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5. The Idiot’s “Vertical Sanctuary”: The Holbein Christ and Ippolit’s Confession
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Chapter Five The Idiot’s “Vertical Sanctuary”: The Holbein Christ and Ippolit’s Confession God is recognized and understood in the world only because God is turned towards the world, only in the Divine Revelation to the world, in the divine “economy” or ordering of the home. The inner divine life is cordoned off from creation “by an unapproachable light” and is recognized only in the order of forbidden or “apophatic theology,” through the exclusion of inadequate and ungodly attributes and names. —G. V. Florovsky I N A N O T E B O O K E N T RY on September 15, 1868, Dostoevsky writes: “Ippolit is the main axis of the whole novel” (9:277). Whether or not one can take this remark too seriously, it is certainly true that Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” serves as the intellectual center of The Idiot. But there’s not much to the dying Ippolit except his confession. What was it about this frail, dying young man that Dostoevsky thought so important? One answer is that as the embittered, verbose rebel against an unjust world, Ippolit exemplifies Dostoevsky’s most famous type, sharing key features with such thinkers as the underground paradoxicalist and Ivan Karamazov. Another is the important role that Ippolit plays in the novel as Prince Myshkin’s “ideological opponent.”1 While sparring with Myshkin, he manages to restate most of the prince’s most famous ideas (about beauty, about time, about humility), thereby serving as his double.2 Ippolit’s relationship with the prince transcends purely intellectual matters. As Sarah Young has recently shown, Ippolit draws attention to the prince’s ideas and reminds him of the shattering effect of the Holbein painting on religious faith, thereby reestablishing contact between the prince and Nastasia Filippovna . Furthermore, his narrative spurs the other characters on to their final crisis.3 Ippolit also draws attention to one of Dostoevsky’s key concerns: the difficulty of expressing anything important directly in human language. 93 Chapter Five 94 In her classic study of the novel’s narrative structure, Robin Feuer Miller argues that Ippolit’s confession serves as “a prelude to an unperformed act”— that is, to his failed suicide.4 In this sense it is “essentially false.” Metaphysical rebellion ending in death; catalyst for murder; impotent words leading nowhere. . . . Ippolit’s confession seems to communicate a grim message about the incompatibility of human language and truth and about the prospects for the Christian mission in action. As the novel’s onstage “condemned man,” Ippolit serves as the test case, a challenge to the redeemer. Malcolm Jones suggests that the dark forces of nature triumph: “A novel which begins with a ‘positively beautiful man’ at its centre, ends with a twisted rebel . . . as its ‘axis.’”5 If The Idiot, famously, attempts to tell the story of a “positively beautiful man,” and if that beautiful man serves as a Christ figure, then it is not only the murder and madness of its shocking ending but also the failed interaction between Myshkin and his dying double that bode ill for the possibility of redemption. The Idiot is Dostoevsky’s darkest novel, and at the same time, the novel with the richest array of static visual images—Nastasia Filippovna’s photograph and numerous paintings: the Swiss landscape in General Epanchin’s study, the Dresden Holbein Madonna (who looked like Alexandra), Adelaida ’s unfinished paintings, the portraits in Rogozhin’s house, and, at the center of it all, the reproduction of Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), which both Myshkin and Ippolit see hanging over a doorway in Rogozhin’s house. Given the importance of iconic imagery in Dostoevsky’s, and Russia ’s, Christian tradition, framed as it is physically (at the deep, dark core of Rogozhin’s house) and narratively (at key moments in the novel), the Holbein Christ is the novel’s central mystery. Looking at the painting, one could lose one’s faith, says Myshkin. Ippolit will be the person whose faith is endangered . For him the painting represents the laws of nature triumphant over the human spirit. Any interpretation of the novel must grapple with the connection between image and story, between the painting and Ippolit’s confession. Rogozhin’s house is the picture frame. Tatiana Kasatkina has traced the historical, religious, and structural roots of Rogozhin’s house to a fifteenthcentury Church of the Dormition of the Virgin in Moscow, built by a Myshkin ancestor who is mentioned...