Amnesia as a state of divine unknowing and innocence in Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Author: Marilyn Graves
Published on: Aug 1, 2003

A Review of the Meaning of Amnesia in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Perhaps since ancient men had shamans to intercede in their fate, there have been special individuals, holy men. In medieval society, epileptics were often regarded as holy fools, possessed with some special access to the divine. These men would have light auras prior to the onset of the seizure and would sometimes report vision of God or of heaven appearing at these moments. Epileptics have a special aura about them. They seem to be out of control of their bodies, in a trance, and lost to memory during the duration of their seizures.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Myshkin is an epileptic, an innocent and a holy man. During the times he is most acutely ill, he can recall nothing that happens around him. Myshkin becomes gravely ill and is treated by a doctor named Schneider in Switzerland. He slowly emerges from an amnestic state and, seemingly well again, travels back to his home in Russia looking to connect with his only surviving relative. The family, almost everyone in fact, welcome him with open arms. Many of them are suspicious, greedy, or ruthless people themselves. But, they are entranced my Myshkin who always tells the truth, who is Christ like in his ability to forgive insult and injury. Myshkin is like oil on this watery background of squabbling, hatred and rage and he floats above it. Myshkin feels a deep sense of pity toward Nastasya Filippovna, a woman filled with self-hatred, who has become the mistress of Rogozhin. Rogozhin loves her but is so bad-tempered and jealous he hounds her. She belittles and provokes him. Dostoevsky portrays these characters with sympathy. The pain they feel, the hopelessness, the powerlessness are filtered through Myshkin’s pity. Myshkin tries to save Nastasya Filippovna but she will not allow anyone to save her.

Freud speculated that there are “criminals from a sense of guilt” (p. 342) in an essay from his Collected Papers (Volume 4, 1959). Believing they are bad, they commit crimes to justify their belief in their own worthlessness and in doing so they attempt to elicit the punishment they think they inherently deserve. Nastasya Filippovna has the sense of worthlessness but engages it by becoming a man’s mistress eliciting the condemnation of nineteenth century society. Rogozhin is her punishment for her wickedness. When he kills her, people are not really surprised. Myshkin finds Rogozhin and the dead woman. He comforts Rogozhin. Dostoevsky says, “Then Myshkin stretched out his trembling hand to him and softly touched his head, his hair, stroking them and striking his cheeks . . . he could do nothing else!” Then he says, “at last he lay down on the pillow as though utterly helpless and despairing and put his face close to the pale and motionless face of Rogozhin; tears flowed from his eyes on to Rogozhin’s cheeks, but perhaps he did not notice then his own tears and was quite unaware of them.” (p. 594).

Rogozhin makes no attempt to deny what he has done or escape punishment. Myshkin here is saint like. In his innocence and goodness he can forgive that which man cannot. His tears seem to bless Rogozhin and confer on the man some superhuman absolution. In this way Myshkin is Christ like. In that sense Myshkin is not of this world and he retreats into a state of unknowing. “But by now he could understand no questions he was asked and did not recognize the people surrounding him; and if Schneider himself had some from Switzerland to look at his former pupil and patient, remembering the condition in which Myshkin had sometimes been during the first year of his stay in Switzerland, he would have flung up his hands in despair and would have said as he did then, ‘An idiot!’” (p. 594). Myshkin is now in a sustained amnestic episode like the one he had before but now perhaps he will never emerge.

Alongside the plot line about the doomed couple is another equally important one. Myshkin falls in love with Aglaia, a relatively normal girl but feels a man like himself has no right to this sort of happiness. He feels he is defective and not worthy of happiness. Self-hatred proves to be contagious. When Myshkin disappears into himself again after the murder Aglaia makes a self-destructive marriage with a man who can only make her unhappy.

Perhaps the very strongest among us can endure the pain of living with misery and self-hatred. The alternative is that the pain can only be dealt with by unknowing and oblivion. Various minor characters in the novel find oblivion in drinking, gambling, or just quarreling incessantly. Death is the oblivion for Nastasya Filippovna. But for the saintly Myshkin, oblivion is amnesia.

Myshkin’s epileptic seizures are described: “Then suddenly something seemed torn asunder before him; his soul was flooded with intense inner light. . . . “A terrible, indescribable scream that is unlike anything else breaks from the sufferer. In that scream everything human seems obliterated. . . The sight of a man in an epileptic fit fills many people with positive and unbearable horror, in which there is a certain element of the uncanny.” (p. 227).

Dostoevsky’s work if full of drama and of characters that are larger than life. Yet, there are people like this in our world now. Sometimes they turn up on reality TV shows and are derided and despised for their weaknesses. The people who have to live with them may eventually get exhausted with the effort of living in the emotional storm they create and abandon them. Abandonment, turning our backs on someone, is a way of not seeing without the amnesia. Dostoevsky himself was probably one of these larger than life characters. As the introduction of my 1981 copy of The Idiot indicates (Bantam Books), Dostoevsky’s father, a brutal, drunken man, was murdered. Dostoevsky thought he was at the moment of execution as a political dissident when he was pardoned at the last moment in front of a firing squad and sent to prison in Siberia for ten years instead. Afterwards, he lead an impoverished life from his losses from compulsive gambling. Dostoevsky apparently really understood and felt sympathy for these despised and self-hating people. In Myshkin he creates a character who can love and forgive those who cannot love and forgive themselves.