ESSAY ⟩ Russia’s Grieving Apathy

Adapting The Idiot for the stage is a complex undertaking. As Mikhail Bakhtin noted, the novel is void of action. From the time Myshkin arrives in Russia until Rogozhin murders Nastasya Filippovna, the story meanders through hundreds of pages of conversations, gossip, duels of egos, and broken engagements.

Weinberg and his librettist, Alexander Medvedev, stripped the novel down to its essential conflict: the collision between Myshkin, the pure, childlike hero—a kind of alien from another world, having returned from a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland—and a cynical, hostile, and indifferent society that rejects and ultimately destroys him.

Myshkin (portrayed by Ukrainian tenor Bogdan Volkov) is the opera’s only character endowed with true empathy—a capacity that forms the core of his so-called “idiocy,” his radical otherness. The society around him views his compassion with a mix of awe and ridicule, knowing full well how to exploit it.

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot reveals a society that has lost its ability to feel compassion, and Warlikowski, with stunning detail, captures this loss: the vanity and emptiness of the Epanchin family, focused only on securing advantageous marriages for their daughters; the chilling cynicism of the aging playboy Totsky; and the plight of Nastasya Filippovna (Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė), who is treated as little more than an object, traded and commodified in the cold calculus of power and desire. Throughout the performance, stockbrokers in bowler hats circle the stage, clutching shares and bonds, emphasizing the reduction of human life to market value.

A figure apart from all others is Parfyon Rogozhin (Belarusian baritone Vladislav Sulimsky), who embodies the dark, infernal element of the Russian soul. Always clad in black, his boundless passions consume everyone in his path, including his love for Nastasya Filippovna. Watching his restless, violent movement on stage brought to mind Milan Kundera’s essay, A Preface to the Variation, where Kundera speaks of his revulsion for Dostoevsky’s heroes, whose grand gestures strike him as grotesque.

Kundera recalls a conversation with a Soviet major in Prague during the August 1968 invasion, when the major justified the presence of Soviet tanks by saying, “We are here because we love you, because we want to save you.” This grotesque logic echoes in the present day, as Russia destroys Ukraine under the guise of “brotherly love,” launching what Kremlin propagandist Sergei Markov chillingly calls “humanitarian missile strikes”—“missiles of goodness.” Only Dostoevsky’s hellish depths seem capable of explaining this warped moral universe.

In this space where empathy has vanished, even Myshkin’s Christ-like compassion—central to both Dostoevsky’s novel and the opera’s creators—becomes futile. His kindness reverberates in a void, a hollow gesture, producing no tangible good. He saves no one, changes nothing. Around him, there is only decay, suffering, and death. Myshkin’s defeat is total, not just physical but existential, as he slips back into madness. In the novel’s final pages, he is returned to Switzerland and locked away in isolation. In the end, everyone is dead, whether in body or in spirit. What remains is a cold, empty Russia, blanketed in snow and bereft of empathy.

This is the Russia Dostoevsky wrote about—a nation adrift, numb, and indifferent. As in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film Loveless, and in the bleak photographs of today’s Moscow, where faceless apartment blocks rise, hollow and alienating, this is a society that has replaced human values with market ones. The syndrome of anesthesia dolorosa, the loss of higher emotions, defines today’s post-Soviet Russia, a place where capital, private interests, and cynicism dominate the barren landscape.

In this era, the death of empathy has become the cornerstone of Russia’s silent pact between its leaders and its people. There is a numb indifference, not only to the destruction of Ukrainian cities, the murder of civilians, and the horrors of war but also to Russia’s own epic losses. Outside of the zealous followers of state propaganda, the Russian public has remained largely indifferent to the relentless “meat-grinder” assaults, the conscription of young, untrained men from Russia’s most marginalized regions, and even to the unprecedented loss of territory in the Kursk region.

Oil depots and military airfields are exploding across Russia, but for the population, nothing has changed. There is no surge of patriotism, no queues at military recruitment offices, no cries for mobilization. Society is soothed by the fiction that this is not a war, but a “special operation.”

This grieving apathy is perhaps the most troubling symptom of all—a diagnosis more terminal than fascism itself, signaling the collapse of a society’s soul. Last summer, Yevgeny Prigozhin might have reached Moscow; this year, Ukraine could push further into Russian territory, even threaten major cities like Rostov, Kursk, or Belgorod—and still, the response would be a hollow silence. As one writer once said, “Whatever happens to my country, in days of doubt, in days of painful reflection, in times of trial and catastrophe, these eyes will not flinch. All is in God’s hands.”

This sense of societal unraveling, this isolation of the individual in a landscape of tragedy, is captured in Weinberg’s luminous score. Like his contemporary Shostakovich, Weinberg’s music is rich in leitmotifs that represent not so much character development as the shifting emotional states and ideas within the story. The opera opens with two sharp, dissonant chords, signaling the collapse of order—a theme repeated at the end of the second and third acts. In the finale, only a single, fading note remains, dissolving into silence.

As the lights dim, three bodies lie on an enormous bed: Nastasya Filippovna, dead, flanked by two suitors who embody the Russian soul’s dual nature. Rogozhin, dressed in black, represents the darkness that killed her, while Myshkin, the white figure, trembles with the cold, having failed to save her. As I sat in the heavy silence of the hall, it struck me that this scene encapsulates the state of Russia today.

Then came the ovations, the flowers, and the repeated curtain calls. The elegant festival audience drifted into the warm night, dispersing to the terraces of nearby restaurants. In the darkness, the illuminated Hohensalzburg Fortress loomed over the city, while the lanterns along the "Philosophers' Path" flickered on the mountainside. In the square outside the Festspielhaus stood Theodor Currentzis, like a ghost of the opera, admired by his fans (earlier that evening, he had conducted Don Giovanni in Romeo Castellucci’s production). But none of it mattered at all. I walked along the heated stones of Hofstallgasse, carrying within me the cold farewell of Prince Myshkin.