The Sublime Crime: 
Faith, Violence, and the Aesthetic of Vandalism in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is often read as a moral novel, a study of innocence in a corrupt world, or a Christian meditation on suffering. Yet the climactic murder of Nastasya Filippovna refuses to settle into any of these interpretive frames. Instead, the scene confronts readers with an aesthetic rupture, a moment in which the moral and ideological systems structuring the novel collapse under the pressure of excess. This paper argues that Rogozhin’s murder functions as an aesthetic event that anticipates central features of twentieth-century Modernism and Postmodernism. In this act of extreme violence, Dostoevsky exposes the instability of identity, the fragility of ideological authority, and the limits of representational coherence.

To demonstrate this transformation of violence into a form of aesthetic production, I draw on a theoretical framework spanning philosophical aesthetics and critical theory. Specifically, I leverage Kant’s theory of the sublime, Georges Bataille’s critique of homogeneity, and Ben Lerner’s conception of vandalism as creative destruction to reframe the murder as a crisis in traditional moral, theological, and aesthetic frameworks. By situating Dostoevsky in dialogue with these philosophical and Modernist practices, this essay reframes The Idiot as more than a moral or religious novel. It becomes a site where the contradictions of beauty and violence, faith and destruction, converge to anticipate a new artistic epoch. 

The radical aesthetic rupture staged by Nastasya Filippovna's murder finds its most compelling contemporary echo in Ben Lerner's analysis of the vandal as a destructive but creative force. Lerner argues that “modern art is inseparable from the destruction of modern art,” which I take to include the premise that the action of the vandal indeed satisfies the criteria for being considered a creative act. The vandal isn't creative; however, their vandalism is, as the action and its consequence are what succeed in provoking an experience of the sublime, which, interestingly (as we shall see in Lerner’s essay) is initially motivated by a preceding experience of the sublime provoked by the works of art the vandal vandalizes. Lerner closes the first section of the article by asserting the claim which now motivates the present work: “It’s precisely when vandals and artists are so difficult to tell apart that an act of vandalism can raise important and often uncomfortable questions about how we really define and value art” (p. 44). This paradox between creation and destruction that Lerner identifies finds an antecedent in Kant’s aesthetics, where the experience of the sublime arises precisely from the breakdown of rational judgment and formal beauty.

Prince Myshkin enters the novel as an idealist whose spiritual innocence seems to offer a counterpoint to the cynicism and violence of Petersburg society. Yet Dostoevsky positions Myshkin’s goodness not as a stabilizing force but as a catalyst for aesthetic tension. However, the society around him operates according to a different logic--one shaped by fragmentation, desire, and the failures of institutional morality. As the narrative progresses, Myshkin’s idealism repeatedly collides with the world’s indifference to beauty, producing moments of dissonance that signal a transition from the beautiful to the sublime. Dostoevsky stages such encounters through Myshkin’s increasing inability to reconcile his aspirational ethics with the structural realities of the world he inhabits. The more Myshkin attempts to redeem those around him, the more he reveals the instability of the moral categories he embodies. His presence heightens tensions without resolving them, suggesting that faith in an idealized moral framework is insufficient in a world governed by competing ideological forces. This tension drives the novel toward its final catastrophic event, where the sublime emerges not as transcendence but as violent rupture.

The paradoxical nature of aesthetic judgment, first articulated by Kant in his definition of "taste," establishes the intellectual precondition for understanding how aesthetic experience can arise from disruption and destruction. According to Kant, taste is something universally subjective, or in his own words, taste stems from “[a] deeply hidden basis, common to all human beings, underlying their agreement in judging the forms under which objects are given them” (p. 79). Kant justifies this claim through the premises, “If we search for a principle of taste that states the universal criterion of the beautiful by means of determinate concepts, then we engage in a fruitless endeavor, because we search for something that is impossible and intrinsically contradictory” (ibid.). In other words, taste for Kant is a paradoxical agreement without concept--a shared form of judgment that depends on the absence of any fixed standard. This paradox anticipates the very instability that modern and postmodern aesthetics will later embrace, where meaning arises not from formal harmony but from its disruption. When Lerner describes vandalism as a creative act, he implicitly extends Kant’s insight: aesthetic experience, far from being bound by rules of beauty, is precisely the result of the collapse of formal rules. If taste marks the paradoxical harmony of subjective agreement, Kant’s ensuing discussion of the beautiful and the sublime reveals the moment when that harmony gives way to excess, where aesthetic judgment confronts its own impossibility--a tension that will become crucial for understanding the vandal’s creative act.

Kant distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime by locating the former in objects that exhibit definite form and boundedness, and the latter in the excess beyond the beautiful limits. For Kant, beauty depends on the apprehension of order--on the possibility of communicating form through the shared communal sense of taste. (pp. 82–3) The sublime, by contrast, arises where form collapses, where the imagination fails to grasp the magnitude before it but reason insists on a totality nonetheless. It is precisely this moment of failure that mirrors the vandal’s creative act: in violating the boundaries of the artwork, the vandal enacts an aesthetic experience born from the destruction of a preconceived and complete aesthetic form. This logic of aesthetic transgression that Kant locates in the sublime reemerges, secularized and radicalized, in modernist art. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ben Lerner’s reflections on vandalism and authorship, where the collapse of form becomes not merely an experience of sublimity but a new definition of creative production.

Lerner begins his essay “Damage Control: The modern art world’s tyranny of price” with the claim, “Much of the story of twentieth-century art can be told as a series of acts of vandalism” (p. 43). In relation to Duchamp Fountain--which, quite literally, is a urinal--Lerner says that, “Whatever else Duchamp’s gesture was--a provocative way of blurring the boundary between art and mundane objects, a critique of the idea of authorship--it was also a metaphoric micturition on the history of creative expression” (ibid.). In this way, we see that modernism’s counter-cultural roots stem from a “critique of the idea of authorship,” where “mundane objects” might attain the status of works of art, authored by the qualitatively dissimilar, though very much the same in quantity (one painting by Michaelangelo equals the same quantity of objects as Duchamp’s urinal), creative acts. Creative expression since the modernists of the early 20th century, Lerner observes, has undergone a sincere reevaluation. This critical shift did not, however, begin in the 20th century. Instead, Dostoevsky anticipates this "tyranny of price" when he concludes The Idiot with Nastasya Filippovna's murder, an event foreshadowed throughout the novel and prefigured in Ippolit's interpretation of Holbein’s Dead Christ (1522). The tension Lerner identifies between destruction and creation finds concrete expression in the real-world acts of artists-turned-vandals such as Vladimir Umanets and Pierre Pinoncelli, whose interventions literalize the paradox of the creative act by transforming existing works into new, transgressive forms of art.

The first vandal Lerner recounts is Vladimir Umanets, whose act of vandalism was done in the name of a self-proclaimed novel art movement called Yellowism. The act itself: Umanets wrote in a dripping black paint pen “Vladimir Umanets ‘12 / A Potential Piece of Yellowism” in the bottom right corner of Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon. Umanets, Lerner relates, “argued that he was working in the tradition of Duchamp,” and confidently claimed that his act “was not vandalism, as he believed it increased the aesthetic and financial value of the Rothko” (p. 44) Likewise, another instance is retold of one Pierre Pinoncelli urinated on Duchamp’s Fountain exhibition, in 1993, at the Carre d’Art in Nimes [1].  The vandal, it seems, attempts to create through the alteration of a work of art; any alteration of an original work of art is destruction, to some degree. Pinoncelli would call his piss-take an act of “creative destruction.” This paradox of vandalism as authorship invites a return to its theoretical ancestor, Marcel Duchamp, whose brief but seminal essay “The Creative Act” articulates the participatory logic that underwrites both modernist art and its yellow desecration.

In this essay we are treated to a clear and concise definition of the “creative act” as conceived by one of modernism’s most notorious figures. Duchamp’s conclusion, which contains important facets of modernism’s creative capacity, reads: 

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds [their] contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists (p. 140)

Duchamp’s interpretation of the creative act follows the intent of Umanet’s claim as one of his aesthetic disciples. Not only that, Umanet’s actions begs the question of expanding Duchamp’s proposed role of the spectator into including--controversially, to my mind--acts of vandalism as creative acts in their own right, forcefully “rehabilitating” the work of art that has been vandalized. It also brings the spectators taste into the fold, allowing for the evolving taste of art enthusiasts to participate in the rehabilitation of artworks of the past into the contemporary moment. Seen through Duchamp’s lens, Umanets’s defacement does not simply destroy Rothko’s painting but inaugurates its second life as an object reborn through a radical reinterpretation--a transformation that exposes the absurd but revealing logic of modern art’s self-reinvention.

In another light, the work of art enters a new chapter of its existence as an art-object. From the moment Umanet’s ink touched Rothko’s work it became something entirely new: Black on Maroon has been redeemed. To an absurd extent, this qualifies the history of the work itself to have an epitaph like the words inscribed on a tombstone: “Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon, b. 1958, d. 2012”; engraved right next to this, a new possibility emerges: “Mark Rothko and Vladimir Umanet’s Black on Maroon: a Potential Piece of Yellowism, b. 2012, d. __”. Yet this cycle of destruction and rehabilitation also reveals the social and political forces that regulate aesthetic value. Georges Bataille’s critique of “homogeneous society” exposes how such regulation depends on excluding the very heterogeneity that the vandal embodies.

Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya Filippovna represents the point at which the ideological and aesthetic contradictions within the novel erupt into full visibility. Rather than functioning solely as a narrative climax or moral warning, the murder operates as an aesthetic act--a moment in which the structures that sustain meaning are undone. Bataille’s critique of homogeneity provides a useful framework for understanding this scene. For Bataille, societies depend on systems that suppress excess, violence, and irrationality in favor of order. This would align societies interest in preserving the “beautiful” rather than sublime aesthetic experiences. However, such systems are always vulnerable to eruptions of the "heterogeneous": forces that resist assimilation and expose the limits of ideology. Rogozhin becomes the agent of this heterogeneous excess. His act destroys more than a human life; it dismantles the fragile moral and ideological coherence the novel and its many characters attempt to maintain. The murder is neither random nor merely passionate. At this moment, Dostoevsky refuses the possibility of aesthetic harmony or moral consolation. Instead, he offers an event that destabilizes the very conditions under which meaning is acceptably produced.

Throughout his essay, Bataille calls attention to the structures of homogeneity that function, fundamentally (“as a rule”), in order to exclude “every heterogeneous element, whether filthy or noble” (p. 146). What this entails for the art world, after Lerner’s “Damage Control”, is that critics who serve the base homogeneity of society have ultimately become corrupted by the markets of capitalism, by their rejection of the creative acts of the vandal. Lerner’s own reflections echo Bataille’s insistence on the necessity of heterogeneity, extending the logic of creative transgression into the moral and artistic realm that Dostoevsky had already explored. Indeed, Lerner invokes the “village idiot,” recalling Prince Myshkin himself, whose innocence and violent break from reality culminate in Dostoevsky’s radical critique of beauty: the staging of a murder of one of the novel’s most beautiful character.

Lerner appears to agree with Bataille’s assessment when he writes: 

If we resort to claiming that what sets vandals apart is that they compromise valuable objects, that the originals aren’t their property, or that they violate the contract between the museum and the public, we run up against the fact that the rejection of beauty and resistance to the market have been rhetorical staples of avant-garde art for half a century or more (p. 45)

To ignore the vandal on the basis of deviancy, or to assert their acts as purely destructive, we overlook the very real possibility that they may have created something that, for lack of a better term, appeals to an on-looker's taste . “Like some kind of village idiot,” Lerner continues, seemingly with Dostoevsky’s specter looming above him as he types, “a vandal takes literally what we’re only supposed to pretend to believe: that anything can be art, traditional media must give way to conceptual performance, and the money-hungry art world must be subject to ruthless critique” (ibid.). Lerner’s reflections on vandalism are extended to Bataille’s critique of homogeneity into the aesthetic and moral domain, revealing how acts of destruction continue to unsettle the boundaries between transgression and creation.

Renowned Dostoevskian scholar, Joseph Frank, gives a comprehensive account of Dostoevsky’s creative process as he drafted the Idiot from 1867-1869. In Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871 (1995), the fourth volume of a five-volume series on the life and works of Dostoevsky, Frank gives a detailed account of the Idiot’s formation in the mind of its artist. Frank writes that Dostoevsky, through the process of writing the Idiot, had come to a new understanding of faith. “Thus faith,” Frank writes “had now become completely internal, irrational, and non-utilitarian; its truth could not be impugned by a failure to effect worldly changes, nor should it be defended rationally, as it were, because of the moral-psychological assuagements it might offer for human misery” (p. 310). Faith, which seems to be sent whirling in anxious terror when Dostoevsky faced Holbein’s Dead Christ--which is reported by Dostoevsky’s wife to have disturbed Dostoevsky to the point of nearly causing an epileptic fit [2]-- should not, according to Frank’s assessment of Dostoevsky’s newfound understanding of faith, feel compelled to offer a response to the image that could make a man “lose his faith.” Thus the conclusion of Prince Myshkin’s collapse back into idiocy should be seen less as a collapse, but more as a release from the outwardly directed concerns which Dostoevsky formerly associated with faith. To grasp how the Idiot achieves this “ruthless critique,” we must turn to Dostoevsky’s own creative process, which Joseph Frank documents in meticulous detail. Frank’s account reveals how the novel’s spiritual and aesthetic ambitions were forged through Dostoevsky’s evolving understanding of faith itself.

Throughout the novel, we see Prince Myshkin act nobly, selflessly, embodying the Christian ideal ethic of love. Despite his expressions of compassion, he is repeatedly deemed by his peers to be an “idiot;” and yet, at the end of this narrative, are we truly meant to take literally his idiocy, when we have come to understand it as a rejection of Myshkin’s standards, his behavior and values? This lapse back into idiocy symbolizes the very same shift experienced by Dostoevsky when he discovered his faith had turned “completely internal, irrational, and non-utilitarian;” the prince has come to understand--as Dostoevsky has through the process of creating the Idiot--that he no longer needs to provide a “rational” defense for its purity. From this perspective, it seems Frank was misguided in proclaiming Myshkin’s fate as tragic, but rather the tragedy is the fate of Russia and, indeed, of all of Europe, as the final words of the novel speak to this very foreboding sentiment. Lizaveta Prokofyevna, matriarch of the Epanchins (Myshkin’s last living relatives), bearing witness to the fate of her only living blood-relation (outside of her immediate family), prophecies the fate of Europe: “Enough of these passions, it’s time to serve reason. And all this, and all these foreign lands, and all this Europe of yours, it’s all one big fantasy, and all of us abroad are one big fantasy… remember my words, you’ll see for yourself!” (p. 615) Implicit within the text itself, Dostoevsky predicts the misinterpretation of the Idiot’s final scene. This reconfiguration of faith as inward, irrational, and non-utilitarian illuminates Prince Myshkin’s paradoxical condition. His so-called idiocy becomes not a flaw but a form of revelation--a dramatization of Dostoevsky’s own movement from rational justification toward an interiorized, redemptive vision of belief.

If we compare the actions of Josef Nikolaus Kleer, one of the vandals Lerner writes of, it is easy to see a clear lineage between the Idiot’s finale and the consideration of vandalism as a creative act in itself. Kleer would pick up one of the plastic rails next to Barnett Newman’s series “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue” and physically assault the exhibit (p. 46). “Kleer’s violence,” Lerner explains, “was motivated, he would maintain, not only by outrage that a work of art could cost so much but also by the intensely negative effect the canvas had on him.” The material conditions of the work itself provoked Kleer to commit the act. Lerner continues,“Kleer believed himself  ‘capable of making a comparable picture for a fraction of the acquisition price’ ” (ibid.). Recall the end of Part I, when Nastasya provokes a bidding war between her suitors, eventually settling with Rogozhin’s offer of one hundred-thousand roubles, ironically wrapped up in a copy of The Stock Market Exchange. Nastasya, by way of asserting her power to choose over the desperate men, tosses the hundred-thousand into the fire. The crowd gathered for her birthday cannot contain their horror experiencing such an absurd display of hubris. Rogozhin’s eventual actions display an expression of resentment for Nastasya having flipped between  Myshkin and himself throughout the events of the novel. Nowhere is this tension between faith, reason, and creative destruction more palpable than in Rogozhin’s final act. His murder of Nastasya Filippovna both reenacts and reimagines the aesthetic logic of vandalism--an act that annihilates beauty to produce a sublime experience that only Myshkin, as witness, can fully apprehend. The resonance between Rogozhin’s act and the modern vandals Lerner describes is unmistakable. Both are driven by outrage at commodified beauty and compelled by an aesthetic impulse that transforms violation into creation, echoing Dostoevsky’s critique of moral and material value in the bidding scene of the Idiot.

Lerner writes that “sublimity has always been associated with terror, with the sensation of being undone, a ‘fear of falling’ ” (ibid.). With his full awareness of Rogozhin’s character, his motivations, Myshkin is capable of recognizing his attempt to do as Duchamp would later write about the creative act in light of modernism’s destructive tendencies. “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone;” Duchamp continues, “the spectator brings forth the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications.” I will now establish the basis for making the claim that Prince Myshkin acts as spectator to the artist, Rogozhin, in order to display how Nastasya’s murder may be interpreted as a foreshadowing of Modernism in the 20th century. Lerner’s conception of sublimity as terror thus clarifies the aesthetic stakes of Rogozhin’s violence. When read alongside Duchamp’s theory of the “creative act,” the scene between Rogozhin and Myshkin emerges as a dialogue between artist and spectator, between destruction and its aesthetic redemption. This convergence of artistic theory and narrative design was not accidental. From the earliest drafts of the Idiot, Dostoevsky envisioned a conclusion that would fuse the moral and the aesthetic, transforming tragedy into a meditation on the sublime possibilities of destruction.

There are hints that this ending, with its sublime quality, was in the mind of Dostoevsky himself as he continued to develop the Idiot. Though complicated and ambiguous, Dostoevsky’s image of the Idiot, as Joseph Frank notes, largely remained unaltered throughout his writing process. Dostoevsky’s conception of the Idiot as a “wild and downtrodden creature” who “seeks the solution and his salvation in pride,” and “ends up with a sublime deed,”  gestures towards this grand finale (9: 156). Though the ambiguity remains by the very fact that the “sublime deed” is carried out by Rogozhin and not by Prince Myshkin. Rogozhin’s commitment to seeking “his salvation in pride” acts as a self-imposed, characterological limitation that would inhibit his ability to realize the sublime act we are left with without Prince Myshkin acting as spectator. Indeed, the prince is silent, in awe before the scene of Rogozhin’s making. The Prince’s “sublime deed” is the act of observing the creative act of vandalism; indeed, cementing the scene as one of vandalism based on his very visceral and reactive experience. Prince Myshkin is the spectator and catalyst to Rogozhin’s act of vandalism. The inspiration for this climatic scene deserves further discussion. The symbolic center of this vision is Holbein’s Dead Christ, whose presence in Rogozhin’s home anchors the novel’s meditation on beauty, suffering, and faith. As Frank observes, the painting functions not merely as an object within the narrative but as the very image of modernity’s aesthetic and spiritual catastrophe.

Holbein’s Dead Christ first appears in Part II of the Idiot, in Rogozhin’s living room, and all we hear of it is that it has begun to undermine Rogozhin’s religious faith. The prince attempts to waylay the anxieties plaguing Rogozhin through a rather long speech. The culmination of this speech can be summed up by Myshkin's conclusion that “The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors.… But the main thing is that you will notice it more clearly and quickly in the Russian heart than anywhere else” (p. 221). Frank reads into this moment a subtle critique by Dostoevsky of the Russian spirit. Frank interprets this to mean: 

The values of Christian love and religious faith that Myshkin embodies are, in other words, too deep a necessity of the Russian spirit to be negated by [the Prince’s] practical failure [to save Nastasya], any more than they are negated by reason, murder, or sacrilege. If Holbein’s picture and Myshkin’s tirade are introduced so awkwardly and abruptly at this point, it is probably because Dostoevsky wished immediately to establish the framework within which the catastrophic destiny awaiting the Prince would be rightly understood. (p. 328)

This foreboding of catastrophe prevails as one of the Idiot’s main themes. Holbein’s painting acts as the hinge for Dostoevsky to maintain the narrative focus on the trajectory that awaits Rogozhin, Prince Myshkin, and Nastasya Fillipovna at the end of the novel, and, by extension, the coming cultural shift that will become known as Modernism. Much like the novel’s perpetual movement towards catastrophe, Dostoevsky understood the deterioration of classical values in Russia, as well as throughout Europe. In this spirit, Frank is well founded in claiming the Idiot to be the “most original of Dostoevsky’s great novels,” while at the same time being “the most artistically uneven of them all” (p. 340).

To grasp how deeply this crisis of beauty and faith penetrates Dostoevsky’s aesthetics, we can turn to his earlier essay “Mr. D__bov and the Question of Art,” where he anticipates the very principles that modernism--and even acts of vandalism--would later radicalize. The piece, which in many ways resembles Duchamp’s later manifesto on the “creative act,” reveals Dostoevsky’s conviction that art cannot exist outside of its historical moment: “Art which is not contemporary, which does not correspond to contemporary needs cannot possibly exist.” Already here, Dostoevsky anticipates a modernist insistence that art’s value lies not in eternal forms but in its capacity to intervene in the present, even at the cost of destabilizing what came before. His claim that “art will always be faithful to man when its freedom of development is not inhibited” resonates with the avant-garde’s rejection of inherited standards, suggesting that true fidelity to the human spirit may at times require rupture, negation, even destruction. And yet, Dostoevsky tempers this ideal of freedom with the assertion that beauty bears an objective value for humanity, functioning as a measure of “health and normality.” This tension--between freedom and necessity, creation and preservation--constitutes the very paradox dramatized in Rogozhin’s final act. What was theoretical in 1861 becomes, by the novel’s end, a lived aesthetic experiment: beauty destroyed so that art might continue to signify within a faithless world. 

What Dostoevsky articulates abstractly in 1861 becomes embodied, grotesquely and violently, in the Idiot: beauty (in Nastasya) is annihilated in the name of passion, obsession, and reason, and yet this very annihilation generates the sublime experience that the novel withholds from every other encounter. Rogozhin, in this sense, fulfills Dostoevsky’s assertion that art must correspond to its contemporary needs, for his act stages precisely the collapse of faith, beauty, and Romantic idealism in an age that can no longer sustain them. His “creative destruction” anticipates not only the twentieth-century vandal who defaces a Rothko or urinates into a Duchamp but also the broader modernist trajectory in which the violation of beauty becomes the precondition for new forms of meaning. Read through “Mr D__bov,” Rogozhin’s crime is not an aberration from Dostoevsky’s aesthetics but a dark extrapolation of them: a moment where the demand for relevance, freedom, and beauty converges in an act that obliterates the very category of beauty in order to preserve art’s capacity to disturb the sensibilities of the viewer and endure. 

Holbein’s Dead Christ, and the characters’ discussion of its effect, concur with Dostoevsky’s conclusion that it is enough to “make one lose one’s faith.” This foreshadows a certain future tyranny of faithlessness in the traditional art objects of--at the very least--Modern Europe; one where works of art would emerge from the most faithless, nihilistic, and mundane objects (such as, in the case of Holbein and Dostoevsky, the corpse, Duchamp’s Fountain, or Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ). Holbein succeeds--we can assume, according to the impression made on Dostoevsky--in destroying the pillars of faith which upheld the pre-modern era of aesthetic symbolism. This convergence of art, faith, and destruction resurfaces in Part III through Ippolit’s reflection on The Dead Christ, which exposes the full philosophical range of the painting’s influence. His despairing interpretation renders Holbein’s realism as a prophecy of modernity’s loss of faith in beauty itself.

Myshkin’s reading of the painting, however, redeems what Ippolit condemns. Where Ippolit sees mechanical desecration, Myshkin perceives an affirmation of irrational faith--the very tension that defines the aesthetic stakes of both Rogozhin’s act and Lerner’s theory of vandalism. Where the prince sees affirmation of the irrational “essence of religious feeling,” Ippolit sees the destiny of Europe: “Nature,” Ippolit observes, “appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast;” or, in an attempt to clarify his meaning, Ippolit continues, “[Nature appears] in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction,” which “has aimlessly clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being [Christ], a Being worth all of nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the advent of that Being” (p. 408). Nature appears to Ippolit as a “machine of the most modern construction” that “clutches,” “crushes,” and “swallows up” the “priceless” image of Christ. Ippolit is aware that European aesthetic practices are usually “in the habit of portraying Christ, both on the cross and taken down from the cross, as still having a shade of extraordinary beauty in his face,” and that Holbein’s portrayal negates the very possibility of beauty after death (“But in Rogozhin’s picture there is not a word about beauty”). Rogozhin’s reproduction of Holbein’s work, which entails the murder of the beautiful and eccentric Nastasya Fillipovna, can now be understood as “vandalism” as far as Lerner defines it, because “‘Vandalism’ is the word assigned to those destructive act that the art world can’t profit from” (ibid.) This opposition between faith and mechanization culminates in Rogozhin’s “triumph.” His reenactment of Holbein’s image through the murder of Nastasya Fillipovna transforms the sacred into a commentary on capitalism’s profanation of beauty--a dynamic Dostoevsky foresaw and Lerner rearticulates as the “tyranny of price.”

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot stages a crisis in which ideological, aesthetic, and theological structures collapse under the pressure and pursuit of excess. By interpreting Rogozhin’s murder as an aesthetic event rather than a purely moral or psychological one, we can see how the novel anticipates the formal ruptures of Modernism and the theoretical concerns of Postmodernism. Through a synthesis of Kant’s sublime, Bataille’s critique of homogeneity, and Lerner’s theory of vandalism, this paper has argued that the novel reveals the fragility of the systems that claim to regulate meaning. In doing so, Dostoevsky opens the space for new aesthetic possibilities--possibilities rooted in rupture rather than coherence, destruction rather than harmony. The Idiot thus stands as a crucial predecessor to the twentieth century’s experiments in form and subjectivity: a work that uses violence to illuminate the boundaries of representation and the enduring human struggle to find meaning within, and beyond, the ruins of ideology. 

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Notes

[1] Just as Umanets countered the claims that he was a vandal because he “added value” to Black on Maroon, Pinoncelli claimed to have likewise added value to the Duchamp exhibit; which, according to the critic Leland de la Durantaye, he actually did succeed in doing, as the reproductions of Duchamp’s Fountain were “faceless replicas,” but this particular reproduction “now had a history and was thus immeasurably more valuable than before” (p. 45).

[2] Anna Dostoevsky wrote of his encounter with the painting: “The painting overwhelmed [Dostoevsky], and he stopped in front of it as if stricken. For my part, I was unable to keep my eyes on it. It was too painful, especially in my delicate condition [pregnancy?], and I went into another room. When I returned about fifteen or twenty minutes later I found [Dostoevsky] still standing there as if rooted to the spot. On his agitated face was the sort of frightened expression I had often noticed during the first moments of an epileptic seizure. I quietly took my husband’s arm, led him to another room and made him sit down on a bench, expecting him to have a seizure any minute. Fortunately, it did not come. Little by little, [Dostoevsky] calmed down, and when we were leaving he insisted on going to take another look at the painting that had made such an impression on him.” (Anna Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: Reminiscences, p. 134)

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References

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Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage Books, 2003. 
Dostoevsky , Fyodor. “Mr. D__bov and the Question of Art.” A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts, Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2018, pp. 101–107. 
Duchamp, Marcel, et al. “The Creative Act.” The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975, pp. 138–140. 
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865- 1871. Princeton University Press, 1995. 
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett, 2010. 
Lerner, Ben, et al. “Damage Control, by Ben Lerner.” Harper's Magazine , 26 Nov. 2013, https://harpers.org/archive/2013/12/damage-control/.