The Idiot

Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin. Returning to St. Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naïve epileptic Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. Here he sees a picture of Nastasya Fillipovna and falls in love with her. Things get complicated when he proposes her and she rejects him for a man of dubious character called Rogozhin. Myshkin finds love in Aglaya but all hell loose breaks when once again Nastasya decides that she is still in love with the Prince. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, the author portrays the purity of „a truly beautiful soul” and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world. A tragicomic masterpiece.