ABSTRACT
In The Idiot, the young nihilist Ippolit, after a meditation on the depiction of the
dead Christ in the painting by Holbein, asks: ‘Is it possible to express in an image
something that has no image?’ (VIII, 340). He answers himself with a description
of chaos personified, a hideous, giant, all-powerful yet deaf and dumb spider that
laughs at his insignificance; this is his representation of the ultimate disorder of
death with no promise of afterlife and the absurdity of existence without God.
Dostoevsky was also preoccupied for most of his mature years with Ippolit’s
question. Unlike Ippolit, however, he believed in the redemption of disordered
earthly life by paradise, and he was determined both to see and to portray the
promise of this potential perfection latent in mankind and its society. Right from
his earliest works he made it his mission to write about Russian society, and later
in life he challenged the view of Goncharov that art could only successfully
present ‘a life fixed in some image’, such as the lives of the aristocracy in previous
decades.1 In the Diary of a Writer for January 1877 he wrote:
