“Digression in Praise of the Ass” by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Abstract

In his early youth, Dostoevsky recognized a single life purpose for himself: to comprehend the mystery of man and the mystery of God. Such a life’s task inevitably presupposed an engagement with the books of the European esoteric tradition and, consequently, their functional presence in the writer’s works. In particular, the writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim played a significant role in the formation of both the conceptual framework and the textual organization in Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. As a rule, Dostoevsky not only directly mentions books that are so important for his works but also introduces them into the narrative as an element of the plot, as an object. In this instance, however, we encounter an unusual situation: a book that functions as a highly non-trivial worldview reference point in Dostoevsky’s text ought to be named explicitly, yet for reasons extraneous to the text it cannot be mentioned. Dostoevsky resolves the problem by nevertheless inscribing the book he needs into the text. If, in The Idiot, we decipher this reference to Agrippa’s work, the novel’s “mysterious” title — over which scholars have long labored — becomes transparent in meaning and, moreover, sets the program for the course of the novel’s action, including its most “strange” turns — strange only if Agrippa’s text is not taken into account.