Myshkin's Million: Merchants, Capitalists, and the Economic Imaginary in The Idiot

Abstract

This paper examines the contribution of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to the multi‐generic elaboration of an economic imaginary that was taking place in the Russian print media in the era of the Great Reforms. In The Idiot, this imaginary is defined by a struggle between two groups of wealthy men–capitalists like General Epanchin and Totskii on the one hand and merchants, such as Rogozhin, on the other. These groups are distinguished by their biographies, the sources of their wealth, and by the forms their money assumes in the novel. While the capitalists’ wealth is largely invisible, assuming the form of unseen businesses and money‐making schemes, the merchants’ money is obdurately material: it makes its most striking appearance in the famous scene at Nastasia Filippovna’s in Part 1. Prince Myshkin, who has traditionally been seen as a being far removed from the financial excesses of 1860s St. Petersburg, is entangled in this economic typology as well. The novel goes to considerable lengths to explain the origin of his unexpected inheritance in the accumulated fortune of a merchant. Myshkin inherits not just the wealth but also the fate of the merchants; while the capitalists prosper, their lives extending beyond the novel’s narrative, the merchants are doomed to stasis, sterility, and failure; both Rogozhin’s and Myshkin’s stories come to an unhappy end.