Nick Cave: Dostoevskian Hero?

"Dostooevky's hero is a déclassé member of the intelligentsia, cut of from cultural tradition, from the soil and the earth, a representative of an 'accidental tribe'. Such a person enters into special relations with the idea: he is defenseless before it and its power, for he is rooted in objective reality and is deprived of any cultural tradition. He becomes a 'person of the idea,' a person possessed by an idea. An idea for him becomes an idea-force, omnipotently defining and distorting his consciousness and his life. The idea leads an independent life in the hero's consciousness: in fact it is not he but the idea that lives, and the novelist describes not the life of the hero but the life of the idea in him; the historian of the 'accidental tribe' becomes 'the historiographer of the idea.' M. M. Bakhtin. Problems of Dostoevsvky's Poetics, p22.