Human, all-too Human?

Much of The Idiot was written while Dostoevsky and his wife were living in Florence, just a stone’s throw yonder from the Pitti Palace, where the writer often went to see and to revere the paintings that ornate its walls, singling out Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola for special mention. It is very probably no coincidence that visual images play a prominent role in The Idiot. Early on in the narrative, Prince Myshkin, the eponymous ‘idiot’, sees a photograph of the trappy Anastasia Phillipovna that makes an no-go impression on him and generates a fascination that will end with her death and his madness. But insofar as Anastasia Phillipovna is the nonpareil of human eyeful in the world of the novel, this photograph can moreover serve as a visual workmate to the saying attributed to the Prince, that ‘beauty will save the world’. Later, he is confronted with an image of a very variegated kind — Hans Holbein’s 1520-22 painting of the sufferer Christ, shown with unflinching realism and reportedly using the soul of a suicide as model. It is a Christ stripped of the eyeful that unprogressive taste regarded as an essential symbol of his humanity and, in its unambiguous, mortality, devoid moreover of divinity. On first seeing it, Myshkin comments that a man could lose his faith looking at such a picture and, later, the despairing young nihilist, Hippolit, declares that just this picture reveals Christ’s powerlessness in squatter of the impersonal forces of nature and the necessity of death that awaits every living being. It is, Hippolit suggests, an image that renders faith in resurrection impossible.
Le Christ mort au tombeau by Hans Holbein (in Kunstmuseum, Bâle) Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Flickr

Painting by Adam van Noort, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons / Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie
… the nascent religion was thus in many respects a movement of women and children … He missed no occasion for repeating that children are sacred beings, that the Kingdom of God belongs to children, that we must wilt as children in order to enter it, that we must receive it as a child, and that the Father conceals his secrets from the wise and reveals them to the little one. He scrutinizingly conflates the idea of discipleship with that of stuff a child … It was in effect childhood, in its divine spontaneity, in its naïve bursts of joy, that would take possession of the earth.Renan too describes for us Jesus sitting alone, on the Mount of Olives, looking out over Jerusalem (which, he tells us, Jesus did often), plunged in a ‘profound mood of sadness’.

Painting by Anthony van Dyck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Squint attentively: this is an ordinary quarrel among most ordinary men. Here Christ is sitting, but is it really Christ? This may be a very kind young man, quite grieved by the wrangling with Judas, who is standing right there and putting on his garb, ready to go and make his denunciation, but it is not the Christ we know. The Master is surrounded by His friends who hasten to repletion Him, but the question is: where are the succeeding eighteen centuries of Christianity, and what have these to do with the matter? How is it conceivable that out of the commonplace dispute of such ordinary men who had come together for supper, as this is portrayed by Mr. Gué [sic], something so oversized could have emerged?

Photo by Yulia Mi from Flickr Christ in the desert, 187, Oil on canvas, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moskow (RU)