Dostoyevsky considered “The Idiot” (published first in Russian in 1869) his “favourite child” — the novel in which he felt the greatest personal investment.
We meet Lef Nicolaievitch Muishkin, a hereditary prince of the old Russian aristocracy, returning from abroad after only partially successful treatment for epilepsy. (Dostoyevsky himself was a lifelong sufferer from temporal lobe epilepsy, sometimes called “ecstatic” epilepsy. Experts have suggested that modern physicians would do well to study Dostoyevsky’s depiction of the condition.) Because of the debilitating severity of the disease during Muishkin’s childhood, people have come to think of him as an “idiot,” but in fact he is no simpleton. Rather, he is a man of almost saintly purity and compassion.
That goodness is tested when the prince encounters a colorful and entertaining array of characters. In the course of events, the novel raises questions about how we confront our own mortality, shame and forgiveness, what it means to be “childlike,” and the influence on Russian society of new European ideas like materialism, atheism, pseudo-rational nihilism, and the changing role of women. It is also a love story, but that love is tainted and twisted by the baffling contradictions that lie within all human hearts.
Dostoyevsky is an original master of psychological realism in fiction. - Summary by Bruce Pirie
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