Nastasya Fillipovna: A New Favourite Character I Found This Year

The Tragedy Of A Society Failing To Protect Its Children

Hello!!!

This is Joyie and welcome back to my little bookish corner of the internet where I talk all things books!

This week, I've been reading The Myth of Sisyphus, but it's quite a lot to take in, so I'm reading it very slow. Have you been reading anything this week?

In today's letter, I want to talk about a fictional character I found this year, who has made her place in my all-time favourite fictional characters list: Nastasya Fillipovna from The Idiot. Nastasya is the type of character I absolutely love. A character who has been failed as a child by society or a guardian, and is traumatised because of that and is lashing out. It's ugly, but I think this ugly, dark side of human nature is just as real and turning our face away from it does more harm than good.

Nastasya loses her family as a kid, and is only twelve when she's marked by Totsky, an influential middle-aged man, because of her beauty. He steps in as her guardian, not to raise her as a responsible adult, but to groom her into the perfect sex-slave for himself. He cultivates her beauty and intelligence, but only to an extent that makes her a well-suited mistress for himself.

However, when she grows older, Nastasya goes beyond what Totsky ever wanted out of her. She takes charge of her beauty and intelligence and makes a show out of it. She refuses to let her abuser conveniently wash his hands off her by selling her into a marriage. As she does that, society labels her as a madwoman and empathises with her abuser as if he is her victim.

However, despite her very showy outbursts, Nastasya fails to free herself from her past. She falls in love with Myshkin, who accepts her with a human love. But she's so used to being objectified, that she fails to accept that love. So, after flip-flopping between him and Rogozin, she chooses the latter. It's a suicidal choice, she knows that. Nastasya has been suicidal since a young age, when she was still Totsky's child sex-slave. In the end, after everything and every choice in the story, that ends up being her fate, that's a tragedy.

The scene of her death is definitely one of the most jarring scenes in the whole book. Lying on Rogozin’s bed as a decomposing corpse is probably when she feels the most human in the entire novel.

Society, instead of protecting an orphaned, vulnerable child, watches her get exploited and does nothing to help her out. And then as she lashes out, the same society turns her into a spectacle. And ultimately, when she inconveniences society with her murder, it solves that by putting Rogozin in jail, and putting Myshkin in a sanatorium, and just… moves on.

The Idiot was heavily inspired by the trial of Olga Umetskaya, and through this novel, Dostoevsky wanted to raise questions about a society that fails to protect its children. Nastasya’s character, inspired by Olga Umetskaya herself, in my opinion, does an excellent job of establishing that concern which unfortunately remains relevant even to this day.

What about you? Have you read The Idiot? What do you think of Nastasya Fillipovna? I'd love to hear about it!!!

For more of my bookish ramblings, you can also find me on Instagram

Also, if you’d like me to write for you, you can contact me at joyiewrites@gmail.com

That’s it for today, I'll be back in your inbox next week.

Until then,

Joyie 🌻