The Idiot
1869
The Idiot is Dostoyevsky's most radical experiment: what happens when a man of perfect goodness enters a world designed to destroy him. Prince Lev Myshkin returns to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium, his innocence and epileptic seizures marking him as alien to the grasping, jealous society he re-enters. He is immediately drawn into a vortex of passion and greed centered on Nastasya Filippovna, a beautiful kept woman whose very presence ignites rivalries between men willing to sacrifice everything. Myshkin's Christ-like inability to judge or abandon anyone becomes both his greatest virtue and his tragic flaw as he watches those around him consume themselves with desire and ambition. The novel asks an unbearable question: can goodness survive in a world that cannot comprehend it? Dostoyevsky called it his most personal work, his attempt to subject his highest ideal of Christian love to the crucible of contemporary Russian society. The result is a devastating portrait of innocence destroyed by moral emptiness.
Editions
X-Ray
“Beauty will save the world.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I want to talk about everything with at least one person as I talk about things with myself.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
