📚✏ 📙 Steemit Bookclub / Idiot / INTRODUCTION
I was just told, dear brother, that to-day or to-morrow we are to be sent off. I asked to see you. But I was told that this was impossible. (...) Brother ! I have not become downhearted or low-spirited. Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us. They will lacerate me, it is true ! But there remains in me my heart and the same flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life. On voit le soleil ! Now, good-bye, brother ! Don't grieve for me!
This is one of the letters that Dostoevsky wrote to his brother before his death sentence. The execution is called off and revealed as psychological torture. Why is this important you ask? After this torture, he became deeply religious and became obsesed with Jesus Christ. Also he was epileptic, and wrote in his letters that just before epileptic seziers he would expierence ''feelings of universal peace and divine love''.
Fast forward 20 years later, he wrote Idiot, and said it was his most personal novel.
First, critics obsess about the idea that Myshkin is Jesus, second Myshkin is also an epileptic, and third, through the whole novel you will see stories about how people react to the knowledge they are going to die.
Definition of idiot
1 : dated, now offensive : a person affected with extreme mental retardation
2 : a foolish or stupid person
Now the title has both of these meanings, but it's irony. It's interesting that the first idea was to name the novel ''Myshkin'' but then he decided to name it Idiot. Why did he want us to focus on the way others perceive Myshkin? That is a question I would like for you to remember while reading the novel.
What will hopefully happen while you progress trough the book is that you will begin to examine some of your views, especially what is considered to be ''good'' today. A glimpse of how the system of values in today's world has been thoroughly distorted has already become a common thing, but in front of a purity as embodied in the image of Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, even those ideal values that have disappeared can be called into question. He defends his principles and ideals with his whole being, even at the price of being called by an idiot.
"On voit le soleil" :) Those Russian writers and their mastery of the French language keep surprising and delighting me :) Obviously, after that mock execution, Dostoyevsky felt "reborn" and saw the world in a different way... The difficult is obviously to make people who didn't have that experience see the world in such a way, with the eyes of a child... or an Idiot :)
@herverisson
exactly! It always fascinated me, how all of them, all those ''big Russian writers'' had this with religion, this really specific understanding and feeling of religion, there is a great quote, which I will now paraphrase, from Dostoevsky's book ''Demons'', his character Stavrogin I think it was, he said ''I....I....I will believe in God''. And this sentence sums up the Russian soul, the struggle to believe in God. If you read Gogol perhaps, that's level up struggle, he burned his sequel of ''Dead Souls'' because his priest told him that it's blasphemy.
I want to read Dead Souls too... :) I read only the short stories of Gogol and The Revizor play :) I have read "Demons" but the truth is that I can't recall much about it... Let's see how is The idiot first!
@herverisson
haha, true!
first thing first :)
The above is very useful, as I hope it adds depth to whatever I write. Thank you.
@arthur.grafo
Glad you found it useful :)