The Nature of Redemptive Suffering in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot Anonymous College

Among many of the themes in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, one of the most prominent is the theme of suffering. Arguably, suffering is one of the largest themes within all of Dostoevsky’s works, particularly because of the difficulty and hardship Dostoevsky experienced in his own life. In The Idiot, suffering takes on a greater meaning when looked at as “a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God” (Deus Caritas Est 6). To understand the importance of suffering within this work, one must look at it in light of salvation history. Before Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, suffering could only be a form of punishment for sin; however, through Christ’s death and resurrection, He transforms suffering into a means of sanctification and redemption. Rather than seeing pain as an evil, Pope John Paul the Great explains in his 1984 encyclical, Salvifici Doloris, that pain is something “that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share” (Salvifici Doloris 7). His encyclical reflects the words of St. Paul: “[n]ow I rejoice in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I so my share on...