![]() ![]() The central idea of The Idiot as we have it was, as Dostoevsky wrote in a letter, "to depict a completely beautiful human being". "He is like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and in order to belong to the light professing love, all love." It had become, he shrilled, "a supreme wickedness to set up a Christ worship as Dostoevsky did: it is the outcome of an evil will." DH Lawrence, another maker of fictive prophecies and apocalypses, was reading The Idiot in 1915. Unlike Eliot, Dostoevsky was Christian, and increasingly passionate about preserving faith. Dorothea's virtue cannot find a form in her modern world. ![]() Middlemarch opens with a paradigm of its heroine as a "later-born" St Theresa, "helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul". The novels meet the old tales with part parody, part dialogue, part rejection and reconstruction. The forms of 19th-century European fictions, including the Russian, have a powerful relation to older Christian stories, from the Bible to Bunyan. ![]() By Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by David McDuff ![]()
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