Infinity, Eternity, and Immortality from Saint Petersburg to the Land of Utmost Bliss
Walter Benjamin #3: "Dostoevsky's The Idiot"
Notes for an unfinished detective novel notwithstanding (the genre for him epitomized architecture’s shaping of modern life), Walter Benjamin himself wrote no novels. He did find the art form significant enough to write dozens of novel reviews and some contemporary novel translations (namely Proust’s Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way), as well as an essay on the novel qua communication channel (“The Crisis of the Novel”)1. Towards what end did Walter Benjamin review a novel which for him was nearly a half century old? Benjamin justified the choice within the same book review:
Like every work of art this novel is based on an idea, or, as Novalis put it, ‘It has an a priori ideal, an implicit necessity to exist.’ And the task of the critic is to articulate this idea and nothing else.2
The whole essay “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot” is four paragraphs long. No need to survey the plot, to which he barely alludes, to unearth the idea at its core, which is his real goal for this piece.
The book on which Benjamin wrote this essay (Russian title: Идиот) is a novel which, to its intended audience of Russian society, would have been recognized as a novel of defamiliarization. Prince Myshkin, the titular idiot, returns to Saint Petersburg after spending five years in a long-term-care Swiss medical clinic. Prince Myshkin speaks up for himself intelligently and courteously, but his social, interpersonal, and romantic failures might today evince a high-functioning autism diagnosis (his actual diagnosis is epilepsy). In one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s early notes for The Idiot (which he composed in Switzerland), the author wrote that Myshkin’s “idiocy was in reality merely his mamma’s invention”.3 Only the novel’s conclusion clears room for a decision on how warranted is its title.
Walter Benjamin uses the sixth novel of Dostoevsky’s career as a vehicle to shape his own ideas about this quality a human life can sometimes exhibit, which he calls unforgettability. Alluding to the fifty-sixth chapter of Isaiah, Benjamin shares his reasons for finding in the character of the idiot-prince a “life that is not to be forgotten, even though it has no monument or memorial, or perhaps even any testimony. It simply cannot be forgotten.”4
Benjamin’s essay compares three categories of endlessness: infinity, eternity, and immortality. He distinguishes between them:
The concept of eternity negates that of infinity, whereas infinity achieves its greatest glory in immortality.5
Franz Kafka traversed similar terrain a few years before this essay in a short story included in his 1915 book The Country Doctor, and which he later incorporated into the final chapter of his posthumous novel The Trial: This short story, “Before the Law”, revolves around a triad analogous to Benjamin’s.
It’s a story with only three characters. Two of them are introduced immediately—the first character in the first sentence, the second character in the second—and the third character appears much later on: in the entire telling we observe a gatekeeper, a man from the country, and the fleas. In Kafka’s “Before the Law”, we can in these three characters also identify three approaches to endlessness.6
The relentless gatekeeper perpetuates the law by protecting it. The demoralized man from the country fails to uphold any law. And the hungry fleas, by being remembered, impact the dynamic of human affairs with a slight but definite shift. Each one of these characters embodies a distinct category of endlessness. The gatekeeper demonstrates infinity; the man from the country, eternity; and the fleas, immortality. Of these three, it is this third type which Walter Benjamin perhaps saw in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as the unforgettable. The fleas neither appeal nor do they respond to appeals, but, in being identified, they agitate the lives both of the gatekeeper and of the man from the country; to the man from the country, they are an autonomous but equally unresponsive part of the figure before him; for the gatekeeper, they are a nuisance which neither relents nor intensifies as his lifelong task of guarding the law renews through the years. The Prince is like this; he is at times a pest and at other times an indelible part of the social ecosystem, but he is present, and he impacts the lives of those around him for better or for worse. For this reason, Benjamin writes of Prince Myshkin:
His life can no more be extinguished than can the life of nature, to which it bears a profound relation—perhaps even less so. Nature may be immortal, but the prince’s life certainly is.
Giorgio Agamben gives a not-wholly convincing reading of this short story in his book The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, published 90 years after Kafka’s “Before the Law.” Agamben’s intention in invoking Kafka is to illustrate the social conditions around the Second Temple Jewish sect known as the Pharisees.
Whatever the origins of this sect — or rather, of this Jewish movement — that historians trace back to the Hasidim of the Maccabean era, Pharisees were certainly separated ones who, in distinguishing themselves from the masses while being essentially laypeople, insisted on scrupulous attention to rules of sacerdotal purity. This is how they “separate” themselves—not only and as much from the pagans, but also and above all from the ‘am-ha’aretz, the people of the earth, meaning, the ignorant farmers who did not follow the law. (In this sense, in Kafka’s apologue “Before the Law,” the “peasant” can be read as an ‘am-ha’aretz, and the gatekeeper as a parush, a Pharisee.)7
Agamben makes his inheritance of the Gospel-writers’ Pharisee-vilification apparent in this reading.
The Christian caricature of a Pharisee as anyone dangerously eager for law-fidelity comes from the historic group’s standing in the New Testament biographies of Jesus for the narrative role of the villains, although, as Agamben points out, Paul himself embraced this movement. No corrective influence prevented such attitudes from persisting into the twentieth century, as can be seen even in contemporary Christian poetry. Former President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education William Bennet edited a massively popular collection of Christian moral tales and poems, which he titled The Book of Virtues (it sold 3 million copies and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half in the early 1990s). A poem popularized by that book, by the Presbyterian minister Frank Crane, demonstrates this casual bitterness indicting the never-forgiven Pharisees in the poem “Boy Wanted,” consisting of a laundry list of admirable traits in young men. It contains the line:
A boy who is not a goody-goody, a prig, or a little Pharisee, but just healthy, happy, and full of life.8
In contrast to their contemporaries the Sadducees, who focused their guardianship on the Temple-based sacrificial rites, and against the Essenes, whose monastic asceticism emphasized an inward-focused holiness, the Pharisees directed their teachings towards the ritual praxis of daily-life Torah observance. The historic Pharisees may or may not have exemplified protective gatekeeping moreso than other historical Jewish groups, but after the Second Temple’s destruction, the Pharisees, from whom Rabbinic Judaism traces its lineage, accepted a newfound religious authority that rival Levantine religious organizations had until then held in dispute; the Sadducees found the sphere of their authority empty and ruined while the Essenes became absorbed into Early Christianity.
If Kafka’s gatekeeper resembles one whose personality reflects the infinite (with his submission to a law that stretches infinitely before and after him), and the man of the country represents the eternal (with his cries to nature and to the gatekeeper’s humanity), then the difference between these two men can be examined in the light of another religious law: not the halacha which Benjamin and Scholem understood to nourish the root of Kafka’s creativity, but the non-Abrahamic tradition stemming from Siddhartha Gautama, whose religion took the name of the tree (Bodhi) under which he attained enlightenment.
The Pure Land sect of Mahayana Buddhism has attained a following hundreds of millions strong by offering an alternative to the stringent Buddhist monastic lifestyle by which their inter-religious rivals pursue the noble eightfold path. The defining myth of the Pure Land faith is the legend of a salvific vow taken by an ancient King who pledged to usher all those who during their lifetime had chanted his name into his Land of Utmost Bliss at their moment of death. Those who accepted the Buddha Amitabha’s votive assurances would gain admittance to his Pure Land at the next turning of the wheel of life, death, and rebirth.
A theology became necessary to reconcile the earlier Buddhist teachings of the Pali canon and the Pure Land practice of nianfo (the ceaseless repetition of “Amitabha,” a name which means “infinite life”). With the Pure Land theological doctrine of “other-power” versus “self-power,” Pure Land theoreticians developed a gradient spanning, on one end, a reliance on the potent commitments of another being (other-power), and, on the other end, a salvation attained via austere meditation (self-power).
The Pure Land aporia regarding the primacy of “other-power” or “self-power” debates this question: If the Buddha Amitabha can guarantee through his efficacious other-power all who worshipfully recite his nianfo a rebirth in his Pure Land, then why bother spending one’s life cultivating meditative self-power?
This Pure Land theological dilemma contrasts the difference between the man of the country and the gatekeeper in Kafka’s story. Their opposing lives exemplify the difference between self-power and other-power. In the Kafka tale, the man of the country calls out to the gatekeeper, hoping for the redemption of an other-powered salvation, while the gatekeeper, in refusing him, asserts his own self-power.
Prince Myshkin in The Idiot neither calls out in a voice echoing through eternity for an other-powered salvation, nor does he make himself into the defender of an infinite principle through self-powered virtue. Instead, like Kafka’s fleas, he leaves a unique mark in his own way, an irritating one, but one which can never be forgotten, even after the conscious memory of his time spent in Saint Petersburg has long since faded.
In the aforementioned book on Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben takes a brief detour through Benjamin’s essay “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot” to consider this quality of a human life’s resounding unforgettability:
I imagine Benjamin had something like this in mind when, referring to the life of the idiot, he spoke of the exigency to remain unforgettable … Despite the efforts of historians, scribes, and all sorts of archivists, the quantity of what is irretrievably lost in the history of society and in the history of individuals is infinitely greater than what can be stored in the archives of memory. In every instant, the measure of forgetting and ruin, the ontological squandering that we bear within ourselves far exceeds the piety of our memories and consciences. But the shapeless chaos of the forgotten is neither inert nor ineffective. To the contrary, it is at work within us with a force equal to that of the mass of conscious memories, but in a different way. Forgetting has a force and a way of operating that cannot be measured in the same terms as those of conscious memory, nor can it be accumulated like knowledge. Its persistence determines the status of all knowledge and understanding.
In this novel, the actions of Dostoevsky’s other characters, motivated by bitterness, hatred, or wrath, earn no mention in Benjamin’s book review. Dostoevsky’s storytelling offers for his readers’ consideration the “ruined woman” Nastasya hosting a game destined for disaster at her birthday party, where she demands the men confess the worst thing they have ever done; Lebedyev drunkenly prophecies how the events of the Book of Revelation were coming to pass in the present generation, frightening an old man to literal death; Rogozhin’s knife craves human blood again and again. Yet in Benjamin’s essay, deliberations are not made over these or any other shocking plot developments. Benjamin’s concern is less The Idiot the novel and more the idiot the man.
Dostoevsky, in his unpublished novel notes, called the idiot figure of Prince Myshkin “a perfectly beautiful man”. Can we take Benjamin at his word on whom, in his life, this idiot represented? In the final paragraph of his essay, Benjamin concludes “Dostoevsky’s great act of lamentation in this novel is for the failure of the youth movement”, by which he meant the German scouting corps whose literary magazine Benjamin proudly edited until, at the outbreak of world war, the organization became a sales funnel into the German infantry.
It’s not clear that the fate of the German Youth Movement was the only contemporary relevance the essayist found in this 19th-century novel. In his biography of Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem recounts discovering a different identity for the person whose unforgettable, immortal life Benjamin was keeping in mind:
In November 1917, Benjamin sent me a copy of his notes on Dostoevski’s The Idiot, written that summer, which moved me as much as my response moved him. I had written him that behind his view of the novel and the figure of Prince Myshkin I saw the figure of his dead friend [Fritz Heinle (1894-1914)].9
Benjamin responded enthusiastically to Scholem’s theory without actually confirming it. According to Scholem’s memoir, the death of Fritz Heinle left a devastating impact on Benjamin. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1st, 1914 and invaded Belgium on August 4th, 1914. On August 8th, Heinle, a fellow member of the German Youth Movement, locked himself in one of the University of Berlin’s student center discussion halls and opened a gas valve. Heinle took with him that evening his girlfriend Rika Seligson, who died at his side. The two prepared for their suicides-by-suffocation by sending an express letter to Walter Benjamin with the message, “You will find us lying in the Meeting House.”
Benjamin shares a detailed account of this grim day and the ones to follow in his essay “Berlin Chronicle,” which would evolve into his later autobiography Berlin Childhood around Nineteen Hundred. He acknowledges that Heinle’s death inspired him to write, not the Dostoevsky essay, but a cycle of sonnets. Benjamin describes those poems by saying, “I tried to summon up, in a meditation on the nature of the lyric, the figure of my friend Fritz Heinle… this first attempt to evoke the sphere of his life through that of poetry was unsuccessful.”
In many ways, the death of Heinle and the failure of the German Youth Movement must have had some coextension in Benjamin’s mind. Heinle died protesting the war, while Benjamin denounced the German Youth Movement’s founder for his support of the war. But the analogy between the real-life Heinle and the fictional Myshkin falls apart in that by the final page of Dostoevsky’s novel, Prince Myshkin remains living.
That is notwithstanding Fredric Jameson’s critique that “Benjamin never really engaged the problem of the novel as such”. It’s not clear on what grounds Jameson presumes that “We may assume that [Walter Benjamin] felt satisfied by Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, a fundamental problematization of the novel as genre”. These quotations come from: Frederic Jameson, The Benjamin Files (London: Verso Books, 2022), page 68.
Walter Benjamin, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), page 79. Only four years after Benjamin wrote it did he find publication for this essay in his friend’s journal Die Argonauten. The German poet Novalis (1772-1801) was the author of Henry von Ofterdingen and Hymns to the Night.
Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), page 257. In the finished novel, no mention is made of Myshkin’s mother; however, the character studies Dostoevsky made for his novels in private notebooks fluctuated radically several times before his characters reached crystallization in his final drafts.
The verse referenced here is Isaiah 56:5 (JPS translation, 1917): “Even unto them will I give in My house / And within My walls a monument and a memorial / Better than sons and daughters; / I will give them an everlasting memorial, / That shall not be cut off.”
The German words Benjamin uses for his triad of immortality-eternity-infinity are:
Immortality / Unsterblichkeit: In German the root verb sterben (to die) shares an etymology with the English verb “to starve”; the antithetical prefix un- flips the meaning to what is undying.
Eternity / Ewigkeit: From this word’s Proto-Germanic ancestor, Old English got the word which would become “ever”.
Infinity / Unendlichkeit: While the word looks similar to the English word “unending”, it’s the word used throughout German philosophy for the concept of the infinite.
Theodor Adorno, in his essay, “Notes on Kafka”, issues a stern warning against exactly the sort of analysis done here, which he characterizes as reading ontological symbols into Kafka’s fiction: “the first rule is: take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above. Kafka’s authority is textual. Only fidelity to the letter, not oriented understanding, can be of help.” Whether cautiously or defiantly, I nevertheless opt to plumb the analogy further. Quotation from: Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1967), page 247.
Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), pages 45–46. Agamben’s reference to the “Hasidim of the Maccabean era” is not an anachronism; aside from the much-later Hasidic movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov in the 18th century, a Jewish religious sect named for the same Hebrew word (חסיד) rejected Jewish assimilation to Hellenistic culture during the Maccabean period.
William J. Bennett, ed., The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), page 79. The Pharisees are mentioned multiple times elsewhere in this book, which can still be seen used today for the edification of young people. What’s striking in Crane’s poem is how being “full of life” is contrasted to law-adherence, in contradistinction to the Orthodox Jewish reading of Leviticus 18:5, that in law-adherence can life be discovered (“keep my statutes and my rules; if a person does this he shall live by them”).
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), page 49.