The Idiot is a novel preoccupied with violence and death. It depicts a harsh world in which people behave brutally toward one another and where the presence of death haunts all the characters. Understanding the novel’s treatment of violence and death requires focusing on the extent to which Prince Myshkin is constructed as a Christ figure. Violence and death play very important roles in Christianity and in the story of Jesus’s life. In Christian traditions, Jesus’s crucifixion and the days leading up to it are known as the Passion, based on the Latin word passionem, which means suffering and enduring. In the novel, “passion” is connected to violence and death via both this original, Latinate sense and its contemporary meaning of intense, wild emotion. Unchecked passion is shown to be the major cause of violence, and thus the novel takes a cautionary position when it comes to such dangerous passion. At the same time, the novel also indicates that insofar as violence and death are inevitable parts of earthly existence, Christians must learn to endure them as Jesus did during the Passion, and as Myshkin does throughout the narrative.
In the novel, violence is often triggered by sexual passion. This is true of Totsky’s abuse of Nastasya, Rogozhin’s beating (and murder) of Nastasya, and Roghozin’s knife attack on Myshkin. In each case, male sexual obsession and jealousy leads to brutal violence which is often cyclical in nature. (The fact that Nastasya was abused by Totsky, one could argue, encourages her to embrace the similarly violent and cruel Rogozhin instead of marrying Myshkin—a decision that ultimately leads to her death.) As a result, the novel takes a rather suspicious position when it comes to sexual passion. The novel does suggest that all humans have an innate fascination with violence and death—often with disastrous results. In Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation,” he explains that as a child he became fascinated by duels and highway robberies, and that this is when he acquired the pistol with which he then attempts to kill himself. Even Myshkin tells Aglaya that when he saw an execution, “I didn’t like it at all, and I was a bit ill afterwards, but I confess I watched as if I was riveted to it, I couldn’t tear my eyes away.” The prince’s words suggest that even the best people are inexplicably drawn to violence and death, even if this is to their own detriment.
One of the main motifs in the narrative is capital punishment, which the novel suggests is morally wrong. Intriguingly, this position is conveyed less by philosophical reasoning, and more by representing the absolute horror involved in executions. In particular, several characters become fixated on the moment at which a condemned person knows that they are going to die. Prince Myshkin conveys this sense of horror in discussing the execution he witnessed: “And imagine, to this day they still argue that, as the head is being cut off, it may know for a second that it has been cut off—quite a notion!” Myshkin’s words are echoed by Lebedev in a discussion of the death of Madame du Barry during the French Revolution. Madame du Barry was a noblewoman and the official mistress of King Louis XV. Lebedev explains that just before she was executed by guillotine, she begged to be afforded just one more moment of life; he comments: “When I read about this countess’s cry of one little moment, it was as if my heart was in pincers.” Myshkin and Lebedev’s discussion of the moment just before an execution suggests that some forms of violence and killing—including capital punishment—are too terrible to be imposed on any human being, no matter their crime. Indeed, many would argue that this is another manifestation of the novel’s Christian principle that violence should be avoided at all costs and that matters of life and death should be left in the hands of God.
Of course, capital punishment is a particularly significant issue in Christianity due to the fact that Jesus was killed this way. The crucifixion of Jesus represents the hubris of human authority and the terrible sin of human violence toward the weak and vulnerable. In the story of the Passion, Jesus is abused, assaulted, and tortured, but does not defend himself or fight back. Instead he endures this violence right up to the point of being nailed to the cross (hence the word passionem). In The Idiot, Myshkin behaves in a remarkably similar manner, enduring both literal and nonliteral violence at the hands of others without ever fighting back. For example, when Ganya slaps Myshkin while Myshkin is defending Nastasya, Myshkin does not retaliate. Similarly, he also does not fight back when Rogozhin attacks him with a knife, instead falling into an epileptic fit, which could symbolically be read as an act of self-harm that prevents Rogozhin’s violence from going any further.
Although the novel on one hand suggests that violence is a pervasive part of human existence, it also suggests that the right way to react to violence is through the Christian tradition of self-sacrifice known as turning the other cheek. Indeed, following Christian philosophy, it suggests that there might even be something redemptive or sanctifying about enduring violence without enacting violence oneself in return.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Passion, Violence, and Christianity ThemeTracker
Passion, Violence, and Christianity Quotes in The Idiot
“And are you a great fancier of the female sex, Prince? Tell me beforehand!”
“N -n-no! I ’m . . . Maybe you don’t know, but because of my inborn illness, I don’t know women at all.”
“Well, in that case,” Rogozhin exclaimed, “you come out as a holy fool, Prince, and God loves your kind!”
“I’m always kind, if you wish, and that is my only failing, because one should not always be kind. I’m often very angry, with these ones here, with Ivan Fyodorovich especially, but the trouble is that I’m kindest when I’m angry. Today, before you came, I was angry and pretended I didn’t and couldn’t understand anything. That happens to me—like a child.”
“He told me he was fully convinced that I was a perfect child myself, that is, fully a child, that I resembled an adult only in size and looks, but in development, soul, character, and perhaps even mind, I was not an adult, and I would stay that way even if I lived to be sixty. I laughed very much: he wasn’t right, of course, because what’s little about me? But one thing is true, that I really don’t like being with adults, with people, with grown-ups—and I noticed that long ago—I don’t like it because I don’t know how.”
“Maybe I’ll be considered a child here, too—so be it! Everybody also considers me an idiot for some reason, and in fact I was once so ill that I was like an idiot; but what sort of idiot am I now, when I myself understand that I’m considered an idiot? I come in and think: ‘They consider me an idiot, but I’m intelligent all the same, and they don’t even suspect it . . .’ I often have that thought.”
“It’s clear that it made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who his lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty. It seems the poet wanted to combine in one extraordinary image the whole immense conception of the medieval chivalrous platonic love of some pure and lofty knight; naturally, it’s all an ideal.”
“Nihilists are still sometimes knowledgeable people, even learned ones, but these have gone further, ma’am, because first of all they’re practical. This is essentially a sort of consequence of nihilism, though not in a direct way, but by hearsay and indirectly, and they don’t announce themselves in some sort of little newspaper article, but directly in practice, ma’am; it’s no longer a matter, for instance, of the meaninglessness of some Pushkin or other, or, for instance, the necessity of dividing Russia up into parts; no, ma’am, it’s now considered a man’s right, if he wants something very much, not to stop at any obstacle, even if he has to do in eight persons to that end.”
“Yes, Prince, you must be given credit, you’re so good at exploiting your . . . hm, sickness (to put it decently); you managed to offer your friendship and money in such a clever form that it is now quite impossible for a noble man to accept them. It’s either all too innocent, or all too clever . . . you, however, know which.”
“Well, see how you throw a man into a final flummox! For pity’s sake, Prince: first such simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation. But excuse me, Prince, this calls for an explanation, because I . . . I’m simply confounded! Naturally, in the final end my aim was to borrow money, but you asked me about money as if you don’t find anything reprehensible in it, as if that’s how it should be?”
He is either a doctor or indeed of an extraordinary intelligence and able to guess a great many things. (But that he is ultimately an “idiot” there can be no doubt at all.)
Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily.
“You are innocent, and all your perfection is in your innocence. Oh, remember only that! What do you care about my passion for you? You are mine now, I shall be near you all my life . . . I shall die soon.”
“The pope seized land, an earthly throne, and took up the sword; since then everything has gone on that way, only to the sword they added lies, trickery, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, villainy; they played upon the most holy, truthful, simple-hearted, ardent feelings of the people; they traded everything, everything, for money, for base earthly power. Isn’t that the teaching of the Antichrist?! How could atheism not come out of them? Atheism came out of them, out of Roman Catholicism itself! Atheism began, before all else, with them themselves: could they believe in themselves?”
“Well, it’s no disaster! A man, too, comes to an end, and this was just a clay pot!”
