RETORT REVIEWS

Dan Schneider
© Dan Schneider 2006

DVD Review Of The World At War
Copyright © by Dan Schneider

It was not long after my family moved into the very first home we had ever owned, in our line's history, that I recall watching, with my dad, a really good television show called The World At War, which recounted the history of the Second World War. For my dad, born in 1916, it was a bittersweet look back at his early adulthood, for after having served for several years with distinction in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. My dad was amongst the first men to volunteer to serve in the military after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but was rejected as 4F because of a childhood broken ankle that never fully healed, and left him a gimp. This rejection, which he personalized, never seemed to be one my dad could get over, and as I had spent many a suppertime listening to my dad rail, first at President Johnson's, then President Nixon's, bungling of the Vietnam War, and then Watergate, I always wondered how much of my dad's venom toward those men, and their actions, was really because of those very things, and how much was because his own country had told him, a man with a sixth grade education, that he was not 'good enough' to die for it?

Yet, as we watched the series, which progressed in 26 hour long (with commercials) episodes over half a year, on WOR, Channel 9 in New York, I saw my dad mellow in his attitude toward those years, as each episode came and went. Whether it was the depictions of suffering, or a sense that he had really gotten lucky in being rejected for the carnage, in the long run, I don't know. I do recall the black and white of the old documentary films used, and the whole series (as we only had a small black and white television in those days), which always brought me back to another place, and the great credits introduction to each episode, which included stentorian music by Carl Davis and flames devouring photographic images of famed and anonymous participants in the war. Having been so steeped by my dad in the culture of his youth- from stories of the Great Depression to the 1930s Buster Crabbe movie serials, to watching Abbott & Costello films, I've always felt three or four decades older than I really am. In rewatching the BBC documentary series, released on eleven DVDs for the Thirtieth Anniversary of their initial airing, this sense of returning to a childhood that predated my existence by decades also returned, as did the memories of my dad commenting on each show as it went. His favorite episode dealt with the North African theater, for he had been a big fan of the old television series, The Rat Patrol, which was then airing in reruns in the city.

The documentary series was produced between 1971 and 1974 by Jeremy Isaacs of Thames Television and featured many key interview subjects, from the common soldier in all the armies to major powerbrokers such as Lord Mountbatten, war correspondent and novelist Lawrence Durrell, Hitler's architect and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who disingenuously tries to weasel out of his responsibility for the Nazi genocide, German Admiral Karl Dönitz, Averell Harriman, Alger Hiss, film star James Stewart, who served in the US Army 8th Airforce, and General Eisenhower's driver, Kay Summersby, and Adolf Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge. There are even segments with the last survivor of the assassination plot against Hitler, Ewald Heinrich Von Kleist. It is an amazing filmic and journalistic feat that was accomplished, for so many aspects of the war that are missing from other attempts at visually documenting it are here. Isaacs got many honors for the series, from a knighthood to the Royal Television Society's Desmond Davis Award, L'Ordre National du Mérit, and numerous Emmy Awards.

The series, narrated by Laurence Olivier, begins with scenes of a devastated small French town, during the Nazi retreat from france, and this narration:

Down this road, on a summer's day in nineteen forty-four, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community which had lived for a thousand years was dead. This is Oradaur-Sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns. The women and children were led down this road, and they were driven into this church. Here they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead in battle. They never rebuilt Oradaur. Its ruins are a memorial. Its maryrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China, in a World At War.

Each of the twenty-six original episodes began similarly, with a fade to the memorable credit sequence described above.

On the plus side the series is the closet thing to a definitive visual history of World War Two, the television equivalent to Edward Gibbon's The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. It also avoids the cheesy melancholy, and inane talking head pontifications, that became the documentary rage when Ken and Ric Burns' PBS historical documentaries took off in the early 1990s, after the monumental success of Ken Burns' The Civil War. However, despite the seeming attempts at thoroughness that this BBC series aims for, just like The Civil War, it has come under scrutiny, over the years, for minor historical inaccuracies, and even more so for blatant biases.
The biases are certainly far more rampant, and part of the problem with the series comes from a decision that Isaacs explains in the 30th Anniversary documentary. Early on he says he decided that each show would be self-contained on an aspect of the war, for 'every good film tells only one story.' Well, this is simply not true, but, even were it true, it is a specious reasoning to be applied to the construction of the series. The result is that, while the whole series progresses somewhat chronologically, it does so only in fits and starts, with many episodes having to waste time going over the same ground as before. A much smarter approach would have been a straightforward month by month chronological approach, with a broad-based approach to the war on all theaters, fronts, and aspects- cultural, political, economic, etc. After all, a bit more thoroughness could only have improved the series.

Another decision Isaacs made, but a good one, this time, was to not focus on the Nazi genocide, nor other wartime atrocities, but paint them as the mere outgrowths of a worldwide culture of war, which they were, rather as the sole reasons for the war. While the 'real' reason for the American Civil War was slavery, not the 'States Rights' argument (which was merely the right for states to keep slavery legal), the 'real' reason for German and Japanese aggression was not to murder millions of Jews, Slavs, Russians, Chinese, and Filipinos, but to gain more land and resources for their relatively small and resource lacking homelands. The murder of innocents was simply to facilitate that end. Yet, in the Thirtieth Anniversary show, Isaacs states were he to redo the series he would focus more on 'The Holocaust', a term that did not even exist back then, for the series devoted only one episode to what was called by it 'The Final Solution'- a more historically accurate and less politically motivated term. Luckily, Isaacs' younger self showed more wisdom than his later self would have. This is proved in the contrast between the single canonical episode of the series that deals with the Nazi genocide, and the two part bonus documentary produced thirty years later. In the earlier show the death camp dead are related as ten million, with no more than five million Jewish dead, which reflects the Nazis' own meticulous recordkeeping, and the historical totals deemed accurate for nearly thirty years after the war, whereas the later documentaries inflate those numbers to the Politically Correct and now iconic 'Six Million', and even one reference at seven million, and from twelve to fourteen million total. How this change in body count was arrived at is never explained, although it's manifest that political forces, such as the Holocaust, Inc. mentality derided by such writers as novelist and essayist Philp Lopate, that were nonexistent, or negligible, in the early 1970s have clearly exerted their influence by the time of the Thirtieth Anniversary documentary.

But, without a doubt, the most ridiculous, and historically damning, bias the series displays is its pro-British bias. Granted, the series was produced in Britain, but the diminution of America's role in defeating the Axis powers is unforgivable, as is the scant attention paid to the Pacific theater of the war, where a larger portion of people actually died than in Europe. Modern estimates place the dead in World War Two at close to 70 million, with forty million of them coming in Asia- Japan, Korea, China, Manchuria, Burma, Indochina, the Philippines, and Indonesia, yet this series devotes only a quarter of its episodes to that theater. Germany is portrayed as the greater global threat, even though they crumbled earlier, and subjugated far fewer people and conquered less land area. Russia's 20 or so million dead are given several episodes, but China's equal numbers are barely mentioned. Chiang-Kai-shek's ruinous and murderous regime, and its two front war, with Mao Tse-Tung's Communists and the invading genocidal Japanese, is not mentioned at all- not a word. The obvious ethnic and racial biases in such omissions really damage the credibility of the series as an objective history, especially since World War Two started with the 1931 invasion of Manchuria.We also get interesting films on the Scandinavian aspects of the war- such as Finland's alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, and Holland's capitulation, but nothing of the Balkans and their suffering. Benito Mussolini, the man Hitler looked to as a hero, is a mere blip in the war as presented in this series, as is his murderous yet bungling invasion of Ethiopia. Worst of all, major U.S. Generals like Patton and MacArthur are given no accord, while minor British politicians are hailed as heroes. Without Patton's successes there would likely have been no D-Day attempted, and the Germans may have been able to hold off the Russian counter-offensives from Stalingrad onward. The Battle of The Bulge, the final nail in the Nazi coffin, is barely grazed, nor is the heroic American repulsion discussed in length. Simply put, without America's help and entry into the war, Germany would have defeated both Great Britain and the Soviet Union, despite Hitler's military misjudgments, and Japan would have had an Empire stretching from India to Australia and north to the Kamchatka peninsula. No amount of Russian human cannon fodder would have done in the Nazi war machine without America's industrial might bleeding Hitler in the west, yet one would believe, from this series, that it was Winston Churchill who was the senior partner to Franklin Roosevelt, not the other way around.

The Pacific War gets only a couple of episodes- on Pearl Harbor and British involvement in Asia- until the fall of Germany is covered, then a few episodes near the end; one entirely on the Atom Bomb, although with scant discussion of the Manhattan Project- the single most important thing that happened in the war years, from a historical perspective. Instead of episodes on the Japanese push toward Australia, and MacArthur's heroic push back, the Bataan Death March, the atrocities across Asia, etc., all we get is a full episode of the British follies at Singapore and in Burma, which were really minor skirmishes where only a few hundred died on either side. The American island hopping campaign- unprecedented in human history, and producing bloodbaths from Tarawa to Okinawa, the real focus of the Pacific War, and ever bit as important as the D-Day Invasion, is utterly shortshrifted, with nothing mentioned of Guadalcanal and a dozen other major battles. Only the air battles over Midway and the Mariana Islands are covered with more than a passing mention. Nothing is stated about the American Pacific submarine battles with the Japanese, although the U-Boat battles of the North Atlantic get a whole episode.

The episode on the atomic bomb suffers from any number of biases, which were especially rampant when the series was produced and Western guilt over atrocities in Vietnam were at their height: from the claims of some Japanese apologists that the bomb was not necessary to get Japan to surrender, and somehow was an atrocity, even though it doubtlessly saved many more American lives than Japanese lives it took. Unlike Dresden, in Germany, which was a bombing raid that served no military nor strategic purpose, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki wiped out major industrial productivity centers. Had we not dropped the bomb when we did, Stalin, who already was assured a disproportionate slice of the post-War pie, would have gotten far more in Asia, and Japan may have come away with Korea and Manchuria still in their Empire. Even after the bomb was dropped, Japan was still sinking American warships. The assertion that Japan was not ready to fight to the last man has been shown, time and again, to be mere wishful historical revisionism. Proof of this comes from hundreds of internal documents, and the fact that the last Japanese soldier to surrender in the war was discovered, still alive on a Pacific atoll, in the mid-1970s.
Yet, despite these many flaws, the series does far more than any other series dedicated to the Second World War, or any other war. Here are some highlights from, and comments on, each of the DVD disks, and the constituent documentaries:

Disk 1

A New Germany: 1933–1939
The series starts memorably, with the opening lines and shots of a ruined city, then details the disastrous Weimar Republic, and how Hitler used their failure to slowly insinuate himself into power. This show gives an excellent portrayal of the indoctrination for war and how slow changes creep up and gather unstoppable inertia.

Distant War: September 1939–May 1940
This show details the months of English, and world inactivity, over the German advance into several regions, climaxing with their invasion of Poland, and the atrocities the Nazis committed. Little known facts, such as Russia's almost simultaneous invasion and defeat by Finland are recounted. This defeat would embolden Hitler to see Russia as a paper tiger, whose military leadership was ravaged by Stalin's disastrous political purges.

France Falls: May–June 1940
This show deals with France's cultural arrogance, military stupidity, and general confusion in dealing with Hitler, and how early shows of French strength could have forestalled Germany's lightning quick taking and occupation of that country.

Bonus Documentary: The Making of The Series

This is a 48 minute long documentary made on the 15th Anniversary of the series, in 1989. It gives some good insights.

Disk 2

Alone: May 1940–May 1941
Focuses on the fall of Dunkirk, and British humiliation, then redemption, during the Battle Of Britain. Agitprop reigns, such as the UK's pots and pans drives for steel for munitions. Greece and Yugoslavia fall to the Nazis. Hitler seems on the verge of defeating Britain, but reveals to his stunned generals that Britain was a feint to lull Stalin into complacency. Russia, and its material riches, is the main target, although the failure to finish off the UK will haunt Hitler.

Barbarossa: June–December 1941
A highlight is the interview with Hitler's main architect, Albert Speer, who ineffectively passes the buck on his many crimes. Early Nazi gains in Russia are because of Stalin's own purge-happy folly in the 1930s. Moscow is saved by the Russian winter, which also repelled Napoleon, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which preempts Japanese plans for a Siberian campaign. This allows Eastern troops to aid Mother Russia under General Zhukov.

Banzai: Japan: 1931–1942
The European bias of the series shows as this is the first show to deal with Japan, whose attack on Manchuria in 1931 was the actual start of the Second World War. Interesting things discussed are small Japanese defeats to the Russians, and how that changed Japanese strategy for the Asian war, how they used bicycles to conquer Malaya, how Singapore lacked landward defenses, which allowed 130,000 British to be captured, and how the Japanese needed to develop shallow water torpedoes to succeed at Pearl Harbor. A lingering question, unasked, is if FDR knew Pearl Harbor was coming, and that was the reason only outdated battleships were left in the port. All the modern aircraft carriers were out in the sea, on maneuvers.

On Our Way: USA: 1939–1942
This show documents Lend-Lease, which saved Britain, and the folly of Hitler's declaring war on the US, which would otherwise not have legally been able to get into the European war. This show is one of the earliest public statements of the American internment of Japanese-American citizens, although it understates the number as 100,000, when it's now known to be about 220,000. The Bataan Death March kills thousands as 80,000 Americans surrender, and MacArthur is forced to retreat. Japanese expansion is stopped at the Battle Of Midway, and the folly of America's focus on the European side of the war over the Pacific goes unquestioned, even in 1974, although we know better now.

Disk 3

The Desert: North Africa: 1940–1943
Focuses on the North African campaigns, Italy's follies in Ethiopia, and the growing legend of German General Rommel and his Panzer tanks.

Stalingrad: June 1942–February 1943
This show is very heavily militarily slanted, as a show on war should be. The mass killings of the Nazi genocide and Japanese atrocities were secondary, and later documentaries have unfortunately elevated these elements, thus decontextualizing them as outgrowths of the war, not causes for it. This show is one of the better episodes.

Wolfpack: U-Boats In The Atlantic: 1939–1944
This show deals with the brilliance of German Admiral Karl Dönitz, whose U-boats caused early havoc in the war, as America was only able to guard British ships as far as Iceland, across the North Atlantic, until Pearl Harbor. Dönitz later became the second and final Führer of the Third Reich after Hitler's suicide, a forgotten footnote of the war.

Red Star: The Soviet Union: 1941–1943
Leningrad's siege is explored, as well the frozen lifeline across Lake Ladoga. Stalin grouses over the West's lack of help, even as Russian failures are directly tied to Stalin's own genocidal streak and military incompetence.

Disk 4

Whirlwind: Bombing Germany: September 1939–April 1944
British vengeance for the Battle Of Britain rains death on Germany, and America joins in as the Allies come to dominate the European airways.

Tough Old Gut: Italy: November 1942-June 1944
The defeat of the Germans in North Africa sends them scrambling back to Sicily, then Rome, as the Italians switch sides in the war and join the Allies. Mussolini falls, and the Allies land at Anzio, eventually take Rome and push the Germans back to the Alps.

It's A Lovely Day Tomorrow: Burma: 1942–1944
Another show heavily biased toward Britain. Burma was a minor theater in the war, yet it is treated with more detail than the unprecedented island-hopping campaign of America. The Japanese are better jungle warriors early on, but pressures elsewhere in their Empire allow the British to retake the country.

Home Fires: Britain: 1940–1944
Winston Churchill is hagiographized by his speeches, and The Isle Of Man becomes a giant British internment camp for Germans, Italians, and others suspected of Nazi sympathizing. Internal British politics dominates this episode. It is one of the duller episodes.

Disk 5

Inside The Reich: Germany: 1940–1944
This episode details internal German politic, agitprop, and the plots to assassinate Hitler.

Morning: June–August 1944
This show focuses almost entirely on D-Day, and the weather problems that almost canceled Operation: Overlord. Nine thousand men die on the beaches of Normandy. This is an effective episode with a straight ahead style that's been lost in the post-Ken Burns documentary era of talking heads and overt sentimentality.

Occupation: Holland: 1940–1944
The tightrope between complicity, collaboration, and resistance is explored. Mere passing reference to Anne Frank is a welcome relief, as her story is so overdone it's become a cliché.

Pincers: August 1944–March 1945
Poland's almost forgotten, as the Warsaw Ghetto erupts. The Nazis withdraw and the Russians move in. The war in Europe is coming to an end as Hitler's last gamble at the Battle of The Bulge fails, and Germany is besieged on all fronts.

Disk 6

Genocide: 1941–1945
This episode deals with the Final Solution. Interestingly, this series, when made in the early 1970s, lacks the polarized politicization later accounts would hold, starting with the usage of the term The Final Solution over the more Politically Correct The Holocaust. There is also a more accurate tolling of the Nazi estimates of numbers of Jews in Europe- six million, and five million more in Russia. Estimates on death camp deaths is about ten million, with no more than five million Jews killed. Nowhere is the now sanctified 'Six Million' Jewish dead mentioned. This stands in marked contrast to a later documentary in the DVD set.

Nemesis: February–May 1945
The bombing of Dresden shocks German resolve. Hitler loses touch with reality and poisons his dog, then shoots himself. His mistress-cum-wife, Eva Braun takes cyanide capsule. Their bodies are burnt.

Japan: 1941–1945
VE Day arrives on May 8th, 1945, but Japan proves to be the strongest of the three Axis powers. Although as many or more people died in Asia than did in Europe (reportage and body counts were far more nebulous in that theater, even to this day), this series' greatest flaw is how it shamefully shortshrifts the Pacific theater of the war, focusing on it only after the European war has ended.

Pacific: February 1942–July 1945
The forgotten battle of Tarawa is an American prelude to hell, as the Japanese would rather die than surrender. Iwo Jima and the other memorable Pacific battles lay ahead. Just as General Patton barely gets a mention in the episodes on Africa and Sicily, General MacArthur's odyssey is an afterthought.

Disk 7

The Bomb: February–September 1945
This interesting episode features comments from State Department employee Alger Hiss, the man whose reputation Richard Nixon later baselessly smeared, and actor Jimmy Stewart, who was an American flyer. The conference at Yalta divvies up the post-war world, and this show explodes the myth that the Japanese need not have been atom bombed into surrender.

Reckoning: April 1945….And After
This episode claims twelve million killed in the Final Solution, and features disgraced plagiarizing historian Stephen Ambrose pontificating rather speciously and moralistically. There are foreshadowings of the then-current Vietnam conflict throughout this episode.

Remember
Noble Frankland of the Imperial War Museum debunks the notion that soldiers are owed anything special by society, and leads an excellent final show on the aftermath of war- remembrances; a Keith Douglas poem- he was a British poet killed in 1944 at Normandy; and a final toll of at least 55 million dead (later figures estimate about 70 million died), including 2.5 million Japanese, 15 million Chinese, 1.5 million Yugoslavians, 3 million Poles, 5 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 400,000 British and 300,000 Americans. All these figures are the pre-politicized tolls.

Disk 8

Bonus Documentary: Hitler's Germany: The People's Community 1933-1939
This is the start of documentaries culled from excess footage, and not in the original series. This is a good look at pre-war Germany, starting with the burning of books, which, as someone states, ultimately leads to the burning of people, figuratively or not.

Bonus Documentary: Hitler's Germany: Total War 1939-1945
Hitler's arrogance and insanity dooms the Reich.

Bonus Documentary: The Two Deaths Of Adolf Hitler
Interesting forensic look at whether or not Hitler shot himself (a soldier's death) or bit on a cyanide capsule (a coward's death). The controversy is over the British claim of the former and the Soviet claim of the latter. The show ends with the matter unresolved, but we now know it was definitely by bullet.

Disk 9

Bonus Documentary: Secretary To Hitler
Outtakes of interviews from Hitler's young female secretary Traudl Junge, with insights into the last hours of his life in the bunker.

Bonus Documentary: Warrior
One of the few shows that focuses on America's part in the war. An excellent mix of images and words, with the offhand poesy of common GI's movingly wrought. It packs an emotional wallop. Highly recommended.

Bonus Documentary: From War To Peace
A whole episode devoted to disgraced historian Stephen Ambrose's pontifications. The worst in the DVD set. Not only does Ambrose shill for the Russian 'right' to install terroristic totalitarian regimes after the war, as part of the war booty, but he consistently downplays American losses and sacrifices in the war. Given the pro-British cast of the series, it's no wonder he was the only American 'expert' to get airtime. He's far better on economic issues than geopolitical ones, but seeing him as a cashmere sweater wearing wannabe hippy is a hoot.

Disk 10

Bonus Documentary: The Final Solution Part One
Some interesting details on Poland emerge.

Bonus Documentary: The Final Solution Part Two
An interesting contrast to the 'canonical' version for the original series. Here, post-PC standards have upped the death camp dead from ten to fourteen million, and Jewish dead from no more than five to the canonical six million. No proof is offered of these numerical changes, but the thirty years' difference in the making of the canonical version for the series, and this biased follow up, can be seen.

Disk 11

Bonus Documentary: Making The Series: A 30th Anniversary Retrospective

This two hour retrospective is far more incisive and detailed than the 15th Anniversary show on Disk 1. Series producer Jeremy Isaacs says he regrets not focusing more on the Holocaust and the Pacific war, but while he was wrong on his first plaint he's right on the second. The focus and strength of this series was and should have been on the war aspects, for the Nazi genocide and the Japanese atrocities at Nanking and other places (which over the course of the war killed as many or more people than the Nazi death camps did) were mere outgrowths of a larger phenomenon.

Bonus Documentary: Experiences Of War
Almost as moving as the bonus documentary Warrior, on Disk 9. Excellent interviews with Dr. Vannevar Bush, a Roosevelt scientific aide who helped develop the atom bomb, provides such cogent insights as the fact that wartime Presidents are almost dictators in comparison to British Prime Ministers. Recent history has shown we've paid for this truth. There is also a great segment with a Hispanic American GI, who details his life's post-war breakdown after an injury in the Pacific sends him to an asylum where his wife and kids abandon him. Just heartwrenching.

Watching this series, again on DVD, and thinking back on my dad's removed fascination with it, when originally aired, made me realize that those days with my dad are now farther removed from the present than the war years the series documents were from his watching of them. Yet, I know why he was so rapt by the series, despite its flaws, and the fact that a more thorough and unbiased video history of the war is just begging to be made. It's because the series wisely focused on the ordinary person, like him. This focus undoes almost all the biases the rest of the series promotes, and makes the whole DVD set an easy recommendation for history buffs, yet to be used as a starting point, not an end all and be all. This series was not just the tales of the giants: Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Tojo, Roosevelt, Rommel, Mussolini, Eisenhower. It was tales of the ordinary man, and how his contributions changed the world.
Watching this series also nails the current lie that we are involved in some global struggle, a 'clash of civilizations', on par with the World Wars, when we are really avaricious and unaccountable myopics absurdly trying to fend off some puny backwater terrorists. This series shows those claims for what they are- lies. Now is not a time of giants that will be studied in the future for their contributions in moving the world forward, but of small men with small agendas, which is a thing quite different, in the worst possible ways, from being ordinary men, like my dad was; ordinary men who helped change human history for the better, in The World At War.

Review Of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot
© Dan Schneider

In his lifetime, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote four famed novels that secured his literary place in history. Chronologically they were Crime And Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed (or Devils), and The Brothers Karamazov. The last named book I read many years ago, in my youth, and found it quite boring, although I will reread it in the future. Crime And Punishment I read last year, and, while it had some good things to offer, it was too bogged down in stereotypes, and had a dreadfully weak end. I have recently read The Idiot, which leaves only Devils to go.

In many ways, all of Dostoevsky's works- long and short- read similarly, as does almost all Russian 19th Century fiction. There are many longwinded passages that could be severely trimmed or excised, and the minutia of superfluous detail that many digressions wallow in tends to exhaust rather than inform or entertain readers. The Idiot is no different from Crime And Punishment (or Leo Tolstoy's War And Peace, for that matter) in this regard. Yet, it is a significantly different book dramatically, thematically, and philosophically than its immediate predecessor. Crime And Punishment's strength is that it posits a philosophic dilemma, then lets things unravel, seemingly naturally, at its best, although the tale eventually loses its way with too many stereotyped characters and actions. By contrast, The Idiot is shorn of most caricatures and stereotypes, but never seems to have any great central existential dilemma that tells a reader why its author felt this particular character's tale needed to be told. In a sense, the novel is a 19th Century high brow version of the old television soap operas Dynasty or Dallas, with a lone central character who rises above such melodrama, briefly, before sinking back into despair. While it is a much steadier book than its immediate predecessor: artistically, narratively and psychologically- in a sense, a much 'realer' look at Russian nobility, and it lacks some of Crime And Punishment's execrable lows, it also lacks that novel's highs- such as several scenes of confrontation where Raskolnikov's conscience seemingly speaks to him via the intercession of other characters who may or may not be real. That said, overall, the two books are about on an artistic par with one another, although I prefer The Idiot's sustained thrust, although neither could truly be termed 'great', in the way Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, or A Tree Grows In Brooklyn are. Simply dismissing narrative weaknesses as the style of the time does not hold up critically in the long run.

The book is divided into four major sections, with numerous subsections. Despite its length and heft it is not really a complex tale, narratively nor psychologically, and in this regard it is almost a direct predecessor to Marcel Proust's Remembrance Of Things Past, a work (novel or autobiography?) that also sketches mostly 19th Century dilettantes at their worst, although Proust's dilettante characters are French, not Russian.

The story opens well, on a train, in an almost Hichcockian milieu, with Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a fair-haired twentysomething nobleman of good nature and much gullibility, heading toward St. Petersburg on a November morning. It is a most subtle entry into the action of the novel by the extraordinary main character. He has spent four years at a Swiss clinic, under the treatment of a Dr. Schneider, for his supposed idiocy and epilepsy. The former charge, we learn throughout the book, is an insidious slander, but the Prince is very out of place in his homeland. Myshkin's aim is to meet his only relative in the city. This is his distant cousin Madame Lizaveta Epanchin, wife of a powerful general, who is in his fifties. The couple have three daughters, Alexandra, Adelaida, and Aglaia, the youngest and, as is always true in such tales, the most beautiful. While waiting to see the general, the Prince talks with a servant about watching a man who was beheaded by a guillotine, and explains that torture is better than instantaneous death because one still has hope if tortured. He also argues, in a typical Dostoevskian Socratic monologue, that to kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the actual crime itself, although his reasoning is hazy. This is one of several interludes where Myshkin will dazzle listeners with his simple philosophies. One of his most noteworthy comes in a later spiel against capital punishment, and guillotining, in particular:

'As to life in a prison, of course there may be two opinions,' said the prince. 'I once heard the story of a man who lived twelve years in a prison--I heard it from the man himself. He was one of the persons under treatment with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy, then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide. His life in prison was sad enough; his only acquaintances were spiders and a tree that grew outside his grating- but I think I had better tell you of another man I met last year. There was a very strange feature in this case, strange because of its extremely rare occurrence. This man had once been brought to the scaffold in company with several others, and had had the sentence of death by shooting passed upon him for some political crime. Twenty minutes later he had been reprieved and some other punishment substituted; but the interval between the two sentences, twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must die. I was very anxious to hear him speak of his impressions during that dreadful time, and I several times inquired of him as to what he thought and felt. He remembered everything with the most accurate and extraordinary distinctness, and declared that he would never forget a single iota of the experience. About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the ground, to which to fasten the criminals (of whom there were several). The first three criminals were taken to the posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross: and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live.

He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions--one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good- bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them….He happened to look in my direction: I saw his eyes and understood all, at once--but how am I to describe it? I do so wish you or somebody else could draw it, you, if possible. I thought at the time what a picture it would make. You must imagine all that went before, of course, all- all. He had lived in the prison for some time and had not expected that the execution would take place for at least a week yet- he had counted on all the formalities and so on taking time; but it so happened that his papers had been got ready quickly. At five o'clock in the morning he was asleep- it was October, and at five in the morning it was cold and dark. The governor of the prison comes in on tiptoe and touches the sleeping man's shoulder gently. He starts up. 'What is it?' he says. 'The execution is fixed for ten o'clock.' He was only just awake, and would not believe at first, but began to argue that his papers would not be out for a week, and so on. When he was wide awake and realized the truth, he became very silent and argued no more- so they say; but after a bit he said: 'It comes very hard on one so suddenly' and then he was silent again and said nothing.

The three or four hours went by, of course, in necessary preparations- the priest, breakfast, (coffee, meat, and some wine they gave him; doesn't it seem ridiculous?) And yet I believe these people give them a good breakfast out of pure kindness of heart, and believe that they are doing a good action. Then he is dressed, and then begins the procession through the town to the scaffold. I think he, too, must feel that he has an age to live still while they cart him along. Probably he thought, on the way, 'Oh, I have a long, long time yet. Three streets of life yet! When we've passed this street there'll be that other one; and then that one where the baker's shop is on the right; and when shall we get there? It's ages, ages!' Around him are crowds shouting, yelling- ten thousand faces, twenty thousand eyes. All this has to be endured, and especially the thought:

'Here are ten thousand men, and not one of them is going to be executed, and yet I am to die.' Well, all that is preparatory.

At the scaffold there is a ladder, and just there he burst into tears- and this was a strong man, and a terribly wicked one, they say! There was a priest with him the whole time, talking; even in the cart as they drove along, he talked and talked. Probably the other heard nothing; he would begin to listen now and then, and at the third word or so he had forgotten all about it. At last he began to mount the steps; his legs were tied, so that he had to take very small steps. The priest, who seemed to be a wise man, had stopped talking now, and only held the cross for the wretched fellow to kiss. At the foot of the ladder he had been pale enough; but when he set foot on the scaffold at the top, his face suddenly became the color of paper, positively like white notepaper. His legs must have become suddenly feeble and helpless, and he felt a choking in his throat- you know the sudden feeling one has in moments of terrible fear, when one does not lose one's wits, but is absolutely powerless to move? If some dreadful thing were suddenly to happen; if a house were just about to fall on one- don't you know how one would long to sit down and shut one's eyes and wait, and wait? Well, when this terrible feeling came over him, the priest quickly pressed the cross to his lips, without a word- a little silver cross it was- and he kept on pressing it to the man's lips every second. And whenever the cross touched his lips, the eyes would open for a moment, and the legs moved once, and he kissed the cross greedily, hurriedly--just as though he were anxious to catch hold of something in case of its being useful to him afterwards, though he could hardly have had any connected religious thoughts at the time. And so up to the very block.

How strange that criminals seldom swoon at such a moment! On the contrary, the brain is especially active, and works incessantly- probably hard, hard, hard- like an engine at full pressure. I imagine that various thoughts must beat loud and fast through his head- all unfinished ones, and strange, funny thoughts, very likely!- like this, for instance: 'That man is looking at me, and he has a wart on his forehead! and the executioner has burst one of his buttons, and the lowest one is all rusty!' And meanwhile he notices and remembers everything. There is one point that cannot be forgotten, round which everything else dances and turns about; and because of this point he cannot faint, and this lasts until the very final quarter of a second, when the wretched neck is on the block and the victim listens and waits and knows- that's the point, he knows that he is just now about to die, and listens for the rasp of the iron over his head. If I lay there, I should certainly listen for that grating sound, and hear it, too! There would probably be but the tenth part of an instant left to hear it in, but one would certainly hear it. And imagine, some people declare that when the head flies off it is conscious of having flown off! Just imagine what a thing to realize! Fancy if consciousness were to last for even five seconds!

Draw the scaffold so that only the top step of the ladder comes in clearly. The criminal must be just stepping on to it, his face as white as notepaper. The priest is holding the cross to his blue lips, and the criminal kisses it, and knows and sees and understands everything. The cross and the head—there's your picture; the priest and the executioner, with his two assistants, and a few heads and eyes below. Those might come in as subordinate accessories--a sort of mist. There's a picture for you.' The prince paused, and looked around.

'Certainly that isn't much like quietism,' murmured Alexandra, half to herself.

'Now tell us about your love affairs,' said Adelaida, after a moment's pause.

The prince gazed at her in amazement.

Note how Dostoevsky beautifully winds up this scene with offhanded humor. Passages like this, even if they often pop up without warning, and seem out of place, are all redeemed by such moments as the two sisters' totally missing the point the speakers try to make.
Of course, even after these traits are known, others rarely get Myshkin. The general also thinks little of Myshkin, at first, and disses him:

'To judge from your words, you came straight to my house with the intention of staying there.'
'That could only have been on your invitation. I confess, however, that I should not have stayed here even if you had invited me, not for any particular reason, but because it is- well, contrary to my practice and nature, somehow.'
'Oh, indeed! Then it is perhaps as well that I neither did invite you, nor do invite you now. Excuse me, prince, but we had better make this matter clear, once for all. We have just agreed that with regard to our relationship there is not much to be said, though, of course, it would have been very delightful to us to feel that such relationship did actually exist; therefore, perhaps- '
'Therefore, perhaps I had better get up and go away?' said the prince, laughing merrily as he rose from his place; just as merrily as though the circumstances were by no means strained or difficult. 'And I give you my word, general, that though I know nothing whatever of manners and customs of society, and how people live and all that, yet I felt quite sure that this visit of mine would end exactly as it has ended now. Oh, well, I suppose it's all right; especially as my letter was not answered. Well, good-bye, and forgive me for having disturbed you!'
The prince's expression was so good-natured at this moment, and so entirely free from even a suspicion of unpleasant feeling was the smile with which he looked at the general as he spoke, that the latter suddenly paused, and appeared to gaze at his guest from quite a new point of view, all in an instant.

The general thus changes his mind at the man's openness. The general has an assistant, Gavril Ardalyonovich Ivolgin (aka Ganya), who is unrequitedly in love with Aglaia. Yet, he is power hungry and deceitful, so is trying to seduce a former mistress, Anastassya Filippovna Barashkov of an aristocrat named Totsky, who is willing to pay Ganya 75,000 rubles to take his mistress off his hands with marriage, so he can pursue the general's oldest daughter Alexandra. We also suspect that Totsky may have abused Anastassya as a child. Myshkin overhears this plot because he is doing a chore for the general, and Ganya thinks so little of him that he believes there is nothing the Prince can do to stop him. Myshkin rents a room from Ganya's family, who disapprove of Ganya's seduction of the fallen woman Anastassya. This is where Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, a dark haired twenty-seven-year-old whom the Prince first met on the train into St. Petersburg, declares his love for Anastassya, and vows to bring 100,000 rubles to her birthday party, where she is to announce whether she will marry Ganya or not. Rogozhin is the opposite of Myshkin in every way, and from their first meeting on the train this is evident, and eerily foreshadowing of Hitchcock's later film Strangers On A Train.

The evening comes, and many guests arrive, including Totsky, General Epanchin, Ganya, and some other minor characters. Myshkin arrives uninvited, which is a pattern he follows throughout the book, though it rouses little anger in others, for he is so sweet and unassuming. Anastassya, on word from Myshkin, refuses Ganya's proposal. Rogozhin comes with 100,000 rubles, but Myshkin, out of nowhere, offers to marry Anastassya, saying he has come into a large inheritance. She refuses the Prince and chooses Rogozhin. Months go by and the Prince disappears from society, as he pursues Anastassya, who wavers between him and Rogozhin to the prince. Myshkin's inheritance is smaller than expected, and he pays off the debts of too many hangers-on.
Myshkin returns to St. Petersburg to confront Rogozhin. They discuss religion and seem to get along. Yet, later that day, Rogozhin triess to stab Myshkin at his hotel, but fails when Myshkin has an epileptic fit. Myshkin recovers and leaves for Pavlovsk, a summer resort town the idle rich go to. The Epanchins, the Ivolgins, Anastassya and other minor characters all relax there as well. This is when Burdovsky, who claims to be the son of Myshkin's deceased benefactor, when he was in the Swiss asylum, Pavlishchev, comes to him and demands 'just reimbursement' for his father's support of Myshkin. Burdovsky is a fraud, but Myshkin helps him anyway.
While at the resort, Myshkin falls in love with Aglaia, and she returns his love, but will not admit it, although she reads him a poem, The Poor Knight, that belies her feelings. She is embarrassed by it, and scorns him, especially when her family welcomes his interest, until he breaks a Chinese vase one evening, in the course of a political and religious speech. Meanwhile, Aglaia forces a choice on Myshkin- he must choose his true love for her of his compassionate love for Anastassya, who loves him, but refuses to corrupt the naïve Prince with her lowness. Earlier in the book, we got hints of this growing rivalry when Myshkin compared the two women's beauties, and this quite falsely contrived emotional triangle is one of the novel's weakest elements; most likely a nod to the desire to sell the book to women readers in the general public, , as well as male intellectuals. The Prince hesitates, and Aglaia runs off, seeing no future between them. Anastassya chooses to marry Myshkin, then backs out and runs off with Rogozhin again. Myshkin follows them to St. Petersburg and finds that Rogozhin has stabbed Anastassya to death. Rogozhin is sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in Siberia, Myshkin loses his mind and returns to the Swiss asylum, and Aglaia leaves Russia with a Polish count who uses her.

Of course, there are dozens of smaller actions, and subplots, but, as any reader can tell from this summary, the tale is a classic soap opera, through and through, with characters propelling the often absurd social situations along with naturalistic reactions and declarations that contrast sharply to the often ridiculous overt actions they take. Myshkin is, of course, the dominant character, as he is the presumed titular character. His title, as the idiot, is used both literally at start and end of the novel, but is ironically used throughout the bulk of the novel. He is, in many ways, the exact polar opposite of Rodion Raskolnikov, the lead character from Crime And Punishment. Raskolnikov ends up redeemed for his crime, and lives a good life as he did at that novel's start, and despite his wickedry, which dominates the bulk of that novel. Myshkin, by contrast, emerges from a pre-narrative fog, via his goodness and strength of character, yet is undone by the idiocy and immorality of others in society. The Idiot views Russian society, especially high society, as fundamentally flawed and corrupting, whereas Crime And Punishment proffers a somewhat redemptive, if often foolish and hypocritical, bourgeoisie. Thus, Rogozhin, the killer, is a high society debauchee, while his victim, Anastassya, is from the lower classes, although she is much more effectively sketched than the one dimensional females from Crime And Punishment, even if her masochism is her predictable undoing. Aglaia is a more cardboard character, and a stock critique of the fey and idle rich, too sensitive and indecisive for her own good.

Much of the book consists of people going to parties and plotting, as they do in Proust's magnum opus. Yet, there is more than a little touch of the baroque in the conversations. Too often someone takes a political or ethical or philosophical stand with no prompt, as if Dostoevsky is just too eager to tell his reader what the scene, or whole novel, is really about, which is always a sign of an artist unsure of their work's effectiveness. The conversations and ideas just pop up, often at random. A good example is when a minor character, an invalid named Ippolit, suddenly discourses quite schizophrenically on suicide as destructive and also God-like, merely to gain others' favor and sympathy when he threatens to kill himself. To that point in the novel his character has served no real purpose, and instead of being organically integrated into the novel earlier, with small scenes that may give us an idea to his claims and beliefs, instead, his character just explodes into the narrative, and dominates it. Then, as quickly, he disappears, his didactic purpose being served. Perhaps Dostoevsky felt he was being to coy in Crime And Punishment, and needed to get ideas more above board in this book. Regardless of the provenance, the decision is a poor one. Overall, though, the arguments- such as the Prince's above one on guillotining- are brilliantly elucidated in words, whether or not one agrees with them, but their often abruptive presence tends to make the book read a bit like a work wrought with fits and starts that obscure the ideas that those very motions hide.

Many critics have oddly tried to cast The Idiot as a thinly veiled autobiographical piece due to the fact that Dostoevsky, himself, suffered from epilepsy, but how this fact- that Myshkin is Dostoevsky- even were it true, helps the books be understood better, is never clarified. Another of the related main ideas that many critics wrongly point out in this novel is how Prince Myshkin is also seen as a de facto Jesus Christ-like stand in, but this can only be posited by a severe misinterpretation of the Christ myth. Yes, Myshkin is a devout Christian believer- in the old non-Born Again sense, and he seems preternaturally good, but he also subtly manipulates others, perhaps for their own good, if we accept the omniscient narrator's version of the tale's events, yet that very fact runs counter to the Christian beliefs of Jesus Christ as a totally selfless being, as do a number of other facts about Myshkin in the book. As with those critics that rather simplistically see Crime And Punishment as a great pro-Christian document, those who see Myshkin as a Christ-like figure see only those qualities in the character that fit their mold, and conveniently ignore those that do not fit. This is because too often the artist is conflated with his aistic creation. Yet, if as some believe, that Myshkin is also patterned after Dostoevsky, 'evidenced' by when Myshkin, at a party, late in the novel, embarrasses the Epanchins when he goes on and on with a very reactionary screed on religion that many critics insist is really Dostoevsky's own pontifications mouthed by his fictive surrogate, does this not also logically mean that Dostoevsky must be claiming himself a Christ-like figure, perhaps because, like a god, an artist is a creator of worlds? You can obviously see how quickly such facile and unsupported critical notions lead to silliness.

Also, this notion is vitiated by the fact that other non-major characters often speak with a dramatic and logical force equal to Myshkin's, and often in opposition to his views, yet they are somehow not claimed to be Dostoevskian surrogates. As example, at one of the many parties in the novel, a minor character rails that social liberalism is contrary to Russians norms, that a liberal cannot be a Russian, and vice-versa. He says that liberalism is a foreign scourge from the decadent Western European nations, and that social liberalism attacks the very foundations of the Russian social system. This plea for an almost Fascist state is uttered with quite the same conviction as Myshkin's devoutly held religious beliefs, but no critics try to conflate the sentiments that character expresses with those held by Dostoevsky. Why? Merely because it's all said by a minor character, and myopic critics cannot believe that a held truth can be uttered in a sly fashion, in an offhanded way? I am not arguing for the proposition that those sentiments were Dostoevsky's own, but if I were, they would have the same minimal heft as those who argue that Myshkin's every ideal is a Dostoevskian one, even as the author claimed he wanted to create a wholly decent and guileless character, something one might safely assume Dostoevsky never posited himself as being, lest he'd never be able to be a real artist. Subtlety, it seems, eludes most critical interpretations of art.

Another flaw that haunts the book, and goes hand in hand with the baroqueness of the dialogue, is the length of the book, and, again, as in Crime And Punishment, the dreadful use of an anticlimactic epilogue- chapter twelve of the fourth section, although only one is used in this book. Simply dismissing this as 'the style' relieves no modern reader of the burden of wading through unwieldy descriptions and pointless digressions woven merely to show how deeply sketched the background world the main narratives play out against is. Another thing that tests the patience of a modern reader is for Dostoevsky to never merely refer to a character by a Christian name or surname, but by both, often with one or more middle names tossed into the mix, yet then, in the next paragraph, sentence, or breath have that person referred to by a mere nickname, making it seem as if another character has entered the scene, when they have not.

As for the title, The Idiot? I'm surprised that more critical attention has not centered on the question as to whom the title actually refers to. Of course, on the surface level, it refers to Prince Myshkin, but it could also refer to Rogozhin, who is reduced to murderous insanity, or to the narcissistic vanity of Aglaia, or the masochism of Anastassya. In all of Dostoevsky's works I've read thus far, Myshkin is easily the most well-rounded, authentically detailed, and 'sane' major character the writer created, so this makes the question of the title's true referent all the more pertinent, and perplexing in its lack of critical discussion. Another avenue of thought for the title's meaning could be that it does principally refer to Myshkin, but not for the obvious reasons, but because we realize that he is intelligent enough to recognize the flaws that the other characters mock and tease him of, yet chooses to do nothing to improve his lot. Certainly, this is 'idiotic', in the common vernacular, and as idiotic as any of the other characters' actions.

Yet, despite its flaws, The Idiot is leagues above what passes for literature these days. If only there were not so many Cliffs Notes type sites that contribute to the dumbing down and homogenization of thought about classic novels, many people, especially those younger people in college, would not so easily regurgitate the same misperceptions about such works that are easily disproved simply by reading the work. Imagine that, getting the essence of a book by actually reading it. Perhaps I, and my essays, can start a trend?

 

Dan Schneider
© Dan Schneider 2006
www.Cosmoetica.com

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