Welcome to Episode 445 of Celebrate Creativity - Ultimate Freedom - This is the third and final episode devoted to characters with epilepsy from the writings of Fydor Dostoyevsky.
In addition to Prince Myskin and Smerdyakov, there was another major character who has a relationship with epilepsy called Kirillov from dostoyevsky’s novel by the name of Demons. You see, Dostoevsky never explicitly says Kirillov is epileptic, but there are strong echoes of the condition, and scholars often connect him to Dostoevsky’s own experiences of seizures.
In Demons, Kirillov is obsessed with ultimate freedom and the idea of overcoming the fear of death by committing suicide. At several points, he describes moments of sudden, radiant joy that come to him — a kind of ecstatic clarity just before unbearable suffering. Dostoevsky himself experienced something very similar with his own epilepsy. He wrote that just before some of his seizures, he would feel a sudden, luminous happiness, as though eternity were revealed to him in a single instant.
In Demons (Part II, Chapter 1), Kirillov says:
“There are moments, and it is only for a few seconds, when you feel the presence of eternal harmony … You feel it in all your being, and it is clear, it is undeniable. At such moments you would not exchange it for all the joys of earth.”
This is almost identical to Dostoevsky’s personal description of his epileptic aura. Many readers — and critics — have taken this as evidence that Kirillov is written as an epileptic character, even if Dostoevsky never uses the word.
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