Schneider

Schneider, the Swiss professor who treated Prince Muishkin for epilepsy, occupies a pivotal role as the figure who both enabled the prince's return to Russia and shaped his understanding of his own condition. It was Schneider who, after Pavlicheff's death, kept the prince at his own expense for nearly two years and provided the money for his journey back to St. Petersburg. The prince's relationship with Schneider is marked by a profound, if sometimes critical, intellectual and personal debt.

Identity and Role as Physician and Benefactor

Schneider first appears in the narrative through the prince's account of his medical history. The prince explains that he was sent abroad for his health, suffering from a strange nervous malady—a kind of epilepsy with convulsive spasms. Schneider took him into his establishment for the cure of this epilepsy. When Pavlicheff died a couple of years before the prince's return, Schneider himself supported the young fellow from that day to this, at his own expense, and eventually gave him just enough money for his journey back to Russia. The prince explicitly states that his doctor gave him money—and he had very little—to pay his journey back, besides having kept him at his own expense for nearly two years.

Assessment of the Prince's Character

Schneider's most significant contribution to the prince's self-understanding comes in his assessment of the prince's nature. He told the prince that he believed he was a child himself—just before he came away. "You have the form and face of an adult," he said, "but as regards soul, and character, and perhaps even intelligence, you are a child in the completest sense of the word, and always will be, if you live to be sixty." The prince laughed very much at this, for of course that is nonsense, but he acknowledges the truth in it: he does not care to be among grown-up people and much prefers the society of children. Schneider also reproached the prince for his "pernicious 'system'" of telling children everything and hiding nothing from them, believing that the prince did the children great harm by this approach.

Influence on the Prince's Medical and Philosophical Views

The prince's understanding of his own epilepsy is deeply informed by his time with Schneider. He recalls that during his epileptic fits, or rather immediately preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigour and light; when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever. He used to say to himself: "These moments, short as they are, when I feel such extreme consciousness of myself, and consequently more of life than at other times, are due only to the disease—to the sudden rupture of normal conditions. Therefore they are not really a higher kind of life, but a lower." This reasoning, however, seemed to end in a paradox, and lead to the further consideration: "What matter though it be only disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?" The prince had confessed unreservedly to himself that the feeling of intense beatitude in that crowded moment made the moment worth a lifetime. "I feel then," he said one day to Rogojin in Moscow, "I feel then as if I understood those amazing words—'There shall be no more time.'" And he added with a smile: "No doubt the epileptic Mahomet refers to that same moment when he says that he visited all the dwellings of Allah, in less time than was needed to empty his pitcher of water."

Final Role in the Prince's Return to Russia

Schneider was also the catalyst for the prince's return to Russia. The prince had lived the life of a child in the Swiss village and thought he should never leave it. But at last he recognized the fact that Schneider could not keep him any longer. And then something so important happened, that Schneider himself urged him to depart. The prince is going to see now if he can get good advice about it. Perhaps his lot in life will be changed; but that is not the principal thing. The principal thing is the entire change that has already come over him. He left many things behind him—too many. They have gone. On the journey he said to himself, "I am going into the world of men. I don't know much, perhaps, but a new life has begun for me."