Dostoevsky believed Don Quixote was beautiful only because he was ridiculous, and feared his own hero had nothing of the kind. Within weeks his prince called himself ridiculous, and that spring a grieving father used the same words. By 1869 all the author would defend was “the idea.”

One Russian word means both funny and ridiculous. Followed through the novel’s crowded rooms, it arrives at a question the novel leaves open.

By Michael Cummins, Editor, November 1, 2026

On 12 August 1867, in the museum at Basel, Fyodor Dostoevsky climbed onto a chair to look more closely at a painting. It was Hans Holbein the Younger’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, a panel thirty centimetres high and two metres long, the length of a man laid out. His wife Anna wrote in her diary that night that she had been afraid he would be fined. In her memoir, written long afterwards, she remembered that she could not bear the picture and left the room. When she came back fifteen or twenty minutes later he had not moved, and his face held the frightened look she knew from the first moments of his fits. When she led him away to rest, he insisted on going back.

In her diary she called the painting “not at all aesthetic”; it filled her with “revulsion and a kind of horror.” What it lacks, as the museum that owns it now points out, is anyone else. Holbein left out the mourners and the disciples, and in a picture of this subject the absence of every living figure is almost unique. The body has no witness but whoever stands in front of it.

That autumn, in Geneva, Dostoevsky began notes for a novel; in December he threw them all out. Then, owing his publisher about 4,500 roubles and writing, as he put it, from a desperate plight, he wrote the first seven chapters of a new novel in twenty-three days, on an idea he had loved for years and long not dared to take up: a positively beautiful man.

The difficulty is older than the novel, and simple to state. Goodness has no natural audience. How do you make it bearable to read?

Holbein painted a death with no one there to see it. In the novel Dostoevsky began that winter, someone is nearly always watching.

I

Only Because Ridiculous

On 1 January 1868, with those chapters written, he explained the idea to his niece, Sofia Ivanova. The main thought of the novel, he wrote, was to portray a positively beautiful man, and nothing in the world was harder. Every writer who had tried it, Russian or European, had failed, because the task was immeasurable. There was only one positively beautiful figure in the world, and that was Christ. Among the beautiful figures of Christian literature the most complete was Don Quixote, “but he is beautiful only because he is at the same time ridiculous.” Dickens’s Pickwick, “an infinitely weaker thought than Don Quixote, but still an enormous one,” was ridiculous too, and won by that alone. Compassion arises for the beautiful that is mocked and does not know its own worth, and with it sympathy in the reader: “this arousing of compassion is the mystery of humour.” Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean was another strong attempt, but he arouses sympathy through his terrible misfortune and society’s injustice to him. Two routes to a reader, then: Quixote’s, through laughter, and Valjean’s, through suffering. And then: “I have nothing like that, absolutely nothing, and so I am terribly afraid it will be a positive failure.”

The adjective he gives his hero is the one Russian uses for a sunset and for a noble act alike, and it asks for more than kindness. And the pun is his own: the failure would be as positive as the man.

Whatever “nothing like that” means, it cannot mean that nobody laughs at his hero, because the chapters already written contain the laughter. On the train into Petersburg two strangers laugh at the prince’s bundle and his foreign cloak, and he laughs with them; one of them is Rogozhin, a merchant’s son who has just come into a fortune. At General Epanchin’s house, while the prince is out of the room fetching a portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, the beautiful, notorious woman at the centre of the book, the eldest daughter, Alexandra, agrees with her sister that he is too simple, “so that he’s even a little ridiculous.” Their mother, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, tells the girls they are more ridiculous than he is. What he lacks, then, is not laughter in the room but the comedy that makes a reader laugh with love. The letter’s fear concerns readers, and later readers have loved Myshkin for a century and a half. This essay watches a different audience: the people in the rooms.

The letter speaks, too, of “the main thought of the novel” and “the idea of the novel,” and takes comfort that nothing is “yet compromised.” Thought, idea, compromise: the words will come back.

The Russian word in Quixote’s sentence is a form of smeshnoi. It means funny as well as ridiculous, and the distance between the two is the distance between being laughed at and being laughed with. In its various forms it occurs sixty-five times in the novel, sixteen of them about Myshkin; the words for laughter and laughing are different, and are not counted.

Michael R. Katz, whose translation appeared this year, stakes his claim on the comic half of the word: most other translators, he has said, “have missed the humor.” The English here is the essay’s own, apart from three lines from Eva Martin’s translation of 1915, named at the end.

Within weeks the prince says it of himself. What the letter calls the second part, begun that day, became the last nine chapters of Part One, printed in February. At their close, at Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday party, Myshkin has offered to marry her, and he reminds her of the laughter that met his first words: “You smiled at those words, and I heard people round us laughing too. Perhaps I expressed myself very ridiculously, and was ridiculous myself, but I kept feeling that I understand what honour is.” A few pages on, leaving with Rogozhin, Nastasya Filippovna says: “Goodbye, prince. For the first time, I have seen a human being!”

In March he answered the fear. A notebook entry dated 21 March reads: “The hero of the novel, the Prince, if not ridiculous, has another sympathetic trait: he is innocent!” (The biographer Konstantin Mochulsky quoted it long ago.)

None of this settles whether the novel failed. “Positive failure” is the letter’s pun, not a verdict, and what follows reports his verdicts and adopts none of them.

II

The Laughing Room

Dostoevsky chose his precedent himself: the letter’s Don Quixote, beautiful only because he is ridiculous. The novel will name the knight outright, but it starts with the word.

The novel’s first use of its word is the prince’s own, and it expects a listener’s laughter. Waiting in the Epanchins’ anteroom, he tells the general’s footman about a guillotining he saw in Lyon, and about the thought that certain death is worse than torture, and then he says: “To you this seems funny, wild.” Later, with the general’s wife and daughters, he tells of a man reprieved on the scaffold, and offers Adelaida a subject for a painting: a condemned man’s face one minute before the blade. Dostoevsky had stood on such a scaffold himself, on 22 December 1849. So the word enters the novel at the scaffold, and in a plan of early November 1867 the notebooks had put the scaffold and the painting on consecutive lines: a note on the thoughts of a man about to be beheaded, then “the story about Holbein’s Christ in Basel.”

Most of the novel’s comedy is not his. General Ivolgin lies magnificently; Lebedev, the clerk from the train, preaches on the Apocalypse. Myshkin is more often the occasion of laughter than its source. He can be funny, and the vase is coming. But the narrator will hardly laugh at him. Of the sixteen times the word is applied to Myshkin, the narrator speaks three, and hedges each. Someone too fond of laughing “might perhaps have found something to smile at” in his clothes, “but what doesn’t make people laugh?” He smiles “strangely and even funnily.” When he sets out his views to the Epanchins, it would all have been funny “if it had not been so well expounded,” as his listeners agreed afterwards. The book’s other voices laugh at him far more readily than the one that tells it.

People open to him, too. They tell Myshkin the worst of themselves; Tobias Grey, reviewing the new translation, calls him “an ideal confidant.” The telling seldom changes what they do, and it leaves him no safer.

Aglaya, the youngest Epanchin daughter, laughs at him hardest, and her laughter keeps running into Cervantes. Early in Part Two she keeps a note from the prince in a thick, stoutly bound book. A week later she looks to see what the book is. It is Don Quixote, and she laughs, though, the narrator says, “it would be difficult to say exactly why.” By the summer the poor knight of Pushkin’s ballad has become a family joke about the prince, told in front of him, and Kolya reminds her where it began: a month ago, leafing through Don Quixote, she exclaimed that there was nothing better than the poor knight. Before she recites the ballad, she explains it. The poor knight is “the same Don Quixote, only serious, not comic. At first I didn’t understand and laughed, and now I love the ‘poor knight,’ and respect his deeds.” It no longer mattered to him who his lady was: “even if she had been a thief, he would still have had to believe in her and break lances for her pure beauty.”

Then she recites. Pushkin’s knight writes A.M.D. in blood on his shield; his lady is never named, and only Pushkin’s first version spells the letters out, Ave, Mater Dei. Aglaya has already called them A.N.B., twice, and held to it when Kolya “corrected” her to A.N.D.; neither is Pushkin’s. Now she reads N.F.B., for Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, a kept woman whose story many of her listeners know, and speaks the letters so gravely and so simply that they might pass for Pushkin’s. Her mother notices nothing; Evgeny Pavlovich makes sure he is seen to understand. The prince, sure it is deliberate, cannot see afterwards how so true and beautiful a feeling could go with so open and malicious a mockery. Beautiful is the letter’s word. Set the three ladies side by side: Cervantes’s Dulcinea, invented; Pushkin’s Mother of God, in heaven; Aglaya’s Nastasya Filippovna, fallen. Only the last puts Aglaya’s own rule to the test, and the prince will keep it, at her expense. The version she recites is Pushkin’s later one, of 1835, in which the knight dies “like a madman” and no one intercedes; in his first, of 1829, the Virgin takes him into heaven.

In the novel the comparison is Aglaya’s. Her knight is Quixote with the comedy taken out, the one ingredient the letter called essential, yet her own response runs in the letter’s order, laughter first and then love. Caterina Corbella has argued that her reading misleads, and that the one who loves as Quixote does, choosing a body for an invented ideal, is Aglaya herself. She also reads the prince and Rogozhin as two halves of one figure, as Quixote and Sancho are.

III

A Funny Voice

Sonia Dostoevskaya was born in Geneva on 22 February 1868. She died of pneumonia on 12 May, not quite three months old. Six days later Dostoevsky wrote to his friend Apollon Maikov: “My Sonia has died; we buried her three days ago.”

The word comes four times in that letter. The first is “let it be that my love was ridiculous”; two more are set out below. He had sung to her, he writes, in his funny voice, and there the right English is funny. Then: “let them laugh at me and at my love.” In the January letter the word belonged to Cervantes and Dickens. In May it belongs to a father. In June, from Vevey, he wrote that he could still see her eyes following him as he went out to read the newspapers on the day she died.

Here, then, are two sentences, a few months apart.

In Russian the verb is the same: perfective in the prince’s sentence, a single act, and imperfective in the father’s, an ongoing manner. The adverb is the same, and so is the short form of the adjective. The situation is the same as well: feeling spoken aloud, and laughed at. That is all the dates show.

IV

The Misfire

Ippolit Terentyev asks plainly not to be laughed at. He is a consumptive young man with weeks to live. In Part Two he tells Lizaveta Prokofyevna, the general’s wife, that he came to Pavlovsk to see the trees, and asks her, seriously: “That isn’t funny, is it? There’s nothing funny in that?”

In Part Three, written from August 1868, he reads his testament aloud on the prince’s terrace as the prince’s birthday turns into dawn, to a tired, half-drunk audience that did not ask to hear it. He calls it “My Necessary Explanation.” By now the trees have changed hands: in the testament they belong to his consolers, with “their ridiculous ‘Pavlovsk trees.’” Early on he is heckled. When he cries that they don’t like him at all, “there was laughter; most, however, did not laugh,” and he goes terribly red. Part of the testament is about a painting. He has seen the copy of the Holbein in Rogozhin’s house, and the picture, he says, shows “this blind, dumb, implacable, eternal, unreasoning force.” And he notices who is missing: “The people who surrounded the dead man, not one of whom is in the picture, must have felt a terrible anguish and confusion that evening.”

When he has finished, he turns, as if to a friend for advice, to Evgeny Pavlovich, a polished man of the world who is courting Aglaya: he has made a terrible mistake, reading them this notebook. “The position is ridiculous,” Evgeny Pavlovich answers, smiling, “but I really don’t know what to advise you.” Ippolit puts a pistol to his temple and pulls the trigger. It clicks; there is no cap in it. Fear turns into laughter, and some guffaw with malicious pleasure. Here is the derided sufferer, and in that moment he gets the laughter without the love.

In Part Four the prince tells him he is sorry Ippolit has disowned the notebook. “It is sincere, and you know, even its most ridiculous sides, and there are many” (here Ippolit winces) “are redeemed by suffering, because confessing them was suffering too.” The sentence joins Quixote’s route and Valjean’s, and offers them to someone who fears the first. Ippolit’s reply is that they have had “a very funny conversation.”

Holbein’s dead man has no witnesses. Ippolit, reading about him to a terrace full of listeners, has too many. The copy, about 1.8 metres long and 27 centimetres high, hangs over a door in Rogozhin’s house, where the novel’s last night will be spent.

V

Not the Novel, but the Idea

At the Epanchins’ evening party in Part Four, before the old princess Belokonskaya and a roomful of society, Myshkin breaks the Chinese vase that Aglaya warned him about. The laughter grows; he is forgiven, and he weeps. “You’re a kind man, but a ridiculous one,” Belokonskaya tells him. “Give you twopence and you thank them as if they’d saved your life. You think that’s praiseworthy, and it’s disgusting.” She is on the edge of real anger, and then she laughs, this time kindly.

Ippolit, who says he can neither love nor respect the prince, had already said the same behind his back: “a decidedly kind man, though… ridiculous.” Where the letter said beautiful, they say kind, and it is a pairing easy to say with affection, as Belokonskaya’s laugh shows. The audience’s word is smaller than the author’s. The theory works, and what it wins is a downgrade.

He begins to talk. Aglaya forbade him to speak, he tells an old dignitary in confidence, and even named the subjects, because she knows he is ridiculous in them. “I have no right to express my thought. Only in Moscow, with Rogozhin, did I speak openly. I am always afraid that my ridiculous look will compromise the thought and the main idea. I have no gesture. My gesture is always the opposite, and that provokes laughter and humiliates the idea.” Thought, main idea, compromise: the January letter’s words, in its hero’s mouth, months later. Now he turns to the room. They are all ridiculous, he says, he and they alike, and “to be ridiculous is sometimes even good, and better: we can forgive one another sooner.” Minutes later he falls in a fit. The theory has done all it promised: laughter, forgiveness, something like love.

The word’s last appearance in the novel turns the theory around. In the weeks before the wedding that never takes place, Nastasya Filippovna does everything she can to cheer him up and tells him every funny thing she can remember. The prince almost always pretends to laugh a great deal, and sometimes really does. Now she is the one offering the comedy, and he is the one pretending. On the wedding day she runs from the church steps to Rogozhin, as she had once before, at the end of Part One, in the chapter where the prince calls himself ridiculous. The last night is spent in Rogozhin’s house. He has killed her, and her body lies behind a curtain. The two men lie down next to each other and keep watch over her till morning; the painted body over the door still has no one. Myshkin strokes Rogozhin’s hair and cheeks; when the door is opened he no longer recognises anyone.

There is a reading in which this ending is his doing; Murray Krieger called his chapter on the novel, in The Tragic Vision (1960), “The Curse of Saintliness.” The novel gives that reading its scene. At the meeting of the two women in Part Four, when Nastasya Filippovna breaks down, he pleads her unhappiness to Aglaya, and Aglaya runs from the house; he stays. Nor is that reading foreign to the novel’s beginnings: in the earliest notebooks the hero is proud and violent. And the novel never entirely separates him from the man who kills: they exchange crosses, Rogozhin raises a knife against him on the stairs, and they spend the last night side by side, Corbella’s two halves of one figure. If that reading is right, the love that laughter wins is part of the harm. The text does not say whether his goodness caused the ending or only failed to prevent it.

The novel, Dostoevsky told his niece on 25 January 1869, had not expressed a tenth part of what he meant, and “I love my thought that failed, to this day.” To Nikolai Strakhov, a month later: “I stand not for the novel, but for my idea.” The letter to Strakhov does not use the word ridiculous at all. Of the January vocabulary, the thought and the idea remain. Nine years later he would say much the same of The Double, which “positively did not succeed, but its idea was rather bright.” If the formula is a reflex, these verdicts say less about The Idiot than they seem to. Here, though, its words have a scene: a hero at a party, afraid that his ridiculous look will compromise the thought and the main idea.

What Dostoevsky took from Cervantes is in his own letter and his own pages: a beautiful man the world laughs at, loved by some of those who laugh, and a lady to be championed whatever she has done. What changed is as plain. The comedy has moved: it is the room’s, not the narrator’s. This knight has no windmills; Myshkin’s trouble is that he sees people too clearly, and what is comic in him is his manner, not his mind. And Cervantes ends by giving his knight his reason back, so that he dies sane, as Alonso Quixano, called the Good.

Dostoevsky’s prince does not get his back. In the Conclusion he is in Switzerland, in the clinic he came from, like the poor knight of the ballad, who goes home to his distant castle and lives there shut away, “ever silent, ever sad.” Lizaveta Prokofyevna visits, and he does not recognise her at all. “At all events, I’ve had a good Russian cry over this poor fellow,” she says, and her adjective is the ballad’s: in Russian the poor fellow and the poor knight share it. Holbein left the mourners out. At its very end the novel gives its good man one. He does not know her.

Can the love that laughter wins protect the man it is won for?

⁂

The occasion is Tobias Grey’s review of Michael R. Katz’s new translation, “‘The Idiot’: Dostoevsky’s Classic Novel of an Honest Man”, in The Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2026.

The letters, Anna Dostoevskaya’s diary, the notebooks and Pushkin’s ballad are quoted in the essay’s own translations from the Russian, from the Nauka Collected Works in fifteen volumes (1996), which reprints the Academy texts. Where Ethel Colburn Mayne’s English of 1914 differs, as with “nothing like that” and “thought,” they follow the Russian; letters not quoted directly are paraphrased from Mayne. Quotations from the novel are the essay’s own translations, except “it would be difficult to say exactly why,” Ippolit’s “blind, dumb” force and Lizaveta Prokofyevna’s last line, which are Eva Martin’s, from 1915. The echoes traced here are in the Russian. Martin’s English smooths them away: his prince fears “spoiling a great Thought or Idea by my absurd manner,” and his prince’s “true and beautiful feeling” moves onto the girl. Dates are Old Style, the Russian calendar of the time, twelve days behind the Western one. The count of sixty-five uses of smeshnoi comes from a modern digital text of about 210,000 words; the Academy edition may differ by one or two.

For the painting and Anna’s account, the Kunstmuseum Basel’s exhibition texts. For Anna’s return to the panel and the notebook plan of November 1867, Katherine Bowers, “Under the Floorboards, Over the Door”, in Dostoevsky at 200, edited by Bowers and Kate Holland (Toronto, 2021), which also quotes Carol Apollonio’s “beyond the frame” (Dostoevsky’s Secrets, 2009); Apollonio and Bowers both look for the painting’s meaning among its viewers, before this essay does. The same volume’s introduction gives the earliest notebook hero. For the poor-knight passages in Russian, and for the reading of Aglaya as the novel’s Quixote, Caterina Corbella, “Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Idiot”, Dostoevsky and World Culture, 2024, no. 2. For the laughter during Ippolit’s reading, Tatiana Kasatkina, 2025. For the order of composition and the March notebook entry, the 1868 Russian Messenger and Middlebury College’s notes on the making of the novel, after Konstantin Mochulsky. For the ballad, the Academy Complete Works of Pushkin in ten volumes (1977), vol. 3; the novel quotes Pushkin’s later version, and Kasatkina (1999) argues that the earlier one stands behind it. The Russian checks and the concordance are the literary editor’s.

Further reading, not consulted for this essay: Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, translated by Michael A. Minihan (1967); Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator, and Reader (1981); Murray Krieger, “Dostoevsky’s Idiot: The Curse of Saintliness,” in The Tragic Vision (1960); Victor Terras, The Idiot: An Interpretation (1990); Tatiana Kasatkina on the painting’s liminality and the viewer’s position (2006, 2011); L. V. Alekseeva (2018), Bell and others in Funny Dostoevsky (2024), and Stefano Aloe on laughter; Tapp on embarrassment (Slavic and East European Journal 60.3, 2016); Young (2007); Jackson (2016); on Cervantes in Russia and in the novel, Ivan Turgenev, “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860), Vsevolod Bagno, Don Quixote in Russia and Russian Quixotism (2009), and Gratchev, “Prince Myshkin as a Tragic Interpretation of Don Quixote” (Cervantes 35.1, 2015); on the ballad’s versions, S. B. Fedotova (Russkaya literatura, 2025, no. 4) and S. A. Fomichev (2008).

Images generated by Gemini Argon for this essay.

Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary editing by Claude Fable 5.1.