Episode 164: Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” on Perfection (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: This might be a good time to shift gears and talk a little more about his religious views and how they fit into this novel. There's a lot of Christ symbolism, or if not symbolism, for one thing, there's an actual picture of Christ that's in Rogojin's house that first Mishkin sees. And then this character that we haven't talked about yet, Hippolyte in his long speech, gives a lot more information about this. So it's the picture of Christ, had just been taken down from the cross and it just shows him really messed up.

0:31 Wes: This is part three, chapter six.

0:34 Mark: Yep. Mishkin sees this. He says that picture could almost make you lose your faith. It's so antithetical to what we think of as Christ arisen.

0:43 Corey: This is a real painting that Dostoevsky saw in Switzerland while he was writing this book. And apparently he stood transfixed at it for like an hour and his wife had to tear him away for fear that he would go into an epileptic seizure.

0:56 Dylan: You should go and look at it. Right now on Wikipedia, it's called the

1:00 Corey: Dead Christ in the Tomb.

1:01 Dylan: Even just as a little like three by five on your screen, you can tell.

1:06 Mark: Whole bean.

1:08 Dylan: Yeah, it's an incredibly. He looks like a real dead guy. His body's starting to putrefy and there's nothing radiant at all about him. And then the form of it is very striking, like he's. You're almost looking at him from the side in a coffin.

1:24 Wes: Almost.

1:25 Mark: Except he's got a little pointy Russian beard.

1:27 Wes: He's giving us the middle finger.

1:29 Corey: Yes, the painting. I think it's kind of interesting to think it's almost a painting of Nietzsche's idea of the death of God. Not only because it can apparently cause you to lose your faith on the spot, but because it's also literally a painting of the dead Jesus Christ.

1:44 Wes: Here's the passage. So this is Ippolit. It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the Savior and to put this question to oneself, supposing that the disciples, the future apostles, the women who had followed him and stood by the cross, all of whom believed in him and worshiped him, supposing that they saw this tortured body, this face so mangled and bleeding and bruised, and they must have seen it, how they could have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet have believed that he would rise again. The thought steps in, whether one likes it or no, that death is so terrible and so powerful that even he who conquered it in his miracles during life was unable to triumph over it at the last.

He who called to Lazarus, lazarus, come forth. And the dead man lived. He was now himself a prey to nature and death. Nature appears to one looking at this picture as some huge, implacable, dumb monster, or still better, a stranger simile, some enormous mechanical engine of modern days which has seized and crushed and swallowed up a great and invaluable being being, with a capital B. A being worth nature and all her laws worth the whole earth, which was perhaps created merely for the sake of the advent of that being. This blind, dumb, implacable, eternal, unreasoning force is well shown in the picture.

And the absolute subordination of all men and things to it is so well expressed that the idea unconsciously arises in the mind of anyone who looks at it.

3:12 Mark: One of the things that I read about the writing of this was that the main element that got added to thematically make it worth writing. Books 2 through 4 was this end of days, this apocalyptic thing. And so we've got this character of Ippolit that becomes a really major character in the second half. And his whole thing is he is consumptive, he is going to die and he knows it. And it's going to be within two weeks, within a month. It's unclear exactly when it's going to happen.

3:41 Wes: He's going to die, but he doesn't. He fails to die on cue.

3:48 Corey: Another biographical note is that Dostoevsky's first wife died of consumption and he wrote, I think it was crime and punishment while she was, it was like the custom then to have the dead people on the like kitchen table. So her body was like on the table as he was writing some of his novels.

4:04 Wes: But Ippolit is just sort of this absurd adolescent intellectual wannabe who is sickly about to die and philosophizing incessantly about it and forcing people to listen to him, including to this long. What is it? The necessary explanation. That's actually. Oh, this is actually part of the necessary explanation. So this, where he explains the painting is part of this manuscript he's written, which is his final word before he's gonna. I think at this point he's gonna kill himself, right?

4:35 Mark: Yes. So I know that he's introduced as a confederate of. Well, not of Rogojin the nihilists.

4:42 Wes: The nihilist kids, Burdovsky and Lebedev's nephew and Keller the boxer. Yeah.

4:49 Mark: So these are kind of the stand ins for the people that Dostoevsky used to hang out with and why he went to prison. These kind of characters. But it doesn't seem Ippolit, he's not quite so straightforwardly like this is the atheist character himself when it comes down to like the conclusion of this long speech is that he's actually going to shoot himself right there on the spot. It doesn't work. He didn't like load the gun properly. But that's the intention and it's why should I be begrudged if I'm destined to die anyway, why should I have incumbent upon me to live out those last couple of weeks in dread of death? I'd rather just get it over with.

5:29 Wes: Well, he also says his only freedom is in killing himself. At that point he's free to do nothing except suicide.

5:36 Corey: Right. He says like earlier he wanted to learn Greek, but what's the point? Because he won't even make it through the syntax.

5:42 Wes: Right, right.

5:43 Corey: And that he wanted to do good deeds also. But with two weeks, what can he really do? So the last thing he can really do. You only have one free act left to Kill yourself.

5:53 Mark: But it's just put in terms of. And just the fact that he's including this thing about Christ in the first place. I mean, clearly he's lost his faith in terms of he's not traditionally religious, but whether he is the straight up. My question here was, is he the stand in for, I guess Ivan in the other book where he's the straight up atheist character and is giving us that point of view? Because I think it's a little more specific that it's. Even if there is a God, come on, really God's gonna make me live through these last couple weeks? Like it's that kind of reasoning. It's not necessarily because there's no God. I don't have to give a crap about traditional religion.

6:28 Wes: He says he admits of eternal life, right? So admitted that consciousness is called into existence by the will of a higher power. Admitted that this consciousness looks out upon the world and says I am. And admitted that the higher power wills that the consciousness so called into existence be suddenly extinguished. For some unexplained reason, it is and must be. Still there comes the eternal question, why must I be humble through all this? Is it not enough that I am devoured without my being expected to bless the power that devours me? So it's not that there is no God, it's just that why should I worship him? Why should I care about him if this, this is my fate?

7:05 Mark: So we get a full blown existentialism without either a straight up Kierkegaardian, entirely dependent on religion take on existentialism, or Nietzsche slash Camus atheist. Take that because there's no God, there is no meaning. Whatever your religious beliefs, you still have the fact of death hanging over us. And then the larger apocalyptic theme here as he really thought that his whole society was undergoing this self destruction and that something really terrible was going to happen. By 1900 or so, people said he predicted the rise of fascism and all this. You know, whether or not that's really what he's gone for. It seems that he's giving us a picture of existentialism that is more universal than any particular set of religious beliefs.

7:48 Corey: Right. And Ippolit, I think you're right that he's not 100% Ivan, he's not 100% the rationalist, but he certainly expresses what becomes sort of the famous line from the Brothers Karamazov, if there is no God, everything is permitted. Ippolit wonders, if there's no God and he only has two weeks left to live, then why not just like go on a killing spree. There'd be no reason not to. What is stopping him? There's no afterlife, and it's not going to matter to him because he's not going to be punished and go to prison. So why shouldn't he just kill everybody, shoot them all for really no reason? There's nothing to stop that. So he's certainly worrying that atheism is going to take the ground out of morality.

8:32 Dylan: I'm not sure that the book provides an answer to this, but whenever I hear that formulation of it, my reaction is, why would you saying that there's nothing to keep you from doing. It presumes that somehow there's a natural force within you that is a ravenous, murderous, wanton killer, and that there's only a small lid on the top of every person from the outside of the world that keeps you from doing that. And that right there, that presumption just seems incredibly far from clear at all. And it's not clear to me that that is even the activity of freedom that's going on in the idiot either.

9:10 Mark: Well, actually, right before Ippolit's speech. So in chapter nine, this is part two, or part.

9:16 Wes: This is part three, Chapter seven, I think, or six.

9:19 Mark: Okay, Sorry. I was looking at Ippolit's earlier speech, right. Where he's actually introduced Ippolit.

9:24 Wes: Epanchin.

9:26 Mark: Yes, yes. So she's the mother of Aglaya and the other two, the one who's distantly related to Mishkin, she's like the grandma from Downton Abbey. She's like, this is grumpy, likable character. And she says if a lawyer said an open court, he found it quite natural that a man should murder six people because he was in misery. The world must be coming to an end. And this was referring to an actual case of this family that was murdered that was in the news that Dostoevsky had read about and is one of the kind of things that he's putting forward as a sign of the decline of the civilization.

And just like that whole progress and enlightenment thing, well, talking about people's crimes as if they were determined by circumstance like that sort of materialist thinking. So therefore, you know, the fact that anybody would listen for a minute to say that being poor is an excuse for murdering six people, because, yeah, of course, you need to eat, you know, and they're the ones that are standing between you and being able to do that, then things have gone very wrong.

10:35 Wes: Yeah. Evgeny Pavlovich goes on at length about this case as well. Basically attacking, you know, Russian liberalism as sort of being an attack on the essence of the things themselves and an attack on Russia. And he sees that sort of explanation of those murders as sort of the liberal explanation. And then, surprisingly, the Prince ends up agreeing with that. So this is part three, chapter two.

11:02 Mark: One of these several parties. Yeah, that's pretty much all the book is, is a bunch of gatherings at

11:07 Wes: somebody's house, a bunch of conversations. And he basically says he had gone to some prisons and at least those criminals that he saw who were murderers, they knew what they did was wrong.

11:20 Corey: I would like to say something about that. In Notes from the House of the Dead, he said the entire time he was in prison, he never met a single man who was guilty or who thought of himself as guilty. He said every prisoner that he ever met, they all admitted that they did the crime, but they always had a sort of chain of events, a little story they would give you that would remove their own guilt, like an explanation. And some of them were even ridiculous, like a person killed his landlord and he would say, look, it's not my fault. I was trying to be reasonable and I told him I didn't have the money and I was going to pay him next month, but he wouldn't listen. He was such a bad person, and I just had to do it. So he said the prisoners themselves would have this sort of deterministic explanation for their crimes.

12:09 Wes: It's interesting because here's what the Prince says about the prisoners. What I especially noticed was this, that the very most hopeless and remorseless murderer, however hardened a criminal he may be, still knows that he is a criminal. That is, he is conscious that he has acted wickedly, though he may feel no remorse whatever. And they were all like this. Those of whom Yevgeny Pavlovich has spoken, there's these new criminals being defended by liberal lawyers. You know, my childhood made me do it. Those of whom Yevgeny Pavlovich has spoken do not admit that they are criminals at all. They think they had a right to do what they did and that they were even going to do a good deed, perhaps. And it's a surprise in a way that the Prince ends up agreeing with this anti liberal line of attack.

12:54 Corey: To respond a little bit too earlier, where Ippolit is wondering if he should just kill everyone. And there's this idea that gets repeated even today, you know, like that atheists can't be moral or something like that, or that the only thing that's preventing us from going on killing sprees is fear of the afterlife. I don't think Dostoevsky really thinks that. And I don't think he's really worried about, say, crime increasing because everybody stopped believing God, so they're just all going to go killing each other all the time. I'm not sure that's the primary concern for Dostoevsky.

I think he's wanting a grounding to the meaning of crimes. Like he doesn't want for there to be no reason for a crime, even if you're not going to do it, because it means there's no reason for anything. There's no reason to do anything in your life. Life. If there's no reason not to kill people, there's no reason to love your family, there's no reason for anything. So he's more afraid that the meaning is going to drop out of all of our actions in life than specifically like, that people are going to start going on killing sprees because they can't control themselves.

13:55 Wes: Well, I think part of this is I say it's surprising that he sticks up for Evgeny Pavlovich, because there's a sense in which the prince seems sort of like the quintessential liberal and his attitude towards Nastasia and Rogojin. And he stands watch of the body of Nastasia at the end with Rogojin. He's horrified by Rogojin's murder of her. But he doesn't dial 911 immediately. He doesn't attack Rogojin. It's sort of he's accepting of these types of people. And you see this contrast in what he's just said, because right after the scene where he defends Evgeny Pavlovich, Aglaya gets angry at him and attacks him.

And, well, here's what she says. How is it that you saw nothing distorted or perverted in that claim upon your property, which you acknowledged a day or two since, and which was full of arguments founded upon the most distorted views of right and wrong? On the one hand, he seems to be willing to say that there's a right and a wrong and stand up for that idea. But personally, he doesn't. He lets people take advantage of him. He doesn't set boundaries. He has no self respect, basically. And that's part of the lack of status consciousness. And that's sort of the thing that troubles Aglaya through the whole courtship.

It makes her furious. And then it's actually, I actually made a note at this very spot saying this. An alternate title for this book could be called Mad Women because there's Aglaya, who's just angry at him all the time, and also her mother. And then there's Nastasia, who's, at least in the prince's eyes, crazy. So I think part of it is about what is sufficient for a society, what is sufficient for some sense of order. We can't all be completely boundaryless, compassionate, Christlike entities, or it all goes to shit. We have to be able to stand up for ourselves.

We have to have these rules of propriety. So the very things, for instance, and the speech that he gives when he breaks the vase at the end where he says, I thought this Russian high society, I thought it was all bullshit, you know, all your social forms, all your. The sort of rules you observe and all that stuff. I thought it was completely trivial, but it's not. And I think that's the insight here, is that you can actually do away with a lot of this status consciousness, and you can't do away with. With whatever it is the liberals want to do away with that will lead to chaos, let's say.

I think that's sort of embodied in the tale that the prince lives out.

16:05 Mark: Well, except for that toward the end, before he jumps back to Nastasia, when he's actually going to set to marry Aglaya. All the previous gatherings have been sort of a mixture of classes that we have the Epanchins that are Aglaya's family, which are nobility. But then we've also often had either at Mishkin's house, so his landlord, Lebedev. Oh yeah, is his landlord for a lot of the thing. Or the Ganya family, the Ivolgins, which are a lower class and the dad is a drunk. But this very sort of last group scene like this is in high society with higher society.

People were sort of introduced tangentially to a lot of new characters. And the way it's really put is that he's bursting with, as you just said, Wes, you know, I thought that the upper class was just this dried up relic, but now I see, wow, there's so much solidarity, pretty much when you get rid of class, then, wow, you're listening to me. I'm this young person. You're humoring me, even though I'm kind of making an ass out of myself. You're just so open and wonderful when clearly that's his own naivete talking, like he specifically says, I just heard Prince N's story just now.

Was it not simple minded, spontaneous humor? Could such words come from the lips of a man who's dead? And they just described previously this new character telling some anecdote that he's given a million times before and is sort of part of a piece of performance art. And the narrator is saying that, you know, Mishkin was not noticing really how shallow this whole group was. And he's not noticing when so many of the particular members of it are really turning up their noses at him, just kind of thinking he's cute or something. Not really taking him seriously.

I maybe reject that interpretation, Wes, that he's. He's saying.

17:52 Wes: Well, he, he sort of already knew that. Right. Because that's what he says in his speech is. But you know, he's doing his thing. He's on the verge of his epileptic fit, which is, we should say these fits are sort of his. They're mystical experiences for him. They are sort of when he feels most in touch with reality.

18:07 Corey: And Dostoevsky described, he said the moments before you enter the epileptic fit, you would trade for 10 years of your life. You have this sort of bizarre euphoria immediately before the seizure.

18:18 Wes: Yeah. So he's in this euphoric state when he's giving the speech and he's not in his right mind. But I think we can't really discard all of it. Dostoevsky is making some sort of argument for the nobility, for it's sort of. I see it and maybe I'm wrong about this, but a Burkean kind of argument for tradition and hierarchy, that we can simply do away with that and replace it with this utilitarian ideal and the completely materialistic ideal. We need noble intentions in life. We need to be striving for something more than our self preservation and our well being and health and understood in a very narrow sense.

18:51 Corey: Yeah, I definitely don't think you're wrong about that. Because in his political life, Dostoevsky literally argued that they should keep the czars and not have a democracy. It's kind of one of the shocking opinions that he had.

19:02 Wes: Yeah. So I think, even though, and I think Mark is completely right about this sort of. His naivete really sort of shines at this point in the story. Nevertheless, there's some truth to what he's saying. There's meant to be some truth to it.

19:15 Corey: Similar to Lebedev, he often puts his own ideas in kind of the most ridiculous characters. And he often puts the speeches like in the mouths of characters who are. One that he commonly goes to is brain fever. Everybody's always getting brain fever in most of the other novels. I don't really know what brain fever is, but they're going a little delirious and then they give a speech and often that is the real Dostoevsky talking, the epileptic Dostoevsky.

19:40 Mark: So they. Earlier in that thing, the passage in question, it never struck him that all this refined simplicity, nobility and wit and personal dignity might possibly be no more than an exquisite artistic polish. The majority of the guests, who were somewhat empty headed after all, in spite of their aristocratic bearing, never guessed in their self satisfied composure that much of their superiority was mere veneer, which indeed they had adopted unconsciously and by inheritance. That's.

20:04 Wes: Yeah, that's all true.

20:05 Mark: Given that how usually the narrator, the narrator doesn't get to exhibit an opinion that much.

20:11 Wes: But the thing is, you start the novel thinking that this could be a send up of society, right? Thinking this could be a straightforward, the use of this sort of childlike Christ like figure to give us a critique of society as it is. And it turns out to be far more complex than that. And the complexity is that we're not simply meant to think that all of the pretensions and the worries of Aglaya and her mother are superficial stuff that we can do away with. They are superficial in a sense. They are that sort of status consciousness and all the worries about propriety and rules and you know, in a way it's all arbitrary, but in a way it's the stuff that glues society together and prevents chaos.

I thought a little bit about a Confucius and propriety here and ritual. I didn't have time to think very much about it, but it occurred to me that if someone wanted to think more about that, you could do that in connection to this sort of Burkean conservatism and what I think is a little bit of an element of that here. So I think he's embracing a complex idea which recognizes the complete self deception involved in status, but also sees it as necessary. Almost like Nietzsche's untruth is a necessary condition of life, that sort of idea. So in other words, can a purely good man like Mishkin be.

Actually be social? Well, he fails at that pretty badly. And are we meant to think that the social as it is can be reformed? That it can be all completely honest and transparent and people can just say whatever's on their mind and it could do away with all the games? I don't think that's what we learn. I think we learn that the games can't actually be done away with.

21:46 Corey: Right. There is a reason why all these social conventions exist. You can't just naively throw them all away and say, let's create a whole new society where everybody is, like you say, open all the time. It's going to lead to disaster. You can't be open and truthful and honest all the time. I mean, that's just a fact of life and a fact of our social condition.

22:06 Dylan: So there are two things that are on my mind about it right now. One is this issue of truthfulness and the failure of perfect truthfulness in society, because it's not responding to the very binds of society. And so in some ways, ways, utter truthfulness fails as being a kind of perfection that we were talking about earlier. That in the end is a kind of slavishness that would also be juxtaposed against freedom. And so you can't be a free human being in such a situation either. And so there is a constraint of society that has to do with its binds, that you are following rules in a certain way.

But then there's also an activity of freedom that would be both contrary to those rules, but also with those rules. And I'm trying to see through the novel what kinds of conclusions I can take out of that. Because if Mishkin is in some ways the hero of the story, he fails miserably at it. And if we say that truthfulness is a failure, then at some level, how can he exactly be a hero? He's certainly not a hero hero at all. Right. He's maybe more a cautionary tale. Right. His story is a tale of failure.

23:17 Wes: Oh, he's a tragic hero, maybe.

23:19 Corey: Well, I think if you're looking for a solution, Dostoevsky doesn't really offer one in this novel very much. But I think the problem that he's outlining is you want to have Mishkin make it through society and lose his naivete without somehow losing the goodness. Mishkin has to learn about the social situations and how to behave properly and to contain his truthfulness sometimes, and to contain his love sometimes. He has to learn how to not love people. He has to learn possibly even how to hate, if that were appropriate at given times. But the problem is he can't just lose that and become a society person or become Rogojin. He has to somehow. And Dostoevsky sees this as a very difficult problem. He has to learn how to do those other things without losing the core of his sort of religious loving mode of being. And that, for Dostoevsky, is one of the hardest problems.

24:12 Wes: Yeah. So for instance, with Nastasia, his love of her is compassion and pity. Right. It's not the same thing as the love of Aglaya, which is what we would more typically think of as romantic love. He's just delighted by her. And so if you were like most people and you were more selfish, he'd say, yes, I'm not going near Nastasia and I'm going to do everything I can to be with Aglaya. So it would have been better if he were a little more selfish in

24:37 Corey: this sense and a little more capable of cruelty, I think.

24:40 Wes: And the compassion is. It's not like you want to get rid of the compassion. It's just that. I don't know, is it that you have to be able to not act on it? There's the element of self preservation and one's own boundaries and self interest. There's actually got to be some element of self interest balancing out one's altruism and ethical considerations.

25:02 Dylan: I think that's right. I'm trying to remember there is at least one character or at least one section where they refer to somebody being just pragmatic, practical men. Pragmatic might not be the right word.

25:14 Corey: I think it was the. Maybe the money lender.

25:17 Mark: Wasn't it just the beginning of book four, where they're talking about unexceptional men? Is that what you're talking about? Where they're talking about, like, we're going to talk about Ganya again. We haven't talked about Ganya and his wife in a while, and. Yeah, and really they're exactly the kind of practical, mediocre people. And so he. Again, the narrator talking, as very rarely happens in this book for a good couple pages about that.

25:39 Wes: The commonplace people, he calls them.

25:41 Dylan: Yeah. And so, I mean, like, so many of the characters, right. It's not a simple. This is the right way to be. But there's something about that practical person that is something closer, it seems to me, to the person that can survive within these bounds, but also potentially be acting on their passions. The challenge is that they're often not doing things because of love or beauty, I guess. Right. And so they don't have that fiery passion. And it's exactly what sort of makes them boring and commonplace. And it seems like Dostoevsky points to them as possible solutions, but is also sort of, you know, they're completely boring characters, and you feel like he's completely turned off by them. I mean, those are the characters that are humiliated over and over again in the book. Ganya is the one who gets most humiliated. Right. With the $100,000 in book one.

26:34 Mark: Seem to remember it eventually working out okay for him. Did they not say that at the end?

26:38 Dylan: Yes. Well, things work out okay for Ganya. Right. As opposed to all these other passionate characters.

26:44 Mark: Yeah, because he ultimately just has very, like, you know, fairly low expectations and just wants to live a normal life. And so, yeah, you could find another wife. It doesn't have to be Nastasia, it doesn't have to be Aglaya.

26:55 Corey: But I think through Dostoevsky, he was kind of hinting that he doesn't think that's the right way to go either. Like, he has the characters. Was Ganya the one who was the money lender? He was like a.

27:06 Dylan: No, Ganya's not the money lender. Ganya is the one that was originally trying to get Nastasia, but he is

27:12 Wes: the representative, though, of the materialist. So in the. In the argument with Lebedev and Evgeny Pavlovich, Gania defends the liberal position and the more materialistic position.

27:23 Mark: I think you think of Ptitsyn.

27:25 Corey: Yeah. And at one point, I think it was him. He says, it's sort of. I don't remember who said the words, but Dostoevsky was like, if you're going to be a money lender, why are you doing it so small? He was just trying to kind of make his way and make enough money to pay for an apartment. And he says, if you're going to be a banker, why not be a Rothschild? Why not try to become the greatest banker that history has ever seen and get all the money on earth? So I think Dostoevsky is a little annoyed at people who just try to live out their life just kind of normal, and you have mediocre. He wants you to really go all the way with what you're doing.

27:59 Dylan: Go big or go home.

28:01 Corey: Yeah, go big or go home. And Dostoevsky certainly did that in his own life.

28:05 Dylan: Yeah. And that seems to be. I mean, the most attractive characters are all defective in really important ways, but they're also extreme. I mean, from Mishkin to Nastasia. Right. They're captivating. You can't take your eyes off them, but it's not clear that you want to be them nor be around them.

28:24 Corey: But it's also like somehow they're elevated from that, too. As you're reading the novel, it just seems like it would be a terrible tragedy for Nastasia to end up with Ganya because she seems like this kind of almost great person, and it's like she's really just gonna marry this kind of Middle class, boring guy and just live her life. Boring. I mean it seems like a terrible fate for her. She should do something.

28:48 Dylan: She should get murdered by her lover.

28:50 Corey: Right.

28:50 Wes: She would inherit a father in law who was present at everything great that Napoleon did though.

28:56 Dylan: That's right.

28:57 Corey: Right. In a way though, her getting murdered almost seems more fitting. At least she did something in this kind of dramatic. You almost want her life to live out a dramatic like a Shakespeare play or something. It just seemed like the worst thing that could happen to her is to be average and ordinary and retire to that kind of petty life.

29:16 Mark: We should talk about Ivolgin, the pathological liar father of Ganya. But let's sort of finish with Mishkin first. I think we have not said so much about exactly how much psychological realism is in him that he's not presented as. He's just cool under all circumstances and he just immediately loves and he like he gets annoyed by people. It's just that he's kind of willing to forgive them and always give them the benefit of the doubt. Like he's again more naive.

29:44 Wes: I don't even see him as naive exactly.

29:46 Corey: No, they said time and again that he was very clever. In fact, some of the times other characters thought he was naive, like when he inherited the money, he would get cheated out of money. And people are like, you're being so naive, they're scamming you. But then he kind of knew he was being scammed and his lack of

30:01 Wes: observance of social graces and all that stuff that's. It's not that he doesn't know what they are. It really does seem he's just acting out of, well, you could call it principle or inclination, but it's not out of a lack of knowledge.

30:14 Mark: Well, I was more thinking of his self knowledge like at the beginning when he introduces himself as an idiot. He just like presents himself as not somebody who'd be in the running for any romantic entanglements because he's just not medically made up for it. And he makes it sound like, you know, he just, even biologically or emotionally, you know, just couldn't. But clearly pretty quickly he falls into

30:35 Wes: the role of hi, I'm psychologically nine years old. You want to go on a date

30:42 Mark: that he falls into, you know what might be at least with this, he's supposed to be 27 or so. Aglaya is like 20, so at least at the emotional level of her by that late point in the book. And it sort of surprises him that he is like just finds that he actually is in love. Like, he didn't really know from the inside what this was about. He just knew this compassion and, you know, maybe thought that he was in love with Nastasia because he just never been in love before. So that in that sense he was naive and he's kind of figuring himself out in his relation to things.

Even the places where he has his fits. So there's three times. They all seem to be because he's not like the Jesus character, super cool under all circumstances. It's because he's freaked out. Like he has these things when he's under extreme stress. Once because Rogojin has just tried to kill him or is about to kill him. And then at the end, you know, with the permanent one where Nastasia has been killed and the one in between is this party that we talked about where at the beginning Aglaya is like, she's sort of spoiled and bratty, like, I know you're going to break this vase.

I know you're gonna make an ass of yourself. And he actually does a great job for like the first half of the party being really cool and impressing everybody. But then as it goes on is when he goes into these crazy speeches of warmth and stuff and really. But it's. The whole thing is, I think stress, because he is being introduced to the upper crust in this way and is not coping particularly well with it.

32:11 Wes: Yeah, but I think it's also the. What he's getting closer to is marrying Aglaya.

32:16 Mark: Right.

32:16 Wes: This is. He's being introduced as the fiance of Aglaya to Russian high society. And I think the stress of that, it has something to do with the prospect of that union as well, I think.

32:28 Mark: Do we have morbid sexual hang ups?

32:31 Wes: No. I mean, I just think is in the way that anyone's feelings about that would be complex. Speaking of freedom and loss of freedom. Or it could just even be. It's too much, it's too good, it's too exciting. But the other part of it is just that whole cultural, social component where he had certain expectations of the aristocracy. He talks of having all these anticipations about meeting these types of people. He's always wanted to meet these types of people, get to know them, see how they tick. And that's suddenly coming to fruition. So I think that's part of it as well.

33:01 Mark: Just that that doesn't sound very Jesus. Like. Like I've always wanted to meet the upper classes.

33:05 Wes: No. Yeah, it's.

33:06 Corey: I mean, people compare him to Jesus, but he isn't Jesus.

33:10 Wes: Personified, Certainly not a fan of Roman Catholicism. Hundreds of pages later we find out that Prince Mishkin is an anti Catholic bigot, basically.

33:19 Mark: Yeah. Well, that's very. That's right. In that scene, right after, he's just been praising the nobility as being. I thought you'd be shallow in a dead class, but you're really not. You're awesome. Right after that is when I think it's. The context is in fact one of the people is revealed to have known his benefactor, the guy that set him up in the sanitarium in the first place, Pavlichev. And yeah, and it is kind of thinking about how extreme Pavlichev's action was.

33:47 Wes: Well, they reveal he turned Roman Catholic.

33:49 Mark: Yes.

33:50 Wes: And that he does not take.

33:52 Mark: Well, I'll just read the quote, I guess. It is not a Christian religion in the first place. And in the second place, Roman Catholicism is, in my opinion, worse than atheism itself. Atheism only preaches a negation. But Romanism goes further. It preaches a disfigured, distorted Christ. It preaches Antichrist. The Roman Catholic Church believes the Church on earth cannot stand without universal temporal power. He cries non possumus. In my opinion, the Roman Catholic religion is not a faith of all, but simply a continuation of the Roman Empire. And everything is subordinated to this idea, beginning with faith.

The Pope has these territories in an earthly throne and has held them with the sword. And so the thing has gone on only that. To the sword they have added lying, intrigue, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, swindling. They played fast and loose with the most sacred and sincere feelings of men. They've exchanged everything, everything for money, base earthly power. And is this not the teaching of the Antichrist? How could the upshot of all this be other than atheism? Atheism is the child of Roman Catholicism. It proceeded from these Romans themselves, though perhaps they would not believe it.

It grew and fattened on hatred of its parents. It is the progeny of their lies and spiritual feebleness. Atheism in our country it is only among the upper classes that you find unbelievers, men who have lost the root or spirit of their faith. But abroad, whole masses of the people are beginning to profess unbelief. At first because of the darkness and lies by which they surrounded, but now out of fanaticism, out of loathing for the Church and Christianity.

35:17 Wes: And he goes on very similar to Nietzsche's critique. Right. So there's a sort of atheism of which Nietzsche is a critic, and it is sort of the outgrowth of Christianity, even though Europe is losing its faith. And for Nietzsche, the essence of it all is nihilism. That's what they hold on to through a certain kind of atheism.

35:37 Mark: Although I guess I do see a little more of the Heideggerian reverence for the common people, for the natural point of view, you know, that maybe the natural Christian expression is something earthy and good and is a way of properly channeling emotions. Whereas for Nietzsche, no, the masses are the ones that are most likely to have been suckered by the Christian spirit. You know, he's not emphasizing so much the governmental power of Christianity, you know, as Dostoevsky, if this is his view here, as just the ethic of Christianity itself and what it has done to mass culture.

36:15 Corey: Right. And I think Dostoevsky's main sort of political opponents were the sort of intellectual atheist class was trying to redo everything, and he was very sympathetic to maybe the Russian peasants and what he saw as a more spiritual, natural connection that they had with each other that was based off religion and love and not based on this sort of abstract ideas.

36:42 Mark: And maybe, as we were saying, you know, that even the upper classes here, that a lot of their solidarity is not a matter of laws. It's natural in its way, just like the peasant love.

36:54 Corey: Right. And it's more maybe for the upper classes some kind of idea of nobility that binds them together. And it's not just vanity and money in its best form anyway. Obviously, when he was looking at it in practice, a lot of them have sort of like a painted veneer of this. But maybe the central idea of the upper classes is kind of noble spirit.

37:15 Wes: But this is all too extreme for the people he's around. They're like, chill out, man.

37:19 Corey: Right? And this is one of the problems that Mishkin has throughout the novel is that he can never sort of engage in casual small talk when he's first introduced to the Epanchins. And they're like, oh, tell us a little bit about you. He immediately starts talking about executions and death and how all these kind of topics that are far too serious for the given circumstances. All the girls are laughing and they want to just meet this person. And he's telling them about, oh, like one of the sisters asked, what should I paint? She paints landscapes.

And he tells you, oh, I have a good topic to paint. You should paint the face of a man moments before he's executed. The final look on his face as the guillotine comes down, which he witnessed in France. And it's like, this is not appropriate to the social. She means like she asked what should I paint in Finland? Because I only know Russian landscapes. She's talking about like the Finnish mountain. I saw these beautiful mountains, you know. And he's like, oh, the Last Moments of a Dying Man. That would be a great painting. It's like he can't engage in small talk, in these casual pleasantries.

And again with the upper class, they want to just have this party. And he's like, let me tell you about the errors of the Church, how the Medicis meddled with Catholicism or whatever. He has an inability to sort of be chill, I guess. Well, although he's serious all the time,

38:35 Mark: he's moody, like they say in this initial meeting with the Epanchins, he puts forward all those stories and they talk about near the end how, yeah, for the first time since that first meeting, he's his lively self. But on almost all these intervening parties, there's so much spastic talk going on around him by the various people spitting out their apocalyptic notions. Or Ippolit reading his message that he's going to kill himself for. Or Nastasia running this horrid game that we talked about of people expressing the worst thing they've ever done, that he's sort of cowed into just reacting to one thing after another, including this one that we haven't talked about so much.

When this guy Burdovsky, this is how Ippolit is introduced and it's his landlord's nephew and Ippolit and this guy Burdovsky, who says he thinks he was the actual son of Pavlichev. Pavlichev the benefactor of Myshkin. And since Pavlichev is dead and left Myshkin all this money, which is why, as revealed in book one toward the end, why he's then a legitimate part of society and not just like a page boy running around as like some of the other characters.

39:51 Dylan: And why he came to Moscow in the first place. Right? I mean, you know, he came looking for his distant relation, this Beta. But he knew about the money, right?

40:01 Mark: Doesn't seem to bring that up earlier.

40:05 Dylan: Burdovsky comes and he's agitating that he is actually the rightful heir of it. And you're telling the story, right?

40:11 Mark: So this bunch of riff raff comes in. This is one of the places I'd heard of where he's most Jesus like is because he's there with the Pansians and the upper class people and all these lower class Rowdies kind of come in and make this claim on him. And he's in fact already had Ganya research this. Like they had sent him a letter earlier and it's just revealed that they've published a libelous newspaper article about the whole thing that shows Mishkin in a terrible light. And it's in fact his own landlord that drafted this thing for money. And yet he entertains.

So he knows this guy's claim is bunk, but the real story is it's not actually the guy's son, but. But he's the son of a maid that the guy cared for a lot. So like, yeah, he probably want you to have some of this money anyway, so I'll sure, I'll pay you something. But the way he ends up doing this as. No, it's not that you deserve by right, by right of birth, this, it's because I am charitable. I'm going to give you this so that like offends the guy's pride.

41:13 Wes: Right.

41:14 Mark: So he in fact can't take the money under those circumstances.

41:18 Wes: So. And then he immediately feels guilty about doing that. Um, yeah.

41:23 Mark: So the rich people are disgusted with him and kind of like, if you're gonna entertain these people further, we're not gonna hang around you anymore. And the riff raff are all offended by him as well, so he's left alone.

41:35 Wes: Well, the rich people, including especially Aglaya and her mother, are offended by the fact that he would let himself be taken advantage of.

41:41 Mark: Yep.

41:42 Corey: And the poor people are offended that they ironically did not take advantage of him. Yeah, like they would take the money if they swindled it, but they don't want to take it if it's sort of freely given. Right. It's kind of a reverse of almost what you would think.

41:58 Dylan: We said at the beginning that Dostoevsky self consciously had the notion of, you know, the most beautiful perfect person in mind with Mishkin and that the only other two that one would refer to would be Jesus and Don Quixote. I was thinking about that when I was reading because I'd heard that before and I was thinking about it while we're talking and one thing that seems to be true about both Jesus and Don Quixote, besides maybe something like a certain kind of naivete, is they're both, let's call this ambitious. They're both striving to accomplish something.

And so they have a kind of directedness to them, which is part of what makes them so attractive and part of what makes them so ridiculed. Maybe the way in which they go about achieving that ambition. And I'm wondering what Mishkin's ambition is, because in the way we've been talking about it, and it seems sort of right, there's a kind of utter ambitionlessness about him. The closest thing to it is that he wakes up from this fog and he's going to go out and, you know, kind of live life.

43:07 Mark: I want to be friends with you.

43:09 Dylan: Yes, yes, that's exactly right. He kind of wanders in. He doesn't really know what he's doing. He just kind of. He has this pack. He has the faintest notion of directionality. And throughout the whole thing, people are. He like, you know, wanders into a terrace and all these people, you know, good people, bad people, irritating people, people who love him, people who hate him, they all just come around all the time and pretty convinced right now that he just doesn't have anything that he's directed towards doing, which seems to me really in contrast to Jesus, the son of God, and Don Quixote, the tilter of windmills.

43:48 Wes: So this is interesting. So this whole poor knight theme, it begins with Kolya teasing Aglaya because at some point she sort of has fallen in love with Don Quixote and looks up from the book and says, there's nothing better than the poor knight. So even before Mishkin arrives, she sort of has a thing for a Don Quixote esque figure. And then later, Aglaya sort of parodies the prince. And there's a Pushkin poem as well, I guess. Was she reading the poem or was she reading Don Quixote? She was reading the poem. Okay, so this is in. Let's see, part two, chapter seven.

Aglaya sort of explains what she thinks all of this means as she's sort of parodying Mishkin as the poor knight. In the poem, the knight is described as a man capable of living up to an ideal all his life. That sort of thing is not to be found every day among the men of our times. In the poem, it is not stated exactly what the ideal was, but it was evidently some vision, some revelation of pure beauty. And the knight wore around his neck, instead of a scarf, a rosary, a device, A and B, the meaning of which is not explained, was inscribed on his shield.

When she reads the poem, she's going to change that to. What is it? NPB to represent Nastasia. Those are her initials. Anyway, so I say A and B, and so it shall be, cried Aglaya irritably. Anyway, the poor knight did not care what this lady was or what she did, he had chosen his ideal and he was bound to serve her and break lances for her and acknowledge her as the ideal of pure beauty. Whatever she might say or do afterwards. If she had taken to stealing, he would have championed her just the same. I think the poet desired to embody in this one picture the whole spirit of medieval chivalry and the Platonic love of a pure and high souled knight.

So anyway, this represents what's dangerous about the prince, especially to her, right? Because if he can love Nastasia, if he can love a woman in this very high minded, abstract way and not love her as real down to earth human beings love other real down to earth human beings. If he loves this ideal of beauty which involves tremendous suffering, which is what Nastasia's beauty has to do with or what it is in essence, then it's irrational.

46:06 Corey: One thing I'd also like to say is this sort of sets up one of the problems of the novel I have in mind regarding the same poem. They're mocking Aglaya and Prince Mishkin responds by saying how is it possible to unite such true beautiful feelings with such obvious spiteful mockery? So he's saying, how is it that in the same sort of moment you have the beautiful ideal of the night, which obviously Mishkin again believes it's beautiful. He's with the knight in a sense, but at the same time they're expressing these beautiful feelings. They're expressing mockery and spitefulness towards the beautiful feelings. So you have two sort of contradictions happening at the same time. You have beauty and you have mocking the beauty sort of irony. And I think the prince is not capable of irony, so he can't really understand what's happening.

46:54 Mark: Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I almost forgot about this whole double thoughts thing. That's kind of a minor theme in here, which I had originally read or read something that referred to this. As, you know, Dostoevsky is often thought of as, you know, along with Nietzsche and folks like that of anticipating Freud. So double thoughts in that sense might be the unconscious. But what really is referred to by double thoughts specifically it's brought about by this guy Keller. He's one of the riff raff in the scene before. Actually he's one of Rogojin's, the nihilists.

And yeah, he's not one of Ippolit's friends, he's one of Rogojin's friends actually. Maybe he comes back with Ippolit as well, I think. Yeah, he comes back both times I think he doesn't even have a name. At first he's just called the Boxer, but by the end he's like the best man or the security guard, at least at Mishkin's wedding. He's like one of the only people that'll stick around. That's his actual friends. But he. So at one point. This is in end of part one, chapter 11. I see page 347 in my version. He's just confessed basically his part in the Burdovsky matter.

Maybe some other stuff. He was thinking to himself, why not after confessing, borrow money from him? You see, this confession was a kind of masterstroke. I intended to use it as a means to your good grace and favor. He's talking to Mishkin. Then I meant to walk off with 150 rubles. Now, do you not call that base? And Mishkin replies, you've confused your motives and ideas, as I need scarcely say too often happens to myself. I can assure you, Keller, that I reproach myself bitterly for it sometimes. When you were talking just now, I seemed to be listening to something about myself.

At times I have imagined that all men were the same, he continued earnestly, for he appeared to be much interested in the conversation. And that consoled me in a certain degree. For a double motive is a thing most difficult to fight against. I've tried and I know God knows whence they arise, these ideas that you speak of as base. I fear these double motives more than ever just now. But I am not your judge, and in my opinion is going too far to give the name of baseness to it. What do you think? You are going to employ your tears as a ruse in order to borrow money.

But you also say, in fact, you have sworn to the fact that independently of this, your confession was made with an honorable motive. As for the money you wanted to drink, do you not after your confession? That is weakness, of course. But after all, how can anyone give up a bad habit at a moment's notice? It is impossible. What can we do? It is best, I think, to leave the matter to your own conscience. So it's not that when you're doing something nice, you're really doing it for a base motive. That's not ultimately Mishkin's analysis of the situation.

It's more like, you know, I think it's common in stand up comedy or whatever. Like you're at a funeral and of course you're sad for the funeral, but you start thinking about, like, what food they're going to serve or what shoes you're going to. You know, you know, you start thinking of these irrelevant, very.

49:38 Wes: The Larry David shtick.

49:40 Corey: And I think this strand of Dostoevsky's thought, where you have multiple motives colliding, was certainly explored the most in Crime and Punishment, where sort of the mystery of the novel was, why did he kill the old woman? And the answer to that question was sort of irreducibly complex. All these different ideas came together, and that often happens for Dostoevsky's character, where you can't give a simple explanation for why they're doing what they're doing. Often it's like you have an idea and you have sort of another drive and you have a sort of another thing and they have to kind of collide.

And sometimes if they're going in different directions, that's what torments the characters wildly, because you can't reconcile them. But if they come together and you commit an action, it's still complex because you can't say why you did it. It's like both of them. And it might be that without one or the other, you never would have done it. In Crime and Punishment, certainly he had about three or four different motives for killing the old woman, and if you took away even a single one of them, he might not have done it.

50:45 Mark: So really both things are going on. I just want to distinguish between those. That really is kind of getting at, well, what's your real motive? That's the unconscious at work. Whereas here he's explicitly saying you've confused your motives and ideas. So actually the motive for him confessing really was that he was penitent. But just while he was confessing, he also had the idea like, well, okay, now that I'm doing this and getting in good, I might as well get some money out of it too. But that's not necessarily why he did it in the first place. Maybe Mishkin is just being too generous and it really is exactly what you're talking about.

51:15 Corey: Or it could have been both. It could have been both.

51:18 Mark: Any other major characters, I mean, we had this Ivolgin Ganya, and we mentioned Kolya briefly. That's like the 13 year old brother of Ganya who becomes sort of Ippolit's disciple for a while, but then is also Mishkin's disciple. And besides Keller, one of the only guys that kind of sticks with him. And I'm picturing this 13 year old running all these errands by himself. He does a lot. He's like the main communicative link between the characters. So their father Ivolgin, who's a general, but at one point they describe like what it takes to become a general. Pretty much keep your head down and stick in the system for long enough and woo, you're a general. Like it's the most unremarkable thing. Dostoevsky is not impressed by the people that become generals and there's like four of them in here, all pretty much

51:58 Corey: all of them suck up to everybody who's above you. They said his major talent was giving other people credit. And that impressed people, right? Because they're like, oh, look how selfless he is. He's not trying to take the credit, but really it was kind of a calculated maneuver to win favor and actually gain the credit. So he had sort of a political savvy.

52:15 Wes: That's right. Oh yeah, Ivolgin is self aggrandizing.

52:19 Corey: Oh, right.

52:20 Mark: So Epanchin is still in the upper class, is still respected at this point and he's kind of a businessman. Right. When he meets Mishkin at the beginning, he's kind of, why are you hanging around here? I'm busy. He actually has a mission. But Ivolgin is this, this pathological liar and it's like, oh, I held you when you were a baby.

52:37 Wes: Also, he met Napoleon when he was a boy and influenced major decisions and

52:43 Corey: caused him to not leave Russia or

52:45 Wes: whatever or no, cause him to leave instead of stay, salt up a bunch of dead horses and hold out in the Kremlin.

52:54 Mark: But he's not just comic relief. I mean, he ends up being like a tragic figure and even having a stroke near the end.

53:00 Wes: And by the way, Lebedev is sort of his protege and worships him and will never question, know, knows the guy. Guy is ranting and saying, but yeah, we'll just simply humor everything he says, which is interesting because it makes the general look, I'm not sure what we're supposed to think of that because Lebedev is sort of the defender of these aristocratic values and General Ivolgin is a caricature of them. Right. He's just, he's self aggrandizing. He's not an aristocrat, but he imagines himself as one or something like that. So I didn't really know what to make of Lebedev's devotion to him in this, even to the point where Ivolgin steals a bunch of money from Lebedev and he ignores it basically and will even go so far as to blame Ferdishchenko and chase him down all along. Pretty much knowing that the general did it right.

53:50 Corey: I think Lebedev can't kind of give up this idea of nobility. So even though he has this kind of farcical character, he's so committed to these high minded noble ideals that ground life. He just. He can't see reality when that kind of value is questioned. So he won't go along with the rationalists and materialists, even though science is maybe on their side. It's obvious you can't win a fight against science. But he also won't go against. When the value itself is obviously being corrupted, he'll still stick with the value.

54:21 Mark: So the thing that actually seems to drive him to the stroke is Mishkin. It's right after he's been having this conversation with Mishkin and told him about this Napoleon story, the end of that, that part. This is chapter four of part four. I guess Mishkin understood too that the old man had left the room intoxicated with his own success. The general belonged to that class of liars who, in spite of their transports of lying, invariably suspect that they are not believed. On this occasion, when he recovered from his exaltation, he would probably suspect Mishkin of pitying him and feel insulted.

Have I been acting rightly in allowing him to develop such vast resources of imagination? The prince asked himself. But his answer was a fit of violent laughter which lasted 10 whole minutes. He tried to reproach himself for the laughing fit, but eventually concluded he needn't do so, since in spite of it, he was truly sorry for the old man. The same evening he received a strange letter short, but decided the general informed him that they must part forever, that he was grateful, but that even from him he could not accept any signs of sympathy which were humiliating to the dignity of a man already miserable enough.

55:19 Wes: So maybe appeasement isn't always the best policy.

55:24 Mark: And so just to get back to, you know, I know this is like what's on the back, what Corey led with here, that it's the picture of the. The positively good man, and it says it right on the back of the book. You know, it says that nowhere actually in the book. And I kind of would have preferred to not know that that's what Dostoevsky was trying to do, because it sort of makes it more interesting. In fact, I see some parts of this book as maybe a critique of the possibility of putting into practice ethical perfection, is that there are certain just practical dilemmas that, like this one, and like, you know, with the earlier, with Burdovsky trying to get money out of him. That if you are giving, you end up pissing people off like that. If you are perfectly good, it ends up not producing the good result.

56:12 Corey: Right. Because people can be offended at your charity. If you try to give people money sometimes out of charity, you're insulting their dignity. And that kind of thing the prince has a very hard time dealing with because society doesn't always obey the rules of just be good all the time. People can despise you for your goodness, even if your goodness is directed at them. I could despise someone for loving me in certain circumstances or for being charitable towards me. And I think this kind of perfect moral character has no way of dealing with that kind of thing.

Because what else can you do? You can't not be moral to them. You can't leave someone to starve because they're going to be offended. What can you do? You know, And Mishkin just can't deal with that kind of reality. And that kind of reality is just baked into the society that we find ourselves in. It is a critique of Jesus, I think.

57:03 Mark: Yeah, yeah. That if you have a picture of Jesus is someone that was perfectly wonderful and you know, of course, except for being betrayed and crucified at the end, that everybody just loved him and it worked out well for him, then. No, that's not what would happen.

57:20 Corey: And it can be a critique of Jesus, but it's not against Jesus. I mean, Dostoevsky himself said almost like we were just talking about how the guy can't give up the lies of the pathological liar. Dostoevsky wrote in his journals, like if the material is proved without any shadow of a doubt that Jesus was wrong, I'll still go with Jesus. So Dostoevsky is not against the ideal of Jesus. I think the critique is that the world has sort of moved on from that and Jesus is not going to work anymore if we have a sort of a second messiah or whatever. The original formula for Jesus is not going to work this time. Society has become too advanced, Science has become too advanced and people have become too cynical. And you need something that understands the cynicism and understands the society. And this sort of simple love is just not going to cut it anymore.

58:11 Mark: So I think one of his unfinished

58:12 Wes: books is called Super Jesus Uber Jesus.

58:17 Corey: Who Knew karate perfectly, by the way.

58:21 Mark: Well, that seems good for me. Let's sort of do some closings. Is there a conclusion about the work or a theme that was on the tip of your tongue that you haven't gotten out yet?

58:32 Corey: The Conclusion for me is to find the conclusion in the Brothers Karamazov, where he gives the more real answers to some of the problems that are set up in this book, where he attempts to answer them. I think this book is sort of pointing out the failures of love, pointing out the failures of rationality, pointing out the failures of passion. And those are going to be the three characters, the three brothers. And that book is going to work through the problems of how to integrate them in a much more profound way than this one does. This one can kind of leave you like, well, what are you supposed to do? It didn't work out for anybody. So what's the solution, and which book

59:06 Mark: did you like better?

59:07 Corey: Well, the Brothers Karamazov is the greater novel, for sure.

59:10 Wes: I actually liked the Idiot better.

59:13 Corey: I don't know which one I liked better, but I think you get more of Dostoevsky's full thought in the Brothers Karamazov and more of, like I said, the positive solution. Like, what. What do you actually have to do?

59:24 Mark: So one thing we haven't talked about is just the difficulties in translating even the Alphabet from Russian that the two translations I'm working here, the one in my book and the one online that I'll link people to, all the names are spelled differently. Even the name Dostoevsky. Does it have two Y's or only one? They're both correct.

59:44 Corey: Sometimes there's not.

59:45 Mark: Oh, yeah. Or does it end within a J? That was one of the places.

59:49 Corey: Yeah. Good God.

59:50 Mark: The fact that you're called Karamazov and it's not spelled with.

59:55 Corey: I have no idea how it's.

59:56 Mark: Yeah, I'll say that. That's not you being wrong. That is a matter of the alternate spellings from Russia.

1:00:02 Corey: Well, it's a miracle if you can just remember the names of all the characters and pronounce them halfway correctly, because Dostoevsky really does love to have about 200 characters per novel, and they pop in and out constantly.

1:00:15 Dylan: And the sheer number of characters is only part of the problem. It's that there are four or five different versions of the name for the same character, and some of which bear a resemblance to each other and others which bear no resemblance to each other.

1:00:30 Corey: And that's much worse in Brothers Karamazov because all the brothers have this. I read this after some commentator. They all have, like, the diminutive version and the formal version, and then sometimes they just call them by the last name. So, like, Ivan is the intellectual, and his short name is Vanya. And of Course, he doesn't explain it, he just says it. You're supposed to know.

1:00:49 Mark: You know, I had one footnote, like Kolya is meant here that they did that once to help us out.

1:00:56 Wes: I just printed out a character list online. And yeah, yeah, they have a cheat sheet.

1:01:01 Corey: But the other thing that this guy was saying is that it's extremely important in Russian culture when you call them by the diminutive and when you call them by the formal name, which has

1:01:11 Mark: the middle name, that's from the father's name, right? So it's Ivan Ivanovich, because your father was Ivan, but that's not your last name, that's like your middle.

1:01:19 Corey: One of the crucial character developments was that Alyosha, who is basically Prince Mishkin, everybody called him Alyosha, which is the informal version. And it's sort of the same with Prince Mishkin. Everybody treats him informally, almost like a child. And then the passionate character, they flipped back and forth between Dimitri and Mitya. Those are like the two. And then the intellectual character, everyone called him Ivan. And that's supposed to carry all this meaning in Russian culture that just totally goes over your head.

1:01:48 Mark: Or they could just call him General, they could just call him Prince, or just call him by the last name that you didn't know was associated with that first name. But despite that all, like, really, we're only talking about two or three families here. And then some hanger ons, like. So it wasn't too overwhelming in this book, I. I feel like. But there were a lot of digressions. Just in terms of. One of the things I'd read was that you could look at them as Mishkin's parables, like, if you're going to carry the Jesus thing. So the fact that he tells the story about somebody being executed or has this long story about when he was in Switzerland, there was this woman who was shunned because she was so ugly. But then Mishkin managed to sort of get all the children to like her. And so when she died, they all mourn for, like, what is the relevance of this? What?

1:02:33 Corey: But I think that story is actually very important because it shows that Prince Mishkin's loving disposition and his loving attitude and his attitude towards the world actually worked perfectly once before in Switzerland, and it totally healed this woman and it totally convinced everyone but the people who worked for was the children. So the Jesus sort of loving character only worked for the children, but the adults sort of have too much irony and sophistication, and they can't go along with it. So Mishkin actually did perform a pure act of this kind of pitying love that he has towards Nastasia. And it worked. It worked the first time, but it only worked among these simple village children who can sort of, you know, how children can sort of appreciate that kind, loving person in a way that adults. You lose at some time.

1:03:20 Mark: Didn't he remind you of Michael Jackson, the way he talked about himself in.

1:03:24 Corey: Well, yeah, a little bit the way

1:03:26 Mark: that Michael Jackson described himself, let me put it that way.

1:03:29 Corey: You have that sort of innocence, though, that you're striving towards, that gets lost at some point. And what works in the village children in Switzerland doesn't work in the sophisticated Russian capital where it's just a total disaster.

1:03:42 Mark: So just one of the things I was reading about how this was put together was that in one of the drafts during the body of the story, it would refer to how Mishkin did start in St. Petersburg, like a home for wayward kids or something like that. Like something that played off of his. The earlier mentioned sympathy with kids, but that would actually provide, like, oh, he's actually doing something with his money. He's actually being active. And that was removed, you know, that whole strain for the actual. For the final version of the book, that Dostoevsky did not want him to actually be active in this way.

1:04:17 Corey: So I thought. Because I think he wanted it to be a total failure.

1:04:20 Mark: Anyway, I really liked the book. I just found, despite how many of these discussions there were and how many random. Yeah, it was like reading something by Larry David that goes off in all these random directions. And it's still just a joy from paragraph to paragraph. And I understand that the whole thing was not plotted out in advance, and so maybe it's not. The pacing is not exactly what he might have done had he written the whole thing as a draft rather than the individual books as drafts and then publish them serially, we might have gotten something different out of it. But I was very excited to finally get to read this book.

1:04:55 Wes: Yeah, it was thoroughly enjoyable. And in fact, I tweeted from our official Twitter account, I think it's. What I said was, do nice guys finish last? Dostoevsky's the Idiot. A Joy to Read and coming soon on Pel. And then someone responded. One of the two books that Weldon Kees left in his car by the Golden Gate Bridge is a kind of suicide note. A Joy to read is too chirpy. And I wanted to reply, but I resisted. Was it. Have you read the book, or do you just rely on suicidal amateur critics? So, yes, it's tragic, but the overall experience of the book, it's delightful in the sense.

And a lot of authors can't do this. I mean, it's a rare thing. And I feel picky about fiction. I can't get into it the same way I got into this book. But he sort of gets into the heads of his characters in a way that is just sort of very satisfying. There's an intimacy to it. It's a real gift. And it's not just famous Russian literature that you must read. It's absorbing. And for listeners who haven't read it yet, I would definitely recommend that you. It's not some sort of chore.

1:06:03 Mark: Perhaps read it at a slower pace than we did, though.

1:06:05 Wes: Yes. Trying to do it at the pace we did, it was challenging. I finished the last 50 pages this morning, so.

1:06:13 Mark: Dylan, parting thoughts.

1:06:15 Dylan: I love the first book and the fourth book.

1:06:20 Mark: All right. That conclusion is mighty creepy. It's awesome.

1:06:28 Dylan: It's. For me, particularly the first book, but it is wonderfully written and the characters are really rich. And I think the conversation that we've had is a testimony to the complexity and the multivalent nature of the characters and their relations. I don't think I was gripped by it quite as much as you guys were. But you know what? There's been other books that have been the opposite for us. So it fell off a lot for me. In books two and three, I felt like the, you know, the cocktail hours and stuff, they just were a chore. They're just, you know, and the constant perseverating of Lizaveta, you know. Oh, my God, I loved.

1:07:06 Wes: I loved her.

1:07:08 Corey: Yeah, it just.

1:07:09 Mark: I got it.

1:07:10 Dylan: I got it. Like, by the time. The fourth time around of her, like, perseverating, I just was, like, hanging my head. I just. And then, you know, not to criticize a great artist, but I just found that some of the. I don't know if. Anyway.

1:07:26 Wes: What.

1:07:27 Dylan: I liked it a lot. I thought the writing was great, but

1:07:31 Mark: say something specific and scathing.

1:07:34 Wes: Don't just Mishkin this. Let's make sure mishkin becomes a verb.

1:07:41 Dylan: Let me put it this way. I thought the first book is so tight and perfect, it's almost like a continual pan shot. And it's one conversation seamlessly moving into another conversation. And the characters are vibrant, the descriptions of them and their faces. And one of the things I thought was most amazing about it is there's almost no setting at all. It's all about people and the conversations. And that's true of the whole book. But it's most well epitomized in the first book and I did feel let down by the next couple books. I felt like learning later that he didn't quite know where he was going with it. It is really evident to me in the other two books. And then I don't know if he was like trying to careen towards an end of the fourth book, but man, he decides to take off the wheels and just go for it. So I like that part about it.

1:08:38 Mark: Yeah, those initial descriptions where he's introducing the characters are just so, so good. You know, even like Ferdishchenko or whatever like ends up being how he's used, underused in the rest of the book is almost disappointing given what a strong introduction of this fat red nosed guy who, you know, introduces himself as being basically dishonest and seems like he should have done something more sinister than not stolen money later in the book. That was his role when he finally showed back up again, is to not steal money is to be suspected of stealing money.

1:09:15 Dylan: Part of it is the role of Ippolit, right. This consumptive, which I sort of understand why he's in there, but he seems like a throwaway character or a throw in character that doesn't fit with the earlier part. I thought he was a distraction.

1:09:30 Wes: I think he's probably like a polarizing character for readers because I thoroughly enjoyed him and all of his neurotic philosophizing.

1:09:41 Mark: His dream about the lizard.

1:09:42 Wes: Oh yeah, I wish we had talked about that.

1:09:44 Corey: God, I can't read any dream. Anytime they start talking about a dream, I just zone out.

1:09:50 Mark: That's like supposed to be a thing that Dostoevsky is especially known for is the dream.

1:09:54 Corey: I can't take it serious at all. Oh my God, who cares? There was one in Karamazov too That was like 15 pages. Supposed to have some kind of psychological significance, I'm sure, but I just, I'm like, oh geez. And then you woke up and he was there.

1:10:08 Wes: I just so difficult to read Ippolit for some people is going to be tedious. I actually liked all that stuff. I liked all of Lebedev's speechifying, all their conversations about politics. And so I just, I got a kick out of all that as well. What I don't like, as Dylan pointed out, is not present in this novel is landscape. I don't want to hear long detailed descriptions of trees and setting.

1:10:33 Dylan: And you must hate Cormac McCarthy then.

1:10:36 Wes: Well, no, he does it. He's a poet. So he does it so beautifully that it's a different. Like 25 pages of landscape JRR Tolkien, for instance. And I, And I love Tolkien and I used to, you know, I was.

1:10:48 Corey: Yeah, I was going to use totally

1:10:50 Wes: into him as a kid, but how many times can you use the word escarpment? You know, it's the endless detailed descriptions of nature. It's like we have TV and movies now. We don't need to.

1:11:02 Corey: And it's not really what you're reading Dostoevsky for anyway. I'm here for the politics, the philosophy.

1:11:08 Wes: Yeah. On psychology and people.

1:11:09 Corey: And that's the psychology is the main thing. Like one description that I really liked, I don't know if it was this book or another one, but it's like at the beginning of the book, he has this way to get you to understand psychologies that are kind of alien to you. So at the start, you kind of. It's kind of mad for Nastasia to throw the money into the fire, but by the end of the book, you sort of understand why they're doing the things they're doing. And you almost feel like, man, I would have thrown the money into the fire too. He can really get you to understand people that are just.

You wouldn't normally encounter, you know, murderers, people who are way off the rock, or even Mishkin, you can kind of understand, you would have a hard time relating to. In normal life or understanding how you could live your life that way. But he can paint their sort of motives and their way of life so deeply that you really feel like you could be that person almost.

1:12:01 Mark: And that's why I like this better as that kind of literature. And, you know, if you want to look at his philosophy, it's phenomenology, heterophenomenology, as opposed to straight philosophy. Like we've kind of gotten. Oh, he thinks that Catholicism is too worldly and focused on political power in the world. And he thinks that technological advances have taken the heart out of society. Like these really not that interesting bits of social critique, at least from our point of view. And I don't find the equivalent kind of critiques in the modern day particularly compelling either. But it doesn't matter.

1:12:35 Corey: It just.

1:12:36 Mark: There's enough really cool stuff about our experience of ourselves as human beings dealing with other weird human beings that. That should be part of philosophy.

1:12:47 Wes: Yeah, well put.

1:12:49 Mark: Next time we are reading Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico Politicus, where we get to see not only A bit of his philosophy and his contributions to the Enlightenment, but biblical criticism, so everybody will be excited about that.

1:13:04 Corey: Speaking of Spinoza, obviously, Dostoevsky dealing a lot with love, what it means to love people, how you can love, nastiness, niceness we have from Spinoza here. This is Spinoza's definition of love. Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause. Not quite as romantic.

1:13:23 Mark: That was in our Spinoza's Ethics episodes, which people can get in preparation for listening to this next one.

1:13:29 Dylan: I think it's the title of a porno that I saw somewhere.

1:13:33 Corey: Yeah.

1:13:35 Wes: What? Which external cause?

1:13:39 Dylan: The abbreviated version.

1:13:40 Wes: Yes.

1:13:44 Mark: Isn't that the slogan for Fleshlight or something?

1:13:50 Corey: I think that's right, yeah.

1:13:51 Mark: All right. As always, we have a closing song. This one is Don Quixote, appropriately enough, a song by Nick Kershaw. It was actually one of his hits in the 80s, but this is a solo acoustic version from his no Frills album, so it's much less dated sounding now. My interview with him on the Nakedly Examined music podcast is one of my favorites on there. Brilliant guy, Wonderful songs. Please check out nakedlyexaminedmusic.com. look for episode 37 if you'd like to hear that. Thank you again, Corey. I can't believe we waited this long to hear your lovely voice. And now we've done it, and maybe we should do it again sometime.

1:14:29 Corey: Yeah, I had a good time.

1:14:30 Wes: Thanks for coming on.

1:14:31 Corey: If you guys have the patience to try to work through Karamazov, I would definitely come back for that. Or really, whatever else.

1:14:39 Mark: Don't hold your breath for that.

1:14:42 Corey: It's a big ask. Good God, it's long.

1:14:45 Mark: Someday I think we should do back

1:14:47 Dylan: to back episodes of Karamazov and War and Peace, and we'll do them 12 weeks apart. That's what we're gonna do.

1:14:55 Corey: One week to read it.

1:14:57 Mark: Read the Cliffnotes.

1:14:59 Corey: Read the Cliff Notes.

1:15:00 Mark: All right. Good night, everybody. Good night.

1:15:01 Corey: Good night,

1:15:04 Mark: Sam.

1:15:34 Unknown speaker: Your mind can play tricks Makes you what you want to be Just like heroes. You saw them on tv.

1:15:54 Wes: Ghost.

1:15:54 Unknown speaker: The ghost. Walk to walk. Got to go. Judy calls. Here I am. Superman Lois Lane save the world Back again Here I am in my old resilo A night in shining D if I were a sleep man I couldn't be much calmer Hit the road on the run faster than anyone Here I am. One for all all for once Shake the fish, shoot the gun Here I am Don Quixote what do you say? Are we proud? Are we brave? Or just crazy. What do you say? Are we shouting at windmills like you. Common sense is as good as cafe on the moon when man and machine to their high noon radio on the blink Kick the cat, hit the drink Here I am Whoa. Beat the clock Punch the wall fixed in no time at all Here I am, Donkey all day what do you Are we proud Are we Praise Gorgeous crazy Don Quix what do you say? Are we shouting at windmills like you like you oh, like you oh, Here I am. Sa. Sam d.