Written by hermann Hesse |
Translated | Jiang Yi
Dostoevsky's "idiot" Duke Lev Meshkin is often compared to Jesus. Of course you can. One can compare Jesus to anyone who has been touched by mysterious truths, who no longer separates thoughts from life, and who is thus isolated from his surroundings, or even who becomes the enemy of all. For this reason, it seems to me that there is no apparent similarity between Meshkin and Jesus. His only important feature, which resembles Jesus, is his "cowardly chastity." The hidden fear of sex and procreation is an indispensable feature of Jesus "in the historical facts" and Jesus in the Gospels. This feature is clearly part of his earthly mission and is not omitted even in the superficial image of Jesus written by Lernen (a French writer and religious scholar).
"Idiot", [Russian] Dostoevsky, translated by Geng Jizhi, Shandong Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2021, produced by Guomai Culture
But strangely—though I rarely appreciate Meshkin's comparison with Jesus—I inadvertently associate the two images. I realized this very late from some subtle points. One day, I thought of an idiot and suddenly realized that my initial thoughts about him always touched on what seemed like a minor part of him. When I think of him, I always think of him in a special, meaningless secondary scene, just as I think of the Savior. When the association of a certain time evokes the image of Jesus in my heart, when the name of Jesus rings in my ears or comes into my eyes, my first flash is never Jesus on the cross, Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus in miracles, or Jesus who rose from the dead, but Jesus who drank the last lonely cup in the Garden of Gethsemane, whose soul was torn apart in pain between the inevitable sacrifice of life and the sublime new life. At this moment, Jesus, like a child, longed for the last comfort, looked around at His disciples, looking for a trace of warmth and human closeness in the desperate loneliness, for a fleeting sweet illusion—but the disciples were asleep! They lay down and slept soundly. They, the righteous Peter, the handsome John, all these good men, these people with whom Jesus was accustomed to sharing his thoughts, parts of his thoughts, with whom he was repeatedly deceived by good intentions and zeal, who thought they really understood his words, who thought his thoughts had actually been imparted to them, who awakened some resonance in them, who found in them such people as understanding, kinship and solidarity— this moment, in this unbearable moment of suffering, Jesus became a complete mortal, a complete victim, and He turned frankly to them Eager to be close to them more than ever, eager to find some comfort and encouragement in every stupid word, in every half-hanging gesture of kindness, he turned to these companions, the only thing he had—they were not there. They sleep and snore. This cruel scene dwells in my heart. I don't know how this scene has been in my heart since I was a child. And as I said, the thought of Jesus immediately comes to mind as soon as I think of this scene.
The same is true of the thought of Meshkin. When I think of him, this idiot, the first things that come to my mind are moments that don't seem important, but are equally unbelievable, equally lonely, equally miserable and desolate. The scene I am referring to took place that night in Lebedev's mansion in the town of Pavlovsk. The Duke, who was recovering a few days after the epileptic seizure, welcomed the Yeppin family. A bright and elegant atmosphere, although it implies crisis and dullness. At this moment a group of young revolutionaries and nihilists suddenly burst in: the eloquent young Hippolyte, the self-proclaimed "son of Pavlishev", the "boxer" and other uninvited people. This scene is unpleasant. Reading is always disgusting, infuriating and disgusting. This group of narrow and misguided young people with hopeless malice is showing off, nakedly exposed to the spotlight of the stage. At this moment, their every word, every word they use, constitutes a double wound: the effect on the goodNess Ofshkin, and the betrayal and betrayal of the speaker himself because of the cruelty of his words—although in the novel the scene I speak of is not important, is not emphasized, but is strange and unforgettable. On the one hand are elegant socialites, conservatives with wealth and power; on the other are ruthless, indomitable, angry youth who know nothing but riots and hate tradition, who are unscrupulous, barbaric, self-proclaimed rationalists, but with inexplicable ignorance—the dukes between the two factions are isolated, condemned by both sides, and targeted by both sides. And how did this end? Despite three or two flaws in his agitation, Myshkin accepted the unbearable thing with a smile in an attitude perfectly in keeping with his good, gentle and innocent nature, selflessly answered shameless questions, examined himself and bore all his sins - he thus utterly failed, incurring contempt - not contempt on this side or the other, not the young people against the elderly, or vice versa, but the contempt of both sides! Everyone alienated him. He stepped on everyone's feet. In an instant, the extreme contradictions caused by the differences in class, age and opinion between these people were completely resolved. Their front was unanimous, even completely unanimous, alienating him in exasperation—the only pure man among them.
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) was a German writer and poet. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. Representative works include "Steppenwolf", "Siddhartha" and so on. Hesse greatly admired and understood Dostoevsky deeply, when he wrote: "We must read Dostoevsky only when we suffer pain and misfortune and our ability to bear pain is reaching its limit, only when we feel that our whole life is like a burning wound, when it is unbearable pain, only when we are full of despair and experience an inexisting death." When we face life alone and insensitively, when we can no longer understand the crazy and beautiful cruelty of life and want nothing from it, we open our hearts to the music of this astonishing and talented poet. ”
What is the reason why this idiot cannot enter the world of others? Although almost everyone loved him in some way, his gentleness was embraced by everyone, and he was often regarded as a role model by everyone, why did no one understand him? What distinguishes this magical figure from others and the general public? Why are they justified in opposing him? Why should they not be suspicious and must oppose him? Why did he have to follow in Jesus' footsteps and end up being abandoned not only by the world, but also by all his disciples?
This is because idiots have different thoughts than others. It is not that his thoughts are less logical than others, or that they are a little more naïve. No. His thoughts, I call "magic." This gentle idiot denies the whole life, the whole thought and feeling of others, and the whole world and reality of others. His reality is different. And the reality of others is a complete illusion for him. It is precisely because he sees and pursues a new reality that he becomes the enemy of all.
Portrait of Dostoevsky.
Myshkin's distinction from others is not that others respect power and values like money, family, and the state, and he doesn't. It is not that he represents the spirit, that others represent matter, or whatever the wording is! Not really. For idiots, matter also exists. Although he did not attach great importance to it, he absolutely understood the meaning of matter. His demand, his ideals, is not indian asceticism, not to wither the reality of the apparent world, to fall into the spiritual world of self-satisfaction, and to think that only this is true.
No, on the rights of nature and spirit, and the necessity of their interaction, Meshkin can fully agree with others. It is only for others that the coexistence and equality of the two worlds is an intellect, while for Myshkin, it is his life and reality! This is still not clear enough, and we try to clarify it in another way.
Myshkin is distinguished from others by his relationship with the unconscious more directly and intimately than others as an "idiot" and epileptic patient, while at the same time as an extremely intelligent person. His pinnacle experience is a moment of supreme sensitivity and judgment that he has experienced several times. In these moments, these lightning-like moments, the magic he possesses makes him become everything in the world, sympathize with everything in the world, and suffer with everything in the world. He understood everything and appreciated everything. There is a core of his nature in this peak experience. He had not read and appreciated, nor had he studied and marveled at magic and occult wisdom, he had only actually experienced it all (albeit only for a few rare moments). He did not have strange and brilliant thoughts and thoughts, but stood on the boundaries of mystery once or several times. There, everything is affirmed. There, not only are the most obscure ideas real, but even the ideas that contradict them are just as real.
That's what's scary about this man, what's scary. He is not absolutely isolated, and the whole world is not his enemy. A few people, a few extremely unreliable, extremely harmful and extremely dangerous people will occasionally understand him affectionately: Luo Guoren, Nastasia. Criminals and hysterical women understood him. He, an innocent, gentle child!
"Idiot" book shadow, the book is accompanied by character relationship diagrams
But the kid wasn't as gentle as he appeared. His innocence is not harmless either. People are afraid of him, and that's not unreasonable.
I said that idiots occasionally come close to the boundary of being aware that every thought and its opposites are real. That is to say, he felt that from a certain pole, the existence of no thought, any criterion, any characteristic or form was not real and correct—and that each pole had its opposite. Setting a pole, taking a certain stand, observing and affiliating the world, is the primary foundation of all education, culture, society and morality. Anyone who realizes that spirit and nature, good and evil, can be interchanged, even if only momentarily conscious, is the terrible enemy of all order. Because the moment of consciousness, the beginning of the anti-order, the beginning of chaos.
A return to the unconscious and chaotic mind destroys all human order. In one conversation, someone claimed that "idiots" would never speak except to describe the truth, how poor it was! truly. It's all true. Everything can be affirmed. To establish a world order, to achieve goals, to achieve laws, societies, mechanisms, civilizations and morals, it must be denied at the same time as affirmation, and the world must be divided into good and evil in opposition, even if all negations, the initial establishment of all taboos, are very arbitrary - but as long as it becomes law, produces effect, and becomes the basis of ideas and order, it is sacred.
The supreme truth in the sense of human civilization is that the world is divided into light and darkness, good and evil, permission and taboo. But for Myshkin, the supreme truth lies in his mysterious experience of the reversibility of all rules and the equal existence of the metatarsal poles. At the end of the day, "idiots" import unconscious matriarchy and discard culture. Instead of breaking the proclamation of the law, he flipped it over and indicated that the back of the law was written with something the exact opposite.
This enemy of order, the terrible destroyer, appears not as a criminal, but as a cute, shy, innocent, innocent, and selfless image. This is the secret of this terrible book. Out of deep intuition, Dostoevsky described this man as a patient, a person with epilepsy. In Dostoevsky's writings, all the carriers of the new, the terrible and the uncertain future, all the carriers of the prohibition of foreknowledge chaos, are the sick, the suspicious, the burdened: Luo Guoren, Nastasia, and later the four brothers Karamazov. They are all portrayed as out-of-ordinary people, eccentric and unusual people. But all these people, these derailed and mentally ill, can stir up a sacred reverence that we have in the Asians who believe they have an obligation to honor madmen.
Noteworthy, peculiar, important, and seriously consequential is not that a genius and epileptic patient somewhere in Russia between 1850 and 1860 had such a whim to create these figures. Importantly, over the past three decades, these writings have come to be regarded by European youth as important prophetic books. Curiously, Dostoevsky's portrayal of these criminals, hysteria, and idiots looks very different from the criminals and fools in other best-selling novels. We understand them with such fear, so strangely loved them, that we even find in ourselves the connection and similarities with these characters.
This is not an accident, nor is it due to external and literary factors in Dostoevsky's work. Many of the features of his work are extremely shocking—reminiscent of the pre-emergence of the now-perfect psychology of the unconscious—and we do not marvel at the highly intellectual expression and skillful skill of his work, or the artistic reproduction of the world as we know it, but as a prophet, as a prophecy of decay and chaos that we have witnessed in Europe in recent years.
The world of these poetic figures is not an ideal picture of the future – no one would think so. No, we don't feel in Myshkin or any other figure that "you deserve to be!" The exemplary nature of the feeling that "we must encounter this opportunity." This is our destiny! "The inevitability.
The future is uncertain, but the path pointed out here is clear. It means a reset of the mind. It leads us beyond Meshkin, to have a "magical" mind, to embrace chaos, to return to disorder, to the unconscious and the formless, to animals, even more primitive than animals, to the beginning of everything. But this is not done so that we can stagnate there, to become animals or to become primitive silt, but to establish new directions, to meet at the root of existence the instinct for forgetting and the possibility of development, to be able to engage in the creation, re-evaluation and division of the world in new ways. No program can lead us to discover this path. No revolution can open the door to this path for us. Everyone has to go on their own. Everyone has to find their own way. There must be a moment in everyone's life, standing on the border where Myshkin once stood. There, the old truth ends and the new truth begins. Each of us is bound to experience The Insightful Moment of Myshkin at some point in our lives, the moment when Dostoevsky gained prophetic vision in the experience of dying and escaping death.
Editor| Zhang Ting
Proofreading | Liu Jun