An existential psychotherapist reflects on the nature of the character and how he would manifest today. How does the aristocrat from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky resemble one of our acquaintances?
If you were born into an aristocratic wealthy family with a strong father and an equally strong mother, life seems like a real adventure to you. At first, we perceive the young and beautiful Aglaya as a positive antithesis to Nastasya Filippovna, wounded by childhood traumas and tormented by passions.
Charm inherent in Aglaya, courage in judgments and desire to escape from the circle of the middle aristocracy give us the impression that she is a progressive and original girl. But then it becomes clear that neither one nor the other passion of Prince Myshkin can even simply endure this life. One goes into self-destruction, the other goes into fantasies about oneself, about the world, about others.
Youth and, probably, a prosperous childhood, a sense of her almost limitless strengths create in Aglaya, on the one hand, the illusion that she can benefit the whole world by doing something significant for the public good, on the other hand, an unshakable conviction that she wants and can get from the world whatever he wants, and preferably immediately.
Aglaya, like her prototype, the young idealist Apollinaria Suslova, who became Dostoevsky’s mistress and did not forgive him for the lack of complete dedication, wants to love not a real person, but an idealized image. This is how she perceives Prince Myshkin: “I gave myself to him lovingly, without asking, without counting. And he should have done the same. He didn’t get in and I dumped him.»
Aglaya never manages to grow up and leave her illusions. Having married a Polish revolutionary, who captivated her with “the extraordinary nobility of her soul, tormented by suffering in her homeland,” she realizes a teenage protest against her class, parental values and tries to be something she is not, in fact, a revolutionary.