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

hero: - «The ‘poor knight’ is also a Don Quixote, only serious, not comic»
(Dostoevsky 1973:207). And in her agitated reading of Pushkin’s poem, she goes a
step further, replacing the A. M. D., the Ave Mater Dei of the "poor knight" with a N.
F. B., Nastasya Filippovna’s initials, idealising Myshkin’s relationship with her rival
and seeing in his figure another incarnation of the Urbild represented in Pushkin’s
hero. To her, the ballad «describes a man capable of having an ideal, and, secondly,
having once set the ideal before him, of believing in it, and having believed in it, of
devoting his whole life to it.» The poet wanted, in her words, «to unite in one striking
image the whole grand conception of medieval chivalrous and platonic love»:
Поэту хотелось, кажется, совокупить в один чрезвычайный образ всё
огромное понятие средневековой платонической любви какогого-нибудь
чистого и высокого рыцаря; разумеется, всё это идеал [...] «Рыцарь
бедный» — тот же Дон Кихот, но только серезный, а не комический.
(Dostoevsky 1973207)
But, as we know, Aglaya’s attempt at turning Prince Myshkin into a symbolic figure is
rejected by the story line of the novel. Myshkin’s relationship with Nastasya
Filippovna develops into something quite different from the platonic love of medieval
chivalry. Once more, the reader is faced with an Urbild-Abbild-relationship that is
twarted, deformed.
One of the strongest claims about Prince Myshkin is that his story follows the
pattern of Christ’s life story, turning his figure into an imitator of Christ.
The claims find ample support in the notebooks, where the strongest formulation
is to be found in a summary of parts 3 and 4 from April 1868. Here Dostoevskij writes
that the prince «is Christ»: «КНЯЗЬ ХРИСТОС.» (Dostoevsky 1974:246).
In the novel, however, the relationship between Prince Myshkin and Christ has
become much more complex. But there is one scene, in particular, that seems to me to
represent Myshkin’s relationship with Nastasya Filippovna in a way that suggests
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