Revisiting the Failures of 'The Idiot'

• In Event: Fictions of National Identity in Imperial Russian Literature II

Abstract

This essay contribution looks critically at Dostoevsky’s essays and fictional writings of the late 1860s and early 1870s, arguing for the consideration of multiple “Russian ideas” in his work towards a critique of its nationalist visions. Taking inspiration from Sarah Hudspith’s recent call to conceive of “ideas of Russianness,” this paper will examine The Idiot in its original venue and the reviews that it generated in literary journalism. Accounting for the diverse audience of this text--the first major novel in which Dostoevsky attempts to articulate a "Russian idea,"--reveals variations on what he increasingly saw as Russia’s spiritual and political mission outside the borders of Russia. Analysis of the novel's immediate reception and initial presence in journal culture shows the rhetorical challenges of the writer’s articulation of his nationalist ideal, as well as the difficulty he encountered representing its utopian futurity in fiction.

Author

• Lindsay Marie Ceballos, Lafayette College