Goodness has not fared well in literature. Some heroes—The Prince of Homburg’s Frederick, Levin in Anna Karenina—are good ‘as well’, but they are first and foremost something else: Frederick is a great warrior and a king, Levin an honest man. Their goodness is an adjunct of their characters, not their mode of being. Some men of God are good, but they are always primarily godly. Secondary heroines—often older women or mothers—are often good, as if goodness were a lesser, private quality; although Stifter’s Brigitta, archetype of the domestic heroine, is not especially good-hearted. Goodness does not have many icons. It is not one of the theological virtues—faith, hope or charity—even if it can be a begetter of charity; nor is it among the cardinal ones—strength, wisdom, prudence, temperance—that have produced so many literary characters. Often evoked (‘Be good’, ‘He’s no good’), it remains vaguely defined and scarcely represented.
On 31st December 1867, Fyodor Dostoevsky—aged forty six, and already the author of The Insulted and Injured, House of the Dead, Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler and a forest of short stories—wrote to his friend, the poet Apollon Nikolaevich Maikov, that he had been tormented for some time by the idea of representing ‘an absolutely good man’ but was ‘afraid to make a novel out of it, because the idea is too difficult’, adding ‘especially in our time’.footnote1 The following day he declared, in a letter to his beloved niece Sofia Aleksandrovna Ivanova, ‘It is a measureless task . . . There’s only one positively good person in the world—Christ, so that the appearance of this measurelessly, infinitely good person is in fact an infinite miracle’. He wrote:
All the writers—not just ours, but all the European ones too—who ever undertook the depiction of a positively good person, always had to pass . . . Of the good characters in Christian literature Don Quixote stands as the most complete—but only because he’s ridiculous at the same time. Dickens’s Pickwick (an infinitely weaker creative idea than Don Quixote, but still an enormous one) is also ridiculous, and effective because of that.
Nevertheless, he was attempting to grapple with just such a disconcerting character: ‘The novel is called The Idiot’.footnote2
A few days earlier, he had sent the first of the novel’s four sections—he originally had eight in mind—to press. The whole of 1868 was spent dictating the text of the rest to his wife and revising it. In October, he wrote again to Maikov: ‘I won’t finish the novel this year . . . I have become bitterly convinced that never before in my literary life have I had a single poetic idea better and richer than the one that has now become clear to me for the fourth part, in the most detailed plan’. In January 1869 he told his niece: ‘It’s now finally finished! I worked on the last chapters day and night, with anguish and terrible uneasiness . . . but I’m dissatisfied with the novel; it hasn’t expressed a tenth part of what I wanted to express’. But he still loved his ‘unsuccessful idea’.footnote3
The evidence of his notebooks suggests that the idea had overtaken him by force. The temptation of a hero who would be absolutely, positively good first made itself felt in the autumn of 1867 when Dostoevsky was working on a tale in which an ‘idiot’—a young man of unknown origin and strange behaviour—appeared, though as a minor character in the story. The novella did not turn on goodness but on guilt. The idea had been suggested by a newspaper crime report, the sort that always attracted him as a symptom of the diseased times. A young girl, Olga Umetskaia, had set fire to her parents’ house but the court had acquitted her because of the horrible abuse she had suffered—in short, a necessary crime. In the early drafts the girl’s character remained undefined; she soon became a secondary figure in a plot full of recognitions, violence and money, which still, however, included the idiot. Dostoevsky worked on the tale for three months.
The notebooks have a gap between 30th November and 30th December 1867. It was as if The Idiot liberated itself from the original plot during this period, demolishing it in the process. The guilty girl and the supporting cast disappear altogether, and the idiot, as if emerging from his chrysalis, becomes the chief protagonist. He is no longer a mixture of conflicting passions; he is an absolutely good man. And he is not a marginal figure but a prince.