Much has been said Dostoevsky he is a novelist of the city (of St Petersburg in particular) and not, unlike Turgenev and Tolstoy, of nature. In The Idiot however, a notable exception to this characteristic is in the account of a walk that made the prince in the mountains in Switzerland, and in this novel is the third crucial experience "the beauty of life" :
At this point, it was really like an idiot, he could not even speak properly, sometimes he did not understand what was wanted of him. He had ventured into the mountains on a clear day, sunny, and he had walked a long, full of tormenting thought but could not at all embodied. He saw before him a dazzling sky, below, a lake, around a bright horizon, infinite, yes, that had no bounds or limits. He remained a long time looking to tear. He remembered now as he stretched his arms towards the property and infinite light, as he wept. What tortured him, that he was a total stranger to this. What was this feast, what was this grand and eternal feast, which had no end, and to which he was as magnetized so long has always been childhood, a party to which he had not any means to take part? Sees every morning after sunrise as dazzling, and every morning a rainbow rises over the waterfall, each evening, the snowy mountain, the highest out there in the distance, after the sky ablaze a purple flame, any "small fly buzzing around him in the warmth of a sunbeam choir participates in everything and she knows her place, she loves him, she is happy", yes, the lesser blade of grass grows and is happy! Everything in its own way, and knows all his own way, everything starts with a song, everything comes with a song he alone, he knows nothing, he alone does nothing, neither people nor the sounds, he is abroad in all, a runt. " [liv. 3, VII, p. 168-169]
Such passages are extremely rare in the work of Dostoïeski so it is that it is of crucial importance in understanding the hero, if enigmatic in many ways. In fact, it's not really a description of nature as a writer "naturalist" could make a birch woods, a sunset or traces of wolves in the snow. Reality as perceived by the prince without being able to join, to which he tends with his whole being without power communicate with her, is seen through the-natural beings, vague and general (sun, rainbow sky, mountains) together in a "whole" and that means the indistinct nature as a whole. But what really matters is not this or that particular landscape - this one and not another - that the artist would care for and fun to describe, but the feeling of joy, wholeness and mystery that emanates from contemplation of nature, and simultaneously sinking feeling that all this is beyond intelligence. The prince ends up "idiot" abroad as a "runt," a little man crushed by the manifestation of infinite good which is the secret truth of all things, would it be so tiny that a single fly. As if echoing in these places, the great metaphysical proclamation of Alexander Pope: "All is well".
And where does that enlightenment can happen, if not what the "me" does not interfere and does not cross? What is experienced - the presence of an orderly world where everything is in place, and therefore, happy (as opposed to the general chaos of human passions) - is the subject of an intuition, an inner awareness that , as obvious, or she can not be represented and can be set remotely by the virtues of self reflection, language and representation, so that's the very thing that is a source of happiness, which produces very both aphasia and anguish, idiocy in all. Something like a excess be on all human capacity to objectify, to understand, say, and that can only be seen, but which was once known, while that exchange that the has lived with the greatest intensity (like the final moments of the condemned man or the brilliant inspiration that precedes an epileptic seizure). In this excess, donation or the manifestation of being as expensive "treat" and as "festival" shows * with all the features of transcendence (in the sense of what escapes and exceeds what exactly, but that does not reported as such to God), so it can not be fully granted, although the soul is drawn to the outpouring of well-being and, as it shows in the spectacle of nature, by a powerful eros, or, to use the image passing through Dostoyevsky by a magnet. Not the measure of all things, man can not, so it is the prince, but feel foreign, it would all efforts to reach out, open and welcome what is given, but which gives the mode of growing. It is therefore inevitable that the perception of song in the world creates a sense of failure comparable to the impossibility of making every moment a century.
____________________ * See the beautiful book by Jacques Dewitte, The event itself, elements of a philosophical critique of utilitarianism (La Découverte, 2010), to which I devoted a post, "or Jacques Dewitte the art of reading ", June 18, 2010.
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