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The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a perfect presentation of two irreconcilable ontological modes. These modes are represented on the one hand, by Myshkin's no-mind, pre-reflective, natural consciousness in Switzerland and on the other, the socially constructed cultural consciousness of Petersburg society, divided by its concerns of status, wealth, and a compulsive obsession with ego. In the Russian Society with its pretensions and acquisitive ethos, the prince, a misfit, is never able to inhabit the categorical traps of culture. Myshkin's epilepsy is an escape into a pristine world of silence and stupefaction, away from the chaos of culture. Contrary to the societal perspective on his illness and his disability, Myshkin's epileptic condition is a relief from the cultural categories of time and place. Combining perspectives from social constructivism and theories of the pathological, this paper argues that Myshkin's epilepsy is not a medical deficiency but a different mode of being-in-the-world, one that society inevitably confines as 'idiocy'.
Srividya S.. “The Lived Body in Seizure: Epilepsy as an Ontological Mode of Being in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 16-35. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.2.
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