Switzerland

Switzerland is the foreign country where Prince Lef Nicolaievitch Muishkin spent four years undergoing treatment for epilepsy under Professor Schneider, and it serves as the geographical and moral counterpoint to Russia in the novel, representing both the prince's physical cure and his formative exposure to a simpler, more humane way of life. The prince's Swiss sojourn shapes his character, his worldview, and the narrative's central contrasts between innocence and corruption, nature and society, and the ideal of Christian compassion versus the harsh realities of St. Petersburg life.

The Prince's Cure and Exile

Muishkin was sent to Switzerland from Russia because of his severe epilepsy, which had made him "almost an idiot" . He lived there for four years, nearly all of that time in a single village, under the care of Professor Schneider, who treated him and taught him . The prince's malady was a kind of epilepsy with convulsive spasms, and though the treatment did not cure him, it greatly improved his condition . Schneider supported the prince at his own expense for nearly two years after the death of the prince's benefactor, Nicolai Andreevitch Pavlicheff, and eventually gave him money for the journey back to Russia . The prince's departure from Switzerland was prompted by a certain matter that came to his ears, and Schneider himself urged him to go .

Life Among Children and the Village

During his time in Switzerland, Muishkin lived almost entirely among the children of the village, passing all four years of his life there with them . He did not teach them formally—that was the job of a master named Jules Thibaut—but he was among them as an outsider, telling them everything and hiding nothing . The children's fathers and relations became angry with him because the children could do nothing without him and thronged after him at all times; the schoolmaster Thibaut became his greatest enemy, jealous of the prince's influence . Schneider reproached Muishkin for his "system" with the children, and later said he believed the prince was a child himself in soul, character, and even intelligence, a condition he would retain even if he lived to be sixty . The prince himself felt that he did not care to be among grown-up people and much preferred the society of children, finding that young things attracted him . He recalled that on one of his first days in Switzerland, wandering alone and miserable, he came upon children rushing noisily out of school and his soul went out to them; he stopped and laughed happily, forgetting his troubles .

The Story of Marie

The central episode of Muishkin's Swiss life is his relationship with Marie, a poor consumptive girl of twenty who had been seduced and abandoned by a commercial traveller . When she returned to the village, dirty, draggled, and shoeless, the entire community treated her with contempt and cruelty: her mother was the first to cast her into ignominy, the old men scolded and condemned, the young ones laughed at her, and the women looked at her as though she were a loathsome insect . Marie herself considered herself the lowest and meanest of creatures . The prince, moved by pity, sold a diamond pin for eight francs and gave her the money, kissing her and telling her he did so solely out of pity, not because he was in love with her . The children witnessed this and began to throw stones at the prince and torment Marie even more . Muishkin then took to speaking to the children every day, telling them how unhappy Marie was, and gradually they stopped their abuse, began to greet her kindly, and eventually brought her food and shoes and stockings and a dress, clubbing together to buy them . Marie died almost perfectly happy, thanks to the children, who covered her coffin with flowers and planted roses around her grave . The prince was in ill odour with the parents, the parson, and the schoolmaster after all this, and Schneider was obliged to promise that the prince should not meet the children and talk to them, though they conversed from a distance by signs and wrote him sweet little notes .

The Departure and Its Aftermath

When Muishkin left Switzerland, the whole flock of children went with him to the station, about a mile from the village, and every now and then one of them would stop to throw his arms round him; all the little girls had tears in their voices, though they tried hard not to cry . As the train steamed out, he saw them all standing on the platform waving to him and crying "Hurrah!" till they were lost in the distance . The prince received a letter from those dear little souls while passing through Berlin, and only then realized how much he loved them; it was very, very painful, getting that first little letter . He told the Epanchin family that when he came into their house and saw their kind faces, his heart felt light for the first time since that moment of parting .

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Switzerland functions in the novel as the locus of the prince's innocence, his cure, and his ideal of compassionate, childlike Christianity. It is the place where he learned to see beauty in simple things—a donkey in the market at Basle, a waterfall, the sky, the mountains—and where he developed his philosophy that one can tell a child everything and that children can give advice in the most important matters . The Swiss episode also provides the narrative with its most sustained example of the prince's ability to transform a community through compassion, a model that contrasts sharply with the chaos, cruelty, and moral confusion he encounters in St. Petersburg. The prince's Swiss experience is repeatedly invoked by other characters—Aglaya mocks his "quietism" and his four happy years in a Swiss village, while Hippolyte's "Necessary Explanation" contains a dream that echoes the prince's own remembered feelings of being an outcast from the universal chorus of life . The prince himself, when asked about his faith, tells Rogojin a story of a conversation with an atheist in a train and of a poor woman he met in a Russian town, but the deepest roots of his religious feeling are in the Swiss landscape and his life among the children there .