![]() Dostoyevsky, as is widely known, was an epileptic, and one of the great scenes of The Idiot depicts Prince Myshkin’s seizure, which occurs in a dark stairway, just as Rogozhin is about to plunge a knife into the Prince. ![]() This is one of the lessons of Christ for Dostoyevsky: that to truly love is also to commit complete self-sacrifice, and the complete self-sacrifice we see in Christ is, in a sense, suicide. Also: If those are the only real ways of being, what does it mean if you can’t actually choose either of them? The worry in The Idiot is that there are really only two authentic ways of existing, being in love and killing yourself. The Prince asks the question because he knows that Nastasya will be killing herself by marrying Rogozhin-the two of them are poisonously incompatible. ![]() The young woman seems to be in love with both the Prince and Rogozhin, though in The Idiot it’s a bit hard to tell who is in love with who, because everyone is falling in love with each other all the time, and no one will ever admit that she or he is in love, except by way of making fun of the idea of being in love or denying being in love. “WHO CONSCIOUSLY THROWS HIMSELF INTO THE WATER OR ONTO THE KNIFE?” In Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (1869), Prince Myshkin, the idiot of the title, poses this question to Rogozhin, who is in love with Nastasya. ![]()
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