a Writer and correspondence. This has been the dominant context for the creation of a Master Narrative about Dostoevsky’s alleged political conservatism, nationalism and religious beliefs. It has fed into the myth of a cultural “exclusivity” of the Russians, allegedly promoted by Dostoevsky in his so-called doctrine of “the soil” (почва), which was the expression of a “Russian soul” or “Russia spirit” located historically outside European civilization. This has resulted in a characterization of Dostoevsky as a Russian writer who repudiated “European values”. However, the context in which Dostoevsky lived and worked is mostly left out of this kind of reasoning. In particular, Dostoyevsky’s vital interest in Hegel, dating back to his Siberian exile in Semipalatinsk in 1854, is never taken seriously despite the fact that many leading concepts of Dostoevsky’s so-called world-view or sociology of Russian society echo Hegel’s philosophy of history and re-appropriate the concept of “the national Spirit” (народный дух) and the role it plays in what Hegel has called “the world-historical process”. Hegel’s writings and lectures on history and philosophy, delivered at the University of Berlin between 1818 and his death in 1831 left a profound trace among the Russian intellectuals of the 1840s, the 1860s and beyond, and Dostoevsky had many sources, direct or indirect, from which to absorb Hegel’s thought, which was a major conceptual tool for the debates about questions such as whether Russia was or was not Europe. Dostoevsky not only borrows Hegel’s language and method for the analysis of Russian history and society in his novels, he also adapts Hegel’s dialectic method of reasoning to the structure of his fictional narrative, which is an embedded structure, continuously sublating itself (using the method of substitution or Aufhebung) in the process of interpretation by the reader of the text. Bakhtin called this hermeneutic construct “the polyphonic novel” or the “open text”. This means that the way to Dostoevsky’s ideas about history is not a direct one: he does not express ex cathedra judgments; he works through the polyphonic structure of his novel. To arrive at Dostoevsky’s view of Russian history, it is necessary to analyze Dostoevsky’s poetics. Through the poetics of The Idiot, Dostoevsky constructs not only a “genealogy” of Russian history - in Hegelian manner – but also sketches a potential new “self-conscious historical individual” – embodied by the “new people” of the Russian 1860s; it is this new “self-conscious historical individual” who determines the “world-historical process” in Dostoevsky’s 1860s Russia. Dostoevsky’s genius was to have sketched this “self-conscious historical individual” as a subject of the unconscious, led by the pathology of his unconscious drives and the ego’s quest for mastery. Such a “new man” is not a ‘national type’, nor a specifically ‘Russian man’, but a model of the ‘phenomenology of spirit’, as Hegel designated the phenomenon of the combined workings of the produciton of thought and consciousness. The “new man” portrayed in The Idiot is the Hegelian Man of European modernity. At the same time, this “new” world-historical individual is an expression of the national self-consciousness, of what Hegel calls national spirit (Geist des Volkes, Volksgeist1), at a particular moment in time – in Dostoevsky’s present of the 1860s.

1.2 Dostoevsky’s Contact with Hegel’s Thought

Although scant, there is forensic evidence of Dostoevsky’s deep interest in Hegel’s thought. In 1854, while Dostoevsky was in exile in Semipalatinsk, Baron Aleksandr Wrangel, the 21-old local public prosecutor who befriended Dostoevsky and who supplied him with books, wrote in a letter to his father:

Судьба сблизила меня с редким человеком, как и по сердечным, так и умственным качествам; это наш юный несчастный писатель Достоевский. (…) С ним я занимаюсь ежедневно, и теперь будем переводить Философию Гегеля и Психию Каруса.»2

Even more insistent and direct is Dostoevsky’s evaluation of the importance of Hegel for his own creative process in a letter Dostoevsky wrote from Omsk – the first long letter to his brother upon his release from prison, while he was on the move to his new quarters in Semipalatinsk, where he met Vrangel:

«Пришли мне Коран. “Critique de raison pure” Канта и если как-нибудь в состоянии мне переслать не официально, то пришли непременно Гегеля, в особенности Гегелеву “Историю философии”. С этим вся моя будущность соединена!» 3

The most substantial earlier study which mentions Dostoevsky’s interest in Hegel is in Dimitry Chizhevsky’s Hegel in Russland [Hegel in Russia],4 on which the Heidelberg scholar (of Ukrainian descent) started work as a menshevik émigré postgraduate in Prague in 1924, where he also belonged to the International Hegel Association and the Prague Linguistic Circle – the latter a cradle of Russian Formalism and Structuralism. In 1930, Chizhevsky presented a paper at the International Hegel Congress in The Hague on “Hegel among the Slavs”.

Dimitry Chizhevsky’s (with a germanised spelling of Dmitro Tschizhewskij) Hegel in Russia (Gegel’ v Rossii) demonstrates that the Hegel reception in the 19th century amongst the Russian intellectuals was enormous and ongoing, from the 1840s onward. However, despite citing all the known references to Hegel in Dostoevsky’s correspondence and pointing out some overlap of concepts, such as “Volksgeist” («русский народный дух») and the “reality of the concept” (“Realität des Begriffs”)5, Chizhevsky claims that to read Hegel’s influence into these concepts is far-fetched. Dostoevsky was, according to Chizhevsky, more likely to have gleaned them from the Russian “Schelling followers” such as Belinsky,6 and been influenced by Schiller and the German Romantics. He does not offer proof of this in analysis so it remains an opinion subject to further research.

A similar denial of Dostoevsky’s more intimate familiarity with Hegel and borrowing from Hegel’s thought is prevalent in Western scholarship.7

Surprisingly, Soviet scholarship of the Stalinist period did not seem reluctant to treat the question of Hegel’s influence on Russian thought of the 1840s and beyond.8 Thus no less a figure than the first Soviet Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, writes at about the same time as Chizhevsky, about Hegel’s penetration into Russian thought of the 1840s but passes quickly to the reception of Hegel by the Marxist theoretician, Georgy Plekhanov.9

Contrary to expectations, it is Soviet scholarship in the 1970s which takes up the question of the correspondences of Hegel’s aesthetics to Dostoevsky’s poetics. An exceptional Soviet critic, N. V. Kashina, attempts to read Dostoevsky’s poetics through Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics10 and arrives at some insights which still have validity today.

Recently, there has been renewed interst in Hegel’s impact on Russian realism. Ilya Kliger’s essay on Goncharov and Herzen discusses the question of transposition of Hegel’s thought into the Russian cultural discourse, finding that Hegel’s terms undergo a reduction (“insufficiently sophisticated interpetation”11 by the Russian literati.

It is the contention of this paper that a familiarity with Hegel’s writings, especially Hegel’s philosophy of history and phenomenology of spirit, triggers analogies with Dostoevsky’s poetics, which are hard to ignore. The pursuit of these analogies must lead to a revaluation of Dostoevsky’s literary heritage and the drawing of a distinction between his aesthetics and his journalism. For as the Russian Modernist philosophers (the so-called Decadents) pointed out long ago, at the beginning of the 20th century (to the general disapprobation of the Soviet and post-Soviet and even Western critics), Dostoevsky’s journalism contains “nothing of theoretical significance” and is not connected to his artistic creations.12 As reported, Nikolai Berdyaev found that in his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky was “esoteric, and assimilated his views to the level of a commonplace consciousness”. 13 In other words, Berdyaev recognizes that Dostoevsky is constructing a totally different reader in his Diary of a Writer to the one he constructs in his novels and dismisses the content of the Diary as hermeneutically and epistemologically insignificant.

Dostoevsky was acquainted with Hegel’s philosophy, directly or indirectly, through the Russian intellectual reception of Hegel, ever since the 1840s (which Chizhevsky also concedes). Dostoevsky took his knowledge of Hegel to a higher level during his Semipalatinsk years and could have continued his acquaintance through easy access to Hegel’s works while he travelled or lived abroad intermittently from 1862 to 1871.14 The novel The Idiot was completed while he lived in Europe.

The overlay of Hegel’s thought, in particular Hegel’s philosophy of history, is unmistakably present in The Idiot. This becomes evident if we analyse the method of characterisation and temporality in The Idiot which harmonises with Hegel’s theory of history and subjectivity.

2 Hegel’s History as Genealogy of Spirit: Actualization of Reason and Freedom

Hegel’s philosophy of history goes hand in hand with his theory of subjectivity. Both have as the overarching context Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit (Geist).

Spirit15 can be understood as an actualized totality that belongs to the domain of thoughts and emotions of an individual subject who realizes himself as self-consciousness in the world-historical process. Freud would have described “Geist” as the domain of das Psychische – the psychical, or that which belongs to the psyche, which would include the unconscious as the domain in which concepts are generated. 16

But “spirit” for Hegel is also a supra-individual category: as “national spirit” (“Geist des Volkes”), it is the totality of the state, culture, and cultural memory of a people in the historical process. Thus “national spirit” (“Volksgeist”) is defined as an idiosyncratic particularity of the spirit of world history:

“Die Weltgeschichte stellt…die Entwicklung des Bewusstseins des Geistes von seiner Freiheit und der von solchem Bewusstein hervorgebrachten Verwirklichung dar. (…) Solches Prinzip ist in der Geschichte Bestimmtheit des Geistes – ein besonderer Volksgeist. In dieser [Bestimmtheit] drückt er als konkret alle Seiten seines Bewusstseins aus; die ist das gemeinschaftliche Gepräge seiner Religion, seiner politischen Verfassung, seiner Sittlichkeit, seines Rechtssystems, seiner Sitten, auch seiner Wissenschaft, Kunst und technischen Geschicklichkit.”17

What is needed to become aware of this “national spirit” at a particular moment in time is a model of historical discourse – such as the one Hegel is poviding with his genealogy of spirit:

“That a specific particularity indeed constitutes the peculiar principle of a people is the aspect which must be derived form experience and historically proved. To accomplish this presupposes not only a disciplined faculty of abstraction, but an intimate acquaintance with the idea.”18

Hegel’s philosophy of history and theory of subjectivity (expounded in Lectures on the Philosophy of History and Phenomenology of Spirit19) coalesce into one model in which the world-historical process comes to expression through the individual subject or the “world-historical individual”.20 For the Spirit “actualizes itself” in the historical process through the will of the individual subject. Thus the general (spirit) and the particular (individual will) come to form a unity. Geist is a supra-individual, metaphysical formation, it exists as abstract and “in-principle”; it evolves through the participation of myriads of individual wills and self-consciousnesses as world history, powered by reason.

Looked at from another angle, the crux of Hegel’s deliberations in both the phenomenology of spirit and philosophy of history is the question of the relationship between the general (or universal) and the particular (the individual). The general is the concept (Begriff) while the particular is the individual consciousness which actualizes the general (the universal) through his individual acts, wishes, and passions. Together they make up the world-historical process. But not all history can be reduced to a single perspective; peoples and civilizations go through historical stages or history finds different peoples in different phases of the development of world history, the world-historical process, and the degree to which the people – coming to expression as national spirit (Volksgeist) - are aware of this process. Hegel maps various societies and civilizations according to the schema of: 1 original history, 2 reflective history and 3 philosophical history.

This ‘quasi-typological’ schema is not a model for a modern historiography, it is a philosophy of culture which Hegel developed to describe, from the vantage point of the “present” – his present - how peoples in other civilizations (in China, Egypt, Persia, India, the Slavic World) measured up to his test of civilizational self-awareness and his conception of the ability of national cultures to embrace the universal ‘ideal’ or concept (Begriff), which is spirit’s absolute awareness of itself as spirit, actualized in the state (an organised community) which is the ground of individual freedom. It is a view about the different degrees of self-consciousness present in the historical self-perception of nations or peoples of different civilizations, at different points in time. It is a perspective on the ‘evolution’ of the self-perception of spirit as a cultural totality – of laws, customs, institutions, religion - of a particular people, from the vantage point of a particular time in their history.

What appears to resonate with Dostoevsky’s poetics, which puts the individual centre-stage literally - is Hegel’s conception of the individual as the agent on the stage of world history. According to Hegel, spirit, whose self-realization is the purpose of world history, remains only an “abstract principle” if not actualized and made into reality through an individual will:

“A second element must be introduced to produce actuality, and this is actuation, realization, and its principle is the will, the activity of man in the widest sense. It is only by this activity that that concept [what is meant is “Begriff des Geistes” – concept of spirit; svg], as well as purposes existing in principle, are realized, actualized…The activity that puts them into operation, and gives them determinate existence, is the need, instinct, inclination, and passion of man. That some conception of mine should be developed into act and existence, is my earnest desire: I wish to assert my personality in connection with it: I wish to be satisfied by its execution. If I am to exert myself for any object [Zweck - purpose; svg], it must in some way or other be my object [Zweck]. I must at the same time satisfy my purpose21 in it. (…) This is the infinite right of personal existence – to find itself satisfied in its activity and labour.”22

Hegel is aware of the moral objection which can been advanced against such a self-interested view of man and its effect on world history: he does not defend the “evil” of man23 but he returns to his position of philosophical history and insists that in contemplating the stage of world history, he is moving not from the particular to the general (“events” of history which may have led to the demise of great civilizations and peoples through war and willful annihilation) but form the general to the particular, from the principle of spirit to its actualization in a specific time, in other words, from a position of history as genealogy, history looked at from the vantage point of the present, as something coming to realization in the present as self-consciousness.

History as genealogy is explained by Hegel in terms of his philosophy of history:

“The general idea is that the philosophy of history means nothing but the thoughtful consideration (denkende Betrachtung, Werke 12:20) of it.”24

This “thoughtful consideration” of history as a “philosophical method” appears, at first sight, to negate history as deeds and events – “what is given and what exists”.25 Without refuting this contradiction, Hegel side-steps it with a new postulate about the use of the concept of reason as underpinning the method of (studying) both history and philosophy:

“The only thought (Gedanke) that philosophy bring with it to the contemplation of history is the simple thought of reason, that reason rules the world, and herefore that what has gone on in world history has gone on reasonably. This conviciton and insight is a presupposition with respect to history as such; to philosophy, it is no presupposition. Through philosophy’s speculative insight, reason…is shown to be substance as well as infinite power, is itself infinite matter underlying all natural and spiritual life, as well as infinite form, which is the actuation of this matter, its content. (…); infinite power, because reason is not so powerless as to be incapable of producing anything except an idel, an ought, existing only otside reality, who knows where, as something peculiar in the heads of certain human beings. (…) As it is its own prerequisite and absolute final aim, so is it itself the the activity and production of the same, from inward to outward, not only of the natural universe, but also of the spiritul, in world history.”26

The self-sufficiency of reason as both method and substance means that it is above ethics and utopan idealistic aims, which are random and aribitrary (connected to individuals) – in other words, in studying world history, one can’t start from a preconceived ideology. The material of world history is its own purpose and final aim (Zweck). World history is self-generating (“from inward to outward”) and, like reason, has no origins – therefore canot be brought into correlation with “final causes” even though world history has a final goal: the consciousness of freedom of a historical people.

Another propositon about history as genealogy is that “world history occurs in the domain of spirit”27 and that “freedom is the only thing proper to spirit.”28

Spirit is defined as “that which has its centre in itself. It has not a unity outside itself, but has already found it; it is in itself and with itself”, it is a “Bei-sich-selbst-sein”.29 Thus spirit is the ultimate self-identity – identity as the structure of tautology, which cannot be broken down into parts or anatomized. This is the structure of self-consciousness: “The being with itself of spirit is none other than self-consciousness – consciousness of oneself.”30 Self-consciousness is actualized in two forms of knowing: “first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know.”31 World history is thus “the exhibition of spirit as spirit processes the knowledge of itself as it is in itself.”32

But this “concept of spirit” is “abstract” and “general”, it is spirit as potentiality. To actualize itself as world history, spirit needs a “second element”, which is the “principle” of the “will”, “the activity of man in the widest sense”.33

Thus, in world history, nothing happens without individual passion: “without passion nothing great in the world has been accomplished”.34 Hegel uses the word Leidenschaft.35 But Hegel is not fully satisfied with this word, it does not express what he means. It usually implies something bad, something that should be fought and repressed. That is not what he means, he says. He means by “passion” the concentration of the will upon a purpose (Zweck) which is that person’s own, a “particular content” which is “at one”, united with the will of that person, that it makes him what he is. Then follows a definition of the subject or individual which has the structure of a tautology, just like spirit:

Denn das Idividuum ist ein solches das da ist; nicht Mensch überhaupt, denn der existiert nicht, sondern ein bestimmter.”36

For the individual is such a one that is here; not man in general ([a term to which no real existence corresponds]: for such a one does not exist), but a particular [human being] man.37

World history comes into concrete expression through this concrete individual (the particular) that just is. Later phenomenology tells us that as a tautology (“I am I”38 and “I know that I know”), this individual coincides with the structure of language or meaning,39 which relies on propositions. The individual is indeterminate but finite, while Geist (spirit) is the general and ‘infinite’ or, rather, absolute. World history looked at through the perspective of the particular is a conglomeration of individual wills, or as Hegel puts it, a “vast congeries of volitions”, in other words, a heterogeneity of particulars:

“Thus in the shape of natural existence, of natural will, that which has been called the subjective side – physical craving, instinct, passion, private interest, as also opinion and subjective conception – straightaway is present for itself. This vast congeries of volitions, interests and activities, constitutes the instruments and means of the world spirit for attaining its goal, of elevating it to consciousness, and making it reality.”40

Spirit and world history actualize themselves through the consciousness or rational self-awareness of the individual. This is history as genealogy – the awarness of the historical process in a specific historical moment through the perspective of the self-conscious individual. Hegel considers “the course of spirit existing in and for itself, as the necessary, while that which manifests itself in the conscious will of men, as their interest, we ascribe to the domain of freedom.”41

While Hegel realizes that the word “freedom” is “ambiguous”, he nevertheless attempts the following definition:

“..it is freedom in itself which includes within itself the infinite necessity to bring itself to consciousness (for it is, in terms of its concept, knowledge of itself) and thereby to reality: it is itself the goal which it executes, and the only goal of spirit.”42

Hegel places the idea of freedom as the goal of history in the context of a conception of God, which is not strictly speaking a Christian conception but rather a philosophical-historical one:

“The final aim [of the process of world history – svg43] is God’s purpose with the world; but God is the absolutely perfect being, and can, therefore, will nothing other than Himself – His own will. The nature of His will – that is, His nature itself – is what we call the idea of freedom, putting the religious imagination into terms of thought.”44

If God wills nothing but His own will, God also fits into the structure of a tautology, which is the structure shared by the individual and by spirit. Hegel’s view of the role played by Christianity, or rather “the Christian principle” (he uses this term consistently which transforms Christianity from a historical and organised relgion into an abstract principle of freedom) in world history is the cornerstone of history as genealogy. For him, Christianity, through the agency of the “national spirit” (Volksgeist) of the Germanic people in particular, brought about the “consciousness” of freedom:

“The Germanic nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first to attain the consciousness that man as man is free, that it is the freedom of spirit which constitutes its essence. This consciousness arose first in religion, the inmost region of spirit; but to introduce the principle into the various relations of the actual world is a vast task, the solution and application of which require a difficult and lengthy process of culture. For example, we may note that slavery did not cease immediately on the reception of Christianity. Still less did freedom predominate in states, or did governments and constitutions adopt a rational organization, or even recognize freedom as their basis. This application of the principle to the world, the thorough molding and interpenetration of the world condition by it, is the lengthy process which history itself represents.”45

This “lengthy process” culminates in the appearance of the “Germanic spirit”, which is how Hegel dates “modernity”:

“The Germanic spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute truth as the infinite self-determination of freedom – that freedom which has its own absolute form as its content. The destiny of the Germanic people is to be the bearers of the Christian principle.”46

Two thoughts to take away form the connection of religion and freedom are: Hegel’s emphasis on the advanced civilizational status in self-awareness and awareness of freedom of the Germanic people as the only people in Europe to be in philosophical history at the beginnig of the 19th century; and the appreciation of world history as a difficult evolutionary process of the idea of freedom, from its inception to its realization in the historical actuality of a people. It is not far-fetched to surmise that it was this idea of the Germanic people’s “national spirit” being in a more advanced phase of historical development that provoked and challenged the Russian intellectuals of the 1840s and 1860s and triggered responses such as the general pursuit of the Slavophiles of a “Russian spirit”47, Nikolai Danilevsky’s theses on Russia and Europe48 and Dostoevsky’s own construction of a “Russian idea”.49

For Hegel’s conception of history as genealogy, the idea of freedom is not only connected with spirit, it is also a fundamental goal of the state:

“Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of our investigation; the first is the idea, the second is human passion; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast tapestry of world history. The concrete mean and union of the two is ethical freedom in the state. “50

This union of the general (the state) and the particular (individual will) takes place at rare moments in history (which remain unspecified), when the will of the people and the goals of the state coincide:

“…a state is well constituted and internally powerful when the private interests of its citizens are adjusted to the common goals of the state, when the one finds its gratification and realization in the other…But in a state, many institutions must be adopted, much political machinery invented, accompanied by appropriate political arrangements – necessitating long struggles of the understanding before what is really appropriate can be discovered…The epoch when a state attains this harmonious condition marks the period of its bloom, its virtue, its vigor, and its prosperity.”51

We do not find such a state in Hegel’s contemporary Europe and both Hegel and Dostoevsky remain captive citizens of monarchist dictatorships during their lifetime. But the empathy between the views of Hegel on world history and Dostoevsky’s aesthetic representation of the Russian conceptualization of history, in The Idiot and elsewhere, is remarkable. In the first instance, Dostoevsky’s method of characterization ‘shadows’ Hegel’s expressivist view of the individual in the historical process; in the second instance, Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the “new people” – the progressivist generation of the 1860s – reflects the idea of freedom as formulated by Hegel in connection with spirit as self-consciousness; ultimately, the new temporality in which the characters of The Idiot are located – the temporality of the unconscious – is the same temporality as that of Hegel’s history as genealogy of spirit: a kind of time without time, a present which sublates itself as soon as it ‘takes place’, to become past as memory trace.

3 Hegel’s “World-Historical Individual” and Volksgeist

Charles Taylor has called Hegel’s model of subjectivity “expressivist”.52 This means that all the relations into which a subject is drawn must be mediated by language. “Speech” in, fact, is Hegel’s condition of entry into the historical process of a people, a nation. But it also means that the individual produces itself in the present – in an ongoing process – because, according to Hegel, as Taylor explicates, “what we really are is not known in advance of its expression.”53

Dostoevsky’s method of characterization corresponds to an amazing degree to this expressivist conception of the subject or to Hegel’s “world-historical individual,” who is a “vehicle of Geist”54 and brings spirit to best expression in its own time.

Although Hegel first mentions “the world-historical individuals” in the conetxt of “the great men of history” (like Caesar),55 the “doctrine” of the “world-historical individuals” (as Taylor calls it) implies those who can, put simply and in somewhat reductionist manner, read and experess the Zeitgeist but formulated in Hegel’s more complex philosophical discourse as “those who feel the World Spirit (Weltgeist) as an immanent drive (“immanenter Trieb”), whose instruments these men become and “who first sense and give articulation to what must be the next stage” in the self-actualization of Sprit in the historical process. What is of great relevance for the consideration of the structure of characterziation in The Idiot is the fact that Weltgeist has both a will and an unconscious, which constitutes the “unconscious instinct” of men:

There are great men in history, whose own particular purpose comprehends the substantial content which is the will of the world spirit. This content is the true source of their power; it is in the universal unconscious instinct of men. They are inwardly driven to it, and have no further support against him who has taken up the fulfilment of this goal as his interest, so that they could resist him. Rather the people assemble under his banner; he shows them what their own inner bent [immanenter Trieb] is and carries it out.”56

The world-historical individuals are thus leaders of men of their time. They usher in a new form of historical consciousness, for, as Taylor explicates, “once they raise this banner men follow. In a time when one form is played out, when Spirit has deserted the reigning form, it is the world-historical individual who shows the way to what all men in their depth aspire to.”57

The world-historical individuals are those who are more aware, more self-conscious than others and who raise the conciousness of the national spirit (Volksgeist) of their time to the next level or make it aware of new forms of social and spiritual relations. Thus world-historical individuals have a mission which is not the same as an ideology or a doctrine because what they express is Spirit, or more precisely, “national spirit”, which, like “world history”, is above ideology.58 For history is directed by reason (“reason rules the world”) towards the goal of freedom, which is absolute self-knowledge as essence:

“The goal is that it come to be known that [Spirit] passes forward only to know itself as it is an und für sich, that it brings itself in its truth to appearance before itself – the goal is that it bring a spiritual world to existence which is adequate to its own [sc.the world’s] concept, that it realize and perfect its truth, that religion and the state be so produced by it that it becomes adequate to its concept…”59

The “spiritual world” which Spirit has to create in order to become known to itself, must be a “real community”, which must be embodied in a ‘Staat’ (state):60 “In the state alone has man rational existence.”61 As Taylor explicates:

“…all important developments take place in such communities. Those men who live ouside a state…are totally on the margins of history…What comes at the end of history is not community as such, but rather one which from the first time is fully adequate to the concept, to freedom and reason.” 62

The concrete historical “communities” (states) which have come to embody spirit “more or less adequately” are called by Hegel Volksgeister63. Thus the historical process has stages in which the spirit is realized in civilizational types [Gattung]:

“World history is the presentation of the divine, absolute process of Spirit in its highest forms, of this progress through stages whereby he attains to his truth and self-consciousness about himself. The forms of these stages are the world-historical Volksgeister, the character of their ethical life, their constitution, their art, religion, science. To bring each of these stages to realization, this is the infinite drive [Trieb] of the world spirit, his irresistible thrust [Drang]; for this articulation and its realization is his concept.”64

Taylor claims that Hegel’s concept of history is “to be udertsood teleologically”65 and as a “theodicy”, is not stictly speaking correct. We have shown in the presentation of “history as genealogy” that Hegel’s concept of history is not a linear one but one grounded in sumlateneity of perception of history in the present. As for history being a theodicy, it is true that Hegel makes the statement repeatedly but he also repeats much more frequently the proposition that Reason rules the world and world history. The terms “God” and “Reason” thus appear to be used as synonyms except that Reason is used more frequently.66 Moreover, Hegel’s claims that world history is a “Stufengang des Bewusstseins der Freiheit”67 [a stage by stage progression of the consciousness of freedom], is not the same as claiming a teleology of, say, historical periods, or an evolution such as that of species in nature. For the consciousness of fredom can manifest itself in a people, a Volksgeist, and then disappear again. Civilizational types appear and disappear.

Volksgeist is, in the final analysis, the cultural totality of a people, which includes “the character of their ethical life, their constitution, their art, religion, science”, as well as cultural memory. It is the ground (Boden or “pochva”) of a people, which is “their own”, it is what has made the people that which they are. In the context of the state, the “world-historical individuals” become for Hegel “die Saatsindividuen”:

“Der Staat, seine Gesetze, seine Einrichtungen sind der Saatsindividuen Rechte; seine Natur, sein Boden, seine Berge, Luft und Gewässer sind ihr Land, ihr Vaterland, ihr äusserliches Eigentum; die Geschichte dieses Saats, ihre Taten und das, was ihre Vorfahren hervorbrachten, gehȍrt ihnen und lebt in ihrer Erinnerung. Alles ist ihr Besitz ebenso, wie sie von ihm besessen werden, denn es macht ihre Substanz, ihr Sein aus. Ihre Vorstellung ist damit erfüllt, und ihr Wille ist das Wollen dieser Gesetze und dieses Vaterlandes. Es ist diese geistige Gesamtheit, welche ein Wesen, der Gesit eines Volkes ist.”68

[The state, its laws, its institutions, are the rights of the individuals who are its members; its natural features, its mountains, air, and waters, are their country, their fatherland, their external property; the history of this state, their deeds; what their ancestors have produced belongs to them and lives in their memory. All is their possession, just as they are possessed by it; for it constitutes their substance, their being. Their imagination is filled with this, and their will is the will of these laws and this fatherland. It is this matured totality which is one essence, the spirit of one people.”]

While this declaration about the “Vaterland” might sound like right-wing nationalism in our day and age, in Hegel’s and Dostoevsky’s time, when nation states were far less sophisticated instruments of the will of the people – both Russia and Prussia were repressive dictatorships of empires – this was more subversive than it looks. For it presupposes a unity of the state and the will of the people which is theoretical and aspirational in the times of Hegel and Dostoevsky. What Hegel’s profession of Volksgeist inlcudes is the idea of something of “one’s own”, something which is particular to a certain people, which is part of its “gound” (Boden), just like its “mountains” and “air” and “rivers”. This very concept of the spirit of the people (Volksgeist) as something that is “one’s own” is reiterated by Dostoevsky in his 1860 Notice to Vremia69, which should put to rest the idea of Dostoevsky’s почвенничество (“soil” doctrine) as anything but an adaptation and transposition of Hegel’s concept of Volkgeist into a Russian national setting.

In The Idiot, Hegel’s idea of “national spirit” reappers in a new and specific form, as Myshkin’s “Russian thought” («русская мысль») or the concept of the “Russian Christ”. At the same time, Hegel’s “world-historical individual” is embodied by Myshkin, who is the “leader” of a communty whose members are more or less emantions of his individuality (no matter how paradoxical this may sound), and who together constitute the Russian Geist or Volksgeist of the time. Dostoevsky’s aesthetic representation of Volkgesit and the world-historical individual involves a new method of characterization which preempts the theatre of the Absurd, and a new temporality, which is the temporality of the unconscious. With these tools of a “higher realism”, Dostoevsky matches the metaphysics of Hegel’s concepts and brings the Russian “new people” and the Russian Volksgeist into philosophical history.

4 Dostoevsky’s “Eccentric Subject” and Expressivity as Character Structure

Expressivity is the main structural feature of all the characters in The Idiot. This emerges in their body language as well as their ceaseless addiction to story-telling. Expressivity is grounded in the unconscious, which is embodied in the novel by means of a new poetics which anticipates the theater of the Absurd of Antonin Artaud of the end of the 19th century - begging of the 20th century.70 The device used by Dostoevsky is to assimilate his fictional characters’ visible demeanor to marionette-like expressive features of the puppet theatre. It was by means of this technique that Dostoevsky portrayed the modern pathological subject of history, in response to Hegel’s world-historical individual and in keeping with his own analysis of the genealogy of Russian national history, in a particular moment in time – the Russian 1860s. In this sense, Dostoevsky’s apparent ‘quest’ for a “Russian idea” is the expression of the “Russian national spirit” realized in his aesthetics – hidden in plein sight.

It was the great Edward Wasiolek who first pointed out with perspicacity that the search for technique, which was at the heart of Dostoevsky’s quest for the form and the sujet of this experimental novel, extant in various drafts in the Notes to The Idiot, was focused on an eccentric subject. Moreover, according to Wasiolek, this search centred on the quest for a central figure who was not “the positively beautiful man” and who was not a man but a “young woman”. Thus, Dostoevsky’s much publicised declared intention to represent a “positively beautiful man” was not present at the inception of the conceptualised new work; in fact, the opposite of a “positively beautiful man” was there, in the shape of a pathological woman conceived as the central character. As Wasiolek points out, what persists throughout the 8 plans of the novel into the final version is a situation: it is « that of a young woman who flies from one suitor to another, compelled to attract and reject, hating and loving, punishing and seeking punishment. »71

The characterisation of this woman in the first plan is as follows:

« She is extraordinarily proud, she rides roughshod over all conversations, and therefore the worst extravagances of the Idiot neither shock nor outrage her (once he almost killed her, another time, he broke her hands). But once such moments are over, she flees in aversion. These moments arise partly out of her terribly abnormal and incongruous position in the family. In general, she is unquestionably of an original, frivolous, capricious, provocative and poetic nature, superior to her environment. »72

In this characterisation, we recognise the features of at least two women in the final version: Nastasia Filippovna and Aglaia. But what is of vital importance is the fact that the novel starts to evolve from a nucleus containing an imagined subjectivity which is not the model of a beautiful or harmonious person. It is in fact recognisable as a potential model of a modern pathological subject, who is at the mercy not of the environment but of its own unconscious drives, its will or ego and its unconscious desire.

In fact, if we follow Wasiolek’s Introduction a little further, we read:

« The intention of creating a positively good man was not there at the beginning. It did not come until after D. had been through at least 6 plans (Plan Six = Nov 6, 1867) and as late as a month before he submitted the first part of the novel to the publisher. It was first mentioned in January 1868, in a letter to Maykov, in which D. writes that his « idea is to depict the wholly beautiful man. » Dostoevsky also admits, in the same letter, that he is afraid that he is « not up to » the task because it is the most difficult task, « especially in our age ».73

The task, which crystallized for Dostoevsky as his « project » at this point in time, was formulated by him in somewhat old-fashioned terms, in the context of the Classical ideal of beauty which is not just physical but moral. His ‘moral history of the age’, however, turned on the portrayal of eccentric characters who were not “typical” denizens of Moscow and StPetersburg but appeared to some contemporaries to be like puppets in the marionette theatre. Thus, Saltykov-Shchedrin, in his somewhat ambivalent 1871 review of The Idiot, wrote that in trying to portray a “type of man who has achieved full moral and psychic harmony”, Dostoesvky has failed mainly through his method of characterisation.

Saltykov-Shchedrin then goes on to analyse this ‘failed’ method of characterization and in doing this, he leaves to posterity one of the best characterizations of Dostoevsky’s method of characterization in The Idiot. After conceding the immense importance of Dostoevsky’s themes, and superiority of writing skills, he goes on to say:

И что же? несмотря на лучезарность подобной задачи, поглощающей в себе все переходные формы прогресса, г-н Достоевский, нимало не стесняясь, тут же сам подрывает свое дело, выставляя в позорном виде людей, которых усилия всецело обращены в ту самую сторону, в которую, по-видимому, устремляется и заветнейшая мысль автора. (…) все это пестрит произведения г-на Д-ого пятнами, совершенно им не свойственными, и рядом с картинами, свидетельствующими о высокой художественной прозорливости, вызывает сцены, которые доказывают какое-то уже слишком непосредственное и поверхностное понимание жизни и ее явлений…С одной стороны, …являются лица, полные жизни и правды, с другой - какие-то загадочные и словно во сне мечущиеся марионетки, сделанные руками, дрожащими от гнева…74

[And what is the outcome? Notwithstanding this dazzling task, which engulfs all the earlier forms of progress, Mr Dostoevsky, without the least embarrassment, undermines his own task, by representing people, who are striving towards the same worthy thought that the author values above all else himself, in a disgraceful aspect.(…) all of this creates motley pictures in his works which are not characteristic for him, and along with pictures which testify to a deep creative insight, he evokes scenes, which are evidence of some sort of spontaneous and superficial understanding of life and its phenomena…On the one hand, we have characters who are full of life and truth, on the other there are these enigmatic and somnambulant marionettes, created by hands shaking with rage…]

Saltykov-Shchedrin’s judgement about Dostoevsky’s characterisation in The Idiot is completely accurate. The characters have the embodiment of puppets, of dolls in a marionette theatre: their gestures and voice intonations are operatic, outré, staged. Here are a few descriptions of facial expressions and ‘stage instructions’ describing the utterances of various characters, representing Russian polite society:

(НФ) “Потом она вдруг обратилась к князю и, грозно нахмурив брови, пристально его разглядывала» (ПСС, 8:14075);

«резко и неожиданно обратилась к нему вдруг (к князю) НФ» (ПСС, 8:13);

«проговорил наконец дрожащим голосом и с кривившимися губами бледный Ганя» (30, 8: 131);

«властно и как бы торжественно обратилась она к нему» (НФ) (ПСС, 8: 130);

«продолжала НФ по-прежнему резко, твердо и четко.» (ПСС, 8: 130);

(Lizaveta Prokofievna) «Она была в ужаснейшем возбуждении; она грозно закинула голову и с надменным, горячим и нетерпеливым вызовом обвела своим сверкающим взглядом всю компанию, вряд ли различая в эту минуту друзей от врагов» (ПСС, 8: 236);

«лицо Лебедева изображало последнюю степень восторга» (ПСС, 8: 237);

«выкатившему на него от удивления глаза» (Бурдовский) (ПСС, 8:230);

Even Myshkin does not escape this law of characterization of the marionette theatre:

«На этот раз князь до того удивился, что и сам замолчал и тоже смотрел на него, выпучив глаза и ни слова не говоря» (на жест Бурдовского, see next quotation:)

«…’вы не имеете права!’ - и, проговорив это, резко остановился, точно оборвал, и, безмолвно выпучив близорукие, чрезвычайно выпуклые, с красными толстыми жилками глаза, вопросительно уставился на князя, наклонившись вперед всем своим корпусом.» (ПСС, 8: 216);

(Коля) «Когда Коля кончил, то передал поскорей газету князю и, ни слова не говоря, бросился в угол, плотно уткнулся в него и закрыл руками лицо. «(ПСС, 8:221)

(Ипполит) «Он опять засмеялся; но это был уже смех безумного. Лизавета Прокофьевна испуганно двинулась к нему и схватила его за руку. Он смотрел на нее пристально, с тем же смехом, но который уже не продолжался, а как бы остановился и застыл на его лиц.» (ПСС 30, 8: 246) (Ипполит приглашает на свое погребение)

All the characters are portrayed in the mode of gestural excess on the outside. On the inside, too, all represent one or other form of eccentricity, which comes to expression as wilfulness, caprice and childishness. In other words, extreme egocentrism becomes the principle of character structure, the structure of subjectivity. This can be said of all the characters, irrespective of their role on the social and political spectrum of the world of the novel. Myshkin is part of that spectrum and is the ontological face of eccentricity with his imputed «idiotism». For «idiota», in the original Greek, meant a «private person», not one who is not in his right mind, who cannot comprehend, as in the modern sense.

Among the functions of the stories is to drive the plot forward. The plot of The Idiot is not driven by ‘events’ but by episodic stories which are told by the cast of characters and the narrator, in endless digressions. As soon as Prince Myshkin arrives at the Epanchin house, he tells his story about the condemned man to the Epanchin butler. When he is admitted to the breakfast of the Epanchin ladies, he is explicitly invited by Mme Epanchina to « recount something » - she wants to hear how he « narrates » (рассказывает). Myshkin then tells his story about “Marie”. Adelaida demands that Myshkin provide her with a « sujet » for her next painting, to which he responds with a replay of the story of the condemned man in his last moments of life. At Nastasia Filippovna’s birthday party, a petit-jeu is played which involves the guests telling stories about ‘the worst thing they did’ in their life. The plot in Part One is filled with episodic stories about Nastasia Filippovna’s past in the village of Otradnoe, in which the seduction (existing only in the form of allusions) of the 16-year-old girl by a man twenty years her senior takes place over four years, after which this girl emerges as a pathologically vindictive and cruel adult woman. The pathology of Nastasia Filippovna’s biographical story is matched by the pathology of Myshkin’s stories about the condemned man and the abused Swiss girl Marie. Stories which can be called « tall stories » are told by General Ivolgin, who can be called a pathological liar, and stories which are legendary and can be classed as Hegel’s « original » or « reflective » history (Mme Du Bary) are told by Lebedev – the ultimate obsessive (hence pathological) ‘genealogist’ (not : chronicler) who poses as a present-day intrigant or gossip. As the latter, Lebedev is both the raisonneur and practitioner of philosophical history.

Like Hegel’s world-historical individual, every character in The Idiot is « one who is there », « who just is ». However, what that character’s ‘concept’ (Begriff) is must be arrived at by a hermeneutic analysis of the relations in which that character’s stories are vis-a-vis all the other characters’ stories. Such a task is virtually impossible, as Lizaveta Prokofievna finds when she tries to make sense of her daughter Aglaia’s «stories » which put Aglaia in a relation with Prince Myshkin. All the reader can infer from these concatenations of pathological stories, lies, fictional and quasi-historical anecdotes, legends, gossip, enigmatic letters, confessional articles (Ippolit), and newspaper gossip (regarding Burdovsky’s paternity and ‘inheritance’) is that the home, the domain of every character is language, and that his or her language is his or her identity. But how does one analyse language to establish identity, when language, according to Hegel, « has the divine nature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it into something else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all ».76 At this point, the nature of characterisation in The Idiot leads us to the question of ground: what is the ultimate ground of language which is the foundation of character in the novel?

The short answer is: the unconscious. The pathological stories, framed by erratic, pathological – anti-social – behaviour of the characters ‘on stage’ represent the enacting of a drama of negativity which has no other purpose than itself – the representation of the negative, the impossible, the unrepresentable. This is a drama in and of the unconscious, with its repression, its drives, and its self-generating force, in which language or meaning originates as a negativity – described in great detail in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the dialectic – a mechanism of substitution (Aufhebung – sublation) and ‘othering’ as difference.

What the unconscious produces is a “split subject” – extensively theorised in modern psychoanalysis. In Dostoevsky’s novel, this modern split subject which is portrayed with uncanny accuracy several decades before the advent of Freud and the scientific description of the psyche, is couched in the metaphor of “an idiot”. This metaphor is ‘decoded’ at least twice: once in the expression used by Aglaia about Myshkin and the “two minds”, one “important” and one “unimportant” (Part iii, Chapter 8); and once in Myshkin’s description of people of earlier times being men “of one idea” whereas his contemporaries are men “of two or more ideas” and “more sensitive” (Part iv, Chapter 5). The subtext of these cryptic expressions is the image of the modern “split subject,” called in modern psychoanalytic theory the “subject of the unconscious.” This subject of the unconscious, who is constructed by the specific method of characterization in the novel, constitutes the “world historical individual” of the present moment in Russia’s historical process. Hegel did not conceptualise such a pathological negativity even though he discovered negativity as a crucial element in the structure of the subject: the subject who knows himself through the object, via a middle term called desire of the other. Just to make the centrality of the concept of the unconscious explicit – which remains unnamed and is present only as the “third meaning”77 in the Absurdist portraiture of the characters – Myshkin tells Keller about his “divided thoughts” - двойные мысли– which lead him into duplicitous, not consciously intended action (or lying). Nastasia Filippovna is also aware that she is at the mercy of a power within her which is “not her” («Бог знает, что вместо меня живет во мне. »78) Тhe unconscious, which has no “image” – that is, it is not representable even if it is the source of all representation, is invoked in Ippolit’s «Explanation» (Объяснение) as a “terrible force”, ‘senseless’ and unmotivated, but eternal and overpowering, like a gigantic machine of modern technology. This force cannot be couched in human language or imagined as a picture. Ippolit exclaims in agony before its might:

Может ли мерещится в образе то, что не имеет образа?79

Yet picturing is what narration is all about. The novel’s very mode of presentation is pictorial – ekphrasis is the method of characterization and the construction of the universe of the novel, its ‘reality’ and the reality of the “national spirit” which it concretizes. The unconscious as an unimaginable force of the instincts thus forms an anti-narrative to the interminable stories which make up the fabric of the novel and of the national spirit – cultural memory and history as genealogy. If we are to accept Hegel’s model of the world-historical individual, whose will and passions drive history, then we can extend that reasoning by asserting that ultimately history is at the mercy of the unconscious drives of individuals who constitute the spirit of a nation at any particular moment in time of that nation’s existence. The pathology of the subject of the unconscious introduces randomness and contingency into the historical process. In Hegel’s model of world history, the antidote to this arbitrariness and contingency of unconscious forces is the modern state (still only aspirational in Hegel’s time), with its enlightened intuitions and education, which forms a unity with the spirit of the people. For Myshkin, the idea of the state does not crystallize and does not go beyond the messianic mission of “saving” his class – the old elite who are carriers of post-Petrine estate culture. For Dostoevsky, the national spirit which is conscious of itself, which he conjures up in The Idiot, is still in a phase of alienation.80 This impression is reinforced in Dostoevsky’s attitude to Pushkin’s Onegin and the so-called phenomenon of the “superfluous man” (“лишний человек”), but this phenomenon of Russian historical development is positive for Dostoevsky, since it shows that with Onegin, Russia enters what we would identify as “philosophical history” because Onegin (with Pushkin) brings the Russian national spirit into self-consciousness. Dostoevsky’s claims as much when he declares:

«Это первый страдалец русской сознательной жизни.»81

[This is the first individual afflicted with the suffering of Russian conscious life.]

Thus, indirectly, Dostoevsky identifies Onegin as the first Russian potential “world-historical” individual (who is in historical self-consciousness, in the “conscious life” of Russian history), whose “younger” emanation Dostoevsky portrays in the minor character, Evgeni Pavlovich Rodomsky (“пустой человек», 8:278), an unsuccessful aristocratic suitor for Aglaia (8:422), who is displaced (sublated) on Dostoevsky’s historical stage by Myshkin, the “eccentric” subject of the unconscious.

5 Temporality of the Unconscious as Spirit

Alienation82 is part of the structure of the subject of the unconscious. The ‘state of affairs’ called alienation is palpable in the metaphor used by Freud to describe the unconscious as « another scene » (« ein anderer Schauplatz »)83 which is an apt description of the eerie and alienating setting in which the stories of the characters in The Idiot unfold.

The unconscious has its own temporality84, which is, as it were, a ‘time after time’ - just like Lebedev’s description of the ‘Apocalypse’. The device which allows Dostoevsky to construct this ‘timeless time’ is ekphrasis – a verbal picture, which evokes a visual picture in words.

Take as an example the already given description of the face of Ippolit with the smile frozen on it. His facial grimace belongs to puppet theatre or theatre of the Absurd. Lessing’s aesthetics, which classifies the arts into plastic arts, which are spatial, and verbal and musical arts, which are temporal, is turned on its head by Dostoevsky’s characterisation: the principle of construction of character in The Idiot ‘plasticises’ the verbal picture and removes it from the temporality of narrated, linear time. The face in the above example is a «mask», while the smile is a sculpture, frozen in time. Thus the temporality of the narrated time is a no-time, is a time outside time. This temporality outside linear time does not pertain only to the dying Ippolit (who, by the way, is not really dying). When he says: «У мертвого лет не бывает» (ПСС, 8:246), he is making a general statement, which applies universally: none of the characters in The Idiot have “an age”, despite the fact that the narrator is at pains to indicate how old each one of them is when introducing them. All are “childish”, like Lizaveta Prokofievna, Myshkin, and Aglaia, and the “new” “young people” around “the son of Pavlishchev”. «Childhood» is the only temporality with which the whole cast of characters is identifiable. That is because «childhood» is not a sociological or even anthropological category but a metaphorical locus – the locus of the unconscious, with its infantile wishes and regressive primal drives.

It is in the sense of belonging to the sphere of the unconscious that Myshkin is no longer the only «idiot» in the novel; all the characters can be described as «idiots» - regressive, repressed and hysterical (in fact, Myshkin is not the only epileptic85 in the novel, Nastasia Filippovna and Rogozhin are also sufferers). Hysteria is the ground of desire and sexuality but also language.86 Hence the explosive expressivity of all the utterances of the cast of major characters.

The setting, in which the entire visual drama is enacted, is not a realistic bourgeois setting87 but a kind of fantastic “other scene” – namely the scene of the unconscious, which has “no time”.88 Another one of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries astutely recognized the essence of the setting in the novel without connecting it to a new ontology of discourse and subjectivity. In a letter of 14 March 1868, after the end of Part One of The Idiot had come out in the Russian Messenger, A. N. Maikov wrote about his impression of the nature of the characters in the novel:

«Впечатление вот какое: ужасно много силы, гениальные молнии (например, когда Идиоту дали пощечину и что он сказал, и разные другие), но во всем действии боле возможности и правдоподобия, нежели истины. Самое, если хотите, реально лицо - Идиот (это Вам покажется странным?), прочие же все как бы живут в фантастическом мире, на всех хоть и сильный, но фантастический, какой-то исключительный блеск. Читается запоем и в то же время – не верится. (…) Но сколько силы! Сколько мест чудесных! Как хорош Идиот! Да и все лица очень ярки, пестры – только освещены-то электрическим огнем, при котором самое обыкновенное знакомое лицо, обыкновенные цвета получают сверхъестественный блеск и их хочется как бы заново рассмотреть…В романе освещение, как в ‘Последнем дне Помпеи’: и хорошо, и любопытно (любопытно до крайности, завлекательно) – и чуждо!»89

[The impression is as follows: tremendous strength, bolts of genius (for example, when the Idiot gets slapped and what he and others said), but the whole plot has more potentiality, vraisemblance than truth. The most realistic character is the Idiot – (you think that’s strange?), the others all live in an “as if” world, a fantastic world, all are lit up by a strong but fantastic, exceptional illumination. One reads with abandon and at the same time – it’s unbelievable. (…) But what power! What magic passages! How beautiful is the Idiot! And all the other characters are bright, colourful – but lit up by an electric light, in which the most familiar faces, ordinary colours, get a supernatural glow and one wishes to see them from anew… The novel has lighting like in “The Last Day of Pompey”: both pleasant and curious, (curious in the extreme, seductive) – and alienating!”]

Here we have a spontaneous reaction of one of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries whose horizon of expectation was overshot by Dostoevsky’s aesthetics. Maikov cannot see the principle of this aesthetics but, as a critic, he is attentive to the detailed execution of Dostoevsky’s new art and is able to identify its particularities, which turn out to be apt in the highest degree if placed in the context of a psychoanalytic model of discourse and a poetics of the unconscious, as I will now call the poetics of this novel.

Let us review Maikov’s description of the atmosphere and the characterization in The Idiot and the effect these have on the reader.

The ‘electric light’ which shines on the characters and the surreal illumination of all the colorations in the novel are significant findings: what Maikov has stumbled upon – and which coincides with the marionette thesis - is the uncanny, ‘unnatural’ ‘lighting’ of the stage on which the characters of the novel move, and the ‘mechanical’ source of that light: namely, the thermodynamic model of subjectivity grounded in the unconscious that Freud delivers a few decades later in The Project (1895).90 Freud’s model of the psyche, grounded in modern physics, will eventually lead to his metapsychological model of ‘psychic energy’ or the libido and its drives: the sex and the death drives. This model is anticipated in Dostoevky’s The Idiot with the highest degree of artistic acumen, with the characters enacting a pantomime of unconscious desire and the expressivity of drives which are converted into language and discourse. These characters are Dostoevsky’s world-historical individuals, on the stage of world history, or the expression of the Russian nationa spirit in Dostoevsky’s moment in time.

This pantomime, while being self-sufficient as an artistic procédé (a later generation of Absurdists – including Beckett, found it to be so) is framed by the dominant questions of the day which animated Russian social and political discourse, thus utilizing aesthetics as a hermeneutic instrument to diagnose the state of Russian culture coming into the world-historical process as “national spirit”.91 The most prominent of these questions is the question of the ethics of Nihilism, whose exponents cluster around the so-called (false) “son of Pavlishchev” (Antip Burdovsky) and the “dying” Ippolit Terentev, constituting a new potential political elite. This group of the “new people” is pitted against the ethics of the older historical elite of Russia, who represent Russian estate culture (помещичья культура), which is an extant remnant of Europeanized Russia of the post-Petrine reforms. However, this old elite remains on the social and political scene, according to Dostoevsky’s representation of Russian ‘national spirit’, in name only: they are out of date and do not represent the “self-conscious” “world-historical individual” of Dostoevsky’s present of the 1860s. On the one hand, Myshkin is the last living representative of this historical elite (последний в своем роде – which can also mean “the last of its kind”). On the other hand, as an “eccentric hero”, he embodies the “self-conscious” “world-historical individual”, who is the expression of the Russian “national spirit” which is pure self-consciousness by virtue of the poetics of the unconscious of Dostoevsky’s novel. Through Myshkin, the Russian “national spirit” has attained its Concept (Begriff), but this Concept, as expounded in the idea of the “Russian Christ”, is ambivalent. Myshkin with his pathology, his epilepsy, which is a metaphor of pure consciousness, his magnetism vis-avis all the other characters – young and old, high or low class - without money or actual family, walks into StPetersburg society from nowhere, to become a leader of men and the most desirable “husband” for Aglaia, a daughter of the upper middle class bureaucracy which represents state power of the post-Petrine Russia.

Myshkin, the” eccentric hero”, who is in possession of the “important mind” («главный ум», 12: 356) is Dostoevsky’s representative of Hegel’s man of reason, through whom the aim of world history as self-conscious spirit, grounded in reason and the concept of freedom, can potentially be realized. Because, as Maikov rightly pointed out in his analysis above, everything in The Idiot is represented as a possibility, as a potentiality: the ‘reality’ of the characters is a dynamic reality, a reality in the making, produced in the moment – as language and discourse - which the reader is confronted with, seduced by and by whose force the reader is overcome or vanquished. This potentiality is more potent than any static realism, any “realist” portrait, any “type” or “typization”. For Dostoevsky’s “portraits” are located in a new time-space – not that of the chronotope (pace Bakhtin), but of history as genealogy. ‘Genealogy’ in Hegel’s sense (replayed by Nietzsche in the late 19th century and assimilated by Foucault in the 20th century) implies bringing the past into the present, because for genealogy, history is “now”.

6 Dostoevsky’s New Ontology of Discourse

6.1 Types and “Ordinary” People

The staging of discourse and language as the new subject of Dostoevsky’s novel is a radical departure in the poetics of 19th century Realism. While the Natural School championed by Belesky in the 1840s when Dostoevsky first appeared on the Russian literary scene with Poor Folk advocated the portrayal of “national types” in the genre of the physiological sketch,92 Dostoevsky disappointed the progressivist critic with his Double who was already no longer a “national type”. That Dostoevsky’s characters are not “types” was noted by an exceptional Soviet critic, N. V. Kashina, who also showed courage in the Soviet 1970s by attempting to read Dostoevsky’s poetics through Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics.93 Kashina devotes a whole chapter of her monograph to the problem of types and typisation in Dostoevsky’s poetics. She asserts – correctly – that typization is a process of generalisation of individual features but that what was typified before Dostoevsky were not important social phenomena, or psychology, but professions, such as, for example, “the cobbler”, “the house painter”, “the baker”. We are familiar with these types form the Russian literary almanacs,94 such as the physiologies (Fiziologia Peterburg, Peterburgskie ugly). Without generalising about a particular social phenomenon on a philosophical level, Kashina states, the generalisation descends into crass naturalism under the Natural School imperatives of “representing life as it is”. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, generalised about types of “situations”, which, according to Kashina, explains why mass scenes prevail in his novels. While Kashina does not project these “situation types” into discourse types, she does point out that the speech characteristics of Dostoevsky’s literary characters do not reflect their class or professional status; the speech “individualises” the character’s desire or passions, on the level of syntax, unfolding in the sphere of a multitude of expressive reminiscences and allusions to the universal repository of images – in other words, the speech is grounded in intertextuality.95 Her example is Zosima’s speech which is modelled on the speech of Tikhon Zadonsky or the ‘intellectualism’ of Ivan Karamzov, whose speech is grounded in the discourse of popular (publicist) philosophical literature.96 The purpose of staging speech, as opposed to social types, we infer from Kashina – and this is another one of her significant findings - is not to represent an existing reality but to influence the reader’s reception of the represented reality. This kind of ‘realistic’ representation, Kashina says, is achieved by Dostoevsky’s attention to the particular, the singular detail:

В произведениях искусства, Достоевский ценит точность подробностей, которая обеспечивает эффект достоверности, что и является одной из основных задач искусства, решением которой, впрочем, не является целью, а лишь средством направленного воздействия на сознание, воспринимающее произведение искусства.97

[In works of art, Dostoevsky values the accuracy of detail, which ensures the effect of vraisemblance, which is one of the basic tasks of art; this is not an end but the means of the appeal directed at the consciousness of the recipient of the work of art.]

Kashina’s theses confirm the distinctive approach to characterization in Dostoevsky’s novel and indirectly support the view of history as genealogy at second remove, as it were: instead of creating history, Dostoevsky’s characters create a new reader. But this in itself is like a proxy for creating history in the present. This new reader is like all of Dostoevsky’s characters: self-conscious and receptive to the self-consciousness of the other who is (in) the text. By virtue of participating in the performance of language, by distinguishing and discriminating between the cultural discourses which evolve before him and draw him into a dialogic reception, the new reader is educated and transformed into a “new” man or woman perceiving the moment, with Dostoevsky, through the perspective of philosophical history.

History presented as genealogy in the Hegelian mode involves, as already stated, a perspective on history in the present and from the present. Moreover, the historical process as the evolution of the national spirit (Volksgeist) is grounded in national culture which is made up of diverse cultural discourses. In other words, history is a matter of language, it revolves around language. The method of characterization in The Idiot also relies on language to structure the dramatis personae, through dialogue or narratives (the telling of stories). The narratives result in a kind of metaphorisation of subjectivity and hence history. The theory from which I borrow to construct this term “metaphorisation” is Lacan’s theory of language, which goes back to Hegel (as handed down by Alexander Kojève in his 1930s lectures on Hegel in Paris). Аccording to Lacan’s adaptation of Hegel’s dialectic of identity as difference and meaning as a play of absence/presence, “the concept” engenders the “world of things”; thus, the ultimate effect of language is summed up as ‘making the man’: “Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man.” (E, 276/65)”.98 Spirit, as it realises itself in the historical process, which is a striving towards the self-realisation of spirit as absolute self-consciousness or absolute “knowing” (not: knowledge), is therefore the same in structure as the subject of history. The historical process as Spirit comes to its ultimate realisation as interpretation of itself as discourse, which is history as genealogy:

“For, like Mercury, the spiritual guide, the idea is in truth, the leader of peoples and of the world; and spirit, the rational and necessitated will of that conductor, is and has been the director of the events of world history. To be acquainted with spirit in this its office of guidance, is the object of our present undertaking.”99

The subject of history and spirit, as co-participants in world history, thus share the same logical structure - both are tautologies: the subject “knows that he knows” while sprit progresses to consciousness of itself as spirit. The de-essentialising of identity is thus at the core of both Hegel’s and Dostoevsky’s conceptualisation of the historical individual.

This process of deconstructing essential identity continues in the poetics of The Idiot. A polemic about types and “ordinary people” in Part iv of The Idiot brings out the significance of the particular versus the general in the construction of historical ideals and stereotypes.

Without preamble or warning – or indeed motivation – the narrator launches into a disquisition about “ordinary people” («ординарные люди») and types, at the beginning of Part iv of the novel. This is a peculiar classification of people, unknown in any theory of the novel, in any aesthetic theory and in any poetics. That is because this classification does not pertain to the traditional theory of characterisation in a novel, but to the construction of the world-historical individual, who acts on the “stage of world history”, who is not a “type”, but a individual particularity. To elevate the particular into a principle and to place it in the domain of the structure of consciousness, Dostoevsky identifies “ordinariness” as an irreducible and hence absolute marker of individuality or rather singularity. Ordinariness as a presumed character feature is imputed by Ippolit to Gania and vice versa – by Gania to Ippolit. The narrator, too, gives an extended description of Varia, Gania’s sister, as the embodiment of ordinariness. Yet what distinguishes even the ordinary person who is not a “world-historical individual” and a leader of men, is that these ordinary folk are also expressions of the Volkgeist. All are part of the same new ontology of discourse and subjectivity: they know that they know, they are fully aware of themselves as ordinariness. That is, their ego prevails as the maker of the historical process. In Varia’s case, the “process” is captured in her activity as an intrigant, spying on the Epanchin family to help her brother’s suite for Aglaia. She also marries a capitalist – the money-lender (investor) Ptitsyn, which makes her not just a home-maker, but a make of the nascent “capitalist spirit” of Russia of the 1860s – the same spirit invoked by Lebedev in his «звезда Полынь» [“Wormwood Star”] metaphor, pointing to the development of railways as the symbol of this same capitalism.

6.2 Performance of Narrative as History

The characters in The Idiot are not “types” or stereotype; they are associated with the production and performance of types of discourses.

Instead of «events», the novel is filled with types of narratives, all of which are charactresied by one and the same form: they are all «outpourings» of language, gushing forth from an egocentric consciousness (Ego). The content of these outpourings has different historical aesthetic contexts: Nastasia Filippovna’s story, told by a gushing narrator, is the story of Russian Sentimentalism as a feature of «estate culture» (serfdom, abuse, humiliation). Myshkin’s Swiss village story of Marie is the «natural’nia shkola» narrative of the ‘insulted and the injured’ of George Sands and other 1840s utopian and oblichitel’naia literatura. General Ivolgin’s stories recapitulate Russian history as driven by individual military exploits and heroism, which all sound like «tall stories» of a «frontier culture» (since Peter the Great) which is rather reminiscent of the fairy tales of Baron Münchhausen; his imaginative ‘reminiscences’ about Napoleon are a mock-up of what Hegel would describe as “reflective history” and serve as a foil to the construction of the “eccentric hero” (Myshkin) as the world-historical individual of “philosophical history”. But there is also a meta-narrative, which encompasses these narratives as material but also establishes itself in its own right as a new discourse of the unrepresentable – the unconscious - couched in an aesthetics of the Absurd.

The meta-narrative represents a new ontology of discourse which is grounded in the performance of narrative or narrative as performance. Dostoevsky represents in his prose a poetics of performance of narrative and of language in all its complexity and interconnectedness with expressivity, couched in intonations, gestures and mime - grimacing, facial expressions and expressions of the eyes - as well as all manner of bodily manifestations of inner states, like coughing, cowering, giving off short hysterical bursts of laughter. The prose which is created by means of this new poetics of performance of narrative is in itself a new class act; Dostoevsky’s text is a performance on a par with the staging of a musical composition: the utterances are represented in their ebb and flow, like a musical melody, collected in a totality of verbal movement which has the quality of the movement of waves or sound which could be perceived as a representation of pure consciousness or Geist. Thus, this concatenation of individually narrated stories, connected with each other through an absence of necessity (motivation), comes across as an indeterminate totality, as an “an sich” and “für sich”; it appears self-generated and without origins. It is the spirit of history pure and simple, in its concretization in the discourses of the world-historical individual.

The Idiot is a performance of Geist through individual instincts and passions in a way in which other 19th century novels are not. This is because the world of the novel is not determined by “final causes”, but is made up of “ultimately contingent correlations” which have “to be patiently mapped by empirical observation”.100 This is the “modern view of the world”101 modelled by the conception of history as genealogy.

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Hegel’s “expressivist” conception of the world-historical individual102 (welthistorischer Mensch) models character in The Idiot, in which there are no historical types, no social types, in which class is reduced to a floating signifier like money (those who have and have no money), and in which identity is difference and synchronicity (not chronotope as a spatio-temporal dimension). At one point (in Part Four, Chapter 8, the day after the broken vase incident), Ippolit says to Myshkin: «Очень рад, что вы на человека хотите походить»103–“Glad you want to resemble the image of the man”. The subtext of this appears to allude to the famous phrase “Ecce homo”, directed by Pontius Pilate at Christ as he presented him for the Crucifixion. Here it does not refer to Myshkuin’s Christological profile in the literal sense; the Biblical allusion is a mask for the real allusion to Myshkin as Hegelian Man - a successor to the Vitruvian Man of the Renaissance - who just is, who is there, and whose consciousness is grounded in a tautology. As Hegel explains, in consciousness, two things must be distinguished:

“first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know.” 104

This new world-historical individual, who is a subject of the unconscious, knows that he knows but often does not know what he knows. What is highlighted in the scenic structure of the plot is the individual’s consciousness of himself, which stages itself in melodramatic narratives; placed in such an immediacy before the reader, every character attests to his subjectivity, rather than delivers information or advice or philosophical messages, or imparts some sort of ‘knowledge.’ In fact, knowledge takes a back seat in the novel since the narratives carry an inordinate number of facts, which are involved and convoluted and carry more implosive energy - in the expressivity of melodramatic utterances – than is easy to synthesize as information or knowledge. Some characters also complain of their lack of knowledge and inability to make sense of what is going on around them (Elizavete Prokofievna, Myshkin).

There can thus not be an ideal man or woman in The Idiot. Instead of an ideal person, there is a real subject – in potentio - who emerges through his own narrative. This is not a character (“персонаж” - personage) in a novel, but a person (“лицо” – a subject) – a distinction made by Lebedev in reporting a scandalous encounter between Nastasia Filippovna and Aglaia to Myshkin in Part iv, Chapter 6. Lebedev’s distinction is nonsense and reveals his prejudice against the woman he describes as a “Camelia” – a reference to Duma Fils’ La Dame aux Camelias, which is the tragic story of a cocotte or ‘fallen woman’. In this instance, Lebedev embodies a thinking not in types but in social stereotypes. There is in fact no difference between Nastasia Filippovna and Aglaia in the poetics of the novel – they are both portrayed as “subjects” (лица), and both are pathological subjects of the unconscious, grounded in negativity (caprice, will, desire, the drives).

The reality of Myshkin as a ‘person’ (лицо) and that of all the other characters in The Idiot – major and minor - is created through their narratives and the narratives of all the ‘persons’ around them, from the major ones to the episodic ones, even to those who appear in the narratives of the episodic ones. For there are no fictional ‘characters’ (as in caractères of the Realist manifestoes105) in The Idiot on any level. There are only, as Bakhtin said, consciousnesses, or rather, individual expressions of spirit as self-consciousness, embodied in speech, dialogue or story-telling. It is impossible to “capture” the features of any character other than in the moment of performance of their verbal utterance.

6.3 The Hegelian Man, Freedom and the “New People”

The self-conscious individual not only knows himself but he also knows his rights. Dostoevsky’s ‘Hegelian Man’ is a consciousness aware of himself and willful: this individual puts his will above all else. As will, the historical individual is the necessary “second element” in the actualization of Geist in world history. In the Introduction to his Philosophy of History, Hegel distinguishes between the abstract and general principle of the purpose and concept (Begriff) of Spirit (Geist) (which is an abstract potentiality) and its actualization and realization as Will, defined as “the activity of man in the widest sense”.106 The principle (“Grundsatz”, Maxim, Gesetz - W12:36) and the “purposes”(Zwecke) existing in principle are thus actualized in the particular will of the particular human being, who brings “needs”, “instincts”, “passion” and “inclination” into play. This individual has his preferences and is, moreover, entitled to have them:

That some concept of mine should be developed into act and existence, is my earnest desire: I wish to assert my personality in connection with it… If I am to exert myself for any object, it must in some way or other be my object. I must at the same time satisfy my purpose in it…This is the infinite right of personal existence – to find itself satisfied in its activity of labour.107

This is a new language of individual rights, of instincts, of private desire and the realization of freedom through that desire. Such a conception of freedom sketches, in outline, a “new age” with its “new people”. These new individuals who have entitlements or who are at least entitled to self-assertion are in principle mirrored by the “new people”, portrayed in The Idiot in the Burdovsky group, who enter the stage of world history with their battle cry “We demand!”:

- вспомните, что мы все-таки требуем, а не просим.Требуем, а не просим!..

Племянник Лебедева, очень разгорачившийся, остановился.

- Требуем, требуем, требуем, а не просим!.. залепетал Бурдовский и покраснел как рак. (ПСС, 12:224)

But not only the “new people” with their exaggerated and patently false demand for an inheritance to which they appear not to be entitled – though this could be debated as a moot point - are represented as asserting their individual will and caprice. All the main characters are represented as capricious individual wills, while the cast of principals – Myshkin, Nastasia Filippovna, Aglaia, Rogozhin – enact the drama of desire in the unconscious, which is a triangular psychic structure, embodied as “desire of the other”.

Character or the individual is finite. This is reflected in the Ippolit subplot where finitude is represented as part of World History, whose goal is to satisfy spirit as “nature”, as “the inward, innermost conscious instinct”108. Psychoanalysis conceptualizes this “innermost instinct” as the death drive. The process of world history is “the labour of bringing it to consciousness” (as language and sense).

With finitude goes a new temporality which is not a linear process. Lebedev represents or is the agent of this new temporality.

Lebedev’s stories revolve around his “interpretation” of the Apocalypse and “the end of time”. This “time” is not the end of the world but the end of linear thinking. In the plot of The Idiot, temporality is not linear. The narrator, even when he tries to tell things “по порядке” (in the order in which ‘events’ took place), has difficulties doing so. The entire text of the novel, with its artificially construed plot action (amounting to people coming to be with each other and talk - already noted by Vladimir Pozner109) is a giant weave of simultaneities, narratives or types of narratives, modelled initially by the ‘stories’ told by the guests at Nastasia Filippovna’s birthday party in Part One, when they are called upon to tell the “worst thing they ever did” as part of a petit jeu.

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Well may Dostoevsky have written to his brother, in his long letter from Omsk, one week after being released from prison (30 Jan – 22 Feb 1854):

“Send me the Quran, Kant’s Critique de Raison Pure, and if you are in a position to somehow send it unofficially, in particular Hegel’s History of Philosophy. With this, my whole future is united!”110

Dostoevsky was not exaggerating – his poetics and his literary procédé were dependent on his assimilation of the so-called German Idealist philosophers, Kant and Hegel. For Dostoevsky, the “ideal” did not present a problem because for him, as for Hegel, the ideal was not filled with a determinate content (such as “the good”, “the beautiful”) but represented a synonym for the general or the universal, which he always brought into correlation with the particular, the every-day, of the individual subject. He incorporated the ‘ideal’ or universal into a dialectic of individual expressivity which emerges in The Idiot as a manifestation of the Russia national spirit within European civilization of post-Enlightenment modernity. The ‘ideal’ filled with a “Christian ethics” attributed to Myshkin’s ideological profile needs to be revised in line with the philosophical context of Dostoevsky’s thought, which is, as we saw, heavily indebted to Hegel’s philosophy of the world-historical process.

7 Myshkin’s Russian Christ as Hegel’s Spirit

In particular, the content of Myshkin’s ‘ecstatic’ speech at the Epanchin’s party at which he breaks the Chinese vase needs to undergo a discourse analysis in order to be deconstructed as an ideological cliché111 and reconstructed as the “Begriff” to which the Russian national spirit aspires in the “present” of the novel.

The general opinion of the gentry society at the Epanchin party, after Myshkin’s speech, is that Myshkin is a “Slavophile” but “harmless”. His speech has two distnct themes even if these are not clearly demarcated but flow on, merging one into the other. The first theme, up to the fall of the vase, is his impassioned apologia (after someone at the party announces that his benefactor, Pavlishchev, became a Jesuit at the end of his life) about the old elite of Russia, of which he sees himself as part: he thinks this elite is alienated from the “Russian soil” out of “boredom” and not out of “satiety” – on the contrary, out of “thirst” for an ideal; and he thinks the Russian “Jesuits” are like the “European Catholics” – atheists, who advocate revolutionary violence. He is at his most radical when he claims that «Catholicism is not Christianity» but only the continuation of the Western Roman Empire and not only distorts the image of Christ but advocates the Antichrist: because “Roman Catholicism” believes, “что без всемирной государственной власти церковь не устоит на земле”112 [“without universal state law, the church is not sustainable on earth”]. In other words, the church and state in the West have become merged.

The merging of church and state is a huge genaralisation and a blatant historical inaccuracy with respect to the 19th century Europe, which includes England. However, Myshkin’s “analysis” or “critique” of the Roman Catholic Church is not based on his observation of the world of his time; it is an observaiton based on another time, not stated by Myshkin, but stated cleary in Hegel’s anaysis of the Germanic world and the Holy Roman Empire from which it emerged historically. Hegel’s critique of the medieval Church in the pre-Reformation period of the Roman Empire offers an anlogy to Myshkin’s critique: it turns on the conflict between “piety” and “spirituality”113, which “produced an utter derrangement of all that is recognized as good and moral in the Christian Church…A condition of absolute unfreedom is therefore brought within the principle of freedom itself.”114 Hegel’s discussion of spirituality connects the historical manifestation of “the Christian principle” (in unspecified times) with the entry into history of spirit as self-consciousness and the consciousness of freedom.

In substance, Myshkin’s speech is a mirror of Hegel’s analysis of the pre-Reformation Roman Church, with its “dogma” (Church practices) which infantalised its followers and led to a “perversion” of the idea of freedom, encoded in what Hegel systematiclly calls “the Chritsian principle” (as distinct from the organised form of the Roman Catholic Church). At one point, Hegel even claims, that the adoration of the saints, chief among them “Mother Mary”, was not spiritual but belonged to “doctrine”, and that “Christ himself was set aside”.115 In other words, Hegel practically claims that the Roman Church was ‘un-Christian’.

Myshkin’s speech at times sails very close to Hegel’s savage critique of the medieval Church, even lexically:

Папа захватил землю, земной престол, и взял мечь; с тех пор все так и идет, только к мечу прибавил ложь, пронырство, обман, фанатизам, суеверие, злодейство, играли самими святыми, правдивыми, простодушными, пламенными чувствами народа, все, все променяли за деньги, за низкую земную власть.» 116

[The Pope usurped the land, the earthly throne, and took up the sword; from there on, everything is going in that direction, only to the sword, the Pope added a lie, ambition, deception, fanaticism, superstition, crime, they played with the most holy, truthful, honest, passionate feelings of the people, they exchanged all for money, for the base earthly power.”]

In fact, Hegel says much the same thing as Myhkin, even down to accusing the Pope and the Chruch of lying:

“The third form of contradiction is the church itself, in its acquisition, as an outward existence, of possessions and an enormous property, a state of things which, since that church despises or professes to despise riches, is a lie.”117

When he is challenged by Ivan Petrovich that he exaggarates, and that the Roman Church also has representatives who are worthy of respect, Myshkin places the following surprising caviat on his previous claim about the Pope, which makes one wonder what sort of a metaphor his Catholicism represents:

Я никогда и не говорил об отдельных представителях церкви. Я о римском католичестве в его сущности говорил, я о Риме говорю.118

[I never spoke about individual representatives of the church, I spoke about Roman Catholicism in its essence, I spoke about Rome.]

Myshkin’s attack on “Catholicism” ends in the claim that Catholicism produced “atheism” and “socialism”.119 The latter is summed up in the following parodic slogan, reflecting the “belief” of the “Western” progressivists who are, according to Myshkin, revolutionaries:

«Не смей веровать в Бога, не смей иметь личности, fraternité ou la mort, два миллиона голов!»120

[“Don’t dare to believe in God! Don’t dare to have property! Don’t dare to have a personality of your own, fraternité ou la mort! Two million heads!”]121

While “socialism” has no currency as a political term in Hegel’s lifetime, Hegel’s critique of the medieval Roman Catholic Church contains the seeds of Dostoevsky’s critique of “socialist atheism” in Hegel’s revelations of the many malpractices of the bishops in pre-Reformation Europe.122 And while Hegel does not say that these malpractices led to atheism in the populace, he does see them resulting in superstition and materialism instead of faith, which amounts to atheism.123

To act as a bulwark against this “loss of the moral power of religion” in the West, Myshkin proclaims:

“Надо, чтобы воссиял в отпор Западу наш Христос, которого мы сохранили и которого они не знали!»124

[“It is necessary that our Christ should shine forth in opposition to the ideas of the West, our Christ, whom we have preserved and they have never known!”]125

This “Russian Christ” is not taken seriously by those around Myshkin, who are embarassed by his verbal excess, nor does such a figure arise out of any of the material of the novel. What is more, Myshkin’s Russian messianism sounds more like the agenda of extremism than a manifestation of the Russian “national spirit”:

Откройте жаждующим и воспаленным Колумбовым спутникам берег Ногого Света, откройте русскому человеку русский Свет, дайте отыскать ему это золото, это сокровище, сокрытое от него в земле! Покажите ему в будущем oбновление всего человечества и воскресение его, может быть, одною только русскою мыслью, русским богом и Христом, и увидите, какой исполин могучий и правдивый, мудрый и кроткий вырастет перед изумленным миром, изумленным и испуганным, потому что они ждут от нас одного лишь меча, меча и насилия, потому что они представить себе нас не могут, судя по себе, без варварства.И это до сих пор, и это чем дальше, тем больше! И…»126

[Show the thirsting and parched companions of Columbus the shores of the New World, show a Russian the Russian World [русский Свет – Russian Light – svg], let him find the gold, the treasure hidden from him in the bowels of the earth! Show him the future rebirth of all humanity and its resurrection, perhaps, by Russian thought [русскою мыслью] alone, by the Russian God and Christ, and you will see what a powerful giant, just, wise and with humility, will rise up before аn amazed and frightened world [миром], because all they expect from us is the sword, the sword and violence, for, judging us by themselves, they cannot even imagine us free from barbarism.]127

The picture of Russian barbarism, invoked here by Myshkin as Europe’s concept of Russia, can in part be seen as a direct response (overreaction) to Hegel’s well-known view about the Slavic people, including the Russians, expressed in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. However, apart from denying the Slavic people (among others) a leading role in the formation of the spirit of world history, Hegel says nothing critical or adverse about the Russians or the Slavs. Hegel first mentions “Russia and the Slavonic kingdoms” in a review of Europe’s various historical parts: Gaul, “the heart of Europe” conquered by Caesar; Greece and Italy, where “the world spirit” “found its home”128; the “centre of Europe, France, Germany, and England”129; and finally, “the north-eastern states of Europe – Poland, Russia, and the Slavonic kingdoms”. These people “come only late into the series of historical states, and form and perpetuate the connection with Asia.”130

By contrast with the Slavic world, the Germanic world plays for Hegel an enlightened and almost messianic role in the concretization of spirit in world history. The evolution of world history is described by Hegel in somewhat metaphoric terms, as the circuit of the “sun of self-consciousness” which brings with it the idea of freedom via the “Germanic world”:

”World history travels from East to West, for Europe is quiet the end of history, Asia the beginning. (…) Here rises the outward physical sun, and in the West it sinks down; in its place, though, rises the sun of self-consciousness, which diffuses a noble brilliance. World history is the discipline of the wilderness of the natural will to that which is general and to subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows only, that one is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the Gremanic world knows that all are free.”131

It is possible to discern a stylistic parallel and a certain structural similarty in the pathos driving the two proclamations of “historical messianism”: Myshkin’s idea of a “Russian World/Light (“свет” means both), which needs to be “revealed” to the “Russian man”, and Hegel’s “sun of self-consciousness, which diffuses a noble brilliance,” which is mediated by the Germanic world and presented to the “theatre of world history”.132

However, while Hegel’s messianic discourse is executed on a level of abstraction which is consistent with his view of history as genealogy, Dostoevsky’s discourse shows features which appear assimilated to a sociology of religion, concretized as a “linear” Christological vision of a “future”, which includes familiar elements, like the “resurrection”, not of Christ, but of “humanity”, as if “humanity” were a dead man. However, if we read deconstructively, we can see something that is not so obvious at first sight – namely a stylistics which is not at all in keeping with a Christological vision of Christ and which forms the subtext of the image. The stylistics of the image invoked by “исполин могучий и правдивый, мудрый и кроткий” [“a powerful and just spirit, wise and with humility”] invokes a mythological creature, which is more symbol than a traditional cliché; to the reader of the 20th and 21st Century, it unmistakably points to the most famous image in Russian Symbolism – Mikhail Vrubel’s “Sitting Demon” (Демон сидящий, 1890–1902). While Vrubel, who was born in Omsk in 1856, before Dostoevsky left Siberia, arrived on the artistic scene too late for Dostoevsky to have known him, nevertheless, Dostoevsky anticipated the image of a “giant spirit” as a symbol of thought – which came to expression in his ecphrasis some decades before it surfaced as a picture embodying the “Russian national spirit” in the next stage of Russia’s cultural history.133

Myshkin thus evokes an effect of “Russian thought” which will “amaze” the world but not in the literal sense of Myshkin’s expression.134 The description of Myshkin on a subsequent page as sitting motionless and looking straight at Ivan Petrovich “with a fiery gaze” («огненным взглядом глядел»)135 reinforces the impression of the “исполин могучий и правдивый, мудрый и кроткий”, who is Myshkin himself as the embodiment of “Russian thought”, revealing itself as “national spirit” (in Hegel’s sense), in the world-historical process, couched in the poetics of the “eccentric subject” of the unconscious.

The image of this “исполин могучий” (‘powerful spirit’ would render it as well as ‘powerful giant’) has another iteration in the novel – namely in a picture of Christ evoked by Nastasia Filippovna as a subject for a painting she would like to do:

“Христа пишут живописцы все по евангельским сказаниям; я бы написала иначе: я бы изобразила его одного – оставляли же его иногда ученики одного. Я оставила бы с ним только одного маленького ребенка. Ребенок играл подле него; может быть, рассказывал ему что-нибудь на своем детском языке, Христос его слушал, но теперь задумался; рука его невольно, забывчиво осталась на светлой головке ребенка. Он смотрит в даль, в горизонт; мысль, великая как весь мир, покоится в его взгляде, лицо грустное.»136

[“Artists always paint Christ according to the Gospel stories; I would paint Him differently: I would depict Him alone – did not His disciples sometimes leave Him alone? I would have only a little child with Him – the child would be playing beside Him; perhaps he would be telling Him something in his childish language. Christ has been listening to him, but now He is pondering, His hand resting, forgetfully, unwittingly, on the child’s fair head. He is looking into the distance, at the horizon; a great thought, as great as the universe, dwells in his eyes; His face is sad.”]137

This imaginary picture - another instance of ekphrasis – evokes, like the previous two, a picture of thought. Myshkin’s “Russian Christ” and “Russian idea” (“Russian thought”) translate into thought as the absolute “other” of the subject, beyond which there is no other absolute, since there is no “other” of the other.

These two images, one invoked by Myshkin in his speech, the other described as a sujet for a painting by Nastasia Filppovna, is encompassed – intertextually (inside Dostoevsky’s own dialogic text) – in Myshkin’s exclamation that Russia will conquer European civilization by means of “одною только русскою мыслью, русским богом и Христом” [“by means of Russian thought alone, the Russian God and Christ”]. Here we see Dostoevsky’s attempt to bring certain concepts, which are unrelated, into synonymity: the concept of “the Russian thought”, with the concept of “the Russian God” and the concept of “the Russian Christ”. Myshkin never offers a defintion of these concepts, neither does the narrator. That is why we are entitled to go beyond the text, into the intertextual context of these expressions, to determine their value and their function in the text of the novel. Many scholars have resorted to the Bible as an intertext and certainly Dostoevsky makes liberal use of the Biblical discourse in his novels. But these expressions are not present in the Bible. Hence Dostoevsky must have had a different source as his inspiration or he was searching for a means of expression to couch a new and as yet unformulated idea in Russian culture. This idea, I would like to suggest, is Hegel’s notion of “national spirit” as a manifestation of world history. But while Hegel writes with the calmness of the philosopher, Dostoevsky creates ‘verbal’ images which will be striking for his Russian reader of the 1860s.138 Having said that, the phrase “the Russian Christ” is not a verbal picture, it does not involve the device of ekphrasis; it in fact does not evoke any picture in the mind – it is like an empty place, a hole in the canvas. Every reader is free to fill this empty space with his or her own stereotype picture which the word “Christ” or “Russian Christ” evokes. To imagine Myshkin’s “Russian Christ” does not involve the “spirit”; on the contrary, the tripartide synonymity of the “Russian thought, the Russian God and Christ” cancels out spirituality. It is at best incantatory language, suitabe as a catch-cry or a slogan rousing unspecified emotions of enthusiasm devoid of spirit. By themselves and outside a symbolic context, these are just words, not even shibboleths.

However, in a certain sense, Dostoyevsky’s conceptualising an “empty” or “pure” “Russian idea” as the essence of “Russian national spirit” is a mirror image of Hegel’s conceptualising of the “Germanic spirit” of the Germanic people, who are “bearers of the Christian principle”. The content of the “Germanic spirt” can be inferred from the philosophy of history, in particular Hegel’s disquisition on the state; but the content of the “Russian spirit” remains hidden from Dostoevsky’s reader, other than being a flash in time, scintillating on the world-historical stage as the eccentric subject, who embodies the “Russian national spirit” in the perspective of the 1860s. Messianism aside, Myshkin is, paradoxically, the “Russian Christ” (but not in the Christological sense): it is not his “second coming” but as the embodiment of reason, he reflect the cultural paradigm change, which took place, according to Hegel, when Christianity, with a human Christ, replaced the Greek ideal of “the beautiful”, fed on the Olympian gods who were not human.139 Christ is for Hegel essentially a phenomenon of the human spirit. Hegel thus concludes his comparison of Greek culture and Christianity:

“Christ is much more a man: he lives, dies – suffers death on the cross – which is infinitely more human than the humanity of the Greek idea of the beautiful.”140

These moments of Hegel’s philosophical history are refracted in The Idiot in the “classical beauty” of the “pure” Epanchin sisters, who all have Greek names (Aglaia, Alexandra, Adelaida) and are historically ‘insignificant’, part of the “old order” of the gentry, while Myshkin is “the man” and the “private person”, coming into Russian history on the cusp of Russia’s entry into the “modern age”, which will potentially lead to her “maturity” (when Kolia and Vera and Lebedev’s nephew “grow up” as “world-historical individuals”). Myshkin’s emanation, Nastia Filippova, also belongs to “modernity” and precisely because of her anxiety and restlessness (about being unworthy and “impure” beside Aglaia), she is historically relevant as the “eccentric” individual who brings the national spirit forward, into self-consciousness in world history.

The main point of Myshkin’s speech is revealed not in the scene before he breaks the vase but after he recovers from his fainting fit and carries on with his messianic monologue, which becomes more explicitly self-agrandising and demonstrates a total lack of humility in Myshkin, who is “preaching” to the aristocratic company at the Epanchins about the Russian aristocracy and estate culture. He declares sententiously:

Я, чтобы спасти всех нас, говорю, чтобы не исчезло сословие даром, в потемках, ни о чем не догадавшись, за все бранясь и все проиграв. Зачем исчезать и уступать другим место, когда можно oстаться передовыми и старшими?Будем передовыми, так будем старшими. Станем слугами, чтобы быть старшинами.»141

[I am saying this to save us all, so that our class does not vanish for nothing, in darkness, without realisig anything, arguing about everything, and losing everything. Why should we vanish and cede our place to others, when we could remain progressive and masterly. If we are progressive, we will be masters. Let us become servants in order to be masters.]142

The subtext to this puzzling statement is Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic (“Von Herren und Knechten”) in the Phenomenology of Spirit143. If we stay close to Dostoevsky’s lexicon, then «старшина, старшины» should be rendered as “master” (not: leader). The theme of “the disappearance of the gentry” is couched in these enigmatic repetitions: старшими – старшими - старшинами (elder, elder, masters) and portray Myshkin’s “resolve” to maintain his class (сословие) in world history, to keep it relevant and dynamic and meaningful. But is this really about “class” struggle? According to Alexandre Kojève, Hegel’s Master/Slave metaphor represents human existence as a dialectical totality, engendered in negativity (the fight to the death of Master and Slave), whose ultimate aim is freedom of the citizen:

“…Mastery and Slavery are not given or innate characteristics. In the beginning at least, Man is not born slave or free, but creates himself as one or the other through free or voluntary Action. The Master is the one who went all the way in the Fight, being ready to die if he was not recognized…But it was one and the same innate animal nature that was transformed by the free Action of the Fight into slavish or free human “nature” …Mastery and Slavery have no “cause”; they are not “determined” by any given; they cannot be deduced or foreseen from the past which preceded them: they result from a free Act (Tat). That is why Man can…create himself as free…And all of History…is nothing but the progressive negation of Slavery by the Slave, the series of his successive “conversions” to Freedom…of the Citizen of the universal and homogeneous State.144

In a footnote, Kojève dds:

In truth, only the Slave “overcomes” his “nature” and finally becomes Citizen. The Master does not change: he dies rather than cease to be Master.” 145

Thus, the subtext of Myshkin’s “messianic speech” is freedom which can be achieved by the negation by the Masters146 (старшины) of their “nature”. The transformation is implicit in Myshkin’s text, not explicit. If we supplement it with Hegel’s text, and read it through Hegel’s extended metaphor (which has been sketched in the barest essentials above), it becomes clear in all its subversive potential but it also becomes an impossible message for the political scene of Tsarist Russia of the 1860s: Mishkin’s advocacy of republicanism and citizenship in a universal state as the expression of the Russian national spirit, the “Russian idea”. It is no wonder that Dostoevsky had to veil this message with the excessive excitement of his eccentric hero, mask it with theatre of the Absurd staging and negate it with carnival techniques of humour and the open-ended, two-voiced word.

But even if we discount the veiled allusion to freedom as the ultimate aim of Myshkin’s historical class – and thus of Russian History – we still end up with Myshkin as a transformed Master, who is taking the gentry out of their petrified existence into an overcoming of their historical class status. With his profile as a subject of the unconscious and as the eccentric hero and subject of modernity, Myshkin does embody a New Master – a world-historical individual, who is in self-consciousness and who reflects the Russian spirit as self-consciousness – or the Absolute Knowing of himself. Myshkin’s “Russian Christ” can thus be assimilated – in this intertextual and deconstructive reading – to Hegel’s Spirit, which is refracted in the Russian national consciousness of the 1860s through the world-historical individual who is self-conscious (in Dostoevsky’s poetics, ‘self-conscious’ translates into the ‘subject of the unconscious’) and who can see his age through the perspective of philosophical history. Having said this, the narrative work still conforms to a hierarchical structure of levels of meaning, in which the final word is on the level of the Abstract Author, not that of a single character.147 That explains why Myshkin is relagated back into the “darkness” of an ahistorical egistence (in the Swiss sanatorium), from which he emerged (“out of nowhere”) onto the historical stage of Russia’s present in the 1860s. Although he “knows” about “atheism” and “socialism” and sees them both as deriving from “Catholicism”, he is unable to do anything with this historical insight at this moment in time, in which his Freedom (as a Citizen) is only a historical potential. His “Russian idea” is, as argued above, an empty universal, not a historical “fact”. What is a historical fact, is Dostoevsky’s novel which ushers in a new ontology of discourse and subjectivity. This fact can be understood in the context of Dostoevsky’s later evaluation of the significance of a literary work, such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as an indicator of civilizational robustness of Russia as a historical nation. Dostoevsky argued in his Diary of a Writer of July-August Chapter Two, 1877, that Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was such a “fact”:

“Книга эта [Анна Каренина] прямо приняла в глазах моих размер факта, который мог бы отвечать за нас Европе, того искомого факта, на который мы могли бы указать Европе.Разумеется, возопят смеясь, что это - всего лишь только литература, какой-то роман, что смешно так преувеличивать и с романом являться в Европу. (…) но…если гений русский мог родить этот факт, то стало быть, он не обречен на бессилие, может творить, может давать свое, может начать свое собственное слово…»148

[This book (Anna Karenina) acquired in my eyes the scope of a fact, which could render account of us to Europe, that desired fact, which we could point out to Europe. Of course, some will object, laughing, that it is only literature, some sort of novel, that it’s comical to exaggerate like that and go to Europe with a novel. (…) but...if the Russian genius [spirit] could give birth to such a fact, it means this spirit is not condemned to weakness, this spirit can create, it can offer something of its own, it can start uttering its own word…’]

Dostoevsky assigns to literary discourse the role on a par with any other discourse (political, social, scientific) which can demonstrate Russia’s ability to enter the historical process of European civilization and with that become an equal with other European nations. Dostoevsky’s literary works were also such “facts” for his contemporaries – they raised the consciousness of his Russian readers about themselves and their own culture. With The Idiot in particular, Dostoevsky raised the Russian national spirit to an acute degree of self-consciousness by ‘portraying the Russians to themselves’149 as a historical people, in a moment of the 1860s, thus creating a genealogy of Russian history.

Acknowledgements

The part of this research paper, dealing with the poetics of the unconscious, was originally delivered at the XVII Symposium of the International Dostoevsky Society at Boston University, in July 2019, and subsequently published in Russian as Слободанка Владив-Гловер, “Как представить непредставимое: Рассказывание рассказов и поэтика бессознательного в Идиоте” [How to Represent the Unrepresentable: The Telling of Stories and the Poetics of the Unconscious in The Idiot], Достоевский Материалы и исследования, 23. (Санкт-Петербург, «Нестор-История», 2021), стр. 108–137. The Hegelian overlay is entirely original and new, developed thanks to the Hegel Reading Group of the Australia Dostoevsky Society, a virtual research laboratory on Hegel and Dostoevsky, which I initiated in October 2020.

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  • Владив-Гловер, Слободанка “Как представить непредставимое: Рассказывание рассказов и поэтика бессознательного в Идиоте” [How to Represent the Unrepresentable: The Telling of Stories and the Poetics of the Unconscious in The Idiot], Достоевский Материалы и исследования, 23 (Санкт-Петербург, «Нестор-История», 2021), 108–137.

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  • Врангель, А. И. Воспоминания о Ф. М. Достоевском в Сибири 1854–56 гг. (С.-Петербург, Типография А. С. Суворина, 1912).

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  • Wasiolek, Edward (ed.) The Notebook for the Idiot. Edited and with an Introduction by Edward Wasiolek, translated by Katharine Strelsky. (Mineolo, New York, 2017-1967).

  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tr. by D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1989). (First German edition published in Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 1921; first English edition, with translation, published 1922).

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  • Zohrab, Irene “‘Characterisation of Belinsky’ by M.P. Pogodin published by Dostoevsky in The Citizen in response to the first issue of Writer’s Diary. (With a Translation),” The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review, 20 (2019), 1–31.

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  • Zohrab, Irene (2013–2014) “Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in the Context of State Censorship. Problem Statement (With a Postscript on the ‘Hostage Syndrome’),” The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review, vols. 14–15 (2013–2014), 65–109.

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1

In Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, the cardinal concept of “Geist” as an actor in the world-historical process, gradually morphs into the concept of “Geist des Volkes”, which is defined as follows: “Das Allgemeine, das im Staate sich vortut und gewusst wird, die Form, unter welche alles, was ist, gebracht wird, ist dasjenige überhaupt, was die Bildung einer Nation ausmacht. Der bestimmte Inhalt aber, der die Form der Allgemeinheit erhält und in der konkreten Wirklichkeit, welche der Staat ist, liegt, ist der Geist des Volkes selbst. Der wirkliche Staat ist beseelt von diesem Geist in allen seinen besonderen Angelegenheiten, Kriegen, Institutionen usf...” G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte. Werke in 20 Bänden, Band 12. “Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 612”, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986, 69 (from now cited as Hegel, Werke, volume and page if quotation is from this edition). All translations from Russian and German are mine unless otherwise indicated. For a translation of this passage, see G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr. Ruben Alvarado (Aalten, The Netherlands: Wordbridge Publishing, 2011), 45–46. Alvarado renders “Bildung” as “culture” of a nation.

2

А. И. Врангель, Воспоминания о Ф. М. Достоевском в Сибири 1854–56 гг. С.-Петербург, Типография А. С. Суворина, 1912, стр. 34. It is not clear whether Wrangel is referring here to Hegel’s Berlin cycle of lectures on the history of philosophy, or philosophy of history, both published only posthumously in a collected works edition of 1832–45 (see G W F Hegel, Werke [in 20 Banden], “Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft”, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986, editor’s comments on impressum page). Laszlo F. Fȍldenyi references Wrangel’s memoirs on the point of the friends’ joint interest in Hegel but is inaccurate in his rendering of what Wrangel actually wrote. See Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, Yale University Press, 2020, p.20–21.

3

Письмо Михаилу М. Достоевскому 30 января - 22 февраля 1854, Омск [Letter to Mikhail F. Dostoevsky 30 Janaury-22 February 1854, Omsk] Источник [Source]: http://dostoevskiy-lit.ru/dostoevskiy/pisma-dostoevskogo/dostoevskij-dostoevskomu-30-yanvarya-22-fevralya-1854.htm.

4

Dmitrij Tschižewskij, Hegel in Russland. Reichenberg in Böhmen: Stiepel, 1934.

5

Hegel in Russland, p. 350.

6

Irene Zohrab shares this view but also without offering proof or analysis. See Irene Zohrab, “‘Characterisation of Belinsky’ by M.P. Pogodin published by Dostoevsky in The Citizen in response to the first issue of Writer’s Diary. (With a Translation),” The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review, vol. 20:1–31 (2019):1–31, see pages 17, 21.

7

Compare Malcolm V. Jones, “Some Echoes of Hegel in Dostoyevsky.” The Slavonic and East European Review 49.117 (1971): 500–20. Jones gives an overview of the biographical and literary-historical data about Hegel’s presence among Dostoevsky’s contemporaries and Dostoevsky’s relation to it, but like Chizhevsky, concluded that there is no Hegelian thought detectable in Dostoevsky’s opus: “We find in Dostoyevsky no general Hegelian pattern. In so far as there is a philosophy of history in Dostoyevsky, there is no sign in it of the Hegelian dialectic” (p. 508). Jones bases this conclusion not on an analysis of Dostoevsky’s philosophy of history, but on the work of A. S. Dolinin, who had claimed that Nikolai Strakhov’s Hegelianism was Dostoevsky’s source of Hegel’s thought: “A. S. Dolinin has shown conclusively the important ideological parallels between Strakhov’s Hegelianism and Dostoyevsky’s thought, both in his journalism and in his novels.” (p. 507) See also A. S. Dolinin, “F. M. Dostoyevsky i N. N. Strakhov”, in Shestidesiatye gody, Moscow-Leningrad 1940, pp. 238–54. See also A. S. Dolinin, Poslednie romany Dostoevskogo, Moscow-Leningrad, 1963, pp. 307–43. A full bibliographical account of what was available on Hegel in Russia during Dostoevsky’s lifetime, in the Russian journals of the time, is summarised by Irene Zohrab (2013–2014) “Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in the Context of State Censorship. Problem Statement (With a Postscript on the ‘Hostage Syndrome’),” The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review, vols. 14–15 (2013–2014): 65–109, on pp. 83–85. There also appears to be a renaissance of interest in Hegel and Dostoevsky amongst Russian contemporary scholars of philosophy. Compare: С. И. Захарцев, Д. В. Масленников, В. П. Сальников, «Свобода как конкретность идеи абсолютного добра в философии права Достоевского,» Мониторинг правоприменения, Но. 1 (34), 2020, 1–7.

8

Compare, for example, A. Lunatscharski, “Hegel in Rußland”. (Zum hundertjährigen Todestage Hegels)Osteuropa (Stuttgart), 1931, Vol.7 (2), p.65–72.

9

Lunacharsky gives an apt summary of Hegel’s main concepts which had an impact in Belinsky’s Russia: “ Mit dem Nahen der vierziger Jahre beginnt Hegels Einfluß zu wachsen. Die Jugend, sowohl die adlige (Stankewitsch, Herzen, Bakunin) als auch die kleinbürgerliche (Belinski) spürt in Hegel den revolutionären Ursprung. Wie ein Appell und ein Trost klingen die Postulate von der ewigen Bewegung, der dialektischen Entwicklung durch Gegensätze, die Lehre vom objektiven Geist, der sich in den Staaten und der Weltgeschichte verwirklicht und eine Durchsetzung des großen Prinzips gewährleistet: Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünft.” A. Lunatscharski, “Hegel in Rußland”. (Zum hundertjährigen Todestage Hegels), Osteuropa (Stuttgart), Vol.7 (2),1931, p.65–72; p. 67.

10

See N. V. Kashina, Estetika F. M. Dostoevskogo. Moskva: “Vysshaia shkola”, 1975.

11

Ilya Kliger, “Hegel’s political philosophy and the social imaginary of early Russian realism”, Studies in East European Thought, vol. 65, no.3–4 (2013): 189–199. The journal Studies in East European Thought devoted a whole issue to “Hegel in Russia”, vol. 65, No. 3–4, December 2013 but without including the influence of Hegel on Dostоevsky’s aesthetics.

12

N. V. Kashina, p. 7.

13

Kashina, п. 7, quotes Berdyaev: “В Дневниках писателя…-Достоевский экзотеричен, приспособляется к уровню среднего сознания.» (Н. Бердяев, Миросозерцание Достоевского. Прага, 1923, с. 213).

14

Dostoevsky’s first trip abroad, to London and other cities, lasting 10 weeks; a trip in 1863, lasting 3 months; a trip in 1865, lasting 3 months; between 1867 and 1871, Dostoevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigorievna, lived in Dresden, Baden Baden, Geneva, Vevey and Florence. There were subsequent short trips for his health in the decade leading up to his death in February 1881.

15

On the definition of spirit and how it coalesces with the definition of the subject, see Chares Taylor, p. 80–81, who says: “…the basic model for infinite spirit is provided by the mature Hegel by the subject.” Here Taylor also summarises Hegel’s dialectic of identity as difference and as a rejection of dualism in favour of a triplicity of “free subjectivity” (p.80).

16

The poststructural psychoanalysts, Laplanche and Leclaire, have made a direct connection between Hegel’s “consciousness” and Freud’s psychoanalytic “unconscious”: “The problems posed by the Unconscious in the Freudian sense are a far cry from those posed by a psychology or a phenomenology of consciousness. The psychoanalytic unconscious is not, in fact, defined in relation to the intentional field in which the subject “temporalizes” himself, but in opposition to a system whose greater part is unconscious: the system Pcs-Cs. If one wanted to find a philosophical correlate to such a system, one could do no better than to compare it to what Hegel describes under the term of “consciousness” (“unhappy consciousness,” the “beautiful soul,” etc.): an organized structure of self-apprehension which entails and includes a plurality of moments, an entire coherent discourse that is never actualized in its totality (a “consciousness,” a “Bewusstsein”) (p. 129) Jean Laplanche, Serge Leclaire, “The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study”, trans. Patrick Coleman, Yale French Studies, No. 48, 1972, pp. 118–175; p.129.

17

Werke 12, p. 86–7. See also the somewhat inexact, reductionist translation of this passage (“the principle is idiosyncrasy of spirit”) in G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Complete and unabridged, newly translated by Ruben Alvarado (based on the 1857 translation by John Sibree). Aalten, The Netherlands: WordBridge Publishing, 2011, p. 59 (from now on cited as Hegel, Alvarado plus page number).

18

Hegel, Alvarado, p.59. See also Werke 12, p. 87.

19

G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke in 20 Bänden, Band 3. “Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 603”, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. See also: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller with analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford, NY, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1977. (From now on, PhS Findlay plus section and page number).

20

Hegel’s term “world-historical individual is first mentioned in a specific context, but then repeated as a general designation for the subject of history, the “self-conscious historical individual”.

21

Alvarado is not consistent with his translation of Hegel’s terms: in this sentence, Hegel uses the term “Zweck” (which has resonance with Kant’s philosophical discourse) three times, while Alvarado uses “purpose” only once, substituting Hegel’s term with a random synonym. In this way, the consistency of Hegel’s analytic of selectivity is distorted. I am placing the German terms in square brackets to indicate my interpolations in the quotations from Alvarado’s translation or to contextualize Hegel’s argument in a truncated quotation.

22

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 21.

23

Compare Hegel’s evocation of private transgressions against law and order in history’s march, which is an accurate picture of the Russian Federation’s actions in Ukraine; Hegel, Alvarado, pp. 19 ff.

24

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 8.

25

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 8.

26

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 9.

27

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 5.

28

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 16.

29

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 16.

30

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 16.

31

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 16.

32

Hegel, Alvarado, p.17.

33

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 21.

34

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 22

35

Hegel, Werke 12, p. 38.

36

Hegel, Werke 12, p. 38.

37

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 22. I have bracketed Alvarado’s somewhat free translation of Hegel’s German text; my translation is in bold letters and is closer to the original. The highlighting of this truncated predicate “is here”, placed in italics in Hegel’s text, calls to mind a much later Modernist representation of the Lacanian post-Surrealist subject in Marcel Duchamp’s last installation, entitled Étant donné – “Being given”. It is also the standard approach to the world which is “all that is the case” in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language (1922).

38

Compare Ronald Suter’s analytic of Alice in Wonderland’s “identity” as “tautology” in Ronald Suter, Interpreting Wittgenstein: A Cloud of Philosophy, a Drop of Grammar. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989, p. 128.

39

Compare Wittgenstein’s description of tautologies and contradictions and their structural similarity with propositions in Tractatus, para. 4.462, 4.464, 4.465; see also Tractatus, 5: “(An elementary proposition is a truth function of itself.)” Citations of paragraphs are from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tr. by D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1989. (First German edition published in Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 1921; first English edition, with translation, published 1922).

40

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 23.

41

Hegel, Alvarado p. 24.

42

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 18.

43

SVG – these initials stand for my name, which acknowledge my interpolations in the quoted text or my translation of the quoted text.

44

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 18.

45

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 17.

46

Hegel, Alvarado, 311.

47

Compare the quest for a definition of the “Russian national character” by the “original Slavophiles”, Kireyevky and Khomyakov, the editors of Moskvityanin in 1845, in: Richard Hare, Pioneers of Russian Social Thought, London, NY, Toronoto: Oxford University Press, 1951, pp. 91–92; or the attempts by Ivan Aksakov to find “a core of society”, which is “that medium in which is shaped the conscious mental activity of a people”, ibid., p. 150.

48

See Nikolai Danilevsky, Russia and Europe: The Slavic World’s Political and Cultural Relations with the Germanic-Roman West. Trans. and annotated by Stephen Woodburn. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica, 2013, in which Hegel’s name is mentioned only once, notwithstanding the fact that even the subtitle of the book is an intertextual allusion to Hegel’s discussion of history in terms of a “civilzational type” he refers to as the Germanic-Roman world.

49

See Section 7 of the present paper.

50

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 22.

51

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 23.

52

Charles Taylor, Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 87.(From now cited as: Taylor plus page).

53

Taylor, p. 88.

54

Taylor, p. 392.

55

Hegel, Alvarado, pp. 27–29.

56

Hegel, quoted in Taylor 392–3. Taylor uses a different edition of Lectures on the Philosophy of History, one published as Die Vernunft der Geschichte, ed. J. Hoffmeister, Hamburg, 1955.

57

Taylor, p. 392.

58

Hegel, Alvarado, pp. 90–91.

59

Taylor, p. 389 [quoted from VG, 61].

60

Taylor, p. 389.

61

Taylor, p. 390 [quoted from VG, 111].

62

Tylor, p. 390.

63

Taylor, p. 390.

64

Taylor, p. 390 [quoted from VG 75].

65

Taylor, p. 389.

66

It should be recalled that when Hegel read his lectures on history at the University of Berlin, censorship was alive and well in the state of Prussia. Just like Dostoevsky, Hegel was subject to censorship. His contemporary, Fichte, was excluded form the University of Jena for “preaching” atheism. A certain “camouflage” was needed at the time for anyone proclaiming a secular spirituality.

67

Hegel, Werke, 12, p. 77. (See also Hegel, Alvarado, p. 34].

68

Hegel, Werke, 12, p.72. [Hegel, Alvarado, p. 48].

69

Compare the analysis of Dostoevsky’s “soil” (почва) in Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “Dostoevsky’s “Pochva” [“Soil”] and the ‘Genealogy’ of Russian History in The Possessed,” in: Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy. New York: Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 53–72.

70

There is no scope in this article to treat the topic of Dostoevsky’s poetics and the “theatre of the Absurd” other than as a given. I have referenced it more extensively in Слободанка Владив-Гловер, “Как представить непредставимое: Рассказывание рассказов и поэтика бессознательного в Идиоте” [How to Represent the Unrepresentable: The Telling of Stories and the Poetics of the Unconscious in The Idiot], Достоевский Материалы и исследования, 23. (Санкт-Петербург, «Нестор-История», 2021), стр. 108–137. The theoretical connection between puppetry and the unconscious is treated in Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “Über das Marionettentheater”, first serialized in Berliner Abendblätter, 12 – 15 December 1810. See Henrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke in Vier Bänden, Band 3: Erzählungen, Anekdoten, Gedichte, Schrifte. Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990, p. 1137. The grace and unconscious expressivity of the dance in Balinese Theatre (“On the Balinese Theatre” 1931) becomes the basis of Artaud’s theory of the foundation of the performance of language (“the metaphysics of speech, gesture, and expression”) in the “Thetare of Cruelty – First Manifesto” (1932), in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writing. Edited and with a introduction by Susan Sontag. Translated from the French by Helen Weaver. (Los Angeles: University of California Press,1988), pp. 215 and 242. A recent German paper dealing with Captain Lebiadkin’s nonsense verse in Demons shows that the topic of Dostoevsky and theatre of the Absurd is gaining traction. See Felix Philipp Ingold, “Dostojewskij als Dichter des Absurden: Eine literarhistorische Recherche”, Volltext 4/2014, pp. 35–38.

71

Edward Wasiolek (ed.) The Notebook for the Idiot. Edited and with an Introduction by Edward Wasiolek, translated by Katharine Strelsky. Mineolo, New York, 2017-1967, p. 10. [From here on, cited as Wasiolek plus page number].

72

Wasiolek, p.10.

73

Wasiolek, p. 5.

74

Ф М Достоевский, Полное собрание сочинений в 30-ти томах. Том 9 (Ленинград: Издательство Наука, 1973), стр. 416. [From now on cited as ПСС plus volume and page number].

75

Ф. М. Достоевский, Полное собрание сочинений в 30-ти томах. Том 8. (Ленинград: Издательство «Наука», 1973). Cited as ПСС 8 plus page number.

76

PhS Findlay p. 66 (on « Consciousness: Sense certainty »).

77

Compare Roland Barthes discussion of the images in Ivan the Terrible, in which he discovers a certain distortion of the image of the film character to indicate a hidden or “third” meaning, which we could call the presence of the unconscious. See “Eisenstein’s stills,” in: Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath. (London: Flamingo, Fontana, 1977), pp. 32–52.

78

ПСС, 8:380.

79

ПСС, 8.340.

80

See Dostoevsky’s reference to Peter’s Reforms as a “necessary” alienation of the Russian people in their historical development, in his 1860 Notice to “Vremia”, and compare my commentary in Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Dostoevsky and the Realists, Chapter 3, pp. 53–72.

81

ПСС, 19:11.

82

For an explanation of alienation in psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity (in which it is a positive term, unlike in Marx’s theory of labor), see: Jacques Lacan, “The Subject and the Other: Alienation”, in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. J-A Miller, trans. Alam Sheridan. (W.W.Norton & Co: New York, London, 1981), pp. 203–215.

83

Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung(1900). In: Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe Band II. Herausg. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), pg. 512.

84

The temporality of the unconscious is analogous to the temporality in dreams, which belongs to virtuality (мнимость), and which is theorised by Pavel Florensky as “reverse perspectve” or time going form the past to the present. See Pavel Florensky, “Ikonostasis,” in: Pavel Florenskii, Sobranie sochinenii, I. Stat’i po iskusstvu. Pod redaktsiei N. A. Struve. Paris: YMCA-PRESS, 1985, pp. 193–316. I have discussed Dostoevsky’s treatment of temporality in the context of Freud’s and Florensky’s models in Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “Dream Theory of Florensky and Freud as a Key to the Structure of The Brothers Karamazov”, The Dostoevsky Journal: A Comparative Literature Review, vols. 12–13 [2011- 2012], 2012, pp. 109–134.

85

I have treated epilepsy in The Idiot as a metaphor of consciousness and not a mimetic, autobiographical illness in Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “Dostoevsky’s Positively Beautiful Man and the Existentialist Authentic Self: A Comparison,” Canadian American Slavic Studies, Vol 23, No. 3 (Fall 1989): 313–329.

86

Hysteria in the psychoanalytic model of subjectivity (which grew out of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit) is connected with the production of language in the unconscious. “Through the hysteric, Freud was led to the relation of desire to language.” Monique David-Ménard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan. Trans. Catherine Porter, foreword Ned Lukacher (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. xii. The concept of hysteria as used by Freud and his successors in the theory of psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Monique David-Ménard and the feminists) is not associated with a psychic illness but is connected to the concept of “symptom” in the structure of metaphor and metonymy, which is the structure of language and knowledge and representation. See Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “The sexual masquerade: a Lacanian theory of sexual difference,” in Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher,

Lacan and the Subject of Language (NY and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 75.

87

See N. V. Kashina, Estetika F. M. Dostoevskogo. Moskva: “Vysshaia shkola”, 1975.

88

It is in the sense of all the characters being portrayed as agents of the unconscious (as opposed to social types in a realistic setting) that Lebedev’s ‘interpretation’ of the Apocalypse makes sense as a metaphor of the temporality of the unconscious, which is “no time” or “the end of time”.

89

ПСС 30, 9:410.

90

On the connection of Freud’s model of the psyche and modern physics, see Jessica Tran The, Pierre Magistretti and François Ansermet, “The Epistemological Foundations of Freud’s Energetics Model”, Frontiers in Psychology (Open Access), 11 October 2018. DOI: 120.3389/fpsyg.2018.01861 The authors clarify “the epistemological foundations of the Freudian energetics model” and “trace both the historic and epistemological path that led Freud from a concept based on physics, and more specifically thermodynamic energy, to an idea of nervous energy that constitutes the basis of the concept of “quantity” as it is stated as ‘first fundamental idea’ in Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895a). This notion will subsequently evolve, and lead Freud to the introduction of the concept of ‘psychical energy,’ this time in a purely metapsychological sense.”

91

Hegel “diagnoses” the stages of development of Geist of different peoples as the stages of man: childhood (the East), adolescence (the Greeks) and manhood (Roman Empire), Alvarado, pp. 95–98. Dostoevsky may have been aware of this classification but “childhood” in his novel has a more modern meaning, and is a metaphor of the infantile or primary unconscious.

92

On the poetics of typisation of the Russian Natural School, see the ‘classic’ textbook, V. I. Kuleshov, Natural’naia shkola v russkoi literature XIX veka. (Moskva: “Prosveshchenie”, 1965).

93

See N. V. Kashina, Estetika F. M. Dostoevskogo. Moskva: “Vysshaia shkola”, 1975. (From now on: Kashina plus page number).

94

Compare Russian “physiologies,” such as Fiziologiia Peterburga [electronic resource]. Izdanie podgotovil V.I. Kuleshov; otvetstvennyĭ redaktor A.L. Grishunin. (Moskva: “Nauka”, 1991), or N. Nekrasov (Ed.) Peterburgskii sbornik. (Sanktpeterburg: tipografia Eduarda Pratsa, 1846) and F. Bulgarin, Ocherki russkikh nravov ili litsevaia storona i iznanka roda chelovecheskogo. (Sanktpeterburg: tipografiia Eduarda Pratsa, 1845).

95

In his Pushkin Speech, Dostoevsky claimed that intertextuality indicated that Pushkin expressed the Russian national spirit.

96

I am freely paraphrasing Kashina’s text on pages 131–133, Kashina, op. cit.

97

Kashina, p. 134.

98

Jonathan Scott Lee, Jacques Lacan. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p. 53. A more extensive discussion of the theory of language and the construction of subjectivity in Dostoevsky’s novel will have to be reserved for another paper.

99

Alvarado, p. 8.

100

Charles Taylor, 1975, p. 4.

101

Charles Taylor, 1975, p. 4.

102

Malcolm Jones has pointed out in his 1971 article on Dostoevsky and Hegel that “Philip Rahv, in an article on ‘Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment makes a suggestion that among the other influences on the creation of Raskol’nikov one which has been overlooked is that of Hegel’s ‘world-historical individuals’.” (p. 514) Rahv, like Kashina, is thus one of the pioneers in Dostoevsky research on Hegel. Dostoyevsky’s artistic intuitions about the unconscious have little to do with Schelling. See also: Philip Rahv, ‘Dostoevsky in “Crime and Punishment”‘ (Partisan Review, XXVII, 1960, pp. 393–425).

103

ПСС, 8: 465.

104

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 16.

105

See Vladiv-Glover, Dostoevsky and the Realists, Chap. One: “Manifestoes of Realism”, pp. 25–44.

106

Alvarado, p. 21.

107

Alvarado, p. 21.

108

Alvarado, p. 23.

109

Vladimir Pozner, Dostoievski et le roman d’aventure. Europe, 105 (1931).

110

ПСС, 28/1:173.

111

Although dealing with a vast amount of factual material from Dostoevsky’s journalism and letters, James P. Scanlan, in his monograph Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Pre, 2002), does not go beyond the ‘classic’ method in Dostoevsky studies of the past two hundred years of extracting Dostoevsky’s “doctrines” on Christianity, socialism, and nationalism (“soil”) from his ex-cathedra statements in his publicist writings, which constituted polemics with his contemporaries. In his inferences about Dostoevsky’s “political philosophy”, Scanlon, together with Joseph Frank, whom he references (p.172), totally ignores the constraints of censorship during and post-exile which shackled Dostoevsky’s expression of political and social opinions. There is no other contextualisation of Dostoevsky’s “doctrines”: apart from a few perfunctory references to Karamzin, no Russia historians whom Dostoevsky knew (F. K. Schlosser, S. M. Solovyov) is mentioned. Hegel is beyond the horizon of Scanlon’s study and even Kant as a possible context is discounted (p. 22, n. 9). This ‘positivistic’ methodology, based on ‘facts’ of Dostoevsky’s journalistic writings, outside a wider historical context of ideas in both Russian and European discourses, is the basis for the formation of myths about Dostoevsky’s “ideas”.

112

ПСС, 8: 450.

113

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 344–5.

114

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 344.

115

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 343.

116

ПСС, 8:450–451.

117

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 346.

118

ПСС, 8:451.

119

Scanlan rightly points out that “Dostoevsky never explicitly defined socialism in the pejorative sense…”, see Dostoevsky the Thinker (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 182. Myshkin’s parody of socialism is thus not to be taken at face value.

120

ПСС, 8:451.

121

Penguin, Magarshack, p. 586.

122

Hegel, Alvarado, pp. 339–40; 344–5.

123

Hegel, Alavarado, p. 343 - on the worship of relics in the MA.

124

ПСС, 8:451.

125

Penguin, Magarshack 586; Magarshack adds to the original and makes it even more literal.

126

ПСС, 8:453.

127

This passage can be found in Magarshack, p. 588. However, I have departed from Magarshack’s text because it does not strictly observe Dostoevsky’s lexicon, which is symbolic and significant. It is impossible to discern from the English that the lexemes “Новый Свет” and “русский Свет” and “изумленный мир” contain a polemical synonymity (they are not in inverted commas in PSS 12:543), in which “мир” has a material meaning of the discernible world (the whole world who will hear the gentle giant), while “Свет” in the lexeme “Новый Свет” is pregnant with the meaning of exploration, freedom, new horizons, new ideas of republicanism, with which Myshkin identifies a potential “русский Свет”. That is why Dostoevsky does not use the lexeme “Russian World” – “русский Мир”, but uses instead “русский Свет” which is a metaphor of consciousness creating a space for the Absolute Idea, and not a particular ideological messianism.

128

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 94

129

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 94.

130

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 94.

131

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 95.

132

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 94.

133

A painting completed closer to the time of the serialization of The Idiot is Kramskoi’s “Christ in the Desert” (1872). Although Kramskoi’s picture has attracted many Christological interpretations, it, too, can be considered a “picture of Thought” or of “Spirit”, with the clenched fingers of the Man-God being an expression of the Will. See the informative article on the exegesis of Kramskoi's picture byTatiana V. Yudenkova, “Eshche Raz o Kartine I.N. Kramskogo, ‘Khristos V Pustyne’ [Again on Ivan Kramskoi’s Painting ‘Christ in The Desert’]”, Вопросы Искусствознания / Voprosy Iskusstvozaniia, (1997), Vol 2, pp. 465–475.

134

In his translation of the passage, Magarshack adds a phrase to the original – “to the ideas of the West,” - and makes the utterance even more literal, subjecting the “spirit” to a concretization which is not its domain in Hegel’s or Dostoevsky’s discourse.

135

ПСС, 8:452.

136

ПСС, 8:379–380.

137

Magarshack, Penguin, pp. 494–495.

138

That Dostoevsky was looking to create an “active reader” is clear from his workshop comments about how to excite the reader’s curiosity: “Не вести ли лицо князя по всему роману загадочно, изредка определяя подробностями (фантастичнее и вопросительнее, возбуждая любопытство) …» ПСС, 9:373.

139

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 227–8.

140

Hegel, Alvarado, p. 227.

141

ПСС, 8:458.

142

Translated by Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (the Magarshack translation at p. 595 is too free with the original).

143

PhS Findlay, Section B. Self-Consciousness, Lordship and Bondage, pp.111–119. Also compare Alexandre Kojève’s explanation of Hegel’s metaphor of the Master/Slave relationship as a struggle for recognition of the individual consciousness, in: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press), 1993, pp.14–30.

144

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit. Assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, transl. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 224–225.

145

Kojève, 225 n. 22.

146

Dostoevsky’s ‘hero’ has been linked to Hegel’s dialect of the Master/Slave in earlier scholarship. Compare Martin P. Rice, “Dostoevskii’s Notes from the Underground and Hegel’s ‘Master and Slave’”, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, VIII, 3 (Fall 1974), 359–369.

147

I refer here to the well-known model of the narrative work in Wolf Schmid, Narratology (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2010).

148

ПСС, 25:199.

149

Russian Realism started with the call to writers to portray themselves by themselves – hence A. P. Bashutsky’s Наши, списанные с натуры русскими [Russians copied from nature by Russians], in: N. G. Okhtotin, A. P. Bashutskii i ego kniga. (Moscow: Izdatel’stwo “Kniga”, 1986).

题名:
The Poetics of the Unconscious in The Idiot and Hegel’s Subject of Philosophical History
文章类别:
Research Article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/23752122-02401001
Language:
英文
Page Range:
3–60
Keywords:
reception of The Idiot; ekphrasis; the unconscious; expressivity; marionettes; modern pathological subject; world-historical process; Russian national spirit (Geist); concept (Begriff); finitude of language; Hegel’s “philosophical history”; history as genealogy of spirit; “Russian Christ”; “world-historical individual”
原题名:
The Dostoevsky Journal
卷/期:
卷24: 期1
出版社:
Brill
国际标准刊号（电子版）:
2375-2122
国际标准刊号（印刷版）:
1535-5314
主题:
Slavic, Literature and Cultural Studies, Literature & Linguistics, Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Comparative Studies & World Literature, Aesthetics & Cultural Theory, Philosophy, Criticism & Theory

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