The Idiot: "Beauty will save the world"
Saving the world from...what, exactly?
Some housekeeping
No major spoilers for The Idiot. This article may continue to be updated in the future, or I may post a new version.
All page numbers are for the P&V translation.
Asterisks refer to topics I’ll expand on in future posts.
As someone who is not religious, nothing written here should be considered an endorsement or criticism of religion.
In The Idiot
The iconic line first appears during Myshkin’s birthday party:
“Is it true, Prince, that you once said ‘beauty’ would save the world? Gentlemen,” he cried loudly to them all, “the prince insists that beauty will save the world!” (p382)
Ippolit misquotes Myshkin, who never said this — the closest thing he says is when he sees Nastasya’s portrait for the first time:
“An astonishing face!” replied the prince. “And I’m convinced that her fate is no ordinary one. It’s a gay face, but she has suffered terribly, eh? It speaks in her eyes, these two little bones, the two points under her eyes where the cheeks begin. It’s a proud face, terribly proud, and I don’t know whether she’s kind or not. Ah, if only she were kind! Everything would be saved!” (p36)
It is not beauty but rather kindness that will save the world. This is brought up again later during his epileptic episode:
Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of being for all mankind. (p230)
Needless to say, the idea of world-changing kindness is a common theme across all of Dostoevsky’s works. For instance, through a rare crack in his cynical nihilism, Ippolit acknowledges in his manuscript how a single good deed can have a rippling effect in the world (more on this later). This is expanded upon in The Brothers Karamazov when Zosima says “all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
The fact that it’s a misquote is itself symbolic. Myshkin explicitly points out the mechanism for this earlier:
“I only wanted to say that the distortion of ideas and notions (as Evgeny Pavlych put it) occurs very often, and is unfortunately much more of a general than a particular case. And to the point that, if this distortion were not such a general case, there might not be such impossible crimes as these …” (p338)
The fact that “kindness” somehow got misquoted as “beauty” through some game of telephone is precisely a distortion of an idea. Myshkin is constantly dismissed as overly naive or idealistic, and although some people are receptive to his Christian humility, nobody even comes close to understanding his profound, ineffable (quite literally, see p423) connection to beauty as a mediating force that awakens you to something greater than yourself. In a society ravaged by status and greed, it makes sense that beauty is a more concrete, valuable, comprehensible concept than that of abstract selflessness. Note this misquote isn’t entirely wrong — kindness, morality, and pity really are all forms of beauty, but there are very few instances excluding Myshkin where characters demonstrate this awareness. Ippolit ironically demonstrates this awareness but rejects it out of pure spite; for him, “beauty” is merely a hackneyed concept spouted by well-meaning, hypocritical Christians who praise the meaning of life in ignorance of the true despair of death:
“What sort of morality needs, on top of your life, also your last gasp, with which you give up the last atom of life, listening to the consolations of the prince, who is bound to go as far in his Christian reasoning as the happy thought that, essentially, it’s even better that you’re dying. (Christians like him always get to that idea: it’s their favorite hobbyhorse.)” (p412)
But much like the Underground Man and Ivan Karamazov, Ippolit despises himself for not just wanting something he can never have, but rather being so powerless in changing his desires.
The end of the world
What exactly is beauty/kindness saving the world from? The Apocalypse! The end of the world is brought up several times, an extremely heavy-handed leitmotif underscoring how the spiritual decay in the microcosm of society portrayed in the novel is but a symptom of the Westernization of Russia. Lebedev explains this in his interpretation of the Apocalypse:
“It means there was something stronger than fire and flame and even than a twenty-year habit! It means there was a thought stronger than all calamities...which mankind would have been unable to endure without that thought which binds men together, guides their hearts, and makes fruitful the wellsprings of the life of thought!...Show me a thought binding present-day mankind together that is half as strong as in those centuries. There is greater wealth, but less force; the binding idea is gone...” (p379)
This “binding idea” is never explicitly named, but it is clearly related to morality and conscience. Perhaps the best way to frame this binding idea is in Myshkin’s words: “Compassion is the chief and perhaps the only law of being for all mankind.” Industrialization is symbolic of materialism — not meaning consumerism (although that’s certainly related) but the idea that material, physical things are more important, beneficial, and therefore reasonable, giving impetus to rational egoism*. It is ideology itself, the “distortion of ideas”, that is ending the world, as we abuse logic to not only justify helping ourselves over others but to even feel good about it in the process. To Dostoevsky, this is the most terrifying aspect of ideology, the complete and utter erasure of self-awareness, or in other words, how the criminal doesn’t even know that he’s a criminal:
“...the most inveterate and unrepentant murderer still knows that he is a criminal, that is, in all conscience he considers that he has done wrong, though without any repentance. And every one of them is the same; but those whom Evgeny Pavlych has begun speaking about do not even want to consider themselves criminals and think to themselves that they had the right and … even did a good thing, or almost. That, in my opinion, is what makes the terrible difference. And note that they’re all young people, that is, precisely of an age when they can most easily and defenselessly fall under the influence of perverse ideas.” (p339)
What Ippolit considers beauty
It may seem like we’ve wandered away from the original quote, but this detour was required in order to fully understand what Ippolit considers perhaps the most grotesque distortion of an idea of all:
“Yes, nature is given to mockery! Why does she,” he suddenly continued ardently, “why does she create the best beings only so as to mock them afterwards? Didn’t she make it so that the single being on earth who has been acknowledged as perfect … didn’t she make it so that, having shown him to people, she destined him to say things that have caused so much blood to be shed, that if it had been shed all at once, people would probably have drowned in it! (p296)
How can nature create the perfectly beautiful, perfectly virtuous Christ, only to mock his very existence in the gruesome reality of death, not only in the mundanity of his corpse but also in the countless wars fought supposedly in his name, for the sake of peace? Ippolit’s concept of beauty lies in reality, the cold yet comforting truth written on “Meyer’s wall”, the “dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power” evoked in Christ’s dead face.
Despite being a self-proclaimed nihilist, he does not accept his own ideology; as Zosima says of Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, “A tormented person, too, sometimes likes to toy with his despair, also from despair.” It is only in moments of profound suffering that he reveals his secret desire for what he considers true beauty:
“Oh, it’s good that I’m dying! I, too, might utter some terrible lie, nature would arrange it that way!… I haven’t corrupted anybody … I wanted to live for the happiness of all people, for the discovery and proclaiming of the truth!… I looked through my window at Meyer’s wall and thought I could talk for only a quarter of an hour and everybody, everybody would be convinced, and for once in my life I got together … with you, if not with the people!” (p296)
Ippolit wants to share his feeling of unconditional love with those around him, but does not know how to do it. Worse yet, he worries his words will be misconstrued — in fact, this is precisely what happens when he reads his manuscript for everyone, who laughs and ridicules his melodrama. The fact they misunderstood his genuine intentions is itself “a distortion of an idea”, the very thing Ippolit feared, and ironically the same crime he is guilty of in advocating nihilism. Ippolit says about good deeds,
“And how do you know what share you will have in the future outcome of human destiny? And if the knowledge and the whole life of this work finally raises you so high that you are able to plant a tremendous seed, to bequeath a tremendous thought to mankind, then …” (p405)
It’s hinted that this “tremendous seed”, the greatest good that could possibly be done, is Christ’s sacrifice. In the same way Kolya wishes to imitate Dmitri’s virtue in The Brothers Karamazov, Ippolit’s manuscript about self-sacrifice for the sake of a beautiful ideology hints at a desire to imitate Christ. Ippolit wishes to spread the truth of love, but much like Myshkin’s nonverbal “idiocy”, he is tormented by his inability to communicate. Ippolit may not know how to say it, and he may be too ashamed to admit it, but for him, true beauty is kindness.