The Idiot (1868), written under the appalling personal circumstances Dostoevsky endured while travelling in Europe, not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and penetrating psychological insight, but also affords his most powerful indictment of a Russia struggling to emulate contemporary Europe while sinking under the weight of Western materialism. It is the portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society in which a "positively good man" clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his moral idealism. Meticulously faithful to the original, this new translation...

Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women-the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia-both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin's honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him.

Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man in his mid-twenties and a descendant of one of the oldest Russian lines of nobility, is on a train to Saint Petersburg on a cold November morning. He is returning to Russia having spent the past four years in a Swiss clinic for treatment of a severe epileptic condition. On the journey Myshkin meets a young man of the merchant class, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, and is struck by his passionate intensity, particularly in relation to a woman-the dazzling society beauty Nastassya Filippovna-with whom he is obsessed. Rogozhin has just inherited a very...

The Idiot is a novel by the 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published serially in the journal The Russian Messenger in 1868-9. The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Prince (Knyaz) Lyov Nikolaevich Myshkin, a young man whose goodness and open-hearted simplicity lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky set himself the task of depicting -the positively good and beautiful man-.