Classic
The Idiot
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Summary
The gentle, epileptic Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and steps into a Petersburg society that reads his honesty and compassion as idiocy. He is drawn into a destructive triangle with the tormented beauty Nastasya Filippovna and the violently jealous Rogozhin, and his goodness proves powerless to save anyone. Dostoevsky set out to portray a truly good man and produced one of his most haunting and tragic novels.
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Historical Context & Significance
Dostoevsky wrote the novel abroad in desperate financial straits and published it serially through 1868 and 1869. Its portrait of innocence destroyed by society remains one of the most discussed experiments in his body of work.