SOURCE: Woodward, James B. “Overlapping Portraits in Dostoevskij's The Idiot.” Scando-Slavica 26 (1980): 115-27.

In the following essay, Woodward maintains that the character and conduct of Prince Myshkin, while baffling at times, “reflect a deliberately contrived method of characterization” by the author.

“For me”, writes Robert Lord, “The Idiot remains the most challenging and obscure of Dostoevskij's novels, and Prince Myshkin his most baffling and impenetrable creation”.¹ Many readers would doubtless concur with this view. Nor is Lord alone in attributing the novel's exceptional obscurity, in part, to flaws in Dostoevskij's conception. Arguing that “the novel consists of three quite separate and ill-fitting sections” and that “there are three distinct Myshkins, a different one in each section”,² he essentially reiterates the views of Robert Hollander,³ Edward Wasiolek⁴ and numerous other critics who have also noted comparable inconsistencies in the portraits of Lebedev, Ganja and Radomskij. But although it would probably...