The Last Look of Nastasya Filippovna
"The Last Look of Nastasya Filippovna" (female hero of The Idiot), acrylic on canvas, 2021, Bishop Maxim
The painting depicts Nastasya’s death scene. Rogozhin stabbed her under the left breast and there was no more than half a tablespoon of blood; the bleeding was internal. Without a doubt, Nastasya is the most dramatic and most complex character of the novel The Idiot; it is she who steers the course of this novel and the fate of Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin. No one in The Idiot can understand Nastasya Filippovna’s abrupt changes of mood. Nastasya is highly emotional, full of guilt, out for revenge. Prince Myshkin insists that Nastasya is not what she seems, that she is more kind and sweet than her haughty demeanor seems to indicate. One can see suffering beauty in her eyes. She sees an absurd morality play with good and evil on either side of her. So, not knowing what role she must play, she plunges into the comedy and turns the course of events upside down. Nastasya’s imminent death hovers ominously throughout the novel. What makes the scene horrible is not the murder but Myshkin’s comforting of Rogozhin. Myshkin’s goodness and compassion are more terrifying than Rogozhin’s murder of Nastasya. Dostoevsky shows us the ultimate in goodness, and it is grotesque: Myshkin’s embracing the murderer, forgiving him as it were, weeping on his cheek as though in sorrow, but also in relief that, at last, the fate of the three has unraveled itself.