3.6 Smerdyakov
Smerdyakov is an artist, Fyodor Pavlovich says. He may love Balaam’s donkey the same way he loves his “guard dog”. The artist plays with appearances and the dark nook and crannies of the world, and chooses to bring forth something or… Nothing at all. I'm not talking about that kind of artist.
Smerdyakov approaches the world with dissective hands. He arranges lifeless things into a semblance of art, either playing a pointless game of make- believe with the little corpses in his childish cruelty, or taking pride in cooking dishes to fill the belly of the beast. Living things are paste for his hands to reduce to nothing. They can all be spun by dissective hands until they amount to nothing. He plays aimlessly and loses interest. Words, too, are living things to dissect and arrange with sophistry. Not quite an idiot, as he's quite inquisitive, asking questions, nitpicking. But the isolation he's faced since birth and his silent conceit prevent him from turning words into more than dead instruments. Ideas breathe through other ideas. In that sense, in the sense of the idiot as one's own, he becomes the idiot when he merely contemplates in silence. Hoarding impressions and ideas for himself, he does not reach the last step of dialectics, in which ideas come alive again, rising from death by the skeptical scalpel and giving way to speculation.
Wrapped in elegant clothes, exuding a sickening fragrance, shiny curls and boots steeped in pomade, covering the stench of his origin, his conception, the stench of death. Likened to an “eunuch”, young, yet passionless and wrinkled, effeminate: ageless, sexless and fatherless. Ironically, it's this ostentation of his and mimicking of a higher- class appearance and language that brings the deplorable negation of all into the light. Had he stayed in the dark, forgotten as a wretched epileptic fool— the object of collective shame; the absence of responsibility and compassion wouldn't be staring at everyone in their faces with a glint of spite in his eyes. He was called less than human, and chose never to forgive. Balaam's donkey carrying the burdens obediently, waiting for her time to speak.
