The Idiot Dostoevsky's Fantastic Prince : a Phenomenological Approach

In Dostoevsky's novel, The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is more an angelic spirit than he is a man; he is a complex metaphor for fantasy, a mode of consciousness that is divorced from the earth and one which envisions human nature as univocal, unified, innocent, and free from contradiction. Drawing on phenomenology to interrogate those common human dimensions of lived space and temporality, the study examines The Idiot to articulate the way in which fantasy offers not an imagined eschatology rooted in the human order, but rather a futile design to imparadise a world already fallen. For diseased, Dostoevsky's prince is a presence that reminds the community of what is absent.