Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference

Learning How to Look: Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot

Learning How to Look: Nastasia Filippovna in The Idiot Gina Kovarsky Near the beginning of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (Idiot, 1868), Myshkin meets the well brought-up young daughters of his distant relative, Madame Epanchina1 At her easel in the women's drawing room and with paintbrush in hand, one of the Epanchin daughters, Adelaida, complains of not knowing "how to look" (1.5.58/50)2 A landscape painting she began long ago is copied from a print, suggesting a failure of creative vision3 Adelaida's frustration demonstrates that she understands very well that the ability to look is something that needs to be developed. For Myshkin, whose relationship to nature is more unmediated, looking is less complicated: "r don't understand anything about it. It seems to me that you just look and paint." As for Madame Epanchina, she seems convinced that looking need only be regarded as a simple , almost passive activity available to anyone in possession of the necessary anatomical equipment: "What do IOU mean, you don' t know how to look? You have eyes, so look" (1.5.58/50). In The Idiot, it is in large measure by contemplating the restive figure of the fallen woman Nastasia Filippovna that Dostoevsky's readers (along with Myshkin) learn the text's most crucial lessons about what it really means to look. The novel offers an extended portrait of its heroine, built around re1 My heartfelt thanks to Tom Bonfiglio, Hilde Hoogenboom, Deborah Martinsen, Irina Reyfman, and Nancy Workman for their valuable suggestions and editing help at various stages of the writing process. 2 All quotations from The Idiot are from the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky, occasionally emended to reflect a more literal meaning. In the body of the text, book, chapter, and page numbers in this translation are followed by the page number in volume 8 of the 3D-volume edition of Dostoevskii's works, thus: (1.5.58/50). 3 Adelaida's name, which in Greek means "obscure," fits her well. Knapp, "Introduction to The Idiot, Part 2," 30. 4 As Jackson writes in his classic study of Dostoevskii's aesthetics, "[tlhe image of the eyes-of sight and vision-is recurrent throughout all of Dostoevsky's discussion of the artist's representation of reality" (Dostoevsky's Quest for Form, 72). Jackson takes this conversation in the Epanchin drawing room of looking and executions as his point of departure in discussing Dostoevskii's "ethics of vision," noting that Dostoevskii's "approach to the question-to look or not to look - is marked with ambiguity" (Dialogues with Dostoevsky, 50). Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference. Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman, eds. Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2008, 51- 69. 52 Gi NA KOVARSKY peated envisionings of her image, whether through a portrait, through the memory of the portrait, in a waking dream, or face-to-face. Exposure to her image moves Myshkin (and the reader) to imagine the extent and nature of her sufferingS His acts of empathy take him, and The Idiot as a whole, beyond the insulated environment of the drawing room and the novel of manners, into darker precincts explored in the Gothic genre6 As Adelaida and Myshkin realize, to think about "looking" is also to think about representing what one sees. Myshkin's startling response to Adelaida 's request for a subject is to recommend that she paint the face of a condemned man "a minute before the stroke of the guillotine, when he's still standing on the scaffold, before he lies down on the plank." In answer to her questions about exactly what sort of face one should show and how one should paint it, he offers an extended verbal picture of the execution of the prisoner who, while on his way to the scaffold, continually sought to kiss the priest's cross (I.5.63/54). He then comes back to the image itself, affirming that she should paint just the "head and the cross." "Looking" in The Idiot thus takes as its starting point a particular experience of moral suffering embodied in a condemned person's face? Myshkin represents that suffering as craving a material, immediate response, symbolized by the materiality of the cross, itself a symbol for Christ's physical sacrifice. At the same time, Myshkin configures "looking" as also needing to go beyond the physical apprehension of external signs or the decipherment of interior life on the basis of those signs...