book I, chapter I, extreme readiness

In conversation with Rogozhin, Myshkin is immediately notable for the “extreme readiness” with which he replies to every question – a readiness that, according to the narrator, “betray[s] no suspicion of the utter carelessness, idleness, and impropriety of some of the questions” (6). And so, fittingly, begins the depiction of Myshkin’s character within that human situation for which he is peculiarly suited: conversation. This first conversation–perhaps unremarkably–is thematic for the rest of the novel in sense that it contains most of the conversational “angles” through which Myshkin will be established as a kind of sui generis stylist. I say “angle” instead of “dimension” because part of my basic reading of Myshkin is that (in geometric terms) his way of conversing does not necessarily call for a number of separate interpretive levels–e.g., autobiographical, anecdotal, familiar, formal, rhetorical, informational, philosophical, psychological, political, theological–in order to establish itself as an effective method of communication. That is clumsily expressed. What I mean to say is that uncertainty, especially concerning the formal rules of speech in propriety and logic, is a constitutive part of the unusual effectiveness and affectivity of both the manner of Myshkin’s speech and of its substance.

Already we come up against the suspicion that there is something subversive about this man who is “both intimate and unidentifiable”–especially given the pleasure Myshkin’s style gives to his “swarthy” interlocutor. To tempt that suspicion, which may turn out to be well-founded (though I would even then refuse to give in), I would tentatively (“critical shorthand”) refer to another “conversational” style that thrives in a different “medium.” From Allen Tate’s essay on Ezra Pound’s Cantos:

We hear them talk, and we return to hear them talk, we return to hear them again, but we never know what they talk about; we return for the mysterious quality of charm that has no rational meaning that we can define. It is only after a long time that the order, the rhythm of the talker’s mind, the logic of his character as distinguished from anything logical he may say–it is a long time before this begins to take on form for us.

This could be described as temptation only because Tate also says that Pound’s “powerful juxtapositions … reduce [all separate elements] to an unhistorical miscellany, timeless and without origin, and no longer a force in the lives of men.” What favorable judgment in regard to virtue could be made of Myshkin, then, who has read widely “though not quite in a regular way” (29), whose only literary/poetic ability is his skill as a calligrapher? What contribution does Myshkin make of his own accord (i.e. other than as a problematic character in a Russian novel) to “conversation between intelligent men”; to the “courage and resoluteness” of discovery; to the “common understanding of what is virtuous and vicious, noble and base?” (Allan Bloom, Political Philosophy and Poetry) Bloom speaks of recovering a “naive” reading of “the people’s books,” attuned to the good of the soul, dependent on the “inspiration of the poet,” and constitutive of the work of true statesmen–whence Myshkin? How does one even get at Myshkin in order to imitate him?

I will say at this point that I believe Rowan Williams is absolutely correct–especially in his interpretation of The Idiot–to focus above all on the “effect that the writing itself has upon the original purposes of the writer” (Dostoevsky 47). It is clear from the text of The Idiot that, in a certain sense, this “effect” was not unknown to Dostoevsky. In the course of the discussion of the category of “usual and ordinary people” that opens Part Four, the narrator recalls Gogol’s portrayal of Lieutenant Pirogov. I’m not so much interested in the question of ordinariness (self-knowledge takes care of that), but in the wonderful description of an author writing:

This impudence of naivety, this stupid man’s unquestioningness of himself and his talent, is excellently portrayed by Gogol in the astonishing type of Lieutenant Pirogov. Pirogov never even doubts that he is a genius, even higher than any genius; he is so far from doubting it that he never even asks himself about it; anyhow, questions do not exist for him. The great writer was finally forced to give him a whipping, for the satisfaction of his reader’s offended moral sense, but, seeing that the great man merely shook himself and, to fortify himself after his ordeal, ate a puff pastry, he spread his arms in amazement and thus left his readers. (463)

I’ve never read anything like that anywhere else: a description of an artist amazed while he is writing by the actions of his own creation. What better way is there to describe the difference between “men of unusual genius” and ordinary men? What greater endorsement of the words of Reynolds Price with which he begins Dodging Apples, his essay on writing– “The making of any work of art is as mysterious as making a child and likely to remain so longer” –?

I recall that passage in order to make a cautionary point about interpreting Myshkin as a definite type: we should resist the temptation to be too amazed at the secrets we think we have uncovered. Reading is often just another name for envy and we quickly find ourselves seeking to possess something even the author himself would not claim as his own.

Page citations are from the paperback 2003 Vintage Classics edition of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.