About this book
A carefully prepared print edition.
Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returns to Russia after years of illness abroad with little money, unusual candour, and a heart almost dangerously open to the suffering of others. To many he seems naïve, ridiculous, or unfit for the world; to others, his gentleness appears like a moral challenge they cannot bear to face.
As Myshkin moves through drawing rooms, family intrigues, financial schemes, romantic rivalries, and spiritual crises, Dostoevsky sets his luminous innocence against a society ruled by vanity, suspicion, desire, and fear. At the centre of the storm stand the proud and wounded Nastasya Filippovna, the passionate Rogozhin, and the people who try to possess, save, judge, or escape one another.
First published in 1869, The Idiot is one of Dostoevsky’s major novels: a searching psychological drama about holiness in a fallen world, the cost of pity, and the terrible difficulty of loving without domination. Readers drawn to moral intensity, tragic romance, religious questioning, and the inner lives of conflicted characters will find it among the essential works of Russian literature.
