Absolute Goodness and Social Reality: Dostoevsky's Philosophical Idea in The Idiot Through the Image of Prince Myshkin

Abstract

This article presents a systematic philosophical and literary analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot through the character of Prince Myshkin as the artistic bearer of the idea of the "positively beautiful man." Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework integrating dialogic theory, religious-philosophical hermeneutics, existential philosophy, and structural semiotics, the study examines how Dostoevsky deploys the figure of Prince Myshkin to explore the fundamental contradiction between absolute moral idealism and the ontological conditions of empirical social existence. The analysis demonstrates that Myshkin's tragedy is not a consequence of personal psychological insufficiency but of the constitutive incompatibility between his absolute ethical orientation and the pragmatic, violence-structured world he inhabits. Through close reading supported by the theoretical frameworks of Bakhtin, Berdyaev, Shestov, Lotman, and Jakobson, the article reveals the novel's philosophical thesis: that absolute goodness, taken to its ultimate expression, is not a redemptive force within the social world but the cause of an inevitable rupture with it. The analysis traces this argument across four dimensions — dialogic incompleteness, religious-philosophical testing of the Christian ideal, existential tragedy, and semiotic exclusion — demonstrating that Myshkin's fate constitutes a uniquely complex model of the human moral condition in modernity.