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Dostoevsky wrote in a letter to Apollon Maykov (poet and friend) that his idea with The Idiot was to create a "positively beautiful man." In another letter to his niece -- Sofya Ivanova -- he further writes:

"The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There is nothing more difficult in the world and especially now. All writers, not only ours, but even all European writes, who have merely attempted to portray the positively beautiful, have always given up. Because the task is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but this ideal, whether ours or that of Civilized Europe, is still far from being worked out. There is only one perfectly beautiful person - Christ - so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful person is, of course, already an infinite miracle."

This is why he thought he would fail writing this novel. His main idea was to portray that "positively beautiful man" - i.e someone Christ-like - in Myshkin. He isn't an idiot, really. He knows what he is doing, but he doesn't even acknowledge that he is being taken advantage of. Not because he is an idiot: he simply doesn't care and chooses to believe in people. In Norwegian we have a word for it: dumsnill. Its literal translation would be "stupid-kind." I suppose that would be a fairly good translation for this book if we were to translate it into my dialect and not only Norwegian, where "Idioten" (The Idiot) suffices.

Dostoevsky got the idea of this from Holbein's Christ Taken Down from the Cross. Nikolai Karamzin wrote of the picture: "[...] One doesn't see anything of God. As a dead man he is portrayed quite naturally." These words presumably had a strong impact on Dostoevsky, and he later saw the picture in Basel. His wife wrote of the visit:

"On the way to Geneva we stopped for a day in Basel, with the purpose of seeing a painting in the museum there that my husband had heard about from someone.

This painting, from the brush of Hans Holbein, portrays Jesus Christ, who has suffered inhuman torture, has been taken down from the cross and given over to corruption. His swollen face is covered with bloody wounds, and he looks terrible. The painting made an overwhelming impression on my husband, and he stood before it as if dumbstruck…

When I returned some fifteen or twenty minutes later, I found my husband still standing in front of the painting as if riveted to it. There was in his agitated face that expression as of fright which I had seen more than once in the first moments of an epileptic fit. I quietly took him under the arm, brought him to another room, and sat him down on a bench, expecting a fit to come at any moment. Fortunately that did not happen."

The whole point of this novel is to ask the quesion: What if Christ was merely a man? The idea is to show a saintly "idiot" clashing with a society that does not appreciate Christ-like qualities. What if Christ were not the incarnate God but simply a "moral genius" -- a positively beautiful man? The title is ironic because he is no idiot: he is only deemed an idiot because he meets a society that is idiotic.

description

Holbein's painting.

mimihihi's review against another edition

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4.0

War an manchen stellen etwas träge, doch hat mir zum großteil trotzdem gefallen, besonders wie das ende geschrieben war. Allerdings finde ich es vom plot her am ende etwas enttäuschend. Manno myschkin du dussel und nastasja und aglaja deserved better idc