There is one Dostoevsky’s character I’ve been thinking about for a long time now: Ippolit from the Idiot. His explanation, or confession, is something I was wrestling with for months. My goal here is to present my impressions of psychological mechanisms Dostoevsky presented through this character, and to relate them to my experiences.
Ippolit hits close to home – although I am not terminally ill, I was diagnosed with progressive, debilitating, incurable disease in my early twenties. Ippolit’s condition (tuberculosis) was, of course, much more tragic and dramatic, but I can still recognize some common patterns in thinking and reacting.
First Ippolit’s reaction to his horrible illness was his ‘’thirst for life’’. He was aware of poor prognoses related to his condition, so he expressed this will to live by envying others. For example, he couldn’t understand how people are poor: ‘’if they are already alive, everything is in their power’’.
These thoughts were exactly my thoughts, just expressed internally – what remains of my life is completely in my power. This difference is understandable: Ippolit had only a few months to live, while I still had at least several years, maybe even decades, of satisfactory health ahead of me. I became hyper-conscious about my own mortality & the passing of time.
However, Ippolit started feeling how this cruel, indifferent, all-powerful nature suffocates him slowly as time went by. Ippolit’s perspective on life in general was implicitly changing under this pressure – he dreamt that his poor neighbor, whose child froze to death, suddenly becomes a millionaire. Ippolit gives him an advice: to dig up his child and burry it again in a golden coffin. In my understanding, this dream shows the futility of human struggles against the chaotic beast of nature – all that his neighbor can do with his fortune is to make his child’s coffin more beautiful.
There is, again, a staggering similarity to my own experiences. After experiencing a progression of my disease several years ago, simultaneously with multiple crushing failures in other areas of life, I felt almost unbearable domination of external circumstances over me. I felt crushed, and the sense of agency / control over my life disappeared.
So what is left for Ippolit in these circumstances? His answer: rebellion. Ippolit is being actively annihilated by reality, and desperately wants to have the last word (I will not reveal what the ‘’attempt’’ of that last word was, because of people who haven’t yet read it). It is a real-time battle between a weak, tortured, disobedient individual and the invincible force of nature.
He doesn’t want Christian (or stoic) acceptance. He feels insulted, crushed, and rejected by reality – but he refuses to submit. He refuses to obediently become the victim of cosmic harmony. If Ippolit has to die young, at least the world will not have his acceptance.
I started feeling the same wish for rebellion. However, my rebellion was closer to Nastasya Filippovna’s or that of the underground man – I wanted to express my agency and free will against the world that crushes me, even if that meant acting against my self-interests.
What is interesting is that all of my life events presented here happened before reading Dostoevsky. It sometimes feels like he sees right through us.