New Zealand Content Review Pt.I: Dostoevsky's "the Idiot"

I read the 1981 Bantam Classic Edition.

The Idiot displays a lamentable lack of New Zealand context, instead using the character device of an idiot to examine social conditions, morality and the construction of society in Russia during the mid-1800s. 

This idiot, Prince Myshkin, is religious and an innocent who only desires love and acceptance but is luridly enmeshed in scandal and murder. 

His idiosyncrasies are interpreted as idiocies by his social peers, Dostoevsky using this as the device to show the ridiculousness and artificiality of the rules of the highly formalized society of the time. 

It is fair to say that a New Zealand perspective would have changed the focus of the novel for the better, given its claustrophobic and exclusive focus on the drawing rooms of Russian society. A little fresh air, a few rolling pastures, the lush and verdant rain forests of the Far North and West coast, all these could have served to “open up” this dense epic.

Early references to Myshkin’s experiences as a patient in Switzerland and the countryside there brought to mind the farming areas of New Zealand, if only through their references to cows, trees, hedges, waterfalls, mountains and the like. However, there was a glaring lack of comparison in the places where it could have (and indeed, should have) been drawn. 

It could be suggested that Dostoevsky produced his work before New Zealand was the super-power it is today. However, reading the text with this attitude is to take for granted the gift of hindsight. Now we can see just how much Myshkin’s constitution could have been improved by a jaunt along the Pink and White Terraces and bathing in the Mineral Baths at Rotorua. 

Moreover, by this time at least one Russian traveller had made his way to New Zealand (pictured), and so it is inexcusable that more Russian authors were not made aware of the existence of the country. 

Finally, Dostoevsky’s own religious fervor makes it hard to believe that he was not aware, at least anachronistically, of New Zealand’s reputation as “God’s Own Country”.