First published serially between 1868 and 1869, “The Idiot” is Dostoevsky’s most deeply personal work, which he remarked was his own personal favorite. It follows the journey of the title character, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, who is actually intelligent but is cynically referred to as an “idiot” by his fellow characters for his moralistic purity. Prince Myshkin is a young man from an ancient noble Russian family who is returning home after a two year stay at a Swiss clinic for treatment of his epilepsy, a condition that Dostoevsky himself suffered from. On his train journey home he meets the darkly passionate and reckless young man Rogozhin, and is drawn into a love triangle with the beautiful, but flawed and destructive, Nastasya Filippovna. Upon returning to Russia, Prince Myshkin stands out as the exact opposite of the society around him. He is thoughtful, deliberate, deeply compassionate, and selfless; while his contemporaries are greedy, impulsive, materialistic, manipulative, and self-absorbed. They cannot understand the Prince and mistakenly interpret his naivete as idiocy. “The Idiot” is a tragic, haunting, and deeply moving examination of a wholesome and idealistic man’s struggle to cope with the changes being brought on by a modernizing Russia during the second half of the 19th century. This edition follows the translation of Eva M. Martin and includes a biographical afterword.
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