Epilepsy as a theme in literature (IV)

Six novels or narratives of the Russian epileptic author Fjodor Michailowitsch Dostojewskij contain fictitious people who - like their creator himself - suffer from epileptic seizures: Old Murin in "The Landlady" (1847/1848), the young girl Jelena ('Nelly') in "The Insulted and Humiliated" (1861), the autobiographical figure of Prince Myshkin in "The Idiot" (1868), young, unhappy Lisa in "The Eternal Husband" (1870), the revolutionary engineer Kyrillow in "The Possessed" (1871) and finally the conniving servant Smerdjakow in Dostojewskij’s last novel "The Brothers Karamazov" (1878/1880).

Time and again, these characters have inspired artists in the creation of illustrative works. A pencil drawing by the German-American artist Fritz Eichenberg (1901 – 1990) for example is based on one of Smerdjakow’s seizures. The result illustrated by Eichenberg has the following wording in Dostojewskij’s novel [freely translated]:

"For some reason Smerdjakow had gone to the cellar and fallen from the top of the stairs. Luckily, Marfa Ignatjewna happened to be in the courtyard and had heard it in time. She had not seen him fall, had rather heard his cry, a strange, peculiar cry long known to her - the cry of the epileptic, in the throes of the falling sickness. ..... He was found on the cellar floor, convulsing and twitching and foaming at the mouth."

Only towards the end of the novel is the reader informed that the described seizure of the epileptic Smerdjakow was, for once, not a "real" but rather a feigned or simulated seizure. Fritz Eichenberg's drawing does indeed clarify this: the intertwined legs, the theatrical grabbing at the throat, the closed eyes, the lack of injuries despite a fall from the steep stairway - all this clearly shows that Smerdjakow only "enacted" this seizure.

(The reason for this deception lies in the fact that Smerdjakow needed an alibi for the time period during which he wanted to murder his father, old Karamasov. And all who knew Smerdjakow and his epileptic seizures also knew that he was "out of action" for hours after one of his (real!) seizures, i.e. he would have been unable to commit a murder during such a 'post-paroxysmal phase'.