SOURCE: Miller, Robin Feuer. “The Role of the Reader in The Idiot.” The Slavic and East European Journal 23, no. 2 (summer 1979): 190-202.

In the following essay, Miller discusses how Dostoevsky intended The Idiot to influence the reader and identifies the various levels on which the novel can be read.

Recently, a number of literary critics have focused attention on the reader both in his role as a literary creation of the author and as a real presence; they claim to have discovered in him a figure who, as one critic laments, had previously been “excluded by legislation.”¹ Northrop Frye has praised a definition of literature which characterizes it as a “picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning.”² Meaning in the novel lies in the collision between two equally important entities: the author and the reader. V. N. Vološinov articulated this idea as...