The August 1872 issue of Fors Clavigera opens with a beautifully crisp frontispiece captioned, all in one long line, ‘Part of the Chapel of St. Mary of the Thorn, PISA, as it was 27 years ago.’ Centered directly below the line and completing the caption in almost pained brevity stand the words: ‘Now in Ruins.’ Drawing and caption are emblems of what is to come in the body of ‘Benediction,’ the most remarkable of the ninety-six public letters that comprise Fors Clavigera.

Ruskin's drawing of the chapel, done in his mid-twenties, depicts a Gothic idyll in stone, a delicate filigree of pinnacles and sculptured arcades, rosewindows and shaded gables all bathed in brilliant morning light. Frontispiece, caption, and ensuing text trace a continuous arc from felicity to enraged despair, the letter ending as Ruskin stares in incredulous horror while a Pisan stonemason sets to work demolishing the chapel. ‘Now in Ruins’ is Ruskin's summary judgment upon the fall of a Gothic paradise and the rise in its stead of the aggressively secular, industrialized Europe he detested. But the caption also carries a more private significance. For the long course of years between Ruskin's first drawing the chapel and witnessing its destruction1 also saw the wreckage of his own hopes of ever gaining mastery over his disordered life. His books were becoming increasingly fragmentary and idiosyncratic.

Late in life, from the chilling perspective of a posthumous self, Charles Darwin wrote a brief account of his own origins. ‘I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.’ Darwin pushes the act of self-objectification to its theoretical limits: he gazes into the autobiographer's mirror and sees, staring back, not Charles Darwin but an aged instance of the species homo sapiens. Writing of himself as a dead man is not at all difficult, he tells us, ‘for life is nearly over with me.’ The central activity of his life had been the collecting and interpreting of natural phenomena. Now, believing himself to be at life's end, he collects himself, a specimen dispassionately impaled on the keen pin of his selfobservation.

Darwin began his Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character late in May of 1876, when he was sixty-seven years old. He wrote quickly and casually and, except for some later additions, completed the work in ten weeks. Twice in the opening paragraph he refers to the Recollections as a 'sketch,’ with all the rapidity and informality the word implies. In no sense a full-scale selfportrait, the Recollections constitute a discontinuous narrative, by turns anecdotal and reflective, that captures the features of an old man in search of his formative self and desirous of preserving his past for his progeny.

Forty years ago, at an exhibition of Ruskin memorabilia, I was drawn to a large cardboard sheet covered with irregular pencil lines. Seen up close, the halting hand, once exquisitely controlled in drawing the spring of a Gothic arch or a wayside thistle, struggled to form two proper names: the lowest and the last of Ruskin's attempted signatures dropped off the edge of the page.

‘Dear me! I seem to have forgotten how to write my own name,’ Ruskin apologized to an autograph collector who had travelled to Brantwood, his Lake District home in his later years (35:xxxix). Just before lapsing into his last, largely mute decade, in country hallowed by the great English poet of memory, Ruskin had completed the triumphant close of Praeterita, the last words he ever wrote for publication. He had struggled to complete twentyeight of an originally projected thirty-six chapters of his autobiography, issued irregularly between 1885 and 1889, in lucid intervals between ever more frequent and incapacitating attacks of madness. The most devastating occurred soon after he drew a black line at the bottom of the last page and wrote, ‘End / Brantwood. / 19th June, 1889.’ Thereafter, until his death on January 20, 1900, he lived an essentially posthumous existence under the benign custody of his Scottish cousin, Joan Agnew Severn, who appears as a young girl in the final chapter of Praeterita.

I cannot take my eyes from an old watercolor of Oxford, her many spires rising in the checkered sunlight above the lush verdure of meadows and hills. Pastoral landscape and ancient town are caught in perfect equipoise, the greens of the tree tops encircling the muted greys of the myriad towers and pinnacles of the University, ‘green shouldering grey,’ as Gerard Manley Hopkins phrased it.1 John Wycliffe, the great early translator of the Bible, called Oxford ‘the Vineyard of the Lord.’ For a millennium the town and the university which rose from its center have figured as a kind of urban Eden in the English imagination.

But by the mid-nineteenth century, Oxford had become an endangered Eden, increasingly blighted by industrialization and suburbanization, and fragmented as an ideal site where faith and reason, spirit and intellect, nature and architecture had once harmoniously joined in one spot. For successive generations Oxford had a way of profoundly and lastingly affecting her graduates, a disproportionate number of whom rose to high position in the Anglican Church and in government. In the world of literature, John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins all fell under Oxford's spell. ‘Beautiful city!’ Arnold apostrophized a quarter of a century after first seeing her spires:

In the first days of the century just passed, the British buried their Queen with an empire's lamentation. Plump but diminutive, aged and wasted by disease, Victoria was lowered into a casket crowded with memorabilia: bracelets, rings, lockets of hair, plaster casts of the hands of those she loved, the dressing gown of her long-mourned Albert. Her coffin was as cluttered as the mantelpieces of her subjects, whose compulsion to collect expressed their need to grasp at stability in a world in radical transformation.

The Victorians who speak to us most urgently today thought of themselves as living not in an age of peace or progress but, in John Stuart Mill's phrase, in ‘an age of transition,’ caught between a vanishing past and an uncertain future. Such an unsettled cultural climate provided rich soil for the flourishing of elegy. The Gothic Revival embodied this nostalgia in stone. When the ancient Houses of Parliament spectacularly burned to the ground on the night of 16 October 1834, the nation chose to rehouse its government in an edifice that looked back longingly to the Middle Ages. Oxford, the home of lost causes and itself a kind of medieval Eden of cloistered spires and chiming bells, gave rise to the Oxford Movement, which sought to revive the fervor and ancient rituals of the medieval Church, a movement that led in time to the conversion to Catholicism of two of our most greatly gifted elegists, John Henry Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Within a week of his father's death, Tennyson slept in the dead man's bed, ‘earnestly desiring to see his ghost, but no ghost came.’ Years later, recalling his failed effort to conjure his father's spirit, he remarked that ‘a poet never sees a ghost.’ Tennyson's comment is at least as strange as his disquieting act. For it could be said that he saw nothing but ghosts; his greatest poetry is about absence rather than presence, about vanished persons and shadowy places, particularly the long and vivifying shadow cast over his life by the passing of Arthur Hallam.

Hallam and Tennyson met as undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the four years of their friendship, until Hallam's death at the age of twentytwo, marked the ‘most emotionally intense period he ever knew.’ There is no reason whatever to doubt this judgment of Robert B. Martin, the best of Tennyson's modern biographers, or to question Sir Charles Tennyson's account of his grandfather's devastated response to the ‘brutal stroke [that] annihilated in a moment a love passing the love of women. The prop, round which his own growth had twined itself for four fruitful years, was suddenly removed.’

Hallam died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna on 15 September 1833. The bad tidings reached Tennyson and his sister, Emily, to whom Hallam was engaged, in the first week of October.

Dostoevsky's conception of the human personality, as defined by Bakhtin, centres on the problem of dualism and the need for interaction as the foundation of dialogue:

Bakhtin posits dialogue as an ideal of self-affirmation arising from co-existence and interaction. This suggests a harmonious unity with the other in a polyphonic ‘world of consciousnesses mutually illuminating one another, a world of yoked-together semantic human orientations.’ However, few readers would agree that harmonious cooperation forms the basis of Dostoevsky's works, where interaction habitually involves dispute, violence, coercion, violation and withdrawal, on the verbal, physical and emotional levels. While Bakhtin addresses dialogue as an ideal, and perceives harmony in Dostoevsky's polyphony, the novels themselves depict the varying ways in which dialogue is distorted and corrupted, and polyphony is frequently transformed into cacophony.

One of the major problems facing the reader of The Idiot is the presentation of the character of Nastas'ia Filippovna. Her motivation and relationships with other characters remain largely obscure, owing to her absence from large sections of the narrative; she makes her entrance in the ‘real’ time of the novel at the end of chapter nine of Part One, and in Parts Two and Three appears for just three brief scenes. In Part Four, we witness directly only her confrontation with Aglaia, as subsequent details of her marriage preparations and flight with Rogozhin are sketched in by the narrator after the event. In the novel as a whole Nastas'ia Filippovna makes only 131 speech acts–significantly fewer not only than Myshkin, Aglaia and Rogozhin, but also than Lizaveta Prokofievna, Lebedev, Ippolit and Gania.

However, in spite of the fact that she has been the subject of remarkably little criticism, it is clear both from the notebooks and throughout the novel itself that Nastas'ia Filippovna's role is not simply an important one, but that she is central to the plot: ‘In reality, N[astas'ia] F[ilippovna], perhaps, plays the main role’ (IX, 226). Fridlender notes that Dostoevsky considered her to be the second hero of the novel (XXVIII.2, 241), and highlights the impact on the text of her personality, which constantly holds the attention of the reader.

In The Idiot, the ideological battles which form the basis of Dostoevsky's other major novels are decentralized, in favour of experimentation with the ethical value of literary form, exploring narrative as a mode of interactivity which is fundamental to self-perception and orientation towards the other within both interpersonal and textual relations. As control is ceded to the characters, the structuring of the text becomes dominated by the tension between the openness and presentness of Prince Myshkin's saintly scripting, and the determinism and impulse to closure of Nastas'ia Filippovna's counterscripts. The clash of worldviews represented by their scripts provides the dynamics of the text, and gives the novel a sense of unity in spite of the ad hoc manner in which it was written. As Nastas'ia Filippovna gradually increases her control over the text, and disrupts the narrator's attempts to tell the story of the positively beautiful man, the novel develops according to her refusal to define a single script and the attempts of the other characters, and in particular of the narrator, to resist her scripting. The pressure she brings to bear on the narrative, as she attains a level of power not granted to any other female character in Dostoevsky's oeuvre, allows her, when she finally comes to a decision regarding her script, to make her own denouement the denouement of the entire novel.

Reading The Idiot: the hero and other problems

The Idiot (Idiot, 1868) is perhaps the strangest and most problematic of Dostoevsky's major fictional works, and over 130 years after the novel was published, it continues to vex and divide critics. It lacks an easily definable plot, and has a messy, ad hoc structure, in which an enormous temporal gap opens up and the central story and relationships are sidelined in favour of sub-plots, with major characters disappearing, while apparently unimportant ones become central. Its hero, who bears no resemblance to Dostoevsky's initial conception, has invited the most contradictory interpretations, and its narrator, who at the beginning of the novel appears omniscient and sympathetic to Myshkin, by the end resembles the embodied chronicler of The Devils (Besy, 1871–72) and spurns the hero. Its confusion on the structural and thematic levels has led to the suggestion that it ought not to work as a novel at all, yet it remains compelling and retains a curious unity. Dostoevsky's question, ‘Who is the Idiot? A terrible rogue or a mysterious ideal?’ (reference to PSS in end note here instead of note 4, with vol/page ref. IX, 195), applies just as much to the novel as a whole as to its hero.

The Idiot also appears to lack several features of the quintessential Dostoevskian novel. For example, doubles in The Idiot are far less well developed than in his other fiction, and of little significance on the thematic or structural levels.

While our difficulty in interpreting Nastas'ia Filippovna is primarily a result of her absence from the text, the figure of Prince Myshkin, in spite of his near-constant foregrounding in the narrative, proves equally problematic, as the contradictory interpretations of him discussed in the introduction attest. He is a complex creation, unknowable and indefinable, conceived as an ideal, but evidently falling some way short of being ‘Prince Christ’ (IX, 246, 249) in the final version of the novel. Another appellation in the notebook, the open-ended ‘The prince is a sphinx’ (IX, 248) is perhaps the best description of the hero, and the overriding problem of the novel is the question of how to solve the ‘riddle’ his character represents. The aim of this chapter is not to examine the character of Prince Myshkin as such, but to look beyond the traditional axis of the saintly and the malign, in order to see how his personality and vision changes. In order to establish why the prince's fate becomes so closely bound up with Nastas'ia Filippovna's, and the effect of this on his personality, this chapter will examine the foundations of his script and the ways in which it changes for the worse during the course of the novel, concentrating on Myshkin's vision of a ‘higher reality’, its origin in his epileptic fits, and its connections with his fundamental ideas (‘Compassion is the most important and the only law of human existence’; ‘humility is a terrible force’; ‘the world will be saved by beauty’; ‘there shall be time no longer’ (VIII, 192; 329; 317; 189)).