By sharing the pain of the other in love, their souls shine with a beauty whose radiance will conquer death and redeem the world one day.
Dostoyevsky’s Novel The Idiot
‘Is it true, Prince, that you once said that the world will be redeemed by beauty?’ This question is posed by a young friend to Prince Myshkin, who is the essential figure in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. When the Prince remains silent, his friend asks again: ‘What kind of beauty will redeem the world?’ The Prince looks at him penetratingly, but does not answer.*1
However, from now on he will remain at the side of his consumptive young friend with boundless compassion, for he knows that his friend is close to death. He remembers only too well the face of death, which he once faced as a young man. It seems as if he wants to tell his friend with his silence that he will share his pain with him in love and that this will make their souls shine with a beauty that will conquer death and one day redeem the world.
A mock execution
Dostoyevsky himself was 27 years old when he was sentenced to death in St. Petersburg along with a small group of friends for anti-regime, socialist thinking. In a letter to his brother, he writes: ‘Today, 22 December, we were all taken to Semyonovsky Square.’ When they were lined up on either side of the scaffold, the auditor stepped into the centre of the execution ground and read out the death sentence: ‘sentenced to death by firing squad’. Suddenly the sun broke through the clouds. And Dostoyevsky said: It cannot be that we are being executed …
The delinquents are thrown over the white death gowns, the swords are broken over their heads. They are tied to the posts and the hoods are pulled over their eyes, the soldiers hold the rifles ready to fire, then a drum roll. The hoods are torn from the heads of those doomed to die, and they are untied from the poles. A tsar’s messenger announces the reprieve. The death penalty has been commuted to hard labour! A few days later, Dostoyevsky is deported to Siberia with many others. They will learn later that the tsar had been planning this show trial for some time.*2
That one moment of ‘neither death nor life’ which is suddenly bathed in sunlight, lets Dostoyevsky later say:
It is amazing what a single ray of sunshine does to a person’s soul. And also: I can see the sun, […] and knowing that the sun is there, that is life.*3
Stefan Zweig describes this moment in his poem Heroischer Augenblick (Heroic Moment):
Death creeps reluctantly from the frozen joints.
And the eyes, still veiled in darkness, sense
that they receive a greeting from eternal light […]
Because he feels that, only since
he had touched the bitter lips of death,
his heart senses the sweetness of life.
Epilepsy as a metaphor
Dostoyevsky was deeply affected by the unspeakable humiliation he suffered at the hands of the state authorities who had sentenced him to death and then spared his life at the last moment. This shock triggered chronic epilepsy in him. The one crucial moment, when the sunlight penetrating his soul saved him from death in a higher sense and awakened him to new life, will remain in Dostoyevsky’s soul as a lasting experience during his epileptic seizures, which he processes in the character of Prince Myshkin in his novel The Idiot. In this ambivalence, every epileptic seizure of the prince is an attempt by his soul to integrate the contradictions of death and birth and experience them as a unity in human life. Prince Myshkin is a kind of alter ego of Dostoyevsky.
The prince, who in his own misfortune receives the vision of the interconnectedness of all human life, leads a truly humble life. However, the people around him cannot understand him. They live in a false reality of self-love, mock his noble and compassionate soul and call him an idiot.
A parallel between Prince Myshkin and Jesus
In his Thoughts on Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ Hermann Hesse compares Prince Myshkin with Jesus.*5
The parallel between the two is the thought of the moment when Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane drinks the last cup of loneliness […]. It is the moment of incredible, total isolation, of the tragic loneliness of the Idiot: On the one side, society, the elegant, the worldly, the rich, the powerful and the conservative; on the other, the angry youth, implacable, knowing nothing but rebellion, wild, savage, namelessly stupid … – and between the two parties, the prince alone, exposed, critically observed from both sides and with the utmost tension. And how does the situation end? It ends with Myshkin behaving entirely in accordance with his good, tender, childlike nature, […] responding with selflessness to the most outrageous […] and thus being completely rejected and despised […] Everyone turns away from him […], for a moment the most extreme contrasts in society, age, and attitude are completely erased, and everyone is united, completely united, in turning away with disgust from the one who is the only pure one among them. So what is the reason for this idiot’s impossibility in the world of others? It is because the idiot thinks differently from the others. His thinking is what I call ‘magical’ thinking.*6
Prince Myshkin once stood on the magical border during the execution process, where he had to accept everything, the thought of death and its opposite, life. He realised that there is no law, no culture, no morality and no formation that is true from any other point of view than that of one pole – and that every pole has its opposite pole. He thus denied the whole world and reality of others, and the fact that he appeared as a lovable, selfless person made people helpless. He had experienced the true unity and law of human existence in the light and warming love of the sunbeam that once called him to new life.
The law of compassion
‘Compassion is, after all, the most important and perhaps the only law of existence for all of humanity,’ said Dostoyevsky. When we share pain with our neighbours, we embrace all people in our hearts. At the same time, we connect with our common divine source of life, which is the place where the original beauty of God’s love radiates.*7
This is the secret of beauty: it radiates a splendour that expresses the glory of God in all his creation and will redeem the world.
With his complete modesty, even humility, Prince Myshkin is completely unapproachable, and his life radiates an order centred on his own solitude, mature to the point of disappearance. This is indeed a very strange thing: All events, however distant they may be from him, have a gravitational pull towards him and this gravitating of all things and people towards the One constitutes the content of the book. Walter Benjamin
From Stefan Zweig’s poem Heroischer Augenblick (Heroic Moment):
And it becomes clear to him
that in this one second
he was the one
who stood at the cross a thousand years ago,
and that he, like him,
since that burning kiss of death,
must love life because of its suffering’.
References:
1 Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Der Idiot (The Idiot), Munich 1997, p. 588
2 Dostoyevsky-eu Execution
3 Quote from www.aphorismen.de
4 Stefan Zweig, Sternstunden der Menschheit, Heroischer Augenblick, Projekt Gutenberg-de
5 Hermann Hesse, Thoughts on Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, https://hesse.projects-gss.ucsb.edu
6 Ibid.
7 Then beauty realises the significance of its Sanskrit origin: Bet-El-Za, which means ‘the place where God shines’.
