Between guilt and compassion: strokes to the portrait of Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin

The article considers the question of the guilt of the main character of F.M. Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. In spite of the fact that the reflection on this subject has a long tradition in domestic science, the author offers a new approach to its solution. The article studies the question of the attitude of Prince Myshkin to his own guilt rather than the question of the content of his guilt, that is the problem is the nature of the character's experience of his imperfection. All fragments of the novel where Myshkin asks the question of personal guilt are considered consistently. Such a formulation of the question offers a new interpretation of the major episodes of the novel. First, it is the episode of the internal dispute of the character with the "terrible and awful demon" whose prosecution he tries to avoid after the first visit to the house of Rogozhin. The author of the article comes to a conclusion that this scene symbolizes Myshkin's resistance to recognize the guilt in Rogozhin and Nastasia Filippovna's sufferings. The following episode which has become a subject of the analysis is Myshkin's conversation with Radomsky. It also testifies to the inability of the character to admit his guilt: in this case, in Aglaia's sufferings. Besides, the dialogue with Radomsky shows the dominant of Myshkin's internal life: rivalry of the sense of guilt and compassion. Detection of this conflict allows to treat the final madness of the character as the result of the impossibility for him to bear the thought that he is the ultimate cause of the tragedy: on the one hand, his compassion, on the other, resistance to the call of guilt. Not only compassion kills Myshkin's reason (as critics traditionally think), but also recognition of responsibility, intolerable for the mind. Researchers wrote much about the provocative and experimental nature of this novel. Dostoyevsky's experiment in The Idiot, as a rule, is connected with the author's intention to bring a Christ-like person into the world, raising the question of whether Christ's mission is feasible in activities of a mortal imitator of Jesus. The article offers one more aspect of a conversation on the experimental nature of The Idiot: it seems that the experiment also concerns the solution of a question of what will happen if compassion to another exceeds suffering about one's own guilt. Myshkin's defeat makes the answer obvious: compassion which exceeds guilt is pernicious. It is thought that such a solution of the topic of compassion (where it opposes the sense of guilt) underlines the integrity of Dostoyevsky's thought of guilt. This thought received its final embodiment in The Brothers Karamazov, where the experience of guilt is considered as a basis of spiritual human life.

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