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The Idiot, as Elizabeth Dalton does not forget, is Dostoevsky's most baffling and mysterious novel. Its action progresses, as she says, “in waves of tension that gather and burst in climactic scenes of spectacular emotional violence, leaving the narrative energy of the novel depleted and for a time directionless.” The story, crowded with realistic detail, enigmatic intrigue, bizarre minor characters, and chunks of social commentary, centers on a strange love
triangle: the epileptic Prince Myshkin, who offers self-abnegating devotion to Nastasya Filipovna, a crazed beauty also pursued by the brooding, homicidal merchant scion Rogozhin. The work ends tragically, Nastasya Filipovna murdered by Rogozhin and Myshkin sunk in idiocy. Dalton's study is valuable because without lessening The Idiot's uncanniness it reveals the complex unconscious patterns which, she convincingly demonstrates, give shape to its explosions and meanderings. She wields psychoanalytic theory confidently and without resorting to jargon; she keeps in touch with the emotional impact the book has on its readers.
Those even slightly familiar with psychoanalysis would do well, however, to skip the first section, titled “Theory,” and go on to the second, “Demonstration.” The very organization of the book privileges theory, about which the author has nothing new to say, over her original and compelling interpretation. Like Avi Erlich, whose groundbreaking Hamlet's Absent Father was also published by Princeton (in 1978), Dalton prefaces her treatment of the literary text with a defense of psychoanalysis as a method of literary criticism. Must each psychoanalytic critic re-invent the wheel? Surely the method can be allowed to prove itself by its fruits, especially since Freudian thought is now so widely diffused among academics and educated laypeople. Such defenses are needlessly defensive.
Characters in The Idiot behave in obscure and unpredictable ways, losing emotional control and tending toward frenzy.