The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century

History in a Name: Myshkin and the "Horizontal Sanctuary"

History in a Name: Myshkin and the "Horizontal Sanctuary" T. A. Kasatkina "Istoriia v imeni: Myshkin i 'gorizontal'nyi khram,'" in 0 tvoriashchei prirode slova: Ontologichnost' slova V tvorchestve F. M. Dostoevskogo kak osnova "realizma v vysshem smysle" (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2004), 380-93. In this essay I will try to make a connection between what would appear at first glance to be very different kinds of realms of reality- textual and subtextual - in Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. Such, for example, are the prince's epilepsy on the one hand, and his strange family connection with the ha pless builder of the Church of the Mother of God-also named Myshkin-in Karamzin's History on the other; the strange, indissoluble tie between the prince and Rogozhin, who would seem to be his antipode, and the sense of deja vu that the prince experiences when he sees Rogozhin's house, along with the people and things confined within its walls; Rogozhin's need to claim Nastasia Filippovna for himself, and the prince's strange complicity, against his own will, in her ultimate enclosure within the walls of Rogozhin's house. I will try to explain these things, reconstructing what Viacheslav Ivanov would have called the "myth" of The Idiot, but approaching it from a different angle. This reconstruction of what Dostoevsky called the novel's "poem" [poema] represents a kind of summary of the years I have spent studying this"most enigmatic" of Dostoevsky's works. Before turning to the myth itself, a few words need to be said about the idea, or, to put it more precisely-about that torment in Dostoevsky that gave rise to the original idea of the novel, about that venerable and cherished idea which he was so afraid of spoiling and in which he believed so fervently. This is, yet again, the famous idea of "Christ outside of the truth," the "credo" that Dostoevsky set forth in his famous letter to Fonvizina1 I was struck by something that the subtle and thoughtful critic B. N. Tarasov wrote in reaction to a strange opposition between Christ and God that he found in my analysis of 1 In January-February of 1854, Dostoevsky wrote a letter to N. D. Fonvizina in which he proclaimed his commitment to a belief in Christ, even if "the truth were outside of Christ" (see PSS 28, bk. 1, 175-77). This famous passage is known as Dostoevsky's "credo." -Ed. Here and throughout, Kasatkina's emphasis. Caro l Apollonio, ed., The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings for the Twenty-First Century, Bloomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2010, 145- 64. 146 T. A. KASATKINA this concept2 in Dostoevsky. Tarasov saw my view of Dostoevsky's position in his letter to Fonvizina as follows: "if Christ were outside of God, he would prefer to remain with Christ, and not with God ." Tarasov himself believes that Dostoevsky opposes Christ to "scientific" truth, to earthly, Euclidian logic. The fact that such a perceptive man misunderstood my argument is, of course, on my conscience, so I w ill attempt again to explain what it w as that Dostoevsky meant by his cred o, which was later to become so fundamental to The Idiot's message. My interpretation of this subject is much closer to the position of my esteemed opponent than to that which he presents as mine, although they d o not completely coincide. Citing relevant passages from the novel Demons, I shall attempt to show that "Christ outside of the truth" for Dostoevsky is Christ outside of immortality, something that Kirillov addresses in his terrible description of the day of the Crucifixion: "Listen to this grand idea: there came a day on earth, and at the center of the earth there stood three crosses. The man on one of the crosses had su ch a deep faith that he told one of the others: 'Today shalt thou be w ith me in paradise.' The day came to an end, both of them died, they went forth and found neither paradise nor resurrection . The prediction did not come true. [...] the laws of nature did not spare even This One, did not even spare their own miracle, and forced even Him to live amid the lie and to die for the lie [.. .]" (10: 471). Here earthly, Euclidian logic triumphs. It is this very logic, this "scientific" truth of the all-powerful laws of nature, that needs to be viewed as the one and only reality -for...