At nine o’clock in the morning, towards the end of November, the Warsaw train was approaching Petersburg at full speed.
The opening line of the novel provides the setting of winter in Russia. The train is carrying what will turn out to be the protagonist of the story and the fact that it departed from Warsaw is significant. Prince Myshkin is aboard the train and he has headed home to Russia following a visit to a Swiss doctor for treatment of epilepsy. And idiocy.
“An angel cannot hate, cannot help loving.”
Opinions regarding Prince Myshkin are split. Some think him an innocent angel—like Nastassya—while many think him, well, an idiot. The determination of where the reader falls along this spectrum is part of the purpose of the book.
“Nature has so limited any activity by its three weeks’ sentence, that perhaps suicide is the only action I still have time to begin and end by my own will.”
One of the underlying themes running through the novel is the question of free will. Ippolit here posits an interesting notion that free will only exists when one has a fairly definite certainty of the length of their mortality.
“The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanours.”
At the heart of the theme of religion which permeates the story is a conflict between atheism and religious belief. Myshkin, the idiot, is convinced that religious belief must be tied to morality and he views not only atheism as immoral, but Catholicism, thus putting his own faith in the Russian Orthodox church. The Church for Myshkin is the true embodiment of Russian values and ideals which puts him at odds with fomenting democratic and socialist political movements looking to the West for inspiration.
“It will perhaps help to make our story clearer, if we break off here and introduce some direct explanations of the circumstances and relations, in which we find General Epanchin’s family at the beginning of our tale. We have just said that the general, though not a man of much education, but, as he expressed it, a self-taught man, was an experienced husband and a dexterous father; he had, for instance, made it a principle not to hurry his daughters into marriage—that is, not to pester and worry them by over-anxiety for their happiness, as so many parents unconsciously and naturally do, even in the most sensible families in which grown-up daughters are accumulating.”
The Idiot is narrated using a perspective wildly popular in 19th century novels, but very uncommon today. A fully omniscient narrator is capable of reporting not just what can be seen and heard, but also of penetrating into the minds of characters at will to describe what they are thinking and use their memories of past events exposition. Even among omnisciently narrated novels published today, most refrain from the kind of direct address to the reader such as is exhibited here.
