The Dance of Death in Dostoevskij's The Idiot Yevgeny Slivkin

The shattering impression made on Dostoevskij by Holbein's painting, Dead Christ (which plays a significant role in the novel The Idiot), as well as his personal losses during the period of his work on The Idiot, may have directed his attention to the popular Medieval subject Totentanz (Dance of Death), which the name of Holbein has been so strongly interwoven with (F. Douce).

In my paper, entitled The Dance of Death in Dostoevskij's The Idiot, I propose the hypothesis that the structure of The Idiot and the image of My&shachek;kin were influenced by Holbein's masterpieces based on the Totentanz. We may assume that Dostoevskij knew these works, since he visited the Museum of Basel and was particularly interested in Holbein (whose painting Madonna in the Family of Burmeisteri Jacob Mayer he also introduced into the text of his novel).

As numerous scholars have shown, on a metaphorical level the image of My&shachek;kin contains the features of Christ and the poor knight (from Pu&shachek;kin's poem The Legend), who is a serious Don Quixote, as Aglaja puts it in the novel. Yet the evangelical and chivalric sides of My&shachek;kin's character split apart, as I attempt to prove, in the scene of the meeting between Nastasja Filippovna and Aglaja. Actually, it is only this union of Christ-like and knightly qualities that keeps My&shachek;kin from all the associations that the word idiocy suggests, and brings forth the spirituality and kindness which he radiates in the novel.

When discussing My&shachek;kin's idiocy some scholars substitute the term jurodivyj for idiot. G. Ermilova, for example, writes that through religious and folk jurodstvo My&shachek;kin is connected to the deepest strata of Russian national life and culture. N. Minihan suggests that the word jurodstvo, when applied to My&shachek;kin, implies innocence, deep spirituality and incompatibility with the outer world. I argue that My&shachek;kin can be called a jurodivyj only for the short period of time during which the action of the novel takes place. Beyond this period, during his time in Switzerland, My&shachek;kin is an idiot in the clinical sense of the word.

Why did Dostoevskij add the qualities of an idiot to the prominent characteristics of Christ and the poor knight in his hero? I believe that an insight into Holbein's cycle Totentanz could help to answer this question.

Holbein's Totentanz, which expresses the idea of the equality of all people in the face of death, consists of forty-nine engravings on wood. Every piece represents a particular figure (from The Pope to The Beggar) in the process of being seized by death. Among these figures only two try to resist death: The Knight (with his sword) and The Idiot (with his bladder-bauble). I suggest that Dostoevskij perceived Holbein's Dead Christ in the context of Holbein's Totentanz, and created in the image of prince My&shachek;kin the figure of a death-resisting triumvirate of Christ, The Knight and The Idiot.

Futher in my paper I investigate the other reflections of the images of the Totentanz in Dostoevskij's The Idiot.

I conclude that in spite of the fierce anti-western stance of its author, The Idiot conveys an authentic sense of the esthetics of the European Middle Ages, where madness or idiocy, as Foucault put it, was considered as the presence of death in the here and now, but at the same time it is death which has been defeated.