How does this book compare to the author's other major novels?

Dostoyevsky wrote this work while living abroad in extreme financial distress, which led him to experiment with a more chaotic and improvisational narrative structure compared to the tighter plotting found in his other major novels.

Are there notable film adaptations of this story?

Akira Kurosawa directed a 1951 film adaptation that relocated the setting to post-war Japan, while a 1958 Soviet production by Ivan Pyryev remains a well-known attempt to capture the original Russian context.

The Idiot

By,&

Classics Literary Fiction

Pages: 667
Published: 1869
Language: English

Synopsis

Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returns to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium, where he was treated for epilepsy. Guileless, compassionate, and almost incapable of deceit, he re-enters a St. Petersburg society ruled by money, vanity, and cruelty — a world for which his radical innocence leaves him hopelessly unprepared.

As Myshkin is drawn between two women — the proud, beautiful, self-destructive Nastasya Filippovna and the passionate young Aglaya Yepanchin — his goodness becomes a mirror in which those around him see their own greed and torment. Fyodor Dostoevsky sets out, in his own words, to portray "a truly beautiful soul," and then watches that soul collide with a society that cannot bear it.

One of Dostoevsky's four great novels, The Idiot is a searching, tragic meditation on innocence, faith, love, and madness — a book that asks whether genuine goodness can survive in the real world, and answers with heartbreaking ambiguity.

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