The Idiot explores the question of what profound, total moral innocence would look like, and whether this might be taken for foolishness. The novel’s main character, Prince Myshkin, is a totally pure human being who is admired and adored by other characters but is also often characterized as a fool (or an “idiot”—hence the book’s title). The book shows that this characterization of the prince as a fool is mistaken, as Myshkin is actually very insightful. Rather than being a form of foolishness, moral innocence is, in fact, a kind of profound wisdom.
The people around Myshkin do not understand that his innocence is a form of wisdom because they mistake it for other forms of innocence, which are (rightfully) associated with ignorance or foolishness. For example, he is often perceived as childlike, such as when the unnamed elderly schoolteacher comments, “The prince blushes at an innocent joke like an innocent young girl.” The form of innocence that children and especially “young girls” are thought to have is morally pure, but also unknowing and naïve. Blushing at an “innocent joke” would suggest that Myshkin is oversensitive. He may be morally upstanding, but he is also oblivious to the full reality of the world, which—it is implied—would make him more tough and cynical. Similarly, at one point, Keller tells Myshkin, “Oh, Prince, your view of life is still so bright and innocent, and even, one might say, pastoral!” Again, this comment affirms Myshkin’s innocence while insinuating that this innocence is necessarily a form of ignorance or naivety. The word “still” emphasizes the idea that Myshkin is childlike or sheltered, and that once he encounters the reality of the world his innocence will necessarily be lost. Meanwhile, the term “pastoral” contrasts Myshkin’s pure and old-fashioned view of the world (which is linked to a simple, rural way of life) with the weary cynicism of city-dwellers.
Indeed, at this point in Russian history, the vast majority of people living in the countryside were uneducated, illiterate, and deeply religious peasants, while in the cities bourgeois and aristocratic individuals (such as the characters in the novel) debated modern theories of socialism, nihilism, and atheism. As such, Keller’s comment that Myshkin has a “pastoral” view of the world emphasizes the idea that Myshkin is backwards and naïve. This false belief is strengthened by the fact that Myshkin has spent the past five years literally sheltered from the world in a medical institution in Switzerland, receiving treatment for epilepsy. Many of the characters perceive Myshkin’s illness as not only producing innocent foolishness, but as a kind of innocent foolishness in and of itself. Describing Myshkin early in the novel, General Epanchin says that he is “a perfect child, and even quite pathetic; he has fits of some illness.” Again, the fact that the general calls Myshkin a “child” when he is actually an adult shows how Myshkin’s epilepsy infantilizes him in the minds of others. Furthermore, the general’s pairing of “perfect” and “pathetic” indicates that even while the characters recognize the prince’s profound moral innocence, they see it as a form of vulnerability akin to his illness. In reality, Myshkin’s epilepsy does at times impair his cognitive faculties, but his moral purity is actually a way in which he balances or overcomes this by having special insight into the world.
The association of innocence and foolishness is also cemented in the minds of the characters by the figure of the yurodivy or “holy fool,” also known as “fool for God” or “fool for Christ.” Rogozhin tells Myshkin, “You come out as a holy fool, Prince, and God loves your kind!” These words convey the simultaneously revered and denigrated status of holy fools in Russia at the time. Rogozhin acknowledges that Myshkin is sacred and beloved by God, but there is an obvious patronizing note to his comment. In a bourgeois urban climate of moral cynicism and increasing atheism, being a holy fool is seen as retrograde and silly. Ultimately, however, the book shows that other people’s views of Myshkin are mistaken. His innocence is not actually a form of foolishness, but rather a remarkable form of insight and wisdom. Sometimes the other characters get close to recognizing this, although they usually are not able to fully understand it. For example, Doktorenko accuses the prince of being “so good at exploiting your…hm, sickness (to put it decently),” in order to socially manipulate people according to his wishes. He concludes “It’s either all too innocent, or all too clever…you, however, know which.” These words indicate that Doktorenko believes that innocence and cleverness are opposites, and that being clever necessarily means being scheming and deceptive. The truth is that Myshkin’s innocence actually provides him with a special form of intelligence, affording him powerful insight into personalities and social dynamics.
Similarly, in the same passage in which Keller calls the prince “pastoral,” he also exclaims that he is “confounded” by Myshkin’s insight into the minds of others: “For pity’s sake, Prince: first such simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation.” Keller begs for the prince to explain this “contradiction.” Yet what the book actually shows is that there is really no contradiction at all. The character of Myshkin shows that true, profound moral innocence is actually a very powerful and incisive type of wisdom, not a form of foolishness.
Innocence v. Foolishness ThemeTracker
Innocence v. Foolishness Quotes in The Idiot
“And are you a great fancier of the female sex, Prince? Tell me beforehand!”
“N -n-no! I ’m . . . Maybe you don’t know, but because of my inborn illness, I don’t know women at all.”
“Well, in that case,” Rogozhin exclaimed, “you come out as a holy fool, Prince, and God loves your kind!”
“I’m always kind, if you wish, and that is my only failing, because one should not always be kind. I’m often very angry, with these ones here, with Ivan Fyodorovich especially, but the trouble is that I’m kindest when I’m angry. Today, before you came, I was angry and pretended I didn’t and couldn’t understand anything. That happens to me—like a child.”
“He told me he was fully convinced that I was a perfect child myself, that is, fully a child, that I resembled an adult only in size and looks, but in development, soul, character, and perhaps even mind, I was not an adult, and I would stay that way even if I lived to be sixty. I laughed very much: he wasn’t right, of course, because what’s little about me? But one thing is true, that I really don’t like being with adults, with people, with grown-ups—and I noticed that long ago—I don’t like it because I don’t know how.”
“Maybe I’ll be considered a child here, too—so be it! Everybody also considers me an idiot for some reason, and in fact I was once so ill that I was like an idiot; but what sort of idiot am I now, when I myself understand that I’m considered an idiot? I come in and think: ‘They consider me an idiot, but I’m intelligent all the same, and they don’t even suspect it . . .’ I often have that thought.”
“It’s clear that it made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who his lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty. It seems the poet wanted to combine in one extraordinary image the whole immense conception of the medieval chivalrous platonic love of some pure and lofty knight; naturally, it’s all an ideal.”
“Yes, Prince, you must be given credit, you’re so good at exploiting your . . . hm, sickness (to put it decently); you managed to offer your friendship and money in such a clever form that it is now quite impossible for a noble man to accept them. It’s either all too innocent, or all too clever . . . you, however, know which.”
“Well, see how you throw a man into a final flummox! For pity’s sake, Prince: first such simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation. But excuse me, Prince, this calls for an explanation, because I . . . I’m simply confounded! Naturally, in the final end my aim was to borrow money, but you asked me about money as if you don’t find anything reprehensible in it, as if that’s how it should be?”
He is either a doctor or indeed of an extraordinary intelligence and able to guess a great many things. (But that he is ultimately an “idiot” there can be no doubt at all.)
Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily.
“I want to be brave and not afraid of anything. I don’t want to go to their balls, I want to be useful. I wanted to leave long ago. They’ve kept me bottled up for twenty years, and they all want to get me married. When I was fourteen I already thought of running away, though I was a fool. Now I have it all worked out and was waiting for you, to ask you all about life abroad.”
How did she dare write to her, he asked, wandering alone in the evening (sometimes not even remembering himself where he was walking). How could she write about that, and how could such an insane dream have been born in her head?
“You are innocent, and all your perfection is in your innocence. Oh, remember only that! What do you care about my passion for you? You are mine now, I shall be near you all my life . . . I shall die soon.”
As soon as some of our young ladies cut their hair, put on blue spectacles, and called themselves nihilists, they became convinced at once that, having put on the spectacles, they immediately began to have their own “convictions.”
“The pope seized land, an earthly throne, and took up the sword; since then everything has gone on that way, only to the sword they added lies, trickery, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, villainy; they played upon the most holy, truthful, simple-hearted, ardent feelings of the people; they traded everything, everything, for money, for base earthly power. Isn’t that the teaching of the Antichrist?! How could atheism not come out of them? Atheism came out of them, out of Roman Catholicism itself! Atheism began, before all else, with them themselves: could they believe in themselves?”
“Well, it’s no disaster! A man, too, comes to an end, and this was just a clay pot!”