Jostein Børtnes Dostoevsky's Idiot or the Poetics of Emptiness1 ...

From the moment Dostoevsky’s preliminary notes to The Idiot were first
published by Sakulin and Belchikov in 1931, the study of the novel has drawn heavily
on this material. It has often taken the form of a kind of shuttle traffic between
notebooks and finished text in an attempt to solve the enigmas of the latter by
statements found in the former.
The prevailing idea of Prince Myshkin as an imitator of Christ has been well
summarised by Theodore Ziolkovski (1972:104):
Prince Myshkin is a truly Christlike man — in his manuscript notes
Dostoevskij once refers to him as «Prince Christ» — of great moral beauty.
But to make him plausible as a human being Dostoevskij found it necessary to
mar his moral beauty with certain flaws. [...] Dostoevskij drew his Christlike
man as a severe epileptic who eventually, at the end of the book, is reduced to
babbling idiocy — the savior as idiot!
In representing Prince Myshkin in this way, Dostoevsky was, according to Ziolkovski
(1972:104), «exploiting the ancient topos that associates divine truth with madness : in
the eyes of society the savior or redeemer appears as a fool».
The only critic to my knowledge who has contested this interpretation of Prince
Myshkin, is J. P. Stern. In an acute analysis of Dostoevsky's hero he observes that
«even though neither the novel nor the notebooks contain a single word in
affirmation of a divine origin of Myshkin's illness, there can be no doubt that his total
person is intended as something like an imitatio Christi. "Yet, what Dostoevsky shows,
"is the defective nature of Myshkin's imitatio." (Stern 1973:16f.):
in the end the world proves to be too much for him. Its sins and sorrows lie
too heavily on it — too heavily for him to redeem them. His imitatio is
defective, not because it is merely human — given the limits of the convention
Dostoevskij has chosen, the re-enacting of Christ could not be anything else.
4