[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-608090-105":59,"doc-detail-608090-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":123,"head_meta":125,"extra_data":127,"updated_unix":129},105,"en","embarrassment-in-the-idiot-introduction","Embarrassment in The Idiot - Introduction","","The article examines how embarrassment governs Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1868–69), shaping both the novel’s emotional climate and readers’ experience through scenes of escalating scandal, exposure, and social breakdown. It distinguishes embarrassment from shame by treating embarrassment as fundamentally social and event-based, while shame is framed as moral and more enduring. The study further links embarrassment to social cohesion and regulation, analyzing how nineteenth-century Russian instability intensifies breaches of decorum and transgressive revelations.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/embarrassment-in-the-idiot-introduction/608090/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/embarrassment-in-the-idiot-introduction/608090.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Bintang","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-11-02","2026-10-17",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":34},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"How does the article characterize embarrassment in The Idiot?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"Embarrassment is presented as the dominant affect governing the novel’s atmosphere, driving scenes of public breach, humiliation, and escalating drama.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What main distinction does the article draw between embarrassment and shame?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Embarrassment is framed as fundamentally social and concentrated in specific events, whereas shame is treated as a moral emotion and more enduring as a state or trait.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What social function does embarrassment serve according to the article?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Embarrassment is described as a mechanism of social cohesion that regulates behavior by checking an individual against perceived or actual norms of decorum.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},608090,1792954539,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":34,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},962085564381,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_6f874abed73319feea01a86fa6f0fab8","Alyson Tapp  \nUniversity of Cambridge  \nEmbarrassment in The Idiot  \nIntroduction  \nEmbarrassment dominates the affective tenor of Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (1868-69) . It is a work studded with the blushes, outbursts, verbal and physical breakdowns that acute embarrassment brings on. Readers, too, may be viscerally engaged in the novel's circuits of embarrassment: we cringe as we read, both compelled and repelled by the dreadful expectation of a scandal’s impending breaking point. And once completed, the novel is preserved in memory most readily as a series of emotionally charged, densely populated scenes that each culminate in high drama and shattered decorum—the notorious Dostoevskian scandal scene. A slanderous newspaper article is read aloud, damning in its public insinuations, and followed by the exposure of its mendacious authors. A parlour game is played in which guests are incited to recount compromising acts of their past. A young consumptive declaims a lengthy speech before attempting, and failing, to commit suicide in the presence of guests at a Prince’s birthday party. Embarrassment suffuses the novel’s atmosphere and relations, palpable most acutely in climactic scenes such as these.  \nEmbarrassment may seem rather too mild a designation for Dostoevskian moments of revelation and transgression; the embarrassments of The Idiot stem from actions far more dissonant and transgressive than the social slips and errors of judgment typical of the novel of  \nmanners, exemplified by the works of Jane Austen and their blushing heroines. 1 Of all Dostoevsky’s novels, The Idiot, with its marriage plots and drawing room conversation, is the closest, as Robin Feuer Miller has noted, to a novel of manners (Robin Miller, Idiot 98, 266) .2 The Idiot may even be more aptly dubbed a “novel of bad manners.”Already, then, the novel appears as a kind of embarrassment of genre, violating both generic and behavioral norms. Dostoevsky may not have read an English novel of manners, but the novel form that he works with contains the memory of its most prominent generic exemplars.  \nIt is, in part, for the link to the generic prototype of the novel of manners that the focus of this article is embarrassment—and not shame, a close relation of embarrassment that has received recent attention from scholars of Dostoevsky.3 Both embarrassment and shame depend on intersubjective and—in the familiar, axiomatic, terms of Dostoevsky criticism—dialogic relations. Psychologists and sociologists have been undecided about how or whether embarrassment and shame differ. Some suggest it is simply through intensity—that shame is more acute and lasting than embarrassment. Of greater salience to my study is the insistence on amore qualitative difference: unlike shame, which is fundamentally a moral emotion, embarrassment is a fundamentally social emotion. Whereas shame may be an abiding state or trait, embarrassment is concentrated in an event (Rowland Miller 20-21): an uncomfortably exposed, public breach of social norms ruffles the composure of the individual—and potentially other members of the social interaction—in ways that are visibly manifest (blushing, confusion,  \n1 In his recent study of the social gaffe in the nineteenth-century novel, Kent Puckett explicitly excludes Dostoevsky from his attention. Dostoevskian transgression is of an altogether different order from eating peas off your knife (Puckett’s emblematic example); Dostoevsky would belong in a book “about passions strong enough to shatter the self, the social, and the very structure of the literary”(Puckett 5) .  \n2 Associated with the narrative voice of the “novel of manners”, the importance of the drawing room or salon chronotope to The Idiot is noted by Malcolm Jones (Jones 117-18) .  \n3 Foremost among these is Deborah Martinsen’s compelling book-length study of shame, Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure (2003) .  \nagitation) . Shame and the moral emotions are ","cbCaikGCsWlaiJHr","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaikGCsWlaiJHr","pdf",328836,38,"English","# Introduction\n## Embarrassment as a governing affect\n## Embarrassment vs. shame\n## Embarrassment as social regulation\n## Social instability and generic norms","[{\"question\":\"How does the article characterize embarrassment in The Idiot?\",\"answer\":\"Embarrassment is presented as the dominant affect governing the novel’s atmosphere, driving scenes of public breach, humiliation, and escalating drama.\"},{\"question\":\"What main distinction does the article draw between embarrassment and shame?\",\"answer\":\"Embarrassment is framed as fundamentally social and concentrated in specific events, whereas shame is treated as a moral emotion and more enduring as a state or trait.\"},{\"question\":\"What social function does embarrassment serve according to the article?\",\"answer\":\"Embarrassment is described as a mechanism of social cohesion that regulates behavior by checking an individual against perceived or actual norms of decorum.\"}]","Embarrassment in The Idiot - Introduction | PDF",1792215810,96]