2 notes

By representing the two men lying together on their makeshift bed as an
idiot and an insane murderer, Dostoevsky’s imagination has created a version
of мужеложство — “the act of men going to bed with men,” the traditional
Russian term for homosexuality — that affirms the prejudices of patriarchal
society. From the point of view of male homosocial heteronormativity,
insanity is probably the only acceptable explanation of the terrible events that
bring the Nastasya Filippovna-Rogozhin-Myshkin story to an end.

But there is another possible explanation: that this heteronormativity is the
real cause of the tragedy. A queer reading of The Idiot reveals the presence of
homosexual relations in the novel’s universe as well as in the culture that
produced it. The novel’s tragic ending demonstrates to what extent
patriarchal power relations have been structured as heterosexual, and how
the schizogenic force of homophobia that sustains the novel’s patriarchal
order in the end inevitably will cause its own disintegration

7 notes

…but he was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel…