The Face of the Other in Idiot

The Face of the Other in IdiotAuthor(s): Leslie A. JohnsonSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 867-878Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500468 .

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LESLIE A. JOHNSON

The Face of the Other in Idiot

"Just what does it mean, this fa-ce . . . ?" Evgenii Pavlovich asks himself in the last pages of Idiot (p. 485).' Evgenii Pavlovich has just come away from a last meeting with Prince Myshkin, to whom he has given an exhaustive, and gratuitous, accounting of the prince's misconduct. The prince, of course, is more than willing to accept the blame. All he can plead in his defense is the face of Nastas'ia Filipovna. "But there was something else," he urges, "something which you left out because you don't know it: I had looked upon her flce! Even that first morning in the portrait I could not withstand it" (p. 484). Such extraordinary susceptibility to the human face puzzles Evgenii Pavlovich. For all his perspicuity, this self-appointed raisonneur has a blind spot-even though he soon laughs off the prince's words as the raving of a "poor idiot!" (p. 485). His baffled question, however, only serves to reiterate an issue that the entire novel in one way or another has posed from the opening pages: What is the meaning of the human face?

Despite its strategic position on the verge of the denouement, and notwithstanding Dostoev- skii's emphatic use of italics to cue the reader, Evgenii Pavlovich's question has not provoked scholarly attention.2 His curt dismissal, for all its overbearing condescension and defensiveness, seems to have closed the matter-even for generations of polyphonically attuned critics. Yet the dramatic structure of this novel crucially implicates the meaning of the human face; it informs a variety of readings, from the theological to the feminist; it may even contribute to the theoretical debate concerning the nature of Dostoevskian narrative. In the present study, I hope to lay the groundwork for such future discussions by showing how the face structures the action-indeed the very idea of action-in this novel and by clarifying how the prince's susceptibility to the face is the very mark of his much-disputed goodness. For what the face means in Idiot has everything to do with how the face is regarded. Dostoevskii's notion of the good in this, his most ethical, novel is a way of seeing the face of the other.

The human face functions at many levels of the novel's organization. Most obviously, it figures in the system of pictorial imagery.3 The portrait of Nastas'ia Filipovna, for example, provides a recurrent image of a face that is alternately coveted and spurned as it passes from hand to hand. The closed, suspicious gaze of the Rogozhin family portraits arrests Nastas'ia as well as the prince. Indeed the novel is scarcely underway before the prince suggests as the subject for a painting the face of a condemned man a minute before his death. "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb" (1521) by Hans Holbein the Younger figures as an image of insurmountable mor- tality in many discussions of the novel. For those readers (and characters) who have never seen it, this painting is conjured only by Ippolit's verbal description. Lingering on the battered condi-

1. Fedor M. Dostoevskii, Idiot. Polnoe sobrantie sochinienii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973), vol. 8. Citations are from this edition. Translations are my own. I wish to thank the editors of Slavic Review for honoring my request to cite from the novel in English, as well as Russian. My reading depends, in part, on retrieving the etymological wisdom of key Russian words such as prilichie and r azlichat'. It may be that a discourse on difference in relation to the hurnan face could only be discerned in Dostoevskii by a reader who is not a native speaker of Russian and who has had to work the boundary between these two languages to speak her mind.

2. Although Robert L. Jackson does not confront this questioni directly, he discusses the face in relation to the "moral-aesthetic spectrum" in Dostoevskii. See Dostoevsky's Quest fior OIr: A Study of His Philosophy of Art (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), esp. 58ff.

3. For a discussion of painting in the novel, see Tatiana Goerner, "The Theme of Art and Aesthetics in Dostoevsky's The Idiot," Ulbandus Review3t 59 (1972): 79- 82, and Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form, 66--68 and 78-79.

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tion of Christ's face, Ippolit prompts us to ponder not only the meaning of the mortal body, but the meaning of a violated face as well.4

At the level of dramatic representation, the face is central to the semiotics of gesture in Idiot.5 Characters are revealed far more through the use of facial detail than through such devices as inner monologue or erlebte Rede. This stance of limited omniscience marks a shift away from the narration of states of soul or moments of self-consciousness-the realm of interiority- toward the evocation of the face as the emblem of exteriority, the sign of an origin radically other than and outside of ourselves. A different narrative decorum is operating in this novel, one that resists invading the consciousness of the other, preferring instead to let the other reveal herself, dissemble himself, through his or her own face.6 Gestures, such as blushing or the crooked smile, are scrupulously represented, while a look or glance (vzgliad) has the full-fledged status of an action fraught with consequence. David Danow highlights the communicative role of such mimetic details in Dostoevskii's work, but their importance goes further. Such gestures as hiding one's face or averting one's eyes also raise the issue of what it means to have a face, to exist as a faced being.

One consequence of the preference for external description is the role of the face as a screen onto which unacknowledged psychic contents are projected. Dramatizing what psychoanalysis calls projection or projective identification, Dostoevskii uses the face of the other to show up the beam in the eye of the beholder. When, for example, Evgenii Pavlovich recoils from Ippolit's face (p. 316), he betrays his own spiteful, nihilistic impulses. When, on the other hand, Aglaia feels that the prince is looking through her (p. 287), her face mirrors his idealized image of woman. Because he cannot separate this projection from Aglaia's own face, he fails, until it is too late, to see the jealousy that is written all over it.

The face, however, is more than a dramatic or psychological device. Characters in this novel preeminently are their faces. Deistvuiushchie litsa, they tend to realize the metaphor of this conventional designation, to comport themselves literally as "acting faces," so that the entire novel may be viewed as an exploration of a primordial event: face-to-face encounter. This event-which I would argue is the basic unit of the narrative-is not a corollary of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic principle. For Bakhtin, the vis-a-vis is a dramatic requirement of the Menip- pean genre, whereby characters countenance each other so that their voices may clash. In Idiot characters respond to each other's faces before the polyphonic bickering begins.7 Their words and deeds may be ideological, but what matters first is that they take place in and sometimes even at or to the face of another. What, for example, would Nastas'ia's gesture signify if she were to burn the money in private, apart from the wincing faces of her guests? Her action is, and is intended to be, a slap in the face, and such slaps reverberate scene after scene, as the face of the other is assaulted, spat upon, mocked, whipped, unmasked. These slaps arise not from a dia- lectical or even from a dialogical movement, but rather from the suppression or denial of an

4. For an extended meditation on this painting which takes its point of departure from Ippolit's description see Julia Kristeva, "Holbein's Dead Christ," trans. Leon S. Roudiez, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 238-269.

5. David K. Danow, "Semiotics of Gesture in Dostoevskian Dialogue," Russian Literature 8 (1980): 41-75, convincingly argues that nonverbal forms of communication, such as gesture or silence, are full- fledged dialogic elements.

6. In the view of Robin Feuer Miller, the narrative strategy of limited omniscience is a Gothic device to excite the reader's sense of mystery for as long as possible. See Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 103. This manipulation of the reader, however, is not an end in itself. Limited omniscience has positive significance in relation to the face, that sign of otherness behind which, in an absolute sense, one cannot go.

7. If one shows one's face before one says one's word--that is, if the face is not on the order of a sign in a system of signifiers, but is instead the unique sign or signal of the one who signifies his or her own self- then Bakhtin's view that dialogue is the ultimate principle of Dostoevskii's work may be misleading, at least in relation to this novel.



The Fact of the Other in Idiot 869

antecedent ethical response. Either the characters act to keep open the gap that separates them from the other-deferring to the other's difference, submitting to the revelation of otherness that is the face-or they act to suppress that difference, to collapse the other into the totality of appar- ent harmony (the "chorus" of being, p. 352) or the totalizing chaos of war.

In Idiot Dostoevskii intended to tell the story of a "positively beautiful (or good) human being," but critics typically invoke extratextual standards to evaluate the actions of the prince and they rarely agree about his goodness.8 Once we acknowledge the prominence given to the face, however, and recognize that face-to-face encounter is always, no matter how this fact may be dodged or subverted, a moral relation, a specifically textual criterion opens up whereby the actions of the characters may be evaluated. This criterion enables us to identify what is ethical about the prince's conduct. Certainly he has flaws, illusions, and unconscious motives, but, insofar as he is consciously susceptible to the face of the other and holds himself responsible before it, his actions are morally engaged and invite moral interpretation.

The prince, as noted earlier, dates his susceptibility to the face of Nastas'ia from "that first morning." Yet if we return to that morning and consider the context in which the portrait makes such an impression, we find his susceptibility decidedly less fatuous than Evgenii Pavlovich sup- poses. In fact, the prince is susceptible to the face per se. At breakfast with the Epanchins he even alludes to the face in connection with some sort of teaching. This teaching, which must have important consequences for an assessment of his conduct, has never been examined criti- cally, even though its content may be gleaned from the table talk and substantiated on the basis of his actions elsewhere.

Adelaida brings the matter up when she remarks that the prince is "a philosopher come to teach us." Whatever the register of her intonation, the prince takes her at her word. "Maybe you're right," he replies, "maybe I really am, as you say, a philosopher, and who knows? Maybe I really do have an idea to teach . . . really, maybe I do" (p. 51). The prince does not specify what his idea is, but Adelaida has already indicated what she believes he can teach her. An ama- teur painter in search of a subject, she complains that she doesn't have a good eye-literally, "I don't know how to look"-whereas "the prince learned how to look while he was abroad." Then she turns to him with a direct, if arch, appeal: "teach us, please" (p. 50). The prince does not respond immediately-he has not, after all, been on the grand tour-but he is in fact a mas- ter of one kind of seeing. Soon, when he instructs Adelaida on his idea for a painting, his allu- sion to a teaching and his susceptibility to the face converge in an unusual image.

"Depict the face of a condemned man one minute before the fall of the blade" (p. 54). The prince takes this subject from the execution in Lyon, an event fresh in his mind from his talk with the general's lackey. Hardly the most genteel topic for a ladies' breakfast-yet it is greeted by incomprehension, rather than dismay. "What do you mean, the face? . . . Only the face? .... That's a strange subject" (p. 54). Dostoevskii underscores Adelaida's perplexity: "But how should this face be depicted? Just like that, as just a face'? But what sort of face is it?" (p. 55). To which the prince elliptically replies: "Then [the prisoner] glanced in my direction, I looked upon his face and understood everything" (p. 55). The singular sweep of this claim, together with Adelaida's consternation, suggests that what the prince has come to teach is a way of seeing the human face.

Adelaida's perplexity anticipates Evgenii Pavlovich's inability to see what the face means. Had the prince suggested a landscape, a still life, even a portrait, then Adelaida, that artistic daughter of good family and amiable disposition, would have known how to see it. The genre would have specified the tropes by which she could thematize and appropriate her subject. For this reason she needs more information: "But what sort of face is it'?" For her, seeing is a kind of reading. She wants physical, even psychological, detail, the lineaments of a physiognomy, a generic, and therefore a readable, face. The prince's answer indicates that he views the matter quite differently. Instead of specifying "what sort of face" she is to paint, he elaborates his re-

8. "Izobrazit' polozhitel'no prekrasnogo cheloveka"; see letter to S. A. Ivanova, 13 January 1868, in Dostoevskii, Pis'ma v 4-kh tomakh, ed. A. S. Dolinin (Moscow: Academiia, 1928-1959) 2:71.



870 Slavic Review

sponse to a, however fleeting, relationship, a face-to-face encounter with a person about to die. Adelaida's way of looking decrees that the face be viewed as an object situated in a field of reference. How is she to paint only a face? Although the prince provides some "accessory" detail (p. 56), his passionate account shows that for him the painting must constitute an experience, implicate the subjectivity of the viewer, awaken his or her ethical response in the presence of a face in extremis.

Can the perception of a represented image in fact constitute such an event?9 The prince hopes that it can, for he claims that such a painting would be useful (p. 55). The thinking of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas offers important insight into the prince's project. Levinas, for whom the face is a central philosophical issue, argues that the good is a kind of vision: "Ethics is the spiritual optics." "' Prior to any code of behavior or calculus of utility, ethics for Levinas arises in the recognition of my responsibility before the other, that is, in my ability to respond to the face that turns toward me in need. For the prince, as for Levinas, the other may be any other, the face that of a murderer or a beautiful woman. As a subject for a painting, however, the prince has good reason for finding the face of a condemned man especially instructive."

First, this face provides a stark image of otherness per se. "There they are, ten thousand of them," the prince can imagine the convict saying, "and none of them is being executed, but they're going to execute me" (p. 55). Such a face, moreover, paraded before "ten thousand eyes" (p. 55), lays bear the stark vulnerability of the other. The face, says Levinas, "is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence" -ineluctable violence for the convict who has nowhere to hide. 12 Yet the vivid account of his head rolling into the bucket points to the absolute difference between the face and the flesh from which it shows itself. The face breaks the totality of language. It is the one metaphysical sign, flashing from a region beyond the reach of the assailant. If I assail it with my mind, then my comprehending grasp captures a type, a physiognomy, not the face that alone gives sign of this other. If I assail it with brute force, then my appropriating grasp possesses an object, a head, not this face that reveals itself only in a halo- space of inviolability. Up there on the scaffold the face of the condemned man signals a locus of subjectivity so literally transcendent as to configure the idea of infinity. The prince hints as much in his final instruction to Adelaida: "Cross and face-that's the painting" (p. 56). Again Levinas provides the relevant gloss: "In the access to the face there is certainly also an access to the idea of God." '3 The spectacle of execution, in which the transcendent other vanishes into the immanence of flesh, is thus blasphemous as well as obscene. But this realization would not be the final word of the prince's teaching. What he understood when the convict turned in his direction was his own responsibility (p. 55). To look upon the face that turns toward me, yet not to answer its appeal-this challenge in the vocative that exceeds the system of language because no one can answer it but me-is to find myself guilty. The prince deems that such a painting would be useful precisely because it would confront the viewer with the crux of his-and Levinas's-ethical

9. Joseph Leo Koerner deals with this and related questions in "Rembrandt and the Epiphany of the Face," Res 12 (Autumn 1986): 5-32. Koerner's work suggests one reason for Dostoevskii's appreciation of Rembrandt.

10. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 78. Throughout this study, my approach to the face has been inspired by the thinking and language of Levinas, for whom Dostoevskii, in turn, has been an acknowledged inspiration.

11. Jackson, Dostoevsky's Quest for Form, 78-79, comments on the face of the condemned man as a subject for a painting. Because he situates his discussion in terms of Dostoevskii's aesthetic speculations, rather than the prince's teaching, he mistakes the subject as one for "ordinary vision," "entirely appropriate to [Adelaida's] surface realism."

12. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Co- hen (Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 86.

13. Ibid., 92.




teaching: Utterly vulnerable, the face of the other is at the same time inviolable and magisterial, the very origin, as Levinas says, of the commandment "thou shalt not kill." "

If the prince does not put forth a teaching in so many words, his actions eloquently bespeak one. It is as if, having "understood" the meaning of his encounter with the condemned man, he determined to put that meaning into practice, to receive the faces that turn in his direction to the best of his ability. This ethical way of seeing, an ethic or etiquette of facing, is characterized by a special regard for the face. The English word regard, denoting respect as well as vision, conveys some sense of this activity. A better designation, however, is the Russian word prilichie, where the idea of face (lich-, from lik) lies at the root of good conduct.

Prilichie is a key word in the lexicon of Idiot, yet it is not easily translated. Insofar as prilichie pertains to social conventions, it signifies propriety, decorum, that which enhances or conforms to one's own social place or face. The prince certainly honors this meaning: Much to the relief of Mme. Epanchina, he does not need to have a napkin tied around his neck (p. 45). Yet he also observes a "higher decorunm" (p. 453), according to which he is summoned to ethical conduct literally by and in the presence of the face of another. The fluctuation between these two interconnected meanings-between prilichie as (sometimes empty) social convention and as that ethical awareness of the other on which the experience of sociality ultimately depends- contributes a characteristically Dostoevskian ambiguity whenever the word occurs. This ambiguity is not simply a matter of irony, as when the scandalmongering Lebedev disapproves of "bad form" (neprilichno, as in p. 197 or p. 213). Totskii, that high priest of good taste, recoils from the "unseemly" escapades at Nastas'ia's party (neprilichn[o], as in p. 122 and p. 149), yet when he confesses his glamorous "worst deed" before her eyes, his prilichie is exposed as a flagrant disregard for the humiliated face of the other. In the prince's case, on the other hand, action out of regard for the face sometimes entails a breach of decorum. Talking with General Epanchin's lackey, he ignores the conventional facelessness of a man in livery. He simply cannot sit in the presence of a face as if that face were part of the scenery. Ironically, the lackey, having internalized the code of propriety with well-nigh Sartrean bad faith, at first deems it "absolutely improper" to be addressed to his face (p. 18). By the end of the scene, however, his transformed face, "sweetened" or "softened" into susceptibility according to an untranslatable epithet- umilivsh(ee)sia litso (p. 21)-suggests some of the significance of the prince's etiquette. By seeing this servant, the prince enfaces him, elicits from a faceless flunky his uniquely sovereign, transcendent sign. Elsewhere the prince may grieve that he "lacks the proper [prilichnogo] gesture" (p. 283) of Evgenii Pavlovich. His kind of prilichie, however, is the true mark of his princeliness, the prerogative of one whose high regard and courtesy, as in fairy tales of transformation, can restore the face of the lowly, the insulted, and the injured.

This early face-to-face encounter illustrates the first consequence of the prince's ethical regard: its power to transform. People act differently when they come face-to-face with the prince. His regard alters the space between, renders it more intersubjective and conducive to communication-a space where they feel safe enough to reveal themselves and experience their own truth.'5 Time and again, the motley crew of misfits and bruised souls, so burdened by shame or habituated to buffoonery that they hardly know who they are, gravitate toward the prince's face. "Who knows," writes Ippolit, "maybe I've come to Pavlovsk in the main just to meet with him" (p. 322). When, in what Vladimir Jankelevitch would call the "desperado of desespoir," 16 p- polit "bid[s] farewell to Man," he stares at the prince a full ten seconds, asserting "I want to look into your eyes" (p. 348). Nastas'ia feels the same: "I'm looking at you for the last time, the

14. Ibid., 87. 15. The prince's way of regarding the other is analogous to the enabling receptivity of the psycho-

therapist. Each creates an intersubjective space for the revelation of the other, but, unlike the prince, the therapist makes a distinction between being responsible to, and being responsible for, the client. This limits intervention to the realm of the symbolic.

16. Vladimir Jankelevitch, Le pardon (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967), 6.



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last time!" she exclaims, "hungrily peer[ing] into his face" (p. 382). Dostoevskii leaves it to Keller, the self-styled stylist, to find the right words for the prince's way of enfacing: "It's a pleasure just to behold your good nature," he remarks, "a pleasure to sit and talk. . . . [knowing that] such an exceedingly virtuous person is before me" (pp. 257-258). On the one hand, the long, drawn-out superlative serves as a ploy to con the prince out of some money. The word Keller uses for person, however, is also the word forface [litso]. Keller's compliment designates the face of the prince as the agent of his virtue-it is literally a "most well-acting face," that acts or works for good. 7

The transforming agency of the prince's face is most poignantly evident the morning of his aborted wedding. Although his regard cannot stop the suicidal impulse of Nastas'ia, it does transform the mob outside the house. Speaking "delicately," inviting several of the intruders to "do him the honor of favoring him with a visit," he treats these ruffians as honored guests, taming them by his "extraordinarily decorous" regard (p. 494). The intersubjective space that opens up when the prince faces them seems to become distorted upwards, in an eminently non- euclidean way, so that the prince, much to their amazement (p. 494), receives the revelation of their faces, rather than intimidating them with the condescending presence of his own.'8 Keller and Lebedev are astounded by the change they witness: A faceless mob has become a society of faced men. Eventually these guests even discover enough prilichie of their own to feel ashamed before the face of the jilted groom and to leave him alone.

On the mundane, or mondaine, level, good manners have lubricated the social machinery. Yet the differentiation of a hydra-headed mob into separate faces and thus into ethically nascent persons-an act, etymologically speaking, of raz-lich-enie-has a deeper meaning. The story about the peasant mother who rejoices at her infant's first smile (pp. 183- 184), a parable that the prince tells Rogozhin to illustrate the meaning of faith, suggests that the response to the face is a protoreiigious event. Thus when the mother likens her joy to that of God on receiving the tears of a penitent sinner, she makes an illuminating connection: Susceptibility to the face evinced by the infant's smile is analogous to an ethical transformation (the sinner's repentance), and the gestures which signal the transformation of sinner and baby (tears and smile) both imply a dawning awareness of transcendence (the otherness of God and of mother as created in the image of God).

In psychoanalytic terms, the infant's smile is the first social act, the inauguration of specifically interpersonal experience. '9 The smiling infant no longer experiences the mother exclusively as breast, that is, as the immanent extension of its own needs, but also as an other, exterior yet coming forward through the openness of her face. This dawning susceptibility to the face is already an ethical way of seeing, for to smile is to greet the other rather than to grab the object, to make room for the other as a separate being. The face of the other is thus the most irrefutable token we have of the holy-that which transcends us and calls us to account.20 Sensing such an implication, the prince finishes his parable by urging Rogozhin: "The essence of religious feeling is not to be construed through some sort of reasoned argument or some kind of crime or misdemeanor" (p. 184). On the contrary, religious feeling inheres in an experience of transcendence as commonplace-and every bit as challenging-as their present stance, face-to-face, on

17. I deliberately employ the language of the icon. The relation between the psychology of icon vener- ation and the ethics of facing is the subject of a forthcoming study.

18. Compare this action of the prince's face with that of the high society guests who condescend at the Epanchin soiree. Identified variously as "stupendous," "important," or "higher" personages or faces (pp. 443-447), these characters inspire a kind of Mesopotamian awe that obliterates the face of the other, rather than eliciting it.

19. See, for example, Michael Eigen, "On the Significance of the Face," Psychoanalytic Review 71 (1984): 427-441.

20. See Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 124-.127, for a discussion of the Tselem, or image of God, in Hebrew thought. Especially relevant to the prince's conduct is a quotation from Rabbi Joshua ben Levi: "A procession of angels pass before [a] man when he is traveling, and the heralds proclaim before him, saying: Make room for the image (eikonion) of God" (125, author's emphasis).




the landing (p. 182). The message, however, is lost on Rogozhin, whose possessiveness and jealousy tragically obscure his sense of otherness. If the prince's "most well-working face" trans- forms the rowdy mob, it fails to work a lasting miracle on Rogozhin.

The relationship between Rogozhin and the prince cannot, of course, be reduced only to ethical terms. Unconscious projections cloud the vision of both and these unconscious meanings must also be taken into account. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of ethical intention, the prince acts toward Rogozhin as he does toward the mob. He tries to welcome Rogozhin's face- virtually undifferentiated from the closed face of the ancestral portraits-into sociality, tries, so to speak, to enface the beast. Rogozhin's name accords with this idea. "Ni k rozhe rogozha, ni k litsu epancha" goes an old Russian saying signifying something unsuitable or inappropriate.2' Rudolf Neuhauser employs this saying to enrich the semantic range of surnames in Idiot, but even more intriguing is the connection this saying makes between the idea of decorum or seem- liness and the face. Moreover, the saying invites us to identify the rozha in Rogozhin's name as an indicator of his distinctly undecorous conduct. Russian words for face may be mapped in terms of ethical capacity or commitment, ranging from obraz Bozhii, the divine image where the good is unimpeded, to litso, the face as the site of ethical accountability, to rozha, the mug or puss with its flagrant disregard for the face of the other.2 The conduct of a rozha is blatantly neprilichno; it is prone to disgrace itself (p. 95); from it prilichie is neither expected nor considered due. If "beauty is as beauty does," then Rogozhin conducts himself like a rozha at the pavilion, when he brays at the officer who has just been whipped across the face: "Ugh! You really got it, didn't you! Your mug's all bloody!" (p. 291). Rogozhin revels in this spectacle of dishonor, the collapse of intersubjective space that is the very definition of scandal in Dostoev- skii. Not for nothing does he remember this scene when Nastas'ia has been reduced to immanent object (corpse) and the intersubjective space still open between him and the prince is about to collapse into autistic terror and delirium (p. 506).

Reflexively avoiding the ethical engagement of face-to-face encounter, Rogozhin chal- lenges the action of the prince's regard and the prince must strain to discern or differentiate Rogozhin's face from his rozha. On the stairwell, for example, the prince "discern[s]" someone in the niche, reaches in and draws Rogozhin closer to the light in order "to see the face" (p. 195). On the park bench he moves over "almost point-blank" in order to "discern Rogozhin's pale face" in the gloom (p. 301). Whatever else the prince may be looking for, his attempt to bring himself into the presence of Rogozhin's face is also an attempt to draw Rogozhin into intersubjective space, to awaken in this closed being some regard for the other.23 For the most part, Rogozhin avoids ethical vision. The one time we do witness his deferring to the prince, however-when he renounces Nastas'ia at enormous self-sacrifice-this submission to the realm of intersubjectivity is explicitly connected both to the opening up of space and to a change of face: "Suddenly his whole face was transfigured. . . . 'I step aside!'" (pp. 185-186). In this singular instance, moral responsiveness is explicitly equated with the event of enfacement: Rogozhin renounces his rozha. Once the prince is out of sight, Rogozhin ceases to respect his exteriority (p. 174). Soon he takes a knife to the prince's very face, assailing the origin of ethical commandment.

If the first mode of the prince's ethics or etiquette, action that elicits the face of the other, involves something of the enabling receptivity of maternal caring, elsewhere his prilichie is more interventionist. Many of the faces that turn toward him are excruciatingly vulnerable-to shame, to insult, to outright violence-exposed to that slap in the face which, as Lebedev well

21. Rudolf Neuhauser, " Semnantisierung formaler Elemente im Idiot," Dostoevsky Stuidies [Klagcn- furt] 1 (1980): 47-63.

22. After the rozha comes the rylo, that encephalized surface of the body by which a beast invades and appropriates its environment with no awareness of the other. This degraded face, however, is more pertinent to the universe of Nikolai Gogol' than to that of Dostoevskii.

23. Note the language-a virtual repudiation of otherness-of Rogozhin's surly reply when the prince inquires, "Have you completely moved in here?": "Yes, I'm at home here [literally, I am at home with myself, or, I am at myself]. Where else should I be?" (172).



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knows, can be moral as well as physical (p. 438). Rogozhin's uplifted knife traces a paradigmatic gesture in Idiot. Somebody's hand is always drawn back, ready to strike and, thus, to collapse the intersubjective space constituted by ethical regard, but few besides the prince are prepared to stay that hand.

Thus the second mode of the prince's prilichie involves action to prevent the defacement of the other. Here he exercises the princely prerogative to spare or show mercy. "You spared the man" (p. 259), exclaims Keller after the prince excuses his mercenary motives. Since a man or person is preeminently a litso for the prince, what he actually spares on this occasion is Keller's face. Later, at his last interview with General Ivolgin, the prince struggles to "keep a straight face" out of a similar sense of prilichie (p. 414). By now the general's shame is so acute that he cannot even show his face without the protection, literally, of a bold-faced lie. Lebedev under- stands this perfectly, but he will not stay his hand and countenance the general's face-saving antics. On the contrary, after the wallet disappears, he intensifies the general's mortification- "to shame him," he explains, in a parody of the prince's teaching, "to see what sort of physiognomy he'll make, for there's a lot to be learned from the face" (p. 375). When it comes to faces, however, there is no neutral scientific gaze. Lebedev's looking is unethical action. By pretend- ing-for days-that the wallet has not been returned, he spares neither face nor person, and the general finally dies not so much from apoplexy as from a loss of face.

The defacement of General Ivolgin indicates that a "moral" slap in the face can be a mortal blow. Thus, his mortified face (p. 418, p. 429) implicitly parallels Ippolit's description of Hol- bein's Christ, whose face "has not been spared one iota" (p. 339). Ippolit and Rogozhin, each in his own way obsessed with the body, see in this painting the violence of the "laws of nature." Defacement, however, is not an act of nature. In Ippolit's words, the face of Christ "has been frightfully smashed by blows"; "it is all swollen, with terrible, puffy black and blue marks en- crusted with blood" (p. 339). Christ's face has suffered not natural, but ethical, indifference. Nature will metabolize and reabsorb a head, that is, a volume of matter, but only human conduct can deface a face, because the face signals itself from the surface of being only in an intersubjective dimension. Not a physical entity or a phenomenon of being, the face, to invoke yet another formulation of Levinas, is "otherwise than being" [autrement qu'etre], the sign of transcen- dance that shows itself only to the extent that it is regarded and spared.24

The prince, who had seen the original in Basel,25 may have discerned such a meaning in the Holbein painting, for violence to the face is something he can not tolerate. Scarcely arrived in Petersburg, he is already intervening to defend Varia Ivolgin, whom Gania is about to haul off and crack squarely across the face (p. 99). Aleksandra was right: The prince's teaching is "hardly quietism" (p. 56), for he takes the "full brunt" of Gania's blow on his own face (p. 99). In the same way he rises to defend Nastas'ia when the officer whom she has lashed across the face is, in Keller's extraordinary locution, about "to exercise his pugilist's right to a public bout with a woman" (p. 291)! Again he absorbs the blow, but once Nastas'ia is gone he puts the lie to any snickering about chivalry by stretching his trembling hands towards the officer (p. 291). Now the prince encounters not a defacing assailant, but another victim whose face has been bloodied (p. 291). The prince's outstretched hands are a characteristic gesture of suppliance commingled with succor (p. 318; p. 320), a gesture by which he takes responsibility for a face defaced.

24. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu'e^tre ou au-dela de 1'essence, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978).

25. The painting mentioned by the prince at breakfast with the Epanchins (55) is assumed to be the Holbein original that he (and Dostoevskii) saw in Basel. While in Basel, however, Dostoevskii also viewed a painting by Hans Fries, "The Beheading of St. John the Baptist" (1514), in which the saint's head is depicted with open eyes (Goerner, "Theme of Art and Aesthetics," 82). Because the Holbein painting is not explicitly named in this scene, which graphically deals with faces and decapitated heads, Dostoevskii may have conflated these two paintings in the designation "Basel painting" (55).




Such a way of looking is never that of an observer, of one, such as Evgenii Pavlovich, who takes an ironic stance of nonintervention.26 For the prince, to have countenanced defacement is already to be responsible for it, to reach out in a gesture of restitution, to reinstate an intersubjective space in which the injured face may show itself again. This moral susceptibility to the face of the other is both profoundly moving and thoroughly consistent. The problem is that the other characters seldom understand it, let alone evince it themselves. They do not practice the "spiritual optics" of Levinas, and, at bottom, this is the reason they experience the prince's intervention as disruptive. They tolerate it during the family feud because brother and sister basically see eye to eye. They overlook it at the pavilion because an "idiot" cannot give satisfaction. But in the last hostile standoff between Aglaia and Nastas'ia, the prince's intervention is tragically mis- understood. Aglaia is clearly the aggressor, determined to deface her rival, and her slightest shudder of revulsion is a slap in Nastas'ia's face (p. 470). When, however, Nastas'ia finally sum- mons the prince to choose between them, her triumph is to see Aglaia fleeing the room "with her face buried in her hands" (p. 475). The prince is acutely susceptible to both injured faces: to Aglaia's-"Is it possible," he implores Evgenii Pavlovich, "that her face is the same as it was then, when she ran out of the room?" (p. 484)-and to Nastas'ia's "broken, disfigured face," not hidden but staring "straight at him" (p. 475). Because Nastas'ia's face remains before him, he cannot resist its call (unlike Rogozhin, who delivers a coup de grace by throwing water in it [p. 475]). Soon the prince is "gently strokjing] her face and cheeks" (p. 475), as if by some miracle of tenderness, some ultimate pr ilichie, he could put this "broken, disfigured face" back together again.

By this time, the prince is no longer intervening to protect a face from defacement. Now he acts in what can best be described as an effort to forestall the effacement of Nastas'ia Filipovna. The treatment of the face in Idiot suggests that beyond the menace of defacement looms another, more mystical horror: the disappearance of the face as the signal of the other. Dostoevskii prowled the boundaries of experience with Hermetic restlessness, devising a poetics of the "threshold," experimenting with eschatological or "boundary" genres.'7 In this novel one of the boundaries he explores is defined by the difference between the face as the revelation of transcendence, testifying to a place forever beyond our reach, and the face that has collapsed into mere surface, slipped not away from but precisely into the immanence of our horizon.

This fall from transcendence into immanence concerns the prince from the opening scenes, when he dwells on the incomprehensible difference between the face that still looks out in mute appeal and the decapitated head lying in the bucket (p. 56). A measure of the impact of this eschatological event-the ending of a face-is that a character as worldly, as dans son assiette as General Epanchin should dwell on it as well, making it the subject of his "worst deed." The general confesses that once in his youth he berated an old woman at the very moment she "was passing away": "I look and something strange is presenting itself: there she sits, her face fixed on me, her eyes bulging-but not a word in response, and it's strange how she keeps looking like that, and sort of swaying." The general is describing a metaphysical catastrophe: The heteroge- neous, intersubjective space between two faces has collapsed into the homogeneous, horizontal space of a subject and its constituted object. To this day the experience makes him "feel

26. Dostoevskii generally makes a semantic distinction between the looking that objectifies or observes [nabliudat'] and the looking that engages the intersubjective dimension (words built on the root gliad-, such as vzgliad, gliadet', or vzglianut'). Somewhere in between are verbs for watching or scrutiniz- ing (smotret', vsmatrivat'sia). The prince is rarely associated with verbs of observation, which presume ethical noninvolvement.

27. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rostel (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973), 142. On the theme of liminality, see Sidney Monas, "Across the Threshold: The Idiot as a Petersburg Tale" in New Essays on Dostoevsky, ed. Malcolm Jones and Garth Terry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). See also, Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of A Writer and the Tradition of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).



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weird"-yet it has not taught him an ethical form of regard. The faces turned toward him now are only flattering objects, their otherness the merest stain on the horizon of his desire. Soon the general turns even this confession to his advantage, "polish[ing] off his champagne" with Gogolian "self-satisfaction" (pp. 126-127).

The prince is more susceptible to the epiphany of the face and the horror of its effacement at least in part because of his epilepsy. The epileptic seizure is described as an effacement: "The face is radically disfigured, especially the look. Tremors and convulsions take possession of the body and all the features of the face" (p. 195). An eschatological event, the seizure erupts in an instant (p. 195) and the disfigurement produces in the onlooker "an impression of utterly un- bearable, somehow even mystical horror" (p. 195). Of course, the epileptic prince is also se- duced by the visionary ecstasy preceding the seizure-and his longing for a "higher synthesis," for the eradication of difference and a "merging" with being (p. 188), needs to be examined in relation to the problems of anonymity and facelessness raised in the novel. Yet epilepsy also serves the prince as a reminder and a premonition of the fragility of the face, that can shatter like a porcelain vase.

Other factors, however, may also account for the prince's susceptibility. Adelaida's assump- tion that the prince "learned to look" while abroad is deeply ironic, for if he did train in Switzerland, a sanitarium was his school. The prince came to Schneider's, on his own admis- sion, "almost out of my mind" (p. 22), and over the next four years, as his own face was being elicited, perhaps he learned to recognize the effaced look of madness in the other patients. These broken, disfigured faces could not have signaled their otherness. They would have been unreach- ably "idiotic" or private faces (from the Greek idiotes, a private person), incapable of intersubjectivity, unable to perform the deceptively simple act by which this most unidiotic of princes announces his arrival in Petersburg: "I've simply come to get acquainted, nothing more," he informs the lackey and the lackey's general, to the hilarious consternation of both (pp. 17-18; see also p. 22). But to get acquainted [poznakomit'sia], literally, to give that sign [znak] of one- self by which one is acknowledged as familiar [znakom], is the sovereign signifying act of the face. The prince is all too aware of what it means not to be so acknowledged (as when he is called an idiot behind his back). A face from which the capacity to signal itself is disappearing inspires horror in him, but it also calls him to action to avert such an eclipse. His regard for Nastas'ia may surely be considered in other terms, but, according to the ethical criteria advanced in this novel, he responds to the call of her face-"I saw your portrait a little while ago. . . . it seemed you were already calling me" (p. 142)-and he acts to keep her on the hither side of madness, to keep her faced.

If Rogozhin is enthralled by Nastas'ia's body, the prince is subjected by her face-not, he informs the Epanchin ladies, because of its peerless beauty so much as for the "suffering" he sees in it (p. 69). If this strikes Lizaveta Prokof'evna as "raving" (p. 69), then she has not understood her guest's "teaching." The value of Nastas'ia's face is that, for all its suffering, it still turns outward. Like the face of that condemned man, it still signals itself. Earlier, examining the portrait with Gania, the prince had mused: "If only she were good! That would save everything!" (p. 32). Nastas'ia's goodness would mean that she is coping with her suffering, that her injured eyes can still hold the face of another in ethical regard. This ethical capacity-perhaps the ultimate test of sanity-is something that the simulacrum of a face cannot divulge. The prince must go to her party, where he beholds Nastas'ia acting out her self-hatred before the indifferent gaze of her guests. Thus when the prince, regarding her with the "sorrowful, severe and penetrating look" of a Russian icon (p. 138), proposes marriage for the honor she would do him, he alone offers Nastas'ia the intersubjective space in which she might recollect her wits and reinhabit her face. No callow or "old-fashioned fantasy" (p. 138), but an informed response to a suffering face motivates him. For the prince also declares that he "recognized a familiar face" (p. 142) in her portrait. Where would he have received a signal [znak] such as this? Perhaps from the cowherd Marie, all but effaced by abuse, yet still responsive to tender regard. Perhaps from the sanitarium patients, flashing signs of fear or rage from the shattered remnants of their faces. Or perhaps, at the deepest and dimmest remove, from the projected image of himself as a child,




orphaned and abused like Nastas'ia (p. 447), almost out of his mind, trapped in the incom- municating chaos of a traumatized, autistic face.

"Beauty like that is a power," exclaims Adelaida, "with beauty like that you could turn the world upside down!" (p. 69). As it happens, the Petersburg beau monde survives Nastas'ia's face handily. Only the prince cannot "withstand it" (p. 484). The plastic, still integral, beauty of her face only heightens his awareness of an inwardly shattering form, of the excruciating boundary between flickering human regard and the effaced look of madness. As the conviction of her madness deepens, the prince comes positively to "fear her face" (p. 484). Yet so long as she signals her distress, keeps searching, as Lebedev reports (p. 167), for the enabling space of his regard, "her face draw[s] from his heart a whole passion of pity" (p. 289) and he cannot ignore its call (p. 142).8

When the prince shatters the Chinese vase, Lizaveta Prokof'evna hastens to reassure him: "What a catastrophe! The end comes even for a person, and here you are making all this fuss over a clay pot!" (p. 455). This consummately mondaine remark, second nature for a hostess concerned to spare her guest, expresses the prilichie of good breeding. Yet does it not also sug- gest that society, with very little ado, can also countenance the shattering of a person? (Compare the exquisitely mannered indifference of the other guests [p. 445].) Nastas'ia Filipovna's face is such a vase, and it is no secret that she is on the edge. With a hundred thousand rubles about to burst into flame, General Epanchin draws a swift conclusion: "Hasn't she lost her mind?" he whispers to Totskii, who replies, "Didn't I tell you that she always had a tendency that way" (p. 133). For Totskii, Nastas'ia is a connoisseur's delight, with the commodity value of an "un- cut diamond" (p. 149), a gem, that is, without facets, without the face that reveals itself only to ethical regard. For Totskii and nearly every other person (man or woman) in this novel, Nas- tas'ia's face is not a unique sign revealing itself from an origin that transcends any looker. She is a species of thing, a generic signifier, essentially expressible in the grammatical plural. Even Rogozhin, who regards her as incomparable, pluralizes her name: "Da malo 1' Nastasii Fili- povn!" (p. 11). As for the other lookers, indignant, covetous, or merely curious, most of them are indifferent to her in the etymological sense of the word: Bez-raz-lich-ny, they lack the ethical capacity to differentiate her face.

The prince, however, "with his instinctive sense of the higher decorum" (p. 453), cannot remain indifferent in the presence of the face. His primary activity on his brief trajectory through the intersubjective realm is to differentiate, to distinguish and honor the faces that turn toward him. This ethical responsiveness seems preposterous, "almost indecent" (p. 142) by the standards of his milieu. In a world where Zosima's teaching-that each is responsible for all, and I more than all of the others-has not been heard, the problem is nlot that the prince overreacts to the revelation of the face, but rather that so few others practice ethical vision, and so few have any regard for his face.29 Evgenii Pavlovich never lacks the conventionally prilichnii gesture (p. 283) and his insights are considerable, but he does not know how to see the face of the other. "What are you doing to yourself?" he blurts out in the novel's closing pages, as the significance

28. Aglaia in the pique of her jealousy and Evgenii Pavlovich in the presumptuousness of his wit have the wrong subtext for the prince's response to Nastas'ia. The prince would serve Aglaia "with his visor down," as in Aleksandr Pushkin's lyric "Zhil na svete rytsar' bednyi," whereas he openly offers Nastas'ia his face and his regard to forestall the nightmare of her madness. If Pushkin does haunt his relation to Nas- tas'ia, more probably it is the disturbing lyric, "Ne dai mne Bog soiti s uma." This poem seems to mediate the prince's horrified response when Nastas'ia appears at the pavilion. Convinced that she is mad, he sees her as a caged animal, "on a chain, behind iron bars, beneath the stick of a keeper" (p. 289). Pushkin evokes the horror of madness with similar images of beast, chain, iron bars, abusive keepers, and a cruel public come to taunt the crazed poet even as the music goers now madden Nastas'ia and call her an "animal" (p. 290). See A. S. Pushkin, Pol,ioe sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1959), 2:384-386. The prince inflects the self-reference of Pushkin's utterance into the morally enlivened awareness of another: not "God forbid that I go mad . . . ," but "God forbid that she go mad."

29. G. Pomerants, "Kniaz' Myshkin," Sintaksis 9 (1981): 112-167, has felt through the beauty (and goodness) of this character.



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of the prince's impending marriage dawns on him (p. 484). Yet even now, confronted by Prince Myshkin's imploring face, he will not take one step to honor its sign and ameliorate its grief. "Im-poss-ible!" he declares, dismissing the very idea of escorting the prince to the Epanchins. "Spare me these requests, I cannot!" he insists, refusing even to carry a note (pp. 484-485). For Evgenii Pavlovich, the prince presents an "interesting" (p. 485) specimen for disengaged observation, not an incomparable revelation of otherness. "Just what does it mean, this face," he wonders, after facing the prince for the last time before he too is effaced by suffering (p. 485). But "'every few months," we learn in the epilogue, Evgenii Pavlovich visits his sick friend in Switzerland (p. 508). Standing in the presence of that blighted face, "which absolutely [does] not recognize" anyone (p. 510), will he discover the answer to his question?



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The Face of the Other in Idiot