Текст книги "The Idiot"

Автор книги: Федор Достоевский

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FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The Idiot

Translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

with an Introduction by Richard Pevear

Copyright © 2001

ISBN: 1857152549

CONTENTS

Introductionxi

Select Bibliographyxxiv

Chronologyxxvi

Translators' Notesxxxii

THE IDIOT

Part One 3

Part Two 177

Part Three 323

Part Four 459

Notes 617

INTRODUCTION

On a house near the Pitti Palace in Florence there is a plaque that reads: "In this neighborhood between 1868 and 1869 F. M. Dostoevsky completed his novel The Idiot."It is strange to think of this most Russian of writers working on this most Russian of novels while living in the city of Dante. In fact the author's absence from Russia can be felt in the book, if we compare it with his preceding novel, Crime and Punishment(1866), which is so saturated in place, in the streets, buildings, squares, and bridges of Petersburg, that the city becomes a living participant in events. Place has little importance in The Idiot.Petersburg and the residential suburb of Pavlovsk, where most of the action occurs, are barely described. There is little sense of a surrounding world or a wider human community. Russia is present in the novel not as a place but as a question – the essence of Russia, the role of Russia and the "Russian Christ" in Europe and in the world. It was precisely during the four years he spent abroad, from 1867 to 1871, that Dostoevsky brooded most intensely on the fate of Russia, as the exiled Dante brooded on the fate of Florence.

But it would be a mistake to think that this lack of an objective "world" makes The Idiotan abstract ideological treatise. On the contrary, it is perhaps the most physical and even physiological of Dostoevsky's novels. Its events seem to take place internally, not in a spiritual inwardness but within the body, within a body, rendered more by sensation than by depiction. With Crime and Punishment,as the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff wrote recently,* Dostoevsky buried the descriptive novel; in The Idiothe arrived at a new form, expressive of "the inobjective body," which overcomes the dualities of interior and exterior, subjective and objective, physical and psychological. It is given in certain modes of

*In L'Expression du corps chez Dostoevsky("The Expression of the Body in Dostoevsky"), Paris, 2000.

experience: sickness, for instance, is as much subjective as objective; so is violence, and so is life with others, the "invasive" presence of the other (hence the privileged place Dostoevsky gives to doorways and thresholds, to sudden entrances and unexpected meetings). And so, finally, are words spoken and heard, written and read aloud. Dostoevsky concentrates on these modes of experience in The Idiotto the exclusion of almost all else. The novel, broadly speaking, is an exploration of what it means to be flesh.

The idea of the "Russian Christ" is important in The Idiot(and was certainly important to his creator, who repeated Myshkin's words on the subject almost verbatim nine years later in his Diary of a Writer),but a much stronger presence in the novel is the painting that Dostoevsky significantly calls "The Dead Christ" (the actual title is Christ's Body in the Tomb),a work by Hans Holbein the Younger that hangs in the museum of Basel. Dostoevsky places a copy of the painting in the house of the young merchant millionaire Rogozhin. It is discussed twice in the novel, the second time at length and in a key passage. The shape of the painting is unusual: the narrator describes it as being "around six feet wide and no more than ten inches high." It is, in other words, totally lacking in vertical dimension.

Dostoevsky first read about Holbein's painting in Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler(1801), an account of the young author's travels in Europe, modeled on Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey.In a letter written from Basel, Karamzin mentions that he has been to the picture gallery there and "looked with great attention and pleasure at the paintings of the illustrious Holbein, a native of Basel and friend of Erasmus." Of this painting in particular (giving it yet another title) he observes: "In 'Christ Taken Down from the Cross' one doesn't see anything of God. As a dead man he is portrayed quite naturally. According to legend, Holbein painted it from a drowned Jew." That is all. But these few words must have made a strong impression on Dostoevsky. In August 1867, on their way from Baden-Baden to Geneva, he and his young wife made a special stop in Basel to see the painting.

Dostoevsky's wife, Anna Grigorievna, wrote an account of their visit to the museum in her memoirs, published forty years later:

'On the way to Geneva we stopped for a day in Basel, with the purpose of seeing a painting in the museum there that my husband had heard about from someone.

This painting, from the brush of Hans Holbein, portrays Jesus Christ, who has suffered inhuman torture, has been taken down from the cross and given over to corruption. His swollen face is covered with bloody wounds, and he looks terrible. The painting made an overwhelming impression on my husband, and he stood before it as if dumbstruck.. .

When I returned some fifteen or twenty minutes later, I found my husband still standing in front of the painting as if riveted to it. There was in his agitated face that expression as of fright which I had seen more than once in the first moments of an epileptic fit. I quietly took him under the arm, brought him to another room, and sat him down on a bench, expecting a fit to come at any moment. Fortunately that did not happen.'

In a stenographic diary kept at the time of the visit itself, she noted: "generally, it looked so much like an actual dead man that I really think I wouldn't dare stay in the same room with it. But F. admired this painting. Wishing to have a closer look at it, he stood on a chair, and I was very afraid he'd be asked to pay a fine, because here one gets fined for everything."

Each of the three main male characters of the novel – the saintly "idiot" Myshkin, the passionate, earthbound Rogozhin, and the consumptive nihilist Ippolit – defines himself in relation to this painting. The question it poses hangs over the whole novel: what if Christ was only a man? What if he suffered, died, and was left a bruised, lifeless corpse, as Holbein shows him? It is, in other words, the question of the Resurrection. Dostoevsky, who was very careful about the names he gave his characters, calls the heroine of The IdiotNastasya, a shortened form of Anastasia: anastasisis "resurrection" in Greek. Her last name, Barashkov, comes from the Russian word for "lamb."

The name of the novel's hero, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, is also worth considering. It draws a pointed and

oddly insistent comment from the clerk Lebedev on its first mention at the start of the novel: "the name's historical, it can and should be found in Karamzin's History."Karamzin's History of the Russian Statewas one of the most popular books of nineteenth-century Russia. In his Diary of a Writer(1873), Dostoevsky recalls: "I was only ten when I already knew virtually all the principal episodes of Russian history – from Karamzin whom, in the evenings, father used to read aloud to us." He could assume a similar knowledge among his contemporaries. But, as the literary scholar Tatiana Kasatkina pointed out in a recent lecture,* later commentators on The Idiothave generally failed to follow Lebedev's suggestion. Looking in Karamzin's History,we do indeed find the name Myshkin; it belonged not to a prince but to an architect. In 1471 Metropolitan Filipp of Moscow decided to build a new stone Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and Myshkin was one of the two architects called in to build it. It was to be modeled on the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, the biggest in Russia. The architects went to Vladimir, took measurements, and promised to build an even bigger cathedral in Moscow. By 1474 the walls had reached vault level when the addition of a monumental stairway caused the entire structure to collapse. Dostoevsky twice wrote the words "Prince-Christ" in his notebooks for The Idiot.Readers have taken this to be an equation and, like Romano Guardini in Der Mensch und der Glaube (Man and Faith,subtitled "a study of religious existence in Dostoevsky's major novels"), have seen Prince Myshkin as a "symbol of Christ" or, in Tatiana Kasatkina's words, as a man upon whom "the radiance of Christ somehow rests," one who is "meant to stand for, or in some way even replace,the person of Christ for us." Karamzin's account of the architect Myshkin suggests a more ambiguous reading – as indeed does the prince's name itself, which is compounded of "lion" (lev)and "mouse" (mysh).

Dostoevsky began work on The Idiotin September 1867, a month after his visit to the Basel museum, but it was some time before he finally grasped the nature of his hero. His first

*Delivered at Chernogolovka, near Moscow, on May 15, 2000.

notes show the "idiot" as a proud and violently passionate man, a villain, even an Iago, who is to undergo a complete regeneration and "finish in a divine way." After working out a number of plans, he ended his notebook on November 30 with a final resolve: "Detailed arrangement of the plan and beginwork in the evening." Four days later he threw everything out and started again. A new conception of the hero had come to him. He was to be a pure and innocent man from the beginning, a saintly stranger coming from elsewhere, and the drama would lie not in his own inner struggle but in his confrontation with people ("Now I am going to be with people," Myshkin thinks to himself on the train back to Russia) and in the effect of his innocence and purity on others. Instead of going on from the situation of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,as Dostoevsky's early sketches suggested, he leaped to his diametrical opposite.

Dostoevsky described this new conception in a letter to his friend the poet Apollon Maikov: "For a long time now I've been tormented by a certain idea, but I've been afraid to make a novel out of it, because the thought is too difficult, and I'm not ready for it, though it's a thoroughly tempting thought and I love it. The idea is – to portray a perfectly beautiful man.Nothing, in my opinion, can be more difficult than that, especially in our time." He discussed the same idea in a letter written the next day (January 13, 1868) to his favorite niece, Sofya Ivanova. It is important enough to be quoted at length:

'The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man.There is nothing more difficult in the world and especially now. All writers, not only ours, but even all European writers, who have merely attempted to portray the positivelybeautiful, have always given up. Because the task is immeasurable. The beautiful is an ideal, but this ideal, whether ours or that of civilized Europe, is still far from being worked out. There is only one perfectly beautiful person -Christ – so that the appearance of this immeasurably, infinitely beautiful person is, of course, already an infinite miracle. (That is the sense of the whole Gospel of John: it finds the whole miracle in the incarnationalone, in the manifestation of the beautiful alone.) But I've gone on too long. I will only mention that of beautiful persons in Christian literature, the most fully realized is Don Quixote; but he is beautiful solely because he is at the same time ridiculous. Dickens's

Pickwick (an infinitely weaker conception than Don Quixote, but an immense one all the same) is also ridiculous and succeeds only because of that. Compassion is shown for the beautiful that is ridiculed and does not know its own worth – and so sympathy appears in the readers. This arousing of compassion is the secret of humor. Jean Valjean is also a strong attempt, but he arouses sympathy by his terrible misfortune and society's injustice towards him. I have nothing like that, decidedly nothing, and that's why I'm terribly afraid it will be a positive failure.'

At that time he had written only the first seven chapters of part one. They were produced in a single burst of inspiration and sent to his publisher, Mikhail Katkov, who included them in the January 1868 issue of The Russian Messenger.The remaining nine chapters of the first part were finished by the end of February. But Dostoevsky was uncertain about what would follow, and he continued in that uncertainty all the while he was writing the novel. Only as he worked on the fourth and last part did he recognize the inevitability of the final catastrophe. And yet he could write to Sofya Ivanova in November 1868: "this fourth part and its conclusion is the most important thing in my novel, i.e., the novel was almost written and conceived for the novel's denouement."

This novel, which was to be filled with light, which was to portray the positively beautiful, ends in deeper darkness than any of Dostoevsky's other works. What happened here? Some remarks from another letter to Maikov may begin to suggest an answer. Speaking of his own poetic process, he says: "in my head and in my soul many artistic conceptions flash and make themselves felt. But they only flash; and what's needed is a full embodiment, which always comes about unexpectedly and suddenly, but it is impossible to calculate precisely when it will come about; then, once you have received the full image in your heart, you can set about its artistic realization." Dostoevsky's work was always "experimental" in the sense that, between the conception and the full embodiment, he allowed his material the greatest freedom to reveal itself "unexpectedly and suddenly." Despite his passionate convictions, he never imposed an ideological resolution on his work; he was never formulaic. But it is the special nature of The Idiotthat the full

image revealed itself as if with great reluctance and only towards the end of its artistic realization. René Girard was right to say that the failure of the initial idea is the triumph of another more profound idea, and that this prolonged uncertainty gives the novel "an existential density that few works have."* Much of Dostoevsky's distinctive quality as a writer lies in this living relation to his own characters.

Part one of The Idiotintroduces most of the characters of the novel – the three central figures, Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Nastasya Filippovna; the three families of the Epanchins, the Ivolgins, and the Lebedevs – and entangles them in various complex relations. Riddles and enigmas appear from the start, surrounded by rumors, gossip, attempted explanations, analyses by different characters (reasonable but usually wrong). The narrator himself is not always sure of what has happened or is going to happen. When he finished the first part, Dostoevsky still thought that the prince could go on to redeem Nastasya Filippovna and even to "regenerate" the dark Rogozhin. He wrote to Sofya Ivanova: "The first part is essentially only an introduction. One thing is necessary: to arouse a certain curiosity about what will follow ... In the second part everything must be definitively established (but will still be far from explained)." But the second part was slow to come; it was finished only five months later, in July; and in it we immediately sense a change of tone and coloration. It begins under the image of Holbein's "Dead Christ," which appears here for the first time, and of Rogozhin's gloomy, labyrinthine house, a house associated with the castrates and old Russian sectarianism. The prince's humility and compassion acquire a strange ambiguity, and before long, the epilepsy for which he had been treated in Switzerland returns with a violent attack that throws him headlong down the stairs.

Critics have found this shift abrupt and puzzling. But there are hints of it even in the first part, not only in the name Myshkin, which "can and should be found in Karamzin," but in the prince's repeated accounts of executions he has

* Dostoevsky, du double à l'unité,Paris, 1963 (in English, Fyodor Dostoevsky: Resurrection from the Underground,New York, 1997).

witnessed or heard about, and above all in the story of his life in Switzerland, the befriending of the village children, and the death of poor Marie. This story, with its Edenic overtones, has deception at its center, and the deceiver is the prince himself, as he admits without quite recognizing. It is a first variation on one of the central themes of the novel: the difference between love and pity. The relation of the first part to the rest of the novel is one of question and answer, and the question was posed first of all for Dostoevsky himself, who did not know the answer when he started. It is essentially the same question implied in Holbein's painting: what if Christ were not the incarnate God but, in this case, simply a "positively beautiful man," a "moral genius," as a number of nineteenth-century biographers of Jesus chose to portray him, and as Leo Tolstoy was about to proclaim – "a Christ more romantic than Christian," in René Girard's words, sublime and ideal, but with no power to redeem fallen mankind? The prince cannot tell Nastasya Filippovna that her sins are forgiven. What he tells her is that she is pure, that she is not guilty of anything. These apparently innocent words, coming at the end of part one, unleash all that follows in the novel.

The Idiotis constructed as a series of outspoken conversations and exposures, beginning with the very first scene of the novel, the meeting of the prince with Rogozhin and Lebedev on the train to Petersburg, and continuing virtually unbroken till the final scene. The prince, being unguarded and guileless, blurts out things about himself that anyone else would conceal. This is such a winning quality in him that it even wins over the brutish Rogozhin. It also wins over, one after another, the whole procession of people he meets on his arrival in the city, from General Epanchin's valet to the general's private secretary, Ganya Ivolgin, to the general himself, his wife and daughters, to the whole of Ganya Ivolgin's family, and finally to the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. He readily speaks of his illness and "idiocy," tells how he was awakened from mental darkness by the braying of an ass (at which the Epanchin girls make inevitable jokes), reveals his odd obsession with executions and the condemned man's last moments, and when one of the girls asks him to tell about when he was in love, he tells them at

length about his "happiness" in Switzerland. His first words to Nastasya Filippovna, when he comes uninvited to her birthday party, are: "Everything in you is perfection." And his naive directness prompts a similar directness in others, who speak themselves out to him, seek his advice, look for some saving word from him.

But this general outspokenness can also turn scandalous. Ganya Ivolgin repeatedly denounces the prince to his face and once even slaps him. At Nastasya Filippovna's party, a parlor game is played in which each guest (the ladies are excused) must tell the worst thing he has done in his life. On the prince's terrace in Pavlovsk, surrounded by almost the entire cast of characters, a vicious newspaper lampoon about the prince himself is read aloud. And on the same terrace Ippolit reads his "Necessary Explanation," which, among other things, is a direct attack on the prince for his "Christian" humility and meekness.

As one reads, however, and even rather early on, one becomes aware that, together with this outspokenness, there is a great reticence in The Idiot.For all its surprising frankness, there is much that goes unsaid, and what goes unsaid is most important. Olga Meerson has written a witty and penetrating study of this question,* showing how what is normally taboo in society is easily violated in Dostoevsky's work, but as a way of pointing to the greater significance of what his characters pass over in silence. This is a poetics of opening, but hardly of openness.

An ironic variation on the influence of the unsaid is the famous phrase "Beauty will save the world." These words are often attributed to Dostoevsky himself and have been made much of by commentators, but in fact he never said them. Both Ippolit and Aglaya Epanchin refer them to Prince Myshkin, but we never actually hear him say them either. The one time the prince comments on beauty is when he is giving his observations about the faces of Mrs. Epanchin and her daughters. He says nothing of the youngest, Aglaya. The

* Dostoevsky's Taboos,published (in English) in Studies of the Harriman Institute, Dresden-Munich, 1998.

mother asks why, and he demurs: "I can't say anything now. I'll say it later." When she presses him, he admits that she is "an extraordinary beauty," adding: "Beauty is difficult to judge; I'm not prepared yet. Beauty is a riddle." This is the prince's first real moment of reticence in the novel. By the end he will have moved from naïve candor to an anguished silence in the face of the unspeakable.

Everything is a riddle in The Idiot,everything is two-sided, ambiguous. The structure of reality is double: there is the social world of Petersburg and Pavlovsk, and within it a world infinitely higher and lower, both personal and archetypal. Olga Meerson says in the conclusion of her book:

Dostoevsky . . . uses the language of social interactions for non-social purposes. Rather than depicting society, he borrows the sign system of literature – anthropological and fictional – that depicts society, in order to depict and address human conscience, conscious, unconscious, subconscious. Signs of verbal social decorum are transformed by having gained a new function; they no longer apply to the actual social decorum. The latter is constantly and scandalously violated in Dostoevsky precisely by those characters who are exceptionally sensitive to the new, meta-social functions of these signals of decorum.

The social world is relative, ambivalent, comic, "carnivalized," as the critic Mikhail Bakhtin preferred to say – a world in which a polite drawing room turns into a public square. The meta-social world is located in the deepest layers of consciousness, of memory, internal in each of us and at the same time transcending each of us. In this world, characters acquire the qualities of folk-tale heroes and villains, of figures in a mystery play, of angels and demons. There is a captive princess, there is a prince who is called upon to save her, and there is a dark force that threatens them both. The heavenly emissary must deliver the world's soul from bondage, Andromeda from her chains; if he betrays his calling, disaster will follow.

As if to underscore the distance between social realism and his own "realism of a higher sort," Dostoevsky refers to two other stories of fallen women: La Dame aux caméliasby Dumas fils,and Flaubert's Madame Bovary,which the prince finds in Nastasya Filippovna's rooms near the end of the novel.

Nastasya Filippovna will hardly efface herself like Dumas's heroine; that sentimental resolution suits the taste (and the hopes) of her mediocre seducer, the "bouquet man" Totsky, whom she calls a monsieur aux camélias.Nor will she take her own life in despair, like Emma Bovary. Her fate is enacted in a different realm. The parallels serve to mark the difference. But, owing to the chasteness of his art (as opposed to its obvious scandalousness), Dostoevsky allows himself no direct statement of his idea, no symbolistic abstraction, no simple identification of the "archetypes" behind his fiction. He uses the methods and conventions of the social novel to embody an ultimate human drama.

Money, the most ambiguous of values, is the medium of the social world. Its fatal quality is treated in all tones, at all levels, in The Idiot.Totsky wants to "sell" Nastasya Filippovna to Ganya for seventy-five thousand roubles; Rogozhin offers a hundred thousand for her. In one of the greatest scenes in the novel, Nastasya Filippovna throws his hundred thousand into the fire with everyone watching and challenges Ganya to pull it out. There are many other variations: the prince's unexpected inheritance, and Burdovsky's outrageous attempt, spurred on by his nihilist friends, to claim part of it while maintaining his nihilist principles; General Ivolgin's theft of Lebedev's four hundred roubles and his subsequent disgrace; Ptitsyn's successful moneylending and his dream of owning two houses (or maybe even three) on Liteinaya Street; Evgeny Pavlovich's rich uncle and his embezzlement of government funds; Ippolit's story of the impoverished doctor; Ferdyshchenko's "worst deed"; the repeatedly mentioned newspaper stories of murders for the sake of robbery. The clownish clerk Lebedev, though a petty usurer himself, is also an interpreter of the Apocalypse: "we live in the time of the third horse, the black one, and the rider with a balance in his hand, because in our time everything is in balances and contracts, and people are all only seeking their rights: 'A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny . . .' And with all that they want to preserve a free spirit, and a pure heart, and a healthy body, and all of God's gifts. But they can't do it with rights alone, and there will follow a pale horse and him whose

name is Death." His interpretation unwittingly reveals the twofold structure of reality in The Idiot.

Prince Myshkin has two loves, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya, one belonging to each "world" of the novel. He also has two doubles: Rogozhin and Ippolit. There is a deep bond between the dying consumptive nihilist thinker and the impulsive, unreflecting, passionate merchant's son, between the suicide and the murderer, and Ippolit recognizes it. "Les extrémités se touchent"he says, quoting Pascal. As late as September 1868, Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook: "Ippolit – the main axis of the novel." The young nihilist belongs among Dostoevsky's "rebels against Creation," along with Kirillov in Demonsand Ivan Karamazov. His "Necessary Explanation," as Joseph Frank has observed,* contains all the elements of the prince's worldview, but with an opposite attitude. Speaking of Holbein's Christ,he says that it shows nature as "some huge machine of the newest construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being." And he wonders how Christ's disciples, seeing a corpse like that, could believe "that this sufferer would resurrect," and whether Christ himself, if he could have seen his own image on the eve of his execution, would have "gone to the cross and died as he did." Ippolit is also a man sentenced to death by the "dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power to which everything is subjected," but instead of meekly accepting his fate, instead of passing by and forgiving others their happiness, as the prince advises, he protests, weeps, revolts. If Ippolit is not finally the main axis of the novel, he poses its central question in the most radical and explicit way.

Rogozhin, on the other hand, tells the prince that he likes looking at the Holbein painting. The prince, "under the impression of an unexpected thought," replies: "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!" "Lose it he does," Rogozhin agrees. But to Rogozhin's direct question, whether he believes in God, the prince gives no direct reply. That is another significant moment of reticence

* Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years,Princeton, 1995.

on Myshkin's part. Instead, he turns the conversation to "the essence of religious feeling" and says, "There are things to be done in our Russian world, believe me!" A moment later, at Rogozhin's request, they exchange crosses and become "brothers." Yet the exact nature of their brotherhood remains a mystery. From that point on, Rogozhin becomes the prince's shadow, lurking, menacing, hiding, yet inseparable from him, until the final scene finds them pressed face to face. Dostoevsky's doubles, which might seem images of personal division, are in fact images of human oneness.

The Idiotis Dostoevsky's most autobiographical novel. He gave Prince Myshkin many details of his own childhood and youth, his epilepsy, his separation from life and Russia (the author's years of hard labor and "exile" in Siberia corresponding to the prince's treatment in Switzerland), his return with a new sense of mission. More specifically, in Myshkin's story of the mock execution of an "acquaintance," Dostoevsky gives a detailed account of his own experience on the scaffold in the Semyonovsky parade ground, at the age of twenty-eight, when he thought he had only three more minutes to live. According to a memoir by another of the condemned men, Fyodor Lvov,* Dostoevsky turned to their comrade Speshnyov and said: "We will be together with Christ." And Speshnyov, with a wry smile, replied: "A handful of ashes." As Myshkin puts it: "now he exists and lives, and in three minutes there would be something,some person or thing – but who? and where?" The Idiotis built on that eschatological sense of time. It is the desolate time of Holy Saturday, when Christ is buried, the disciples are scattered and – worse than that – abandoned. "Who could believe that this sufferer would resurrect?" As it turned out, Dostoevsky had not three minutes but thirty-two years to think over Speshnyov's words and his own response to them. The Idiotmarks an important step on that way.

Richard Pevear

*Published in Literaturnoe nasledstvo("Literary Heritage"), vol. 63, p. 188; Moscow, 1956.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mikhail BAKHTIN, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1985. The classic study of Dostoevsky's formal innovations and his relations to the traditions of Menippean satire and carnival humor. Michel ELTCHANINOFF, L'Expression du corps chez Dostoevski],unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Paris, 2000. A study of the phenomenology of the body in Dostoevsky's work, in the context of philosophical and religious tradition.