The Idiot

First published in serial form between 1868 and 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot follows Prince Lev Myshkin, a gentle, candid young man who returns to Russia after years of treatment for epilepsy in Switzerland. Entering the sophisticated yet morally unsettled society of St Petersburg, he encounters two figures whose lives are bound by desire, pride and suffering: the beautiful, troubled Nastasya Filippovna and the passionate, volatile Parfyon Rogozhin. Myshkin’s extraordinary openness and compassion unsettle those around him, exposing the vanity, cruelty and concealed vulnerability beneath the conventions of respectable society. As affection becomes entangled with jealousy and competing loyalties, his attempt to meet the world with unconditional kindness proves both deeply moving and profoundly precarious.

Dostoevsky conceived the novel as an exploration of a genuinely good and beautiful human being, placing Christian compassion in collision with a society governed by money, status and appetite. The result is a work of remarkable psychological depth, in which innocence is neither simple nor easily sustained, and goodness can be mistaken for weakness or madness. Written between Crime and Punishment and Demons, The Idiot occupies a central place in Dostoevsky’s mature fiction, extending his lifelong examination of faith, freedom, suffering and the limits of human understanding. Its turbulent emotional world and searching moral questions make it one of the great novels of nineteenth-century Russian literature.

From the book

“Beauty will save the world.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

On The Idiot

“With an integrity that cannot be too highly praised, Dostoevsky fearlessly submits his own most hallowed convictions to the same test.”

— Joseph Frank, literary critic, quoted in The New York Review of Books