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We tend to view innocence as an uplifting cleansing virtue. Contact with it is supposed to improve the soul. But this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, in company, my five year old son will blurt out something I don’t want outsiders to know and I end up blushing! His innocence causes me discomfort. I also remember that little girl from Aleppo who every day updated online the situation in the besieged city. Imagine the reactions of Assad’s regime to her online posts. Would they have been won over by her innocence? No way! They would have been made deeply uncomfortable by her innocence. They would have wanted to shut her up. The idiot here has a similar effect on Russian society. Dostoevsky’s idea was that if Christ returned to 19th century Russian society he would be treated as a simpleton, an idiot. So he has created a character who always endeavours to be honest, to tell the truth as he sees it. He has a “noble simplicity and is boundlessly trusting”. His innocence though causes as much hatred as admiration, more anarchy than goodwill. He makes you realise there are many situations in life where a lie is preferable to the truth if the boat isn’t to be rocked. Because there’s nearly always something expedient in a lie, especially in what we call white lies. There’s usually some personal gain to be had from shunning the truth. Usually these are small private lies; sometimes bigger, more public lies, like Trump denying climate change because it’s in his financial interests to take this stand. He doesn’t want to look at images of innocent nature devastated by oil spills from leaking pipes.
One of the most interesting things I learned while reading this is how the novel has evolved for the better since the 19th century. As brilliant as this is there’s a lot of rambling waffle, as if all the characters are on amphetamines and don’t know when to shut up. Dostoevsky resorts to rather cheap tactics too – a character arrives breathless with the urgency to convey news but instead of getting to the point embarks on a completely different discourse and finally decides now is not the time to share his news. Or the narrator will coyly tell us he doesn’t know what two characters spoke about when they were alone together, even though on the previous page he told us what a character thought in the privacy of his own mind. I wondered if this was mischief on the part of Dostoevsky or just sloppiness. Apparently this was serialised and Dostoevsky was under great duress when he wrote it. Also, all the women are bonkers. They’re so volatile and capricious that it’s impossible to know what they want. They seem to be overloaded with stoppered sexual energy. Sexual emotions, in Dostoevsky’s novel, seem to deny the female characters access not only to innocence but also measured reflection, a subtext I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. The women sometimes confused the clarity of the theme of this novel. And ultimately it’s the sexual jealousy of an essentially innocent young woman that causes the concluding mayhem.
This is not a seamless great read. It can be baggy, chaotic, digressive but the best bits are simply brilliant and overall I found it a tremendously edifying read.
One of the most interesting things I learned while reading this is how the novel has evolved for the better since the 19th century. As brilliant as this is there’s a lot of rambling waffle, as if all the characters are on amphetamines and don’t know when to shut up. Dostoevsky resorts to rather cheap tactics too – a character arrives breathless with the urgency to convey news but instead of getting to the point embarks on a completely different discourse and finally decides now is not the time to share his news. Or the narrator will coyly tell us he doesn’t know what two characters spoke about when they were alone together, even though on the previous page he told us what a character thought in the privacy of his own mind. I wondered if this was mischief on the part of Dostoevsky or just sloppiness. Apparently this was serialised and Dostoevsky was under great duress when he wrote it. Also, all the women are bonkers. They’re so volatile and capricious that it’s impossible to know what they want. They seem to be overloaded with stoppered sexual energy. Sexual emotions, in Dostoevsky’s novel, seem to deny the female characters access not only to innocence but also measured reflection, a subtext I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. The women sometimes confused the clarity of the theme of this novel. And ultimately it’s the sexual jealousy of an essentially innocent young woman that causes the concluding mayhem.
This is not a seamless great read. It can be baggy, chaotic, digressive but the best bits are simply brilliant and overall I found it a tremendously edifying read.