The role of western art in the composition and narrative of Fedor Dostoevskii's novel The Idiot has been well-studied; the role of ekphrasis somewhat less so. Nina Perlina's monograph Teksty-kartiny i ekfrazisy v romane Dostoevskogo “Idiot” is the first book-length study of ekphrasis in Dostoevskii's novel and of ekphrasis in a single novel in general. Perlina employs the trope to generate new readings of key visual moments in the text. The book presents an in-depth analysis of the pictorial scenes or what Perlina calls “living pictures” (zhivye kartiny) that structure the novel as complex, inter-textual, inter-medial “productive moments.” The study examines each of the novel's four parts elaborating on how these “living pictures” evoke a range of implicit or explicit, notional or actual paintings. Perlina argues that Dostoevskii's visits to the galleries of the major European cities where he lived with his wife during the writing of The Idiot supplied all the ekphrases in the novel.

This argument is not new but Perlina expands it substantially to include not only paintings and portraits named in the novel, but also omitted, delayed, or insinuated ekphrases, verbal portraits of characters’ appearance, photograph-like scenes, inserted narratives, and various inter-textual moments. Thus, she relies largely on the classical definition of ekphrasis as enargeia or vivid description. She posits the characters, along with readers, as viewers or spectators, and contends that like a master painter, Dostoevskii lifts the curtain covering his canvas and shows his artwork to his audience. In fact, she suggests that the entire novel is constituted by a chain of visual scenes—vivid impressions of the great masters “imprinted onto” Dostoevskii's memory in the Dresden, Basel, and Florence galleries.

In addition to a brief introduction, the book consists of six parts. Part 1 presents the historical-theoretical framework informing the study and outlines the arguments developed in the subsequent parts. Parts 2 and 3 comprise new approaches to pivotal scenes in the first half of The Idiot. Part 4 turns to Dostoevskii's rereading of Don Quixote in terms of parodic ekphrasis. Parts 5 and 6 return to the erotic triangle in the novel—Prince Myshkin, Nastasia Filippovna, and Aglaia Epanchina—to analyze it in light of western European religious painting. The book's original contribution to the voluminous scholarship on Dostoevskii's visual imagination in The Idiot is found in the readings of particular scenes as based on paintings Dostoevskii saw abroad or evoke specific pictorial genres.

Examples of such readings include: Myshkin's description in the novel's opening paragraph as ekphrasis modeled on Annibale Carracci's painting Christuskopf; Myshkin's encounter with the three Epanchin sisters as a verbal family portrait based on Palma Vecchio's Three Sisters; Myshkin's scrutiny of Nastasia Filippovna's photograph as Johannes Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter; Myshkin's meeting with Aglaia on the green bench as an ekphrastic inversion of Palma Vecchio's The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. The most compelling inquiry, however, arrives when Perlina investigates delayed or omitted ekphrases such as Hans Fries’ The Beheading of John the Baptist. She terms this lapse in the narration “minus ekphrasis” or a “verbally unfilled gap” between Dostoevskii's personal impressions and his attempt to recreate them textually so that they emerge as pictures in his characters’ memories (102). This concept of omitted ekphrasis could be especially productive for further scholarly work on the trope.

Perlina's detailed, meticulously researched, and generally innovative study of ekphrasis in The Idiot contains a few lacunae. To document Dostoevskii's impressions of the paintings transposed in the novel, she uses Anna Dostoevskaia's diaries and reminiscences. But these offer a contradictory account of what husband and wife saw, and are of course filtered through Anna's own subjective vision. Perlina's approach to ekphrasis as constituting any visually-evocative scene seems to invalidate the trope, rendering it too broad and capacious. Much relevant English-language scholarship on ekphrasis and notably on ekphrasis in The Idiot (and on The Idiot as Dostoevskii's Grand Tour narrative, or on picture frames in the novel) does not appear in her bibliography, thus precluding an exploration of the inter-medial, gendered, and erotic conflict at the heart of the trope. What also seems to be lacking is a contextualization of ekphrasis in Russian literature and, for a monograph positing author, characters, and readers as spectators, of a theoretical framework addressing the dynamics of spectatorship, the gaze, and the ways of seeing elaborated in the text. Nonetheless, this monograph opens new lines of inquiry into Dostoevskii's novel for scholars of literature, visual culture, and art history.