Russia & The Idiot.

 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

What seems to have inspired Dostoevsky to write his novel 'The Idiot', is Leonardo da Vinci's mural 'The Last Supper'.

Prince Myshkin, is a Christ-like character, who suffers from epilepsy as did Dostoevsky. The prince is unable to tell lies and is totally without guile or cunning and people try to take advantage of him. General Yepanchin's youngest daughter, Aglaya, falls in love with the prince, but finishes up eloping with a Polish count who later abandons her. She'd told Myshkin that most of what she knew about life had been derived from reading the novels of Paul de Kock, a famous French novelist.

They say that 19th century Tsarist Russian society, had a veneer of French culture, underpinned by Prussian militarism and Oriental despotism. Many of the French nobility and gentry would have spoken French. When The Idiot was published in serial form between 1868-69, over 80% of the Russian population would have been illiterate peasants. Although Russian serfdom had been abolished in1861, life for much of the Russian peasantry remained the same. They used to say that if you scratched a Russian, you'd always find a peasant underneath.

Yet, for both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the Russian peasant seemed to embody some kind of virtue, ideal, and inner wisdom. Dostoevsky wrote about 'The Peasant Marey' which is based on a childhood experience and he writes about the peasantry, in his book, 'The House of the Dead. In Tolstoy's novel, 'War and Peace', Platon Karataev, epitomises the archetypal good Russian peasant.

Dostoevsky's father, a doctor with a drink problem, is believed to have been killed by his own peasants because he was sexually abusing one of the peasant girls. They say they crushed his testicles between two house bricks. The family kept quiet about the circumstances of his death because they needed the peasants. Tolstoy also went with peasant girls, but he managed to retain his testicles.