The Daily Letters

there's a scene in part three of the idiot that i keep returning to. myshkin and aglaya are sitting on a green bench in the park at seven in the morning, and aglaya reveals that nastasia philipovna has been writing to her. not once — daily, for a week or more. the letters urge aglaya to marry myshkin. they tell her nastasia loves her herself. they say nastasia has long known myshkin loved aglaya and wants him to be happy. she has been watching aglaya from a distance when she can.

"she writes such strange, wild letters," aglaya says. "i haven't shown them to anyone."

myshkin's response is immediate: "it is madness — it is merely another proof of her insanity."

but aglaya, who is twenty and has never left home and has been reading forbidden books in secret, says something that cuts through it: "it is not myself she loves, but you, you, and only you. she — do you think she will ever really marry this rogojin, as she says here she will? she would take her own life the day after you and i were married."

this is the thing. nastasia is not simply writing to her rival. she's engineering her own replacement.

and she's doing it consciously, methodically, with daily letters.

i've been trying to think about what the logic of this is, because it clearly has a logic. myshkin attempts an explanation. earlier in the scene he tells aglaya about his time living with nastasia:

"she went away in response to some inner prompting to do something disgraceful, in order that she might say to herself — 'there — you've done a new act of shame — you degraded creature!'"

she didn't leave because she hated him. she left to confirm the worst thing she believed about herself. the act of shame proves the shame is real. the circle closes.

the logic of the letters is an extension of this. she can't accept happiness — not because she doesn't want it but because she doesn't believe she deserves it, and the belief is so total that it functions as a kind of epistemology. she knows she is degraded the way other people know the sky is blue. myshkin tried to argue her out of it and failed. he says: "when i tried to rid her soul of this gloomy fallacy, she suffered so terribly that my heart will never be quite at peace." the suffering from being contradicted was worse than the suffering from the belief itself.

so instead she does this other thing. she outsources the happiness. she finds the woman — young, beautiful, proud, untouched — and she writes to her every day to push her toward the man they both love. she keeps herself in the loop. she watches from a distance. she stays close to the event she is causing.

what's extraordinary about this is that it's not passive. she's not just stepping aside. she's actively constructing the scenario that will, as aglaya correctly perceives, culminate in nastasia's death. and she seems to know this. aglaya says she'd kill herself the day after the wedding. the letters are the preparation for that.

this is what myshkin means when he keeps insisting she's mad. not that she's incoherent — she's completely coherent. but the logic runs entirely from her self-condemnation outward, and once you grant the premise (i am irredeemably fallen) everything else follows with terrible consistency. the letters make sense. the daily watching makes sense. the plan to marry rogojin and die makes sense.

dostoevsky is doing something precise here. he's showing a kind of suffering that can't be helped by kindness. myshkin is the kindest character in the book — arguably in all of russian fiction — and his kindness made things worse. not because it was fake. he says he loved her once, genuinely, and she knew when that changed to pity. and the pity was an insult worse than cruelty, because cruelty at least confirms the dark picture of the world she carries, but pity says: you are an object of charity now, you who were once a person who could be loved.

she went from being loved to being pitied and she couldn't survive the transition. so she engineered the situation that would allow her to die having given the man she loved his best possible life.

there's a word for this but it's not madness. it's a kind of inverted martyrdom — not for god or principle but for the one belief she holds absolutely: that her own worthiness for happiness is zero. the traditional martyr gives up life to affirm something beyond themselves. nastasia gives up life to affirm her own nullity. the logic is the same shape, flipped.

what makes it sadder is that the belief is not self-generated. it was installed in her by totsky, the man who kept her for years as his mistress from childhood. dostoevsky spends very little time on this backstory in the sections i've been reading — it was laid out earlier in the novel — but its shadow is everywhere. the degradation she's so certain of was something done to her, not chosen. but by now she's internalized it so completely that she enforces it herself. totsky doesn't need to be present anymore. she is.

this is one of the things dostoevsky understands that most novelists don't: the way an injury becomes a character. the wound that starts as something external gets taken in and tends itself. nastasia doesn't need her abuser anymore because she became the part of herself that believed his assessment. she's running the same operation on herself that he ran on her, just more efficiently.

myshkin can see all of this. he can describe it clearly, sitting on a park bench at dawn, to a twenty-year-old girl who's never left home. and he can't do a thing about it. his helplessness is the point. the prince's famous goodness does not save anyone. it witnesses them.

aglaya keeps asking: if you know all this, why don't you help her? and myshkin keeps saying: i tried. she won't let me. the marriage would ruin her because she's proud and she would never forgive the pity. and he's right. every option is worse than the one before.

the letters sit on aglaya's lap, three of them, thrown there in fury. "she writes that she loves me herself," aglaya says. the anger is real; the feeling underneath is harder to name. she read them and she hates nastasia and she cannot stop reading them and she came out to the green bench at seven in the morning and waited for myshkin because somewhere in the tangle of it she needs to understand what kind of woman does this.

the answer is the kind who cannot be saved. the kind for whom goodness functions as another form of injury. the kind for whom the kindest thing anyone ever did was to stop trying.

myshkin doesn't stop trying. it's the one flaw in his holiness, or maybe it's the whole point of it.