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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Monday, November 12, 2012

Whom will Myshkin marry?

Strangely, the "love interest," the seemingly insane but beautiful Nastasya Fillipovna, does not appear in the entire Part 2 of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" - though she does pass by one of the characters in a carriage and shouts something to him about promissory notes that he won't have to repay - she does this, it seems just to embarrass the character, one of the many who has fallen in love with her. The central relationship, however, between Nastasya and the title character, Prince Myshkin, goes nowhere in this entire section: Myshkin has returned to Petersburg and then gone out to one of the suburban dachas in hopes of finding Nastasya, and everyone around Myshkin knows he's enamored, that he proposed to her on the night that they met, and that in fact she is in love with him as well - but they can't seem to get together. That's partly Myshkin's socially awkward personality, and in part Nastasya's self-destructive behavior - as we saw at the end of Part 1, she elects to run away from Myshkin's marriage proposal (and from at least one other potential suitor, Ganya) to abase herself with the crude Rogozhin. Now, she's "damaged goods," that is, she has a reputation as a prostitute and as an manic and tempestuous woman - but her reputation does not daunt Myshkin. In fact, it seems to entice him: he's exactly the sort to marry someone in order to save them (from themselves). As readers, with more knowledge - and more common sense - than Myshkin, we know that this marriage could never work, not even in a Dostoyevsky novel. He may be a saintly character, but he seems also to be a tragic character, too vulnerable and naive to survive in the backstabbing world of Russian nobility and intelligentsia. If he is to marry anyone, I suspect, it will be the beautiful young Argalya (?) Epanchin, who, at the end of Part 2, has completely broken off any relation with Myshkin - surely a sign that they're destined for each other.

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