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The Idiot

Name: The Idiot
Rating: 5 (9 reviews)
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
ISBN: 9780375702242

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 2003 · 656 pages

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic tale of one man’s pure innocence in the face of a society obsessed with power, money, and manipulation

The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.

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recommended by 9 people

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“In my opinion the beauty of fiction is when you have characters that are interesting and a story that really grips you in a way that the ideas behind it isn't as transparent and they have so much more impact - Dostoyevsky does this best ('Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot')”
Grimes
“I really relate to the particular type of mental instability that Dostoyevsky describes in pretty much all of his work. A character starts talking, and things start getting out of control and become increasingly animated, intense and disturbing. It reads like an extreme version of how I feel whenever I have to interact with humans. The Idiot is probably my favourite of his works, because I love Nastasya Filipovna, Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchin, Rogozhin... I think a lot of my friends think I’m a bit like Nastasya! Anyway, it’s the most cartoonish and absurd of everything I’ve read by Dostoyevsky, and the best distillation of insanity as a virtue. A Baz Luhrmann-esque treatment of this book would make an incredible film.”↗
Lionel Shriver
“Of Dostoevsky’s novels, most writers would cite The Brothers Karamazov — I adored it in adolescence, but could not bear rereading it in my thirties. I hadn’t the patience. But rereading The Idiot — the tale of the holy fool Prince Myshkin — as an adult rewarded the return. I was then writing my second novel and grappling with how difficult it is to write about goodness. Virtue in literature, as it is often in real people, can be downright off-putting. The secret, I discovered, was to put virtue at risk — thus guaranteeing that our hero is misunderstood and persecuted. We can locate the same ingenious fictional strategy in the New Testament.”↗
Carson Mccullers
“The next and possibly one of the strongest influences in my reading life is [Dostoevsky] – Tolstoy, of course, is at the top… One is just swept away from one incredible scene to another incredible scene. The scene when [Nastasya] lights a fire to burn up the bank notes in front of [Ganya] is almost like a [True Story] fiction, but in spite of it, the emotions of the scene make it so real.”↗
Ralph Steadman
“A book about an innocent, Prince Myshkin, who falls in love with a photograph of a woman and then the real thing. He is cursed with being a beautiful human being not meant for this world, and is consequently enveloped in the dark madness of a corrupt yet inviting scenario.”↗
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