The Idiot(1869)

Fyodor DostoevskyWilliam LeatherbarrowAlan Myers

Into a compelling reap portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness and humility betray the inadequacy of of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten, not he.

The Idiot (1868), written under appalling personal circumstances when Dostoevsky was travelling in Europe, not only reveals the author's acute artistic sense and psychological insight, but also affords his most penetrating indictment of a Russia struggling to emulate contemporary Europe and sinking under the weight of Western materialism.