Saintly characters in Dostoyevsky

As noted in yesterday's post, Prince Myshkin is obviously no idiot - though he is strange, socially awkward, idealistic, ascetic, almost childlike, highly empathic. He embarks on a ridiculously long discourse in response to a simple question when he's having dinner at the Epanchin's - and it's the first any of them have met him - in which he begins by talking about the horrors of execution, the peculiar feelings and sensations of the condemned when they know, as no other can, that in a few moments they will cease to exist - it's a topic of great interest to him (and to Dostoyevsky?) - he een describes a lengthy discussion he had with a man whose execution was called off at the last moment (interestingly, Tolstoy dramatizes an episode like this in War and Peace, if I'm remembering correctly - which shows the difference between a dramatized scene and a narrated scene, inevitably, even in D's hands, much weaker). Myshkin then goes on to explain how he has difficulty relating to adults (women in particular, I think) but always connects with children, and he describes the cruelties in his village that people visited upon a poor, sickly woman named Maria - she was loathed and scorned in part because of her extreme poverty and also because she ran away with a traveling salesman of some sort and came back "shamed" (a theme that Hardy picked up in Tess, I think) - by Myshkin, after noticing children in the village stoning and mocking Maria, gradually brought them around so that the children all loved her and helped her and ultimately decorated her grave. Obviously this is a theme that D. picks up later in the Brothers Karamazov - and I would say with much greater effect in The Brothers K, for these reasons: the saintly young man working with the children (in Brothers K it's to get them to support and love one of their comrades who is dying of consumption) is part of the action of the novel and not something recounted at a distance by the protagonist; the saintly young man in the Brothers K exists in contrast with his licentious brother, so his action as a savior is set up against a conflicting force rather than in isolation; the saintly brother K is wrestling with the idea of devoting himself to the church, and we see a strong relation between him and one of the monks, whereas Myshkin's relation with his mentor, Dr. Schneider, is left vague and unexamined; there's a greater poignancy in the boys rallying for one of their cohort than for the weakest and poorest in the village. Still - Myshkin is becoming an ever more complex character in his own right, as D. has him extemporize at the dinner and, in the next chapter, we see him settling in the rooming house where he will no doubt end up playing some kind of mediating role in the many romances, engagements, and affairs swirling around him, which he (and we, to a degree) can barely keep straight or understand.