The Idiot

“ My intention is to portray a truly beautiful soul.” – Dostoevsky
Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life – object poverty, incessant gambling, the death of his firstborn child – Dostoevsky produced a second masterpiece, The Idiot, just two years after completing Crime and Punishment. In it, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power and sexual conquest than with the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal and murder follow, testing Myshkin’s moral feelings as Dostoevsky searches through the wreckage left by human misery to find “ man in man.” The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian novel, one that penetrates the complex psyche of the Russian people. “ They call me a psychologist, ” wrote Dostoevsky. “ That is not true. I’m only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.”