Dostoevsky and World Culture Dostoevsky and World Culture 2619-0311 2712-8512 IWL RAS https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2025-3-32-57 Research Article Articles "What Time Is It?": Ippolit's "My Necessary Explanation" in the Structure of the Novel The Idiot. Article 1 Kasatkina Tatiana A. fedor@dostmirkult.ru 25 09 2025 1 3 32 57 Dostoevsky The Idiot two natures of man Ippolit Prince Myshkin “My Necessary Explanation ” complex of quotations Gospel Apocalypse Goethe Faust Copyright © 2026, IWL RAS 2026 The article addresses the difference in perspectives arising from the two natures of man on the same problems and fatal questions of human existence. Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot is entirely built upon collisions, comparisons, and attempts at interaction between these two human natures. One such ideological and ontological confrontation is the treatment of the same questions at the beginning of Part One of the novel, in Myshkin's conversations with the Epanchins, and at the beginning of Part Three, in Ippolit's "My Necessary Explanation." It becomes evident that the questions which Ippolit views from the outside, Myshkin perceives and experiences from within — and vice versa. This reveals something quite counterintuitive for a reader accustomed to reverence and admiration for the sublime: the higher nature, when seen from the standpoint of the lower, appears frightening, repulsive, disgusting, and death-bearing. From the standpoint of non-belonging — in which both Myshkin and Ippolit find themselves at certain moments — the lower nature likewise appears frightening, repulsive, unaccepting, and destructive. As a result, readers and scholars often confuse and fail to distinguish between the images of higher and lower nature in the novel — as well as between the different qualities of Myshkin's first and second epileptic fits. The article also analyzes the complex of Gospel and liturgical quotations, as well as quotations from Goethe's Faust, that Dostoevsky placed at the "threshold" of "My Necessary Explanation." These intertexts support, deepen, and unfold — through their references to donor texts — the discursive problematic developed in the novel.