....by Simon Gray
When it was first suggested that I should think about adapting The Idiot for the stage, I delayed refusing at once only, I suspect, because I wanted a week or two in which to rest on the compliment.  I hadn’t read any Dostoievsky since, at the age of seventeen and in a state of some intoxication, I had run through all the major novels within a matter of months.  In those days, I had actually seen myself as spiritual nephew to Stavrogin.  I was a despairing conscious hero whose every gesture and phrase revealed the futility of a world gone mad with convention.  I was living, I should say in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in retrospect I quite understand that I must have cut a somewhat disturbing figure.  I spent many afternoons picking a path, my lip curled in sardonic contemplation, through the town’s rare shadows; and many evenings framed in the windows of small restaurants where I toyed with second and third slices of cherry pie while I allowed my moody eyes to meet, through the glass, the bland gaze of passers-by.
      Between my darkness and their brightness, there passed a glance of great politeness.  I had glamour, borrowed but desperate.  What had they, poor things, but their small certain pleasures?
      The one major novel for which I didn’t care, which I found soft in its centre while prone to intolerable longueurs on its perimenter, was The Idiot.  The Prince’s sweetness struck me as a betrayal of my very personal expectations—which had grown through Raskolnikov to Stavrogin, and which has led me to look forward to a deeper and still deeper descent into the abyss.  Anyway I was sufficiently homme du théâtre to have noted in the university at which I was an undergraduate those poseurs who had already thrown fits in lecture-rooms, and just outside them, and whose dreadful sufferings their gentle smiles had made famous in that world in which I was determined to find my own extravagant role.  Rogozhin, a madman and therefore, my only possible model, possessed in the translation in which I encountered him an accent so quaintly and unconvincingly cockney that it made the effect of making all his actions, however passionately recorded in the narrative, equally cockney, quaint and unconvincing to my imagination.  On the other hand Stavrogin remained, among other nihilistic things, a gentleman and an intellectual, and thus already resembled myself in two important particulars.
      By the time, some years later and in England again, I had come to think of myself as at least partly detached from my younger and more excitable readings, I had buried my memories of Dostoievsky as I had buried other embarrassing post-adolescent excesses.  I was sure (I still am) that Anna Karenina was the greatest of all novels.  I read Mansfield Park eight times, Middlemarch six, the whole of Dickens twice and parts of him three times as often.  On the few occasions when I was persuaded to ‘try’ Dostoievsky again, I failed not only in my attempts to re-read The Devils, but also to read for the first time everything that I had previously missed.  Of all authors, he was the one I was least likely to want to adapt; of all his novels The Idiot was one that held not even a dim and wryly ‘placed’ appeal.
      But I hadn’t refused the invitation directly, and it was a necessary courtesy to skim swiftly through the novel before declining to involve myself in it further.  It is a novel that is not lightly skimmed. The plot is complicated; the characters prolific; the proportions eccentric. In fact The Idiot was turning out to be a case (Dickens is another) where skimming is more laborious than actual reading. So after an evening spent at ten pages a minute with nothing assimilated but a few preposterous little melodramas, I was forced to start again.  I read slowly, carefully, with increasing astonishment.  For if The Idiot I encountered now was not The Idiot I had misremembered (though it met, if not a hostile response, then an equivocal one), the perimeter of the novel, which I had totally forgotten, which had vanished far beyond even misremembering, I now found marvelous—marvelous in its detail, marvelous in its abundance of richly appreciated life, marvelous in its curious and desolating comedy.  And my recognition of this prompted an uncertain but growing recognition that there was, also and above all, a theme.  A theme that made the perimeter not a perimeter at all, that made even the most seemingly inconsequential observations part of a painfully, at times even hatefully, felt whole.
      There was something else.  However frequently I was blocked by impenetrably Russian obscurities of religious reference, I was weirdly at home with the novel in all its most extraordinary effects.  In other words, the world of The Idiot had (for me) in its texture a varied Englishness—no, not quite and so chauvinistically that.  Rather a distorting but robustly animating focus which, in my Englishness, I found irresistibly familiar.  The characters, as I summoned them up in retrospect, assume some of the nightmare distinctness of faces from a Hogarth print—almost as if straight from some recent racial memory; and from there it was a short step through the illustrations of Phiz to the world of Little Dorrit.  I offer this sketch of what was scarcely even a critical process with some embarrassment—no doubt the connection between Dickens and Dostoievsky had long been an academic common-place.  It was nevertheless my starting-point, the point from which I began both to feel my response to the novel’s tones and comedies in terms of theatrical details, and through them to become excited at the prospect of attempting to give to that distressing and urgent theme an appropriately personal and (hopefully) theatrical shape.  

Three views on a genius

Sigmund Freud
      Four facets may be distinguished in the rich personality of Dostoievsky; the creative artist, the neurotic, the masochist and the sinner . . .The moralist in Dostoievsky is the most readily assailable.  If we try to rank him high as a moralist on the plea that only a man who has gone through the depths of sin can reach the higher heights of morality, we are neglecting one consideration.  A moral man is one who reacts to the temptation he feels in his heart without yielding to it.  The man who alternately sins, and in his remorse makes high moral demands, lays himself open to the reproach that he has made things too easy for himself.  He has not achieved the most important thing in morality, renunciation, for the moral conduct of life is a practical human interest.  He reminds one of the barbarians of the great migrations, who murder and do penance therefor, where penitence becomes a technique to enable murder to be done.  Ivan the Terrible behaved in exactly this way—in fact, the compromise with morality is a characteristic Russian trait.  Nor was the ultimate result of Dostoievsky’s moral struggles anything very glorious.  After the most violent battles to reconcile the impulsive claims of the individual with the demands of the community, he ended up, retrograde fashion, with submission both to the temporal and the spiritual authorities, with veneration to the Tsar and to the God of the Christians, and a narrow Russian nationalism, a position which lesser minds have reached with less effort.  This is the weak part of the great personality.  Dostoievsky threw away the chance of becoming a teacher and liberator of humanity; instead he appointed himself as jailer.  The future of civilization will have little to thank him for.  It is probably that he was condemned to seek frustration by this neurosis.  The greatness of his intellect and the strength of his love for humanity should have opened to him another, apostolic, way of life.   To treat Dostoievsky as a sinner and a criminal rouses violent resistance which need not be based on the philistine assessment of the criminal.  The real motive soon becomes apparent:  two traits are important in this criminal, boundless egoism and a strong destructive tendency, both in conjunction; and the conditions for their expression is the absence of love, the lack of an effective valuation of (human) objects.  One immediately recalls the contrast presented by Dostoievsky, his great need of love and his enormous capacity for love, which expressed itself in manifestations of superhuman goodness, and enabled him to love and help where he was justified in hatred and revenge . . . That being so, we have to ask whence comes the temptation to reckon Dostoievsky among the criminals.  The answer is that it comes from his choice of material, which singles out from all others violent, murderous and egoistic characters, which points to the existence of similar tendencies in his own soul, and also from certain facts in his life, like his passion for gambling, and perhaps the sexual abuse of a young girl (Stavrogin’s Confession).  The contradiction is resolved by the perception that Dostoievsky’s very strong destructive impulse, which might easily have made him a criminal, was in his life directed mainly against his own person (inward instead of outward), and this found expression of masochism and the sense of guilt.  His personality, moreover, contains sadistic characteristics in plenty, which are expressed in his irritability, his love of tormenting, and his intolerance even towards people he loved, and which appear also in the way in which, as an author, he treats his readers.  That is, in little things he was a sadist to others, in bigger things a sadist to himself, that is, a masochist, who is the mildest, kindliest, most human being possible. 

Bertrand Russell
Dostoievsky would have nothing to do with ‘proper pride’; he would sin in order to repent and to enjoy the luxury of confession.  I will not argue the question how far such aberrations can justly be charged against Christianity, but I will admit that I agree with Nietzsche in thinking Dostoievsky’s prostration contemptible.  A certain uprightness and pride and even self-assertion of a sort, I should agree, are elements in the best character; no virtue which has its roots in fear is much to be admired.

D H Lawrence
I have been reading Dostoievsky’s Idiot.  I don’t like Dostoievsky.  He is again like the rat, slithering along in hate, in the shadows, and, in order to belong to the light, professing love, all love.  But his nose is sharp with hate, his running is shadowy and rat-like, he has a will fixed and gripped like a trap.  He is not nice . . . Dostoievsky, like the rest, can nicely stick his head between the feet of Christ, and waggle his behind in the air.  And though the behind-wagglings are a revelation, I don’t think much even of the feet of Christ as a bluff for the cowards to hide their eyes against.