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The Idiot (1868-69) by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a novel about Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young Russian man who returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium where he has been treated for epilepsy. Myshkin is wholly guileless — genuinely good, direct, compassionate, and innocent of the social calculation that governs the St. Petersburg society into which he is plunged — and Dostoevsky's project in the novel is to place a truly good man in the world and see what happens to him. What happens is tragic: Myshkin falls in love with two women simultaneously, the beautiful and turbulent Nastasya Filipovna (who has been destroyed by a man who kept her as his mistress) and the younger, more conventional Aglaya; his goodness is incapable of saving either of them; and the novel ends with him catatonic. Dostoevsky intended the 'idiot' of the title to be a figure for Christ — pure goodness placed in a fallen world — and the novel's tragedy is the tragedy of goodness's inadequacy to human need. It is generally considered, along with The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, among Dostoevsky's three greatest novels.
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The Idiot (1869)
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The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky·1869
The Idiot — Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the novel called 'The Idiot' if Myshkin is not stupid?
The Russian word 'idiot' in Dostoevsky's time had both the contemporary sense of a person with an intellectual disability and the older sense of a person who is socially marginal, outside the normal functioning of society. Dostoevsky uses both meanings: Myshkin has epilepsy, which in nineteenth-century Russia was associated with intellectual and social disability; and he is 'idiotic' in the social sense — incapable of the self-interested calculation and social performance that Petersburg society requires. But Dostoevsky also intended the title ironically: it is the good, genuine people who are called idiots by the corrupt world, while the 'sane' and 'normal' people are in fact morally far more disturbed than Myshkin. The title's irony deepens throughout the novel.
Who is Nastasya Filipovna and why is she important?
Nastasya Filipovna is one of Dostoevsky's most complex and tragic female characters: a beautiful woman who was kept as a mistress by the wealthy Totsky from the age of twelve, raised in isolation and dependency, and then used as a pawn in a social transaction. By the time she appears in the novel, she is fully aware of what was done to her and consumed by a combination of pride, self-destruction, and the conviction that she is 'fallen' and does not deserve happiness. Myshkin's immediate recognition of her as a victim who deserves compassion rather than judgment is the first great scene of the novel; his declaration that she is not what others say she is, and that she is 'not like that,' is the most direct expression of the novel's Christian compassion. Her story ends tragically, killed by Rogozhin — the passionate, violent man who loves her in the only way he knows.
How does The Idiot compare to Dostoevsky's other major novels?
Dostoevsky himself called The Idiot his favorite among his novels. It is generally considered more formally loose than Crime and Punishment (which has a tightly organized narrative of guilt and redemption) or The Brothers Karamazov (which is Dostoevsky's most philosophically comprehensive work), but more emotionally intense than either — the characters of Nastasya Filipovna and Rogozhin are among his most concentrated expressions of passion and destruction. The novel's plot is more sprawling and digressive than Crime and Punishment, which can make it harder to enter; but readers who are drawn to Dostoevsky's interest in human extremity — the most intense expressions of love, pride, compassion, and violence — often find it the most gripping of his works.
What is the epileptic fit scene in The Idiot?
Dostoevsky was himself an epileptic, and the depiction of Myshkin's epileptic aura in The Idiot is the most famous literary treatment of epilepsy in the history of fiction. In the moments before a seizure, Myshkin experiences a state of extraordinary clarity and beauty — a sense of harmony with the world and with himself that he understands, even in the moment, cannot be real or sustainable. Dostoevsky described this aura as 'a feeling of happiness such as it is quite impossible to imagine in a normal state and which other people have no idea of,' and added the devastating qualification that it is a feeling of 'the highest synthesis of life' that is immediately followed by the complete unconsciousness and physical suffering of the seizure itself. The passage is one of the most discussed in Dostoevsky and has generated a vast literature on the relationship between epilepsy, mystical experience, and creativity.
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