Mitya, Without Malice

Mitya is the embodiment of what the novel calls Karamazovian passion. He is so bewitched by Grushenka that he has lost his reason. His father is a wicked man and has not made his life easier, true, but if we are honest, Mitya's own actions are still ridiculous. He is willing to ruin himself completely to win her over. He seduces by playing the rake: an intense, reckless, relentless pursuit. He speaks in poetic excess. He offers devotion to the point of humiliation. The danger is part of the charm. His appeal lies in the unpredictability, the sense that at any moment he might ruin himself for the spectacle, spend money like water, drown himself and everyone around him in champagne.

And yet the notable thing is that I cannot find any malice in him. At moments he almost strikes me as innocent. Not innocent in the classical moral sense, but innocent in the sense of a purity of impulse. He feels less like a calculating villain and more like a simple fool who does wicked things because he cannot stop himself. His sins do not feel premeditated. Most of his antics are sprees. The harm comes not from cruelty but from a lack of mastery over his own temperament. He is possessed by passions he does not understand.

And even without deliberate malice, that passion, unchecked and ungoverned, will be enough to ruin him completely.