SOURCE: Slattery, Dennis Patrick. “From Switzerland to Petersburg: The Descent.” In The Idiot: Dostoevsky's Fantastic Prince: A Phenomenological Approach, pp. 16-75. New York: Peter Lang, 1983.

In the following essay, Slattery considers the spatio-temporal imagery of The Idiot to demonstrate how Dostoevsky mixes fantasy with reality in his novel.

If the reader approaches The Idiot as an ordered poetic experience of fantasy, he must make use of an imaginative reading, one which looks closely at and listens to the voices of the novel's interior dramatic action. For when entered into imaginally, The Idiot begins to direct the reader's understanding of fantasy. Dostoevsky uses fantasy as a metaphor for seeing the world in a particularly angelic way and as an attitude that seeks, at least from the perspective from which we see it, to imparadise the world.¹ This attitude is embedded in the poet's narrative argument, primarily through Myshkin, but...